Prologue

Eight years earlier

The Land of Oz

Nick stared down the wrong and wickedly pointy end of the witch's ebony wand and braced himself for a Curse that would turn his bones to fairy dust, or shrink him down to the size of a field mouse, or maybe even just end him outright.

Small cottages in rainbow hues, far beyond the usual seven, backdropped the showdown. Ironically bright, cloyingly twee, too idyllically quaint for what was about to happen in the middle of the yellow brick road that wended through the township. Tumbleweeds and smoking ruins would've been more fitting, but maybe they would come later.

It was as quiet as a mouse parade, only two people standing in the Oz sun. Nick had the glare in his eyes, Zolesha had it at her back. It was stealing his only advantage, that she was mad enough to use her dark magic in full light. The spell would be lessened, but it would still be powerful enough to destroy the mundanely unmagical Nicholas Chopper.

Everyone he knew and loved cowered behind chocolate-box doors, beneath windowsills of sugar-shell mosaic, under thatched roofs of sunflower-yellow straw, in cellars that were just plain holes in the ground.

No one would be helping him against the young witch. He knew it, she knew it. Fear of her magic and cruel reputation pushed the idea of a last-minute reprieve so far away that his friends might as well have been the hundred miles to the fabled Emerald City.

"Any regrets?" she purred. Her green skin seemed to sap the life from the cheerful light, dimming the air around her with power. An omen of his own fate.

"The day you came here seems like a good place to start," he replied.

She laughed—a cold, mirthless sound. "You were always funny." Her pause resounded, dinner-gong loud, down the yellow brick road. "It's not too late. Almost, but not quite."

"What do you want me to say? Oh, Great and Powerful Zolesha, you're absolutely right. Threats and harassment and cruel tricks are the way to a man's heart?"

"If I were a man, it would be called an ardent pursuit. I would be championed for going after what I want," Zolesha shot back. "Be honest—what is it about me that has led us here? What does that milkmaid have that I don't?"

She weaved her wandless hand through the air, a forest-green serpent, stealing the light. Nick knew what she was getting at, but his refusal of her had nothing to do with her verdant appearance. He couldn't have cared less about her hue—or her power, for that matter.

He told her as much, carefully. After all, her skin hadn't always been that color.

"Then what?" she demanded to know.

He considered lying, explaining that they were too young for courting and marrying and whatnot. She was tall for her sixteen years, an age that matched his own, her beetle-black eyes two hate-filled orbs, nearly level with his steel-gray ones. Unlike a monkey, it wouldn't fly. His parents had been even younger when they first began courting. He couldn't even pretend that was the reason.

"Too thin? Not curvaceous enough? I could carry a hundred milk pails with a flick of this wand," she prompted. "Or worse."

The cut-shadow robe dripping over her frame hid her lanky figure, her features so sharp they veered toward gaunt. But again, that wasn't it. In fact, she might have been exceptionally beautiful if it wasn't for the one thing that made her goblin's-ass ugly. The true reason they were standing there, and the reason he would always refuse her.

"You know why we're here," he said simply, tapping his chest. "That thing you call a heart is rotten to the core."

It hadn't revealed itself right away, that wicked heart of hers. When she first arrived, apprenticed to Glinda the Good Witch, who lived up in the literal ivory towers of the palace above his town, Nick—and every other hormone-fueled teenage boy in a thousand-brick radius—had found her instantly fascinating. She had fed into that with glee; the extroverted witch-in-training, coming to town to seek out amusements, claiming she needed to "get away from the stuffy do-gooder castle." Teenage boys loved a renegade, and she had drawn them to her like damsels to a woodcutter.

Once she had them hooked, however, it hadn't taken long for her true colors to show through her soon-to-be-green skin. She could run ice-river cold mean to screaming-kettle cruel in the blink of an emerald lid, to anyone and everyone around her. Not that she behaved badly in front of her mistress, of course. Glinda might have been too good of a Good Witch, refusing to give an inch in her belief that all witches—novice or otherwise—were born good, should be good, and would do good always. Zolesha gave her no reason to think she was an exception, dewdrop sweet to the grand enchantress, hiding her ability to turn lemon-sherbet sour to everyone else, on a whim.

After seeing more of the real Zolesha, Nick's teenage fascination with her mixed with not a small amount of survival-instinct-filled caution. That seemed to have gone now, as he told her, "You're a two-headed snake, for one thing. Cruel and vicious in one breath, but when Glinda comes along, you're sickly-sweet as sugar pie. Worse, she believes it. Sorry, believed it. You're not fooling anyone anymore."

Her green skin was proof of that. A few jade patches at first, after she had Cursed one of Nick's friends to eternal hiccups a few months into her apprenticeship. Glinda had heard about it and removed the Curse that night—the "how" of which was all very hush hush—and Zolesha had been charmed in return, ensorcelled to turn a shade of green every time she had a "mishap." A warning for her mistress and, likely, her apprentice as well.

But all it really meant was that the young witch walked around half the time with skin the shade of a dark fighting-tree-leaf green, and the other half an almost-pistachio flavor. And she had slowly started to wear it with pride.

"Glinda sees the good in me that you, apparently, can't." Zolesha sniffed. "Goodness, I have had a lot of accidents this year, though, haven't I? How is the pretty little milkmaid's eye? All healed, I hope? But I suppose it isn't her eyes that attract the most attention, is it?"

"She's fine," Nick growled.

He wished he'd never pursued Melinda. That was what started this. A year and a half ago now, he'd been unsuccessfully trying to catch the farm girl alone in the barn. Zolesha caught him trying to catch Melinda, and she became skin-green-jealous of the young milkmaid's beauty. One ebony wand curse later, and the poor milkmaid's head was bald as a winter cherry tree. Naturally, Glinda repaired the damage that Zolesha claimed had been a wand misfire—another "mishap" which the Good Witch chose to believe, though Nick thought there was no way she hadn't noticed that her apprentice was another shade greener after the incident.

Maybe part of being a good witch meant they had to constantly forgive people? Nick figured it could be the only explanation. After all, no one could be that oblivious to such an apparent clue. The guilt was literally etched on Zolesha's face.

"You used to be flattered by my little displays of affection," she said, that ebony wand still poised.

Nick scoffed. "There's a difference between flattery and being relieved that it's flowers at the door, and not a Curse to make my skin blister with purple boils or tint my teeth chartreuse."

He had confronted her after the milkmaid incident, brimming with a sixteen-year-old's sense of stupidity—though he would have called it justice—the next time she had descended from Glinda's palace. One explosive series of reprimands from him later, and he had waited for a Curse to hit him with enough force to take his own hair off.

Unfortunately, the confrontation with Zolesha had not had the result he had expected. Instead of getting Cursed to the hilt, Zolesha had started pursing him with almost as much frozen-pond passion as she had for her witchy training.

Bewitched flowers would appear at his door that waved their petals and wafted their perfume to him when he left his home on the way to the township's one-room schoolhouse.

Or the funny ones, like the ensorcelled frog who hopped up on his bedroom windowsill to croak out a love ballad from her, gaining complaints from the neighbors.

Or the tragic ones, like poor Myrsina, a copy of herself that Zolesha had made of out of snow one winter to "look after" Nick, and then had become jealous of when he actually befriended the sweet-hearted version of the witch. Zolesha had promptly melted the girl down. He could still hear Myrsina's begging cries as she returned from animated snow to a puddle of quickly refreezing ice.

Or the gross ones, like when she left a wood box at the top step of his porch, full of half-nibbled chocolates—Zolesha's jagged tooth marks on them, one and all. The chocolates weren't magical, though, so maybe witches couldn't enchant food.

The point was that Zolesha's attempts to attract his attention were often as exotic as they were confusing.

To his young heart, it had been sort of flattering. But then another series of curses would happen—one on a friend over the minor transgression of not getting out of Zolesha's way fast enough, another on the tavern owner who brought tea to her cold, and Nick would be reminded of how cold and cruel she actually was.

"I bet she never sent you a marching band of tin soldiers, did she?" There was no warmth in Zolesha's eyes. "No one appreciates my efforts."

"No one appreciates your cruelty." Nick's own eyes narrowed. "Glinda should be keeping a tighter leash on you."

Zolesha smirked. "You said it yourself—Glinda thinks I'm good"—she tapped her chest, mimicking Nick—"in here. And I happen to agree with her. You're the cruel one for snubbing me, running off and burrowing yourself away like a feeble little boy every time Glinda is away, choosing that inferior girl over me. You refuse me after I shower you with attention, then you ask to court her, who gives you nothing? Yes, you are the cruel one. You won't even tell me why it was her instead of me. I mean, I've never been cruel to you."

Nick gulped. "Why chase someone who doesn't want to be caught by you, though?"

"Why ask inane questions?" She stifled a yawn. "This is boring. Should we make it more interesting? Why don't you scamper off to one of your hiding places—I'll give you ten minutes—and if I find you, we end this the way we're going to end it anyway?" She gave her wand a slight flick. A warning.

"And if you don't find me?"

"Impossible. But it makes it more fun," she replied.

Nick still didn't know how Zolesha had found out about his courtship with Melinda, though she'd severed it quickly enough. He'd been hiding in one of his best spots at the flour mill on the Sapphire River—a place he went to often when Glinda bubbled off to the Emerald City for days or weeks on end, leaving him wide open to green-fingered advances—when a friend ran in, shouting for him, yelling that Melinda had been badly injured by Zolesha.

By the time Nick had gotten back to the township, he'd found Melinda huddled on the yellow brick road, her eyes a pupilless white. One fierce argument with the witch and a fearful moment that he might get Cursed himself, and Zolesha had relented and reversed the Curse on the farmer girl. The milkmaid had run sobbing from the scene, taking any hope of a courtship with her.

Nick had turned to leave too, when Zolesha's begged him to stay, saying she had only harmed Melinda out of love for him. To show him the milkmaid was the "wrong" choice. That Melinda was nothing, so harming her meant nothing.

It was this cruel heartlessness against an innocent girl that had cracked Nick's common sense open and poured out the words that had put him in his current situation.

"You cruel and cold-hearted bitch,"he had said. "I'd rather bind my heart with steel springs than even consider loving a wicked girl like you."

"Cruel and cold-hearted bitch?" she had replied, all pleading gone from her voice. "Very well. If that's what you think of me, I'll be only too happy to show you how cruel and cold hearted I can be. I'll find you when I'm ready, since you made me Uncurse that tart. What a waste of a wand. Brace yourself."

She had found him. On his way back from the schoolhouse the next day, this day, she'd been waiting. And his friends had vanished like his bones were about to.

"I've been honest with you. I've told you why it couldn't be you," Nick said. Looking at the lethal bit of wood currently pointed at him made him want to pin his tongue down with a brimblethorn, as a precaution to keep it from flapping like that again, getting him in even more trouble than he was already in. The temptation was already rising, along with his anger.

"Say it plainly. Call me what you called me yesterday, so I can be sure you meant it," she asked. Her green face was onyx dark under the shade of her pointed witch hat. But even in the shadow of its brim, he could make out the lines of her tears glistening down her thin teenage face. She wasn't bored, she was… sad.

"Listen, Zolesha," Nick said cautiously, his brain cycling through a dozen bad ideas on how to talk her down.

He decided to try and fill the air with so many words they would bat down the rage-thrown comment he had carelessly tossed at her the other day. "I know what I said to you. I didn't mean it the way it sounded. You'd just blinded and unblinded Melinda—I was a little upset and looking to hurt you. Us teenage boys, whew, we just wag our tongues without thinking, you know?"

To his surprise, the thin green hand pointing the slender black wand at him quivered slightly, and the fierce point of it lowered the distance of a fly's wingbeat. He debated rushing her and knocking away her magical weapon in the moment's hesitation—a witch without a wand was just a vulnerable as any other person—but the distance was a deadly-quick spell too far away.

"How is ‘cold hearted' and ‘too wicked to even consider loving' supposed to be taken?" Zolesha hissed at him.

"You certainly don't sound cold hearted now," he tried to joke. Maybe humor would shake her anger free so he might actually survive the week and make it to his next birthday.

"I'm not saying that you're evil," he hurriedly added. "Just, maybe, a bit darker than you have to be. You've hurt a lot of people, Zolesha. A lot of people that I care about. Surely, you see how Glinda behaves and how much she's loved for it. I would think that if you acted like her, maybe you'd have people love you as well."

Zolesha wiped the sleeve of her free hand across her face. When she spoke, the words were bone dry. "No one will ever love me," she said, hollow as a termite-nibbled oak.

"I'm not saying that." Though he pretty much had.

She breathed in, and the power around her intensified. "You will never love me."

She was right about that, but he wasn't going to agree with her out loud.

"And it's all Melinda's fault," Zolestra growled.

This again?

"I should have done something worse to her," the witch said in a dark breath. "The same something I am going to do to you."

Nick knew he was about to learn a powerful lesson on how heartbreak could be more dangerous that witchcraft.

The wand tip danced in his view, seeming as if it wasn't quite solid, like it was a slice of nighttime sky seen through the heat shimmer of the Deadly Desert.

"How is it her fault?" Nick tried to keep her talking.

"You fawned over Melinda, and she has the personality of a wrung-dry dishrag," she said, tapping out her anger in the air with the tip of her wand. "Then there was the time you had the audacity to challenge me about the hiccup Curse I put on that obnoxious boy way back when. Anyone else would be dead by now. Isn't that proof enough that I am not cruel?"

"No. I ‘challenged' you when you made my best friend suffer what would have been permanent hiccups. Thankfully, your mistress fixed it." He held back from telling her that it was her personality that made her impossible to love, from speaking plainly as she'd asked. Even to his sixteen-year-old mind, antagonizing the furious, heartbroken witch didn't seem like a wise idea.

"She won't be able to fix the Curse I'm going to put on you."

It was likely true; Glinda had journeyed to the Emerald City three weeks earlier and still had not returned. It was one of the reasons the witch-in-training had gotten out of hand. She wasn't being supervised, and with no magic schools in Oz, she couldn't be sent anywhere else.

Yet still, Zolesha hesitated.

It was the knife's-edge aggravation of waiting for her to do something or nothing that finally made Nick snap, his own anger finally surging to meet the apprentice witch's. "You know what, Zole? I've had enough. Either blast me with some kind of curse like you did Melinda and be on your way or don't. Frankly, I don't have time to deal with idle threats. And… you are a cold-hearted bitch. There. Happy now?"

He got what he wanted, and there was nothing to be happy about. With a single magical word, the wand flicked in Zolesha's green hand and a skin-burn wash of heat ran across Nick's entire body. She panted at the exertion of it and nearly dropped her wand, but she held on long enough for the magic to solidify, the wand becoming as steady as the gleam of hate coming from her hat-shrouded eyes.

What had she done? Other than suddenly feeling like he had spent a day shirtless in a field with the hot sun hammering down on him, there were no additional sensations, no feeling that screamed "you've been Cursed."

"What did you do?" he snarled and tried to take two strides forward. To do what, he didn't know. Wrench that wand out of her hand, maybe?

Determination settled onto his face, tight and hot, furrowing the lines of his forehead. But something was wrong. The tight sensation was spreading quickly, like a vicious sunburn across the entirety of his body. It throbbed, pain splintering through every limb, his determined breaths becoming jagged gasps. His first successful step forward broke through the sudden tightening and pain, as if his clothes were made of broken glass, shredding him.

Nick jolted to a stop, but his arms continued in slow motion, fighting against the tearing tightness until his fingers came to a stop inches away from her robe's collar. He wanted to grab her about the throat and strangle her into unconsciousness until she could be trussed up and her wand taken away, but now all he could do was look at his hands, stretched out in front of him.

His freshly minted, silver-colored hands.

Gone was the healthy tan of his days in the fields helping his neighbors or in the forest hunting game to share his spoils with those who were not so lucky. Gone was his ability to get his limbs to do what he wanted them to do, exactly when he wanted them to, so he could forget lounging, carefree, in the reservoir ponds of the Sapphire River. Gone was anything other than the pain.

"What have I done?" Zolesha repeated his question in a stunned, horrified voice, so quiet Nick wondered if it was just an echo of his own. Then, her face changed and twisted into a callous smirk, breaking off a laugh that sounded more crazy cackle than her usual hateful humor. "What have I done? I'm showing you what cold hearted means, Nicholas. Everyone will say it's you with the frozen heart from now on."

Nick's pain doubled with each push of his body against the hardening of his skin. Even his face felt solid, resisting the anger and agony that were hammering against the inside of him, trying to be released.

"From now on," she said as she tucked away her wand into the shadowy folds of her dress, "whenever you show, or say, or even hint at emotion, it will show on your skin, your body. Flesh turning metal. Don't worry, you'll still have the cursed joy of being able to feel all your emotions, you just won't ever, ever be able to express them without pain and change. Nor will you ever be able to talk about the Curse itself. I can't have you getting sympathy from others, now can I? That would defeat the whole point of this little lesson."

Zolesha cackled again as if it were all just a wonderful joke before she continued, "You'll see how hurtful it is to be thought of as cold hearted when all you have is love for someone who won't return it!"

Nick realized the feeling of glass clothes was his actual skin shredding itself against the razor-like folds of bent arms and flexed muscles. But even that feeling was going away as his outer skin smoothed, its metallic thickness increasing, deadening all sensation.

His pain brought her black eyes and thin mouth pleasure. She licked her envy-green lips and added, "If you are a good little boy and learn to hide your emotions, your shiny new skin will recede. But it will never completely go away. And each time you show emotions, it will come back quicker, and with more force than ever before."

Nick tried to respond, but his throat felt like it was clamped by a rusty steel vice.

"Someday, you will go too far," Zolesha said wistfully. "You'll show too much. And then you will be a statue forever. For now, I'll just be happy knowing that every time you show any type of feeling for anyone or anything, your body will become as cold and unfeeling as steel. You could say I did you a favor by chasing away that milkmaid, otherwise you'd be a garden ornament by midnight."

"Glinda will fix me," he tried to say, but it was only a mumble through a jaw that would not unclench.

"I assume you just said my mistress will fix you," the witch said. "But rest assured, that will never happen. She'll need my wand to break my enchantment, and I've decided that the only thing that was keeping me here is no longer worth staying for. I'm leaving to find my way in the Land of Oz. By the time Glinda comes looking for me, I'll be as powerful as she is right now. Maybe even more so." She winked. "I wasn't idle while she's been away."

Nick tried to relax his expression, praying that the metal would ease, but it was as if he were attempting to fold a steel spoon with his lips. The panic set in deep, but it had no avenue to show itself; his metallic body was a steel dam holding back every bit of what made Nick himself.

Zolesha reached into her cloak and pulled out her dark-gray wand. With one last, grimly delighted look at him, she waved it over her head and a trail of red smoke whisked about, drifting down in a cone around her with a winter-draft speed. It appeared as if the thickest parts of the inverted tornado-like cloud of smoke was erasing parts of her with each waft in the air. When it finally cleared to a thin red haze, Zolesha was gone.

Nick stood statuesque in the middle of the yellow brick road, unable to move, screaming inside his paralyzed body.

It turned out Nick had been right and wrong. Zolesha may have not killed him with her Curse, but she had surely stolen his life.