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“She hasn’t been dead long.” With his metal fingers, he grabs a slip of paper from the table and reads it, a scowl sinking the line of his brows over his eyes.

“What is it?”

He hands the note to me.

The writing is cursive, elegant.

Did you think it would be that easy, Kansas? it reads.

A chill runs down my spine.

“Is this—”

Tin nods. “That’s his handwriting. I’d know it anywhere.”

“How could he do this? Henrietta was innocent.”

Tin turns to me. “You need to stop underestimating him. He is not the wounded man you found in that cornfield. He was never that man. He is half witch, half god, and he will destroy you if you let him.”

“I haven’t been—wait…”

The room seems to shrink around me.

“Did you say he’s half god?”

Tin turns away, but I grab his arm at the last second, yanking him back. He’s far too big for me to handle, but the gesture is just surprising enough to pull him to a stop.

“That’s a pretty big detail to just breeze past,” I say.

With a sigh, he says, “It’s not substantiated. But it came straight from our mother and I’ve seen nothing to contradict her claim.”

“Does he believe it?”

Tin snorts. “What do you think?”

Of course he does. Even when Rook was pretending to have no memories, to be wounded and weak, he was unable to completely mask his confidence and his arrogance. It was always there, gleaming beneath the surface like a gold coin in a riverbed.

“So why does he want to find the gods? If he is a god?”

“I don’t know. I imagine it has something to do with his power.”

“How so?”

“When he was younger, he couldn’t control it. The royal family brought him to the palace to study. But even then, it would fail him. It would come and it would go. He doesn’t need a source, so not having access to it at all times is a problem. It makes him look weak. And there is nothing the Wizard of Oz hates more than looking weak.”

“So you think he wants to find the gods so he can learn how to use his magic?” That’s the same thing we were just discussing about my magic. Maybe Rook and I have more in common than I thought.

“I don’t know if I’d characterize it as a learning experience. Fix his magic might be the better way to frame it.”

“But these are all good things, right? If he finds the gods and they return, the dark cloud retreats, the desert disappears. Oz is saved.”

“Yes. But ask yourself why he’d need to create a distraction to stop us. Why send all of Oz after us? Why kill your fortune teller? What is he hiding?”

My stomach turns. I don’t have an answer to his questions, but my gut is telling me the answers aren’t good.

In the front of the shop, the bell above the door rings out.

Tin and I look at one another.