Free Dorothy Must Die: The Other Side of the Rainbow Collection: No Place Like Oz, Dorothy Must Die, The Witch Must Burn, The Wizard Returns, The Wicked Will Rise by Danielle Paige Page A

trees were lush and green in contrast to the icky cornfields. Huge, red apples dangled temptingly from their branches, shiny and juicy-looking.
    I stepped off the road, the grumbling in my stomach outweighing what I’d seen with the mutant corn.
    Star, still in my pocket, knew what was up, too. She poked her nose out and chirped hungrily as I reached for a piece of fruit.
    For a split second I thought I saw the tree blink. I snatched my hand back.
    I looked at the talking monkey next to me, remembering that anything was possible here. “Did that tree just move?”
    “They talk, too, but they’ve taken a vow of silence.”
    “Voluntarily?”
    “The princess felt that their conversation ruined the apple-eating experience and was therefore a violation of the Happiness Decree.”
    “What about their happiness? The trees, I mean?”
    “I think we all realized a little too late that the only happiness that matters is Dorothy’s,” Indigo chimed in.
    Ollie looked at me. “I know you want to, but you can’t.”
    “Is it poison? Or is it forbidden?”
    “It’s against the Happiness Decree. It’s not worth the risk,” Indigo said.
    “But we need to eat. And Ollie needs his strength. No one is around.”
    I plucked two apples and nodded at the tree, meeting its sad eyes. “Thanks,” I said. I handed one to Ollie, who took it and examined it, unsure.
    The first bite melted in my mouth. It tasted like pie. Apple pie. Apple and cinnamon and sugar and butter all mosh-pitted around in my mouth. It was a magically delicious apple! Finally, something in Oz that was actually as cool as advertised.
    It was too good to last. I’d just taken another satisfying bite when I saw Indigo’s face go white. She pointed behind me and opened her mouth to say something. No sound came out.
    And then.
    It started to get dark. But it wasn’t the sun setting. The sky was as sunny as ever. Instead, it was like the world around us was being covered in shadows, starting with the yellow road. Then the shadows began to rise up from the ground, curling and inflating and twisting into forms. They were taking on shapes. Shapes that looked oddly, eerily familiar to me.
    It was the Tin Woodman. He wasn’t alone.

I knew we were really in trouble when I saw that Indigo was too scared to even mutter an I told you so. She was just a little wall of fear with wide eyes. The color seemed to drain from her tattoos until they were just gray impressions on her skin. Ollie was shaking right down to the tip of his tail, the uneaten apple still in his hand.
    This Tin Woodman was not the Tin Woodman I remembered. By now I shouldn’t have expected anything different—nothing was the way it was supposed to be in Dorothy’s remade Oz. Still. I wasn’t prepared for what I was looking at now.
    He looked more like a machine that had been cobbled together out of spare parts, a hodgepodge of scrap metal and springs and machinery pieces all held together by screws and bolts. His long, spindly legs were a complex construction of rods and springs and joints, and bent backward at his ankles like a horse’s legs; his face was pinched and mean, with beady, flashing metal eyes and a thin, cylindrical nose that jutted out several inches from his face and ended in a nasty little point. His oversize jaw jutted out from the rest of his face in a nasty underbite, revealing a mess of little blades where his teeth should have been.
    I half remembered the Tin Woodman’s story. He had been a flesh-and-blood man until a witch had enchanted his ax to make him chop off pieces of his body one by one, and one by one he had replaced them with metal parts until that was all that was left of him. From what it looked like, he had been making improvements ever since. The only thing that was really familiar about him was the funnel-shaped hat he wore. I guess some things never change.
    Behind the Tin Woodman, four people in black suits materialized out of the shadows a moment after he did.