He held my hand and pointed...to nothing.

I s.n.a.t.c.hed my wrist back. "You know what's oft been said about people seeing things?"

He smiled and tapped his gla.s.ses. "I'd imagine it's said that they have eyes." He turned and went over to the lone corner of his crumbling workshop and started yanking down books and flipping through them. "I know I've seen that mark somewhere. But I can't recall in which fairy tale. Hmm..."

"Now who's talking to himself," I muttered. But that brought me 'round to a thought niggling in the back of my mind. "Hey, about voices..."

"Was it Rose Red? No."

I tried again a little louder. "Uh, I had this question."

"I know. Janghwa Hongryeon jeon." He again ignored me and started tracing his finger over a page and mumbling words in a foreign tongue.

"OZ!"

He startled and tossed the book over his shoulder. "You don't have to shout. I'm right here."

I suppressed an eye roll. "Question. Voices. In the flames." I wasn't sure even how I wanted to ask this.

I didn't have to.

"No, you didn't imagine them." Dorthea knocked on the workshop's crumbling stone column. "Can I come in?"

I shrugged but said nothing as she entered. Dorthea called the green flames to her hand and twirled them like a jester's ball. "It's the curse. I hear them constantly. And the legion gets bigger each time I drain life energy. It makes me stronger."

"Makes you a nutter," Verte corrected, stomping in from the clearing.

Dorthea squeezed her fist and extinguished the flames. "Yes, that too. But every voice brings power and knowledge with it. Which is why I know what that is." She pointed to the underworld ink staining my soul and legs. "Why didn't you tell me you were being stalked?"

"Speaking of nutters, how could I explain my shadow can move on its own and is trying to devour my soul?" My face heated. There was such a jumbled mess of emotions in my gut that I didn't even know which one caused the blush. I picked my favorite-anger. "And who the hex do you think you are to lecture me? Saving you is what got me into this mess, and the only reason you know about Morte is because you and your curse took a bite out of my soul."

Now it was Dorthea's turn to blush. "I didn't-"

"You never do." The thought that she, of all people, had sifted through my private thoughts. What had Dorthea seen? That worried and infuriated me. "Tell me, did I taste good?"

Her eyes shot open, and Dorthea's blush turned to a queasy gray. "No, I-"

"I haven't seen Kato and Hydra. You're looking a bit chunkier than normal. Did your curse overeat and get them too?"

Flames burst out of her body, arcing in a circle, scorching everything in its path-straight to me.

"ENOUGH!" Verte shouted. The flames snuffed out at her command. "You both may be dumb as talking doork.n.o.bs, but I would have bet my Sorcerer's Ill.u.s.trated collection that you were better than this. I've waited more than two centuries for all the pieces to come together, and I will not let you"-she pointed a shiny red nail to me-"or you"-she used the other pointer finger for Dorthea-"or especially you"-she pointed both fingers at the Storymaker-"to muck it up. Now, march. Everybody, go outside."

And we all did, because you knew a storm was coming when Verte's wart started wiggling like a weather vane. So it was best to listen up. Or take shelter.

Half the ironwood trees that formed the wall surrounding the clearing had rotted and fallen into twisted piles of bark. The rest didn't look too far behind.

"Timber, little hero. I will see you fall soon as well," Morte promised as the sun shone on me.

A pile of leaves lay on the crispy gra.s.s, a stark contrast of alive and dead. Not too far away, there was another pile. Of bags.

"Where are we going, and for that matter, where are Hydra and Kato?" I looked at where the chicken-legged house had stood. That s.p.a.ce remained empty. If she had swapped heads, there would be a new shack. "Did she..." I put a hand to my neck.

Oz followed my stare. "Oh, she's fine. Both, in fact, are still with us, if that's what you mean." His brow furrowed. "Well, not with us, as you can plainly see from s.p.a.ce-time theory. But that's here nor there, as in they are not here but there."

"There is where?" I suddenly felt like I had been transported to Suessville.

"Cam-" Dorthea started before Verte cut her off.

"Camping. Dreadful idea and you know this spoiled brat"-she nudged her thumb at Dorthea-"no way she was going to stoop that low. So Kato broke it off and ran away with Hydra. That Gwenevere, she's always been into younger men."

"Lies."

Duh, and not a particularly good one either. Whatever was going on, they didn't trust me to know about it. With those two gone, there was just the five of us, if I counted Morte.

I smiled weakly and counted the pile of bags. Enough belongings for one or two people at most. "So should I guess? We aren't going anywhere."

I was getting kicked out.

Verte tapped the wart on her crooked, green nose. "Plain as this beauty mark, we can't stay here no more. And if you ain't figured that you and Dot can't be near each other yet, you deserve what comes next. I made a deal with you. Your service is no longer required. We'll take care of everything from here."

No, I wasn't getting sent away. I was getting left behind.

"Abandoned again."

Again? What the spell are you going on about now? I thought silently at Morte.

He chuckled, long and deep, a sound that made my bones shudder. "Very interesting."

I stomped my bare heel to get my shadow to hush.

I felt Dorthea's concern through our bond before I saw it on her face.

"It's him again, isn't it?"

I shrugged. "Not your problem anymore. I'll be glad to have this place to myself. Rots that you had to trash it before you left, but it suits me."

"It is my problem, and I'm going to try and fix it." Dorthea pulled a small notebook out of her back pocket and started writing. The ink was red.

As she wrote, the leaf pile stirred-even though there wasn't a lick of a breeze.

"Hey. No." I backed up a step. "Whatever you're doing, stop."

I waited for the green haze and power drain to kick in while the leaves swirled around my feet.

Stones rumbled behind me at Oz's workshop.

"Focus. Make every word count toward what you want." Oz poofed himself into a catterfly and hovered over Dorthea.

Dorthea scrunched her face and wrote faster, the leaves speeding with the fury of her writing. They plastered themselves to my feet, the stems digging into my shins.

I screamed and collapsed to the ground. My skin felt like it was being sewed with acid. And then, when the flurry of leaves was over, I looked down, horrified. "What have you done?"

"There comes a time in every marionette's life when you've got to cut the cords, you know?"

-Geppetto, Planned Puppethood.

15.

No Strings Attached.

Dorthea leaned in to Verte, breathing hard. "Trying to protect you."

"With shoes?!"

The leaves had knit together to form a pair of knee-high riding boots. With heels, no less. Because that's totally what every girl needs for hiking through the forest.

Dorthea seemed to still have trouble catching her breath, so Verte answered. "Shoes worked before. If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Oz the catterfly poofed into a rhimouserous, inspected his apprentice's work, then poofed back into a crotchety geezer. "Should stop the pestilence from spreading and keep you anch.o.r.ed in Libraria, away from the underworld and its price." He waited a beat before adding, "a.s.suming she did the spell right. I look forward to checking up in a week or so to see if the magic actually worked or not. Should be fairly easy-you'll either still be you...or you won't be anything."

What? Before I could question it, he swapped forms again and scampered off, ducking down into a hole. His workshop rattled and shook before squishing together, folding in, and getting small enough to be sucked down the hole after its master.

And then there were four.

After making sure Dorthea could stand, Verte loaded their bags onto a freshly carved ironwood broomstick. She returned to me with a leather drinking skin. "Those leaves came from the same tree as this sap. It's the last I could siphon from your tree. Drink some every day to keep the Emerald curse from nibbling at ya and to block Dorthea's story from filling in the holes." Her belt clouded over and her voice changed. "Be yourself. Ink is thicker than blood. Aim true." She thrust the bag of sap in my hand, wiggled her nose, then patted my head, like a good Dalmatian. "Hope you don't screw up."

After six years with Verte, I knew that was the best good-bye I could expect.

Dorthea wobbled over. I waited for a weepy hug from the future hero of all of Story. Instead she held out her hand.

"Seriously? A handshake?"

"No. I gave you a gift. You owe me one too."

That's the princess I'd grown to know and occasionally loathe.

I held out my hands. "Sorry, aside from this goop, I lost everything."

"Your necklace."

I was about to tell off her greedy b.u.t.t, when I saw a vision through our bond. Dorthea sobbing into the opal, wrapping her hair around it to bring me back to life. I saw it through her eyes. Her memory.

"It's my fault you're wearing that horrid thing in the first place." She held out her hand again. "You should never have been tangled up in my story. Go find your own happy ending. I'll keep the light on for you while you try."

I nodded since I didn't trust my voice and tossed her the opal, careful not to touch her. Just in case the Emerald curse wanted to take me over again.

She reverently placed the necklace over her head and tucked the opal under the neckline of her tattered dress. Nothing else was said while she and Verte hopped on their broomstick. It rose, sputtering and coughing glittery smoke, finally lifting high enough to skim over the trees.

And just like that, they were gone.

And that left two, just me and my shadow.

Not that I cared. Just last night I was spellbent on leaving them anyway. So what if this time I was the one left behind? I stared down, looking for my shadow. "Guess it's just us."

Silence.

"Copy rider got your tongue?"

The echo of my voice was the only sound. With the second sun low in the sky, my shadow should have stretched long behind me, but not a black speck spread out from those enchanted shoes. There was nothing.

Not two, then.

For the first time in what seemed like forever, I was truly alone.

My eyes started to burn. I rubbed them with my palms. "I'm just relieved," I told the air. "Finally got exactly what I wanted." The barren spot on my chest, where the opal once sat, ached.

I slumped to the ground, like a puppet whose strings had finally been cut.

I had waited so long to be free. To have no one ordering me about, telling me who I should be, that I wasn't good enough, or bad enough, in certain cases. But I don't think I'd ever sat down and thought about what it really meant to be on my own.

So I spent all night thinking. Which is an absolutely horrible habit to get into. You can come to terrible conclusions that way. In fact, after a very long and silent night, I had one of those sorts of revelations.

Turns out, freedom felt a lot like being lost.

Everyone else had such a clear purpose. Even Verte had one...it just wasn't clear to anyone else.

Kato wanted to make his people proud, to continue being a guardian and return Blanc to her prison. Wherever he was, I'm sure he was still working with Bob, his overgrown, mangy butler who acted an awful lot like a dad. I remembered growing up with my dad in the Sherwood Forest pretty well. Trying to be one of the guys. To make him proud.

That hadn't turned out so well. I'd run away to try and prove myself and hadn't seen him since. But that was six years ago.

As for Dorthea, she'd become Oz's apprentice, so she could control the Emerald curse and get her parents back from the mysterious realm of Kansas. From our blasted bond, I knew that she felt she owed a great deal to her mother. I don't remember having a mother. I'm a.s.suming I had one, since I hadn't hatched like a swan princess. When I tried to think of a mother, the closest thing I could come up with was Verte.

She clearly didn't want my help.

So as the first sun, Ethos, rose in the sky, all my thinking had led me to one conclusion: I was pixed. The only thing I had were my clothes, a headache from overthinking, and a rumbly tummy that sounded like it belonged to a bear.

Getting up, I stretched out my muscles, opened the drinking horn Verte had given me, and took a deep whiff. Then promptly gagged.

I'd rather starve.

I looked around the clearing. It was all brown and drained of life. Empty.

"If only Hydra were here, she could put her oracle head on. Then I might know what to do." I sighed. In the middle of the wish-pocalypse, after I summoned Griz to the Mimicman's ivory tower, her flying puppies had carted me off until I wiggled free, landing at Hydra's beach shack. At the time, I didn't know what I was supposed to do with myself-aside from stay alive.