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No … the Wizard of Oz.

I’m hot and cold and enraged and disoriented.

He stabbed me.

He stabbed me!

But there is no trace of him and the room is still.

I pat down my front and find my blue-and-white-checkered dress stiff with old blood and stained dark from the flow of it.

Just beneath my left breast, the material is torn cleanly open.

Oh god.

A wave of dizziness overtakes me and I stagger back, bumping into a chair, crashing into it. I curl my hands over the chair’s arms and close my eyes, breathing in deeply to try to stave off the rush of anxiety and fear.

I was stabbed in the gut.

I don’t have to be a doctor to know how bad that is.

Back on the farm, a doe once tried to cross our field in the dead of night and caught herself on the fence. It was her bleating that woke us before sunrise. Henry had to put her down as her insides spilled to the outside.

If I’m mortally wounded … who do I call for help in Oz? How do I call them? I have yet to see a phone in Oz or any other type of communication device. Rook saw a doctor in Glimming Hollow but the West’s castle is in the middle of nowhere and now she’s dead.

Because I killed her.

A hot swell of bile threatens to spill out of me and I clamp my hand over my mouth.

I don’t know if I should vomit or scream or sob.

None of this makes any sense and I keep expecting to wake from this nightmare safe in the bed that Henry built me all those years ago on the Kansas farm.

But I can’t wake up.

The nightmare remains.

I killed the Witch of the West before I had a chance to understand who she was and what she meant to me and how she connected to my past.

The answer is lurking in the back of my mind like a ghost, one I’m desperate not to look at directly.

Not yet.

I spot the West’s discarded clothing across the room, a ring of ash around it.

I’ve killed two Cardinal Witches. Two of the most powerful women in Oz.

Dread wells up, threatening to consume me.

This is a mess. A huge fucking mess.

In Kansas, two murders would get me tried and imprisoned. I could argue the murder of the Witch of the East was in self-defense, but the West? She didn’t raise a hand to me. She may have provoked me, but that was no reason to turn on her.

She didn’t deserve it.

I killed the only person who might have had the answers to my life before the Kansas farmhouse.

What have I done?