Very Bad Wizards

by Stunich, C. M.

  “What happens if a guardian and their wizard do hook up?” I ask, and Stryker smiles, not at all deterred by my lack of interest. He’s a stubborn one, that’s for sure.

  “They’ll be killed by others of their own race. If a guardian can’t keep up with their responsibilities, then they’ll be forcibly separated from their wizard and taught a lesson. Like I said, the only thing that breaks a guardianship bond is death …”

  “Brutal,” I say, gritting my teeth and wondering about Taavi’s strange behavior. Mine. Mate. Breed. What was all that about anyway?

  “Devastating,” Stryker agrees, and then he just stops walking. His eyes widen and power ripples around him, giving my skin that electrified feeling again. “Shit,” he curses, exhaling sharply and closing his eyes.

  “Your guardian …” Taavi starts as Stryker parts his lids, gold eyes dark with frustration.

  “Court must be in terrible shape to let go like this,” he muses, looking briefly over at me and doing his best to force a smile that doesn’t go anywhere near reaching his eyes. “You see? This is what happens if your guardian isn’t in control.” Stryker holds up his hands, and even though I can’t see anything, I can feel the power crackling in his fingers.

  He flicks them out suddenly, and dozens of glowing light orbs spiral into the darkness of the forest, illuminating every corner, sending creatures scattering. There’s so much light in here now, it’s like the sun’s finally broken through the thick canopy of trees.

  “He’s either being tortured, or is strapped to the faerie queen’s bed,” Stryker says, sadness coloring his words. “We should hurry. It’s at least a two day walk from here before we arrive at her court.”

  “And which court might that be?” Taavi asks, but Stryker doesn’t answer.

  For several hours more, we walk in silence, and I start to get this paranoid itchy feeling in my hands, like the woods might never fucking end. Like we’ll be trapped in them forever.

  I don’t even know what time of day it is, and that bothers me. There’s nothing to mark the passage of time, nothing but our steady footsteps on the yellow bricks.

  “What’s the purpose of these Ruby Trials anyway?” I ask, when I feel like Stryker might actually answer me. He blinks, as if coming out of a deep sleep, and turns to look at me.

  “Dorothy is looking for someone to kill the Wicked Witch of the West, of course,” he says, and Taavi stiffens up a bit.

  “Why would Dorothy care about a cardinal witch?” he asks, sounding perplexed. “She rules Central; she owns the Emerald City.”

  “Dorothy wants more than just Central,” Stryker replies grimly, shaking his head. “She wants to rule the whole of Oz. The Ruby Trials provide two key things for her: the first is to ferret out all the wizards in Oz, and gain control of, or kill them. The second is to find someone strong enough to go after the Witch of the West. He’s been a thorn in Dorothy’s side since she showed up with a basket of bread, and that awful, awful little guardian of hers.”

  “If she’s so strong, why doesn’t she just go after the witch herself?” I wonder, swerving away from the edge of the path, and a cluster of purple-topped mushrooms with little beads of black liquid on their caps. Anything that looks like that is clearly marked trouble in my mind.

  “Dorothy and Thyer—that’s the Witch of the West—are too evenly matched. She might win, but she might not. She won’t take that risk. Instead, she started the Ruby Trials, and passed a law that any wizard passing through the land of Oz must register at the City of Emeralds.”

  “What if I don’t want to register?” I ask, already annoyed with this Dorothy person, despite the fact that I haven’t even met the bitch yet. “What if I don’t want to fight in her trials?”

  “Then you, my friend, must be strong enough to fight back when her morality police come for you.” Stryker’s gold gaze darkens with memories, and I have to wonder what, exactly, Dorothy did to his fiancée. It’s a question I don’t dare ask. He seems mild enough, but I’m not sure I’m willing to stir up his temper. He promised not to hurt us for three days, but it’s already been one and a half. After that time period is over, we’ll be at his mercy. He knows I can’t use my magic. I know he’s afraid of fire.

  It’d be a lose-lose situation.

  “Dorothy has no dominion over other wizards,” Taavi scoffs, and Stryker gives him a sympathetic sort of look.

  “You’ve been away from Oz for some time, haven’t you?” he asks, pausing briefly at the sound of footsteps. Taavi and Stryker exchange a look before the former grabs my arm, and the three of us take cover behind some of the massive trees, all of Stryker’s light orbs blinking out and throwing us into darkness.

  There’s a tiny house with a smoking chimney near my foot, and I do my best to scoot away from it. God only knows what sort of creature lives inside.

  “The C.R.O.W.S.?” Taavi whispers, but Stryker shakes his head slightly.

  “Worse.”

  We sit in silence for several, agonizing minutes before a good two dozen soldiers come marching around the bend in the road. They’re all wearing white and green gingham from head to toe, their hair slicked back into matching braids under their billed caps.

  And even as new as I am to this world—this delusion—I can feel it.

  They’re brimming with power.

  “The Emerald Corps,” Stryker says in a low voice, mouth turned down in a frown. “Also known as the morality police. My guess is that Isaac is continuing his quest to please Dorothy; he’s tipped them off about your presence in Oz.”

  “I detest being right all the time,” Taavi says blandly, giving me a look that I return with a blank one of my own. Okay, so rescuing Stryker sort of brought this crap to our doorstep, I get it. Taavi was pressuring us to head to the City of Emeralds, to speak with Dorothy about Aunt Em. And until now, I’d sort of considered her my ticket home, too.

  But that’s all gone to shit, hasn’t it?

  I’m going to be trapped in this delusion forever.

  Swallowing hard, I turn my hands into fists, nails digging into my palms.

  A man follows along behind the group of soldiers, dressed similarly in green and white gingham, but with a badge on his chest in the shape of a castle with pointed spirals. His eyes are as gray as a stormy sky above a tumultuous sea, his full mouth painted in a severe frown. His own hands are squeezed into tight fists, like mine, covered with white gloves.

  He stops walking, and the entire company does the same, without a single person even bothering to turn their head to look at him.

  The man looks around, and it’s pretty clear that he’s not only searching for us, but has some idea of where to actually look. His hair is a metallic silver color, not like an old person’s gray hair, but actually shiny. It’s cut short, but still long enough in the front that the bangs across his forehead shimmer in the light of the torches his soldiers carry.

  “They’re close by,” he says, reaching one hand up and using the other to remove the glove, finger by finger. “Find them for me.”

  The soldiers scatter in pairs, heading into the woods. One set of them is coming right for us.

  Meanwhile, the officer pulls off his glove, revealing a fully articulated metal hand. He squeezes it into a fist, and then opens his fingers as I turn to Stryker and Taavi.

  “You two have a plan, don’t you?” I whisper, because I’m sort of playing chess without knowing any of the rules. The pieces are in my hand, but I have no idea where I’m supposed to put them.

  The officer with the metal hand turns toward my voice, as if he can actually hear me from all the way over there. The deep gray of his eyes sends chills down my spine. There’s no heart in that gaze, just cold, steely indifference.

  “We could fight, but every soldier in the Emerald Corp is a sorcerer,” Stryker says. “It wouldn’t end well for us, not with you in your current state.”

  “We should approach them, and state our intent,” Taavi says as the pair of sol
diers closest to us veer slightly off to the right, buying us a few more seconds. “We’re not in trouble here, and the C.R.O.W.S. aren’t exactly in league with the Emerald Corps.”

  “I highly advise against that,” Stryker says, a bead of sweat forming on his temple. Despite his outward calm, I can tell he’s nervous. Neither he nor Taavi expected this.

  Bushes rustle on the opposite side of the road, and there’s a chorus of shouting as the soldiers zone in on it. Unfortunately, the ones nearest us aren’t fooled by the diversion. Some sort of faerie creature darts from the bushes, its long legs stumbling over themselves as it tries to get away, blue eyes bright with fear.

  The man with the gray eyes holds up his palm to still the soldiers, and then slowly, carefully twists off the tip of his metal pointer finger. Casually, as if pointing out an unusual flower or a particularly interesting tree, he lifts his finger in the direction of the fleeing faerie.

  And then shoots it.

  The bullet comes right from the tip of his finger, as if it were the barrel of a gun. The sound of it is similar, too, like the crack of thunder. I’ll never forget the sound of Uncle Henry pulling the trigger on Taavi.

  The projectile hits the faerie in the back of the head, and then keeps going, exiting its forehead with a spray of blood and bone before it implants itself into the trunk of a tree.

  The creature collapses to the yellow bricks beneath its feet, blood pooling around it.

  “Find them,” the officer repeats again, gray eyes scanning the woods.

  “Come,” Taavi says, his voice tight as he grips my hand and pulls me deeper into the darkness of the forest. I’m still gaping at the dead creature on the pathway, my mind churning with the unnecessary cruelty of that action. Why not just let the poor thing go? We’re the ones traipsing around through the woods, invading the space of the things that live here.

  “Told you,” Stryker murmurs, but not like he’s particularly happy about being right either.

  We slip into the shadows, moving as quickly and as quietly as possible away from the road.

  “If we get too deep in, we’ll never find our way back out,” Taavi murmurs after a moment, pausing in the blackness to find his bearings. Sunlight peeks through the trees up ahead, highlighting a clearing. There’s something ominous about it though, and we make a serious effort to walk around it.

  “Who is that guy anyway?” I whisper as we pass clusters of strange berries, and bushes lit up with tiny, glowing fairies, like the one Bain keeps inside his hat.

  “The head of Dorothy’s army, General Mannix,” Stryker explains. “The fact that she sent him here instead of one of her lesser minions doesn’t bode well for any of us. I told you: Isaac must’ve filled her head with stories. I bet he told her all about the great storm wizard he encountered in the woods.”

  “Oz is a great storm wizard,” Taavi snarls, keeping my hand in an iron-clad grip. “And she’ll be greater still once she has a handle on her magic.”

  “Which is exactly what Dorothy’s worried about,” Stryker muses, but then we’re moving too quickly to talk, following Taavi’s lead. As interesting a person as Stryker is, it’s clear he’s used to having his guardian around to deal with everyday shit; he has no problem following Taavi’s orders.

  We duck under Jurassic-sized ferns, digging even deeper into the strange mysteries of the woods. There are mushrooms as big as I am, and carnivorous plants with bright yellow and green cups, lined with teeth.

  And they wonder why I might actually be interested in going back to Kansas.

  There aren’t any sharp-toothed, people-eating plants there. Just drive-thru coffee, hot fries at my favorite diner, and technology.

  As we move deeper into the forest, and my nerves stretch to the breaking point, I try to remind myself that this is all a delusion brought on by … something. It’s all just fake, a fragment of my imagination.

  “Ow, fuck,” I snap when my arm brushes against the teeth of one of the plants, and it bites down as hard as it can. Taavi turns on a dime, and tears the large bell-shaped cup from the tree, snapping its stem. As soon as that happens, the teeth release, and I’m able to peel the plant off of me.

  But it hurts.

  And there’s a lot of blood.

  I find myself stuck there, staring at the bright smear of ruby red.

  “We’ll have to bandage this when we stop for the night,” Taavi says, gritting his teeth as he drops the duffel and pulls out a small sweat towel. He ties it around my arm as I stand there, wide-eyed and shaking. “It’s not too bad, and those plants aren’t poisonous, so don’t worry.”

  His words sound hollow and far away, like he’s at the end of a long tunnel.

  Only, he’s standing right beside me. And I hurt. And I’m bleeding.

  I’m bleeding.

  My knees go weak, and I collapse. The only thing that keeps me from hitting the ground is Taavi’s arm around my waist, hauling me back to my feet.

  “I’m sorry to be such a bother, but really need to haul ass out of here,” Stryker says, glancing back in the direction we’ve just come. I don’t know what he can see out there because it’s black as pitch, but me, I’m too busy staring at the red that soaks the white towel on my arm.

  That hurt.

  I’m bleeding.

  I’m bleeding.

  “This is real,” I say, choking on the words as they slip past my suddenly dry lips. I can’t stop staring at the wound on my arm. “This is all real.”

  “I’m glad you’ve finally come to that conclusion, Oz, but we need to keep moving. Can you walk?” I look up at Taavi’s face, blinking past my shock. But then I try to talk, and the words won’t come out. With a grunt, Taavi nods at the duffel bag. “Pick that up, wizard, and let’s go.”

  He starts forward, carrying me in his arms as Stryker grabs the bag. It’s a bit humbling to realize that we actually move faster with him holding me. Guess a group is only as strong as its weakest link, right?

  “This is all real,” I whisper again, tracing my memories back to that moment in the cellar with Yori and her annoying boyfriend. There’s not a single second between then and now that I can’t remember. No blackouts, no fuzzy memories. I fell asleep on the bed with Taavi, true, but then I woke up.

  I woke up.

  Because this isn’t a dream.

  “Put me down,” I breathe out, and Taavi complies, taking my hand and dragging me through the faerie forest.

  There are things in here that would happily eat me. Ensorcell me. There’s a man with a metal hand shooting people in the head while he searches for me with the coldest gray eyes I’ve ever seen.

  “I’m afraid,” I whisper to Taavi, realizing for the first time that I’ve been courting death from moment one. The kelpie. The scarecrows. Isaac.

  I’m an idiot. A stubborn motherfucking idiot.

  “You should be,” Taavi says, panting. But not so much from the exercise. He’s afraid, too. Pretty sure Stryker is as well. “But don’t let it cripple you. It’s not a lack of fear that defines bravery, Oz.”

  This is real. I repeat that to myself over and over again, for hours on end. I’m pretty sure we’re moving in a zigzag, keeping the Yellow Brick Road on our left, making progress toward Emerald City. But I can’t be sure. If Taavi doesn’t know where we are, Stryker and I are both fucked.

  Eventually, I collapse in a clearing of dew-covered grass, panting and clutching my wounded arm against my chest.

  “We must be far enough away to rest?” I ask, taking deep, panting breaths as I look up at Taavi pleadingly. “Five minutes, that’s all I need.”

  “I could use a bit of a rest as well,” Stryker hedges, his face twisted with emotion. While I’ve been chanting mantras to myself for the last several hours, he’s been lost in a haze of memory. That was the first thing I noticed when he laid eyes on the Emerald Corps.

  Pain.

  And fury.

  If I had to hazard a guess, I’d put money on the moral
ity police having something to do with his fiancée’s death.

  “Five minutes,” Taavi agrees, offering up one of the water bottles to me, and another to Stryker. He takes one himself and finishes it off in two big gulps, sweat beading on his bare chest and arms.

  I stare into my own water bottle, and try not to freak out. There are moments where freaking out is acceptable. This is not one of them.

  A small sound draws Taavi’s attention to the edge of the clearing, where the little bit of sunlight that warms the area is cut off by shadows. It was getting late yesterday, when we ran into the Emerald Corps. My guess is that we’ve been running all night, and it’s now morning again.

  Out from the shadows steps a little black dog, with eyes like pitch, and long silky hair. A Scottish Terrier, I think, is the name of the breed.

  The very same dog that Dorothy has in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

  “Taavi …” I start, fear lighting up my limbs with adrenaline as I rise to my feet.

  The dog stares at us for a moment, and then it smiles. And I don’t mean that it simply pulls its lips back from its teeth in a pant or a snarl. No, it fucking grins.

  And then it attacks.

  The dog shifts mid-lunge, into the same massive, black beast that Taavi became when he fought the kelpie.

  “Oz!” Taavi shouts, grabbing my arm and yanking me out of the way just in time to avoid the swipe of the monster’s claws as it rakes the green grass where I was just sitting. Without having to ask, I know what to do. I throw myself against Taavi and kiss him as hard as I can, with tongue and everything.

  It only lasts a second, and then he’s throwing me out of the way and morphing into the horse-sized dog creature with the horns and the tail that looks like the feathered train of a dress. He’s bigger than the other beast, but when they come together in a frenzy of snarls, teeth, and claws, it’s pretty obvious that they’re an even match.

  Fights that are evenly matched don’t often end well for either party.

  “Stryke—” I start, and then trail off as I glance in the wizard’s direction, hoping for some magical back-up for Taavi. Instead, I find him on his knees with the gray-eyed man behind him.