Chapter 3

Three

An almighty shake shunted Dorothy forward, her hands flying out to avoid toppling headfirst into the diesel fuel lines she'd been checking, down in the bottom hold of the Kansas Folly. Panting hard, her hands braced against the sides of the engine hatch, she stared at the snake pit of tubes and wires. Above her, across the main deck, the moderate howl of the storm that Uncle Henry had predicted had become a lashing beast.

She'd spent too long out in the barn. Time had gotten away from her. For once, it seemed Uncle Henry's bones had been mistaken—the storm wasn't going to hit properly in a day or two; it was hitting now, and with a vengeance.

Staggering back to the rickety ladder that led up to the main deck, she tried to lift up the heavy hatch, but the wind fought back, as if it wanted to slam the hatch shut in her face, so Dorothy couldn't see what it had planned. In the narrow gap she managed to eke open, she looked out, just in time to witness half of the barn roof being pulled upward by the wind like a giant toddler was trying to peek in.

A cascade of splinters, runnels of rusty corrugated iron, and bits of pigeon nest scattered down onto the deck, but Dorothy held her position, frozen in fear. She was a fair distance from the farmhouse. Too far away from Aunt Em and Uncle Henry.

"Please don't wait for me," she gasped, willing them to take shelter in the storm cellar. There was no possible way that she could make it there, past the wall of tearing wind that had an appetite for old barns. But she had faith that the barn itself would survive, like it had a thousand times before. There might be a few holes, damaged joists, and scattered debris when it was over, but she was safe there.

At least, she thought she was.

A split second later, the barn doors ripped off into a gray twisting wind that was driveway-gravel-scouring the paint off the old red barn's wooden sides.

Dorothy dove back down into the belly of the boat, the hatch thundering shut behind her. She grabbed Toto—dozing in a storage box that would eventually hold her fishing gear, oblivious to the storm—and flung open a second hatch, throwing herself and her precious cargo even deeper into the bowels the ship, praying the clunky, vintage boat was too short, too heavy, and too ugly to interest the tornado that had decided to punctuate her horrible day with a downright natural disaster.

Her prayer was ignored as the entire boat began to vibrate, wood creaking, bolts groaning, things bouncing and thudding across the main deck high above. She wrenched down the hatch door to the empty cold-storage hold that was the closest thing to a storm cellar the boat had, plunging her and Toto into total darkness.

She held Toto tightly in one arm, starfishing her legs and free arm to brace against the hold walls, as the shudder of the boat became at least an eight on the Richter scale.

Without warning, the violent shake became a weightlessness, her spine peeling away from the slats at her back. Her body slammed back into the floor a moment later, her feet and hand desperately scrabbling for purchase as the wild wind seemed to grab the boat, and on rocky, waterless seas, it began to spin, caught in a whirlpool. Rather, a cyclone worse than any county fair ride she had ever taken.

"I'm in the air…"Such a casual thought, squeezed from her mouth as the g-force played with her brain, turning it into putty that heaved from one side of her skull to the other.

It was like being in the spin cycle of a washing machine, attached to a human centrifuge that part-timed as a slingshot.She wasn't just spinning in a circle inside the houseboat, she was catapulting every which way with such velocity she was half-pinned to the floor, half-pinned to the cold-storage wall, half-pinned to the ceiling, so many tumbling halves, but all of her flinging around and around, while doing everything she could to keep Toto protected.

Another jolt and a faster spin saw the dangerous scattering of utensils and tools, left behind in the hold for safe keeping, propelling themselves into the wall near her head. A slotted spoon clipped her cheek, a spatula slapped her across the forehead, but a dull-edged bread knife graciously skimmed right by and plunged into the wood, where it wobbled precariously.

She must've passed out at some point between getting thrown into the wall and the ceiling for the thirtieth time, because the next thing she knew, she was wide awake and freefalling. The floaty feeling only lasted a few seconds before the entire boat ran aground… careening into solid earth with the kind of crash landing you'd expect after plummeting from the skies, the entire vessel sounding like it was ripping to pieces, not just breaking on impact.

Luckily, a spool of foam and a stack of old blankets she had been meaning to reupholster the galley seats with had been forced into a pile from the whirling motion of the not-remotely-fun houseboat ride. They'd gathered at the far end of the hold, just below the wobbling bread knife. Even more luckily, she had been flung squarely into the pile of said cushioning, her body folded like a pretzel, upside down. Her last bit of luck—though it was closer to a miracle—was that the boat shattered, rather than every bone in her body.

"Toto?" she yelled instantly, realizing the crook of her arm was empty of the furry lump she'd put every inch of her bruised body into protecting. "Toto, where are you?"

A whimpering growl responded from the opposite end of the hold, where thin membranes of lint-dancing light had snuck in through some of the cracks. Between Dorothy and that growl, two shards of the boat's hull stuck up like stakes, a mound of earth spilling into the belly of the Kansas Folly.

"Come here," she urged. "Good boy, come."

Toto's brown-and-black form dug itself out from under a strapped down tarpaulin and bounded his way over to Dorothy, skirting around the jagged mess in the middle. Though her legs were splayed up on the thickest pile of foam, her back on the pile of blankets, he somehow found a way to crawl up onto her chest. A few face licks later and he bounded off of her again, barking like hell to be let out.

She untangled herself from the would-be upholstery and pushed open the cold-storage hatch, climbing out into the mess that was the galley remnants, plucking Toto out before he gave up and decided to pry away one of the cracked planks to get to freedom. Unsatisfied, he just ran to where the ladder should've been and started barking all over again.

"Wait a minute, Toto," she told him, checking her phone. No cell signal. The closest tower was likely down from storm damage. Still, her phone showed a missed message from Auntie Em: We're in storm cellar where are you?!?!

The fact she had used an interrobang at all, let alone two, showed exactly how worried her aunt was. She started typing out a response but figured it would be best to just walk across the backyard and knock on the cellar door itself.

Dorothy frantically climbed over the debris all around her and pushed her way through the splintered insides of the ruined houseboat, until she found the relatively intact ladder. As she made it to what remained of the main deck, shivering into the storm-damp air, she swore. Loudly.

The Kansas Folly had landed next to a cornfield that should've reassured her that she was still in the vicinity of the Gale farm, except each of the tall stalks was in fact two separate stalks twisted around each other in double helix like a DNA strand. The cobs peeking out from inside the corn husks ranged in radical colors from neon pink to lurid violet to cherry red to a cotton-candy blue.

The boat itself had landed on a winding road made of bright-yellow brick, the starboard side listing into a small cottage with a thatched roof of hay—thankfully for Dorothy's sanity, it was a more traditional, dull-gold color—that wouldn't have been of place in a fantasy movie.

Above the remains of the boat, the gray storm had an unnatural lavender undertone, unlike anything she'd ever seen. To the east, a snowcapped mountain range with geology-defying curved tops served as a backdrop for the rest of a village. It was if she had stepped inside a modern art reproduction of a two-hundred-year-old Swiss painting.

Dorothy wobbled on the tilted top deck as she pulled herself to the bulwark that wasn't taking out part of a stranger's house and dared to peer over the edge, already knowing that not only was she nowhere near the family farm, she didn't think she was even in Kansas anymore.

Along with the debris of the boat and glassy puddles of water from the downpour that mirrored a sky that looked so… wrong, there were people on the yellow street. Although a quick observation of them made her question whether she could use the word "people" or not.

The most normal of them was a disheveled woman with quiver-like leather things hanging on her hips, lying in the portside shadow of the wrecked houseboat. She wore a tattered pink dress and had a crown skewed on her wind-blown strawberry-blonde hair. Strewn all around her, sticks of all shapes and sizes and colors. Though, on closer inspection, Dorothy realized they weren't just sticks; they seemed to be… wands.

Fifty yards away, where the cottages stopped and the brick road meandered into more cornfields, was a green-skinned woman wearing a Spirit of Halloween–style black dress and clichéd pointed witch hat. The third person was a lumberjack-looking, black-haired gentleman who had just stepped out from the side of the cottage that Dorothy's houseboat had unsuccessfully attempted to flatten. At first, she thought his skin was a light lavender, like the storm, in a weird complement to the green-skinned wannabe witch. But she quickly realized he wasn't lavender, he was metallic, his skin's sheen reflecting the dissipating clouds above.

Before her still-whirling mind could make sense of everything around her, the witch screeched out a deadly wail that made Dorothy's tornado ride pale in comparison.

Dorothy was a hundred times more confused than on her first day at college—and that had been a doozy—asthe green-skinned woman pointed a stick at the wreck of the houseboat and charged up the yellow brick road, screaming obscenities and waving the ebony twig in the air as if she wanted to plunge the stiletto end into Dorothy's heart.

The princess-looking blonde woman frantically scraped a hand across the yellow bricks, searching through the pickup-sticks style pile of Renaissance fair wands around her. She snatched one up, muttered that it was "no better than a broken tree branch" and flung it away.

The silver man—who reminded Dorothy of those street artists who painted themselves and pretended to be statues—limped toward the boat wreck and the prone woman struggling through the fancy kindling.

Grabbing Toto, who seemed all too eager to sniff out his surroundings, Dorothy dropped to the ground and released her beloved dog, not sure of what else to do but not trusting the cracked remains of the boat to safely hold her.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Dorothy registered the words being chanted by the strawberry-blonde woman on the ground nearby. "A circle, a sphere, protect those that are dear."

Power rippled down the length of the green woman's wand and centered into a dark orb of crackling black energy that looked like a photo negative of a lightning ball. Energy ripped through the air in a thunderous race toward Dorothy: a laser-straight line.

The woman in princess pink whipped a star-headed crystal wand from the scattered array and flicked it in the air as she finished her chant.

The crackling ball of black lightning slammed into a shimmering, glass-like bubble that suddenly surrounded the boat and its immediate vicinity, separating Dorothy, Toto, the dame in the ballgown, and the silver guy from the charging lunatic.

The green-skinned woman pulled to a stop a dozen paces away, a fresh black wand pulled from the folds of her equally black robes. She aimed it at Dorothy. A flash of silver shot in from Dorothy's left, and the spray-painted man was standing in front of her, a buffer between her and the madwoman, suggesting that whatever that bubble was, it wasn't going to be enough.

More magic—and yes, that was the only thing Dorothy could call it, as no scientific word came to mind—shattered against the petroleum-spill sheen of the glass bubble. Inside the sphere, the impact rang like a crystal bell, and though none of the black electricity made it through, the sharp burn of ozone wafted in the air, nostalgic and disconcerting to Dorothy's nostrils. Toto sneezed in agreement.

"You killed my sister!" the witch shrieked, resuming her stumbling march forward.

Dorothy swiped up a long piece of broken boat slat and clutched the bottom like a baseball bat, splinters pinching her palm. She didn't know what kind of horrible nightmare she was suffering from, but she was going to go down swinging.

"Drop the sphere, Glinda," the green-skinned woman said to the woman on the ground, "and I'll let you live. This is between me and her. This is revenge!"

The man answered instead of Glinda, who was too busy searching through the mess of wands to do anything else. "Find a broom and fly off into the sun, Zolesha," he stated in a surprisingly calm voice.

"Fly off? How about I turn you into a flying monkey this time and see if that doesn't shut your mouth," the black-robed witch snarled at the man.

"You can't curse me twice," he replied. His whole demeanor was as flatly neutral as his words, unnerving considering the insane fever dream that was going on around them.

Another spell—this one a ball of ice—struck the glass globe, and the strawberry-blonde woman, Glinda presumably, moaned in pain as if she had been hit too. She struggled up onto her feet, her crystal wand in one hand and a singed wooden stick in the other, her shoulder leaning heavily into the busted side of the Kansas Folly. Grunting in frustration, the summertime witch tossed what must have been a useless wand away.

Everything seemed to pause in that moment.

The clouds above continued to dissipate, and the glow of the sun pushed hard on them. The two witches had opposite reactions to it. Glinda seemed to drink it in, standing a little taller despite her crooked crystal crown. The green-skinned witch—Zolesha, by Dorothy's guess—seemed to fade in its light, a thin night-flower shrinking in the heat.

"You can't wait us out forever," Glinda told the slowly wilting woman.

"What good deeds do you think you can do from in there to stop me?" Zolesha declared, but even Dorothy saw it for what it was: a bluff. "That globe has to be running through your ‘Goody Two-shoes' energy like Munchkins through humblebee poppy-honey."

Toto barked at the dark witch, and Dorothy scooped him up off the road before he could charge out of the globe and give in to his terrier tendencies, hunting down nasty critters.

Zolesha looked past Dorothy to the boat behind her. Her whole demeanor shifted.

"Throw me my sister's shoes, and I will leave," the witch suddenly declared. "For now."

"If she wants them…" the silver-skinned man said to Glinda, and the implication was obvious. If it was good for the bad witch, it was bad for them.

"My thoughts exactly," Glinda replied as she slowly bent over, again searching through the pile of wands while still holding the bubble-creating crystal one in the air.

She wobbled a bit on unsteady feet and nearly pitched over.

Dorothy couldn't believe she was going to play along with the craziness around her as she instinctively reached down next to the wobbly Glinda and picked up a gold-gilded wand with seashell carvings down its shaft. She handed it to the supposedly good witch and wondered how she would describe this particular dream to her therapist later.

Glinda twirled it in the air while keeping the other wand level. A moment later, two silver shoes appeared from behind them, each floating in the air inside soap-bubble-like balls of glass.

The good witch bobbed her golden wand up and down and gestured to Dorothy. "Stay on this wearer until I call upon them, or return to me if they are separated from her body."

Dorothy had fully expected Glinda to kick off her glass slippers and magic the silver ones on her own feet, so she was completely caught off guard when the shoes rocketed toward her. The Vans tennis shoes she had treated herself to a few weeks back were shredded off her feet into scraps of cloth and rubber.

"What the hell?" Dorothy shouted once the shock of the moment died.

"They weren't exactly going to fit Nick," Glinda said. She tucked the gold wand in one of the empty quivers on her hip and looked back at the green witch. "And if Zolesha wants them, we can't, under any circumstance, let her have them."

The other witch looked absolutely apocalyptic.

She swung her wand against the bubble protecting them as if it were a whip and she was keeping back a crowd of circus lions. A purple spell impacted the shield and Glinda stumbled, her wand lowering.

It didn't take Gandalf to understand a few more attacks like that and Glinda's globe would be gone.

Zolesha tossed aside her wand and reached into her robe for another.

She pulled out a wand so gray it could have been black, but her expression changed from bitterly angry to concerned as she continued searching around inside her shadowy garb with her free hand. Dorothy had seen the same kind of expression on someone who was searching for their phone and not finding it.

Something not where you left it?Dorothy thought.

The witch looked again at the fresh wand, then at the large crystal bubble surrounding the trio plus Toto, and snarled.

She stepped just to the edge of the globe, the wide brim of her black hat skipping across the glass-like surface and catching flames where it touched, thin wisps of smoke wending into the air.

"You win for now, Glinda," the witch hissed. "But I will return, and I will kill this creature that killed my sister."

Dorothy struggled to process the comment, disbelief ringing in her ears. What was going on? Who'd killed someone? What creature? Had she killed someone? Surely, she hadn't. And even if she had, it had to have been an accident. For one thing, she didn't see any bodies… but those shoes, now on her feet, had come from somewhere.

Zolesha raised the gray wand and swirled it inever increasing circles above her head, a trail of red smoke drifting down as if it was colder than the air around it. Everywhere the smoke touched the green-skinned witch, she too disappeared in fog-like patches until the last of her was erased.

Glinda heaved a sigh and lowered her trembling wand, the pink sphere of protective magic popping out of existence with a smack of displaced air. She slumped back onto the ground, her torn dress sprawled out around her. The tall crown of silver and glass rested lopsided on her head but had not detached or broken on the brick, evidence of even more magic.

"What did she mean I killed her sister?" Dorothy asked. "What is this place? Where am I? What the hell is going on?" The questions tumbled out of her in rapid succession.

"Nick, perhaps you should answer her. I need to… I need to catch my breath," Glinda replied, her dainty legs splaying outwards like a broken doll as she leaned backward, letting the side of the Kansas Folly support her upper half.

The man who had thrown himself into the path of the witch's magic turned to face Dorothy for the first time.

The right side of his clothes were slightly singed—likely from something that had happened before Dorothy's arrival—but underneath the patchwork of charred linen and cotton, she could see his silver skin was perfectly unharmed. Silver skin that covered his hands and throat and face, accenting dark eyebrows and darker hair above steel eyes that may once have been a different color, but were now reflecting the violet of the storm clouds that burned off above. He had the kind of bone structure that sculptors would've killed to carve into clay, painfully good looking despite the immediate strangeness of his appearance.

If it were any other day, in any other moment, Dorothy would have assumed she had wandered into a cosplay convention with a handsome anime fan pretending to be some metallic hero.

His face was emotionless as he answered Dorothy's questions in an unsympathetic voice. "Your house, that appears also to be a boat, landed on Zolesha's wicked sister, killing her."

He pointed to the bottom of the boat, which in turn had the bottom of a dress sticking out from below it. At the edge of the dress were black socks that had a distinctly Victorian-era vibe to them, all lace and frills and bows. A vibe that perfectly matched the silver shoes now on Dorothy's feet. Windswept black ash, tar-pitch, and crow feathers stuck to the rain-slick underbelly of the hull near the remains of the dress. Still more feathers and ash were being swept up from the sunken legs above the bumpy flat socks.

"What are you talking about?" Dorothy's voice was laden with layers of confusion and frustration. "Are you saying that is—I mean, that was, a person?"

The silver-skinned man ran a hand through his dark hair in a purposefully slow motion. "I'm not sure the word ‘person' would really quantify what she was." He glanced over to the summery witch as if looking for help.

Unfortunately, Glinda had passed out.

Her mouth was open, and breath slowly rose and fell in her chest, but she seemed more spent than Dorothy always was after a two-day study binge for a test she'd somehow missed on the syllabus.

"Hmmm," he said, rubbing his hands on his torn and burned shirt. "I guess it is on me to explain it."

"Somebody better start explaining a whole lot," Dorothy grumbled.

The man nodded solemnly and kept speaking in that careful, neutral tone. What a shame.He's got a nice deep voice that would be amazing to listen to on a long winter night if only it wasn't so robotic.

"She was a Wicked Witch," he explained, and she could hear the significance in the words. "So, she may have started out human, like her sister Zolesha, but once they do enough bad deeds, they become more curses and darkness than person."

"Who the heck are you people?" Dorothy huffed out, holding back about a dozen F-bombs. Despite how crazy everything was, she couldn't bring herself to cuss again. She respected her Aunt Emma too much and had long trained her San Francisco mouth to be Kansas friendly.

"I'm Nick," he answered. "That's Glinda the Good Witch. And you are in the eastern reaches of Munchkin Country."

Toto took that moment to waltz over to the sleeping beauty sprawled indelicately across the road. He nudged her, then licked her face. Seemingly unsatisfied with her lack of attention, he trotted over to Nick and put his nose into the air, breathing the man in. Dorothy couldn't blame her dog; there was something about the broad-shouldered man with his stormy exterior and dark accents that made her want to bury her nose into his neck, to see if he smelled like engine oil and steel, like the barn she was meant to be in. Her safe place.

She shook her head and grimaced.

"Get it together, Dorothy," she mumbled to herself.

Apparently, Nick had good hearing to match his good looks. "So, your name is Dorothy? I assume you're not from here, Dorothy?"

"Kansas," she managed to wheeze out, with the faint hope that it might still be somewhere down the yellow brick road, and she'd just hit her head really hard when the boat divebombed the ground.

"Kansas? I don't know it. I assume you're from Earth, then?" he casually asked, his expressionless face trying to hide a subtle curiosity tugging ever so slightly at the corners of his eyes.

Her stomach flipped at his words. "Are you saying I'm not on Earth?"

"Not any longer," he replied, as if he were discussing the changing weather.

He turned and looked at the door of the cottage that half of her houseboat was banked against. Thankfully, the stone of the building had held its own against the boat's feeble wooden planks; aside from some missing thatch and a bowed-in-almost-to-tumbling wall, there was little damage. "Excuse me. I must make sure everyone inside is alright."

He stepped toward the entrance without waiting for her reply.

"If I'm not on Earth, then where the devil am I?" Dorothy asked his broad, statuesque back.

Nick paused long enough to look back at her over his shoulder and replied, "Why, the Land of Oz, of course."