It was a sweater. My red one. It was a little too tight and had a tiny hole in the sleeve, but it was my favorite because it was the only thing I owned that was actually designer. It was dirty, covered in what looked like the red clay roads for which Dusty Acres was named. It had probably been tossed from the trailer during the cyclone. She hugged it to her chest.

She wasn’t using. She was just missing me.

I balled my fists in anger. I had spent years trying to clean her up. And the thing that finally made it happen was getting rid of me.

“You can access magic from the good places as well as the bad, you know,” Gert said softly.

I laughed. “Maybe you haven’t looked around in my head enough. There are no good places.”

“You can decide what kind of magic you practice. Just like you can decide who you are. In the end, it’s really the same thing. But you don’t have to be angry.”

“What if I want to be angry?” I snapped. “Don’t I have a right to be angry?”

Gert just shrugged evenly, but I kept going.

“Look at what I did back there when I was angry. I set the sky on fire and made it snow ash. Being angry works. It works a lot better than anything else I’ve tried.”

“But imagine if you didn’t have to start there. Imagine if you got to start somewhere good.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “I can imagine a lot of things. That doesn’t mean they’re possible.”

“Anything is possible, dear. Look around you.”

I laughed bitterly. “Oz—where all your worst nightmares can come true.”

“Look at us,” Gert said, ignoring me. “We witches spent our lives fighting each other. Now we live under the same roof. Working together for something greater. It just goes to show . . .”

I tried to imagine becoming besties with Madison Pendleton after years of her torturing me. I shook my head.

But Gert wasn’t talking about Madison Pendleton, not really. She was talking about my mother. I felt like if I forgave her, I was just asking her to hurt me again.

“Why are you pushing this?” I asked. “My mom’s a million miles away. It doesn’t matter.”

“She’s the voice in your head.”

“And you want yours to be in there instead?”

“I want yours to be, Amy.”

I refused to look at her, refused to be taken in by those warm, grandmotherly eyes. I knew what was behind them.

I kept staring at the water but when Gert didn’t respond, I looked up to see her fading into white smoke.

Well, clearly she was done with this conversation. I looked back down. The image of my mom was fading away. As it did, the water began to bubble.

Steam began to rise from the roiling, angry water. The pool was boiling, and I knew it wasn’t part of Gert’s spell. I was the one doing it.

Forgiveness can get you places, I guess. But sometimes you need to light a fire.

I sank into my bed that night without bothering to change out of my gown. I’d seen Mom. I’d done magic. It bugged me that even now, my mom was tied to everything I did. Was she seriously still screwing with me from a gazillion miles away? I couldn’t blink away the image of her in the scrying pond, all cleaned up and holding on to my sweater. It made me sad. It made me miss her. But it didn’t magically erase the years of other, grimmer images.

Sleep felt as far away as home.

The next morning, I was almost glad to remember that I had a session with Nox. I needed to punch something. That I would get to punch Nox was an added bonus.

On my way to the training room, Gert’s and Glamora’s voices wafted out at me as I passed Glamora’s chambers. Something about their tone—hushed, yet sharp and full of warning, like they were talking about something secret—made me stop just outside to listen in.

“Don’t encourage it, Glamora.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean. That girl has more cracks in her than the road of yellow brick. Nox will break her in two.”

“Or she’ll break him. Don’t pretend you were never young. She has no real connection to any of us. But she and Nox—there’s something there.”

“We are bound. She is warming to me—”

“That’s not enough. You know that I have my own suspicions about exactly who it was that brought Amy to Oz. There are few people with enough power to summon someone from the Other Place, and if my hunch is correct, we both know that a simple binding won’t be enough to hold the girl to us. But I can think of a stronger glue. . . .”

“She’s starved for it, certainly. But I don’t know if our boy is capable of love. He wasn’t built for it. We didn’t build him for it.”

“It’s funny, Gert,” Glamora said. “All that mind reading, and you still can’t see inside the heart. Our boy is starved for it, too. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

I backed away, shaking my head, and rushed down the hall. I did not feel that way about Nox. Maybe he wasn’t the total jerk I’d thought he was at first, but that didn’t mean anything. It definitely didn’t mean he felt anything for me.

My pulse was still speeding when I got to the training cave. Seeing him was already going to be different after last night—dancing together, hearing his story for the first time, and feeling the magic that had finally surged through me.

When I walked into the cave, he wasn’t alone. A glint of tin caught the light and blinded me for a second. It was the girls who had interrupted our dinner the other night, covered in blood. They looked fine now—better than fine. Annabel, the tall one with the unicorn scar, was stretching, while Melindra, the half-tin girl, leaned against the wall with her arms crossed, staring at me.