Dorothy Must Die Read Online Free PDF

already infinite and still it wanted more.
    There was no sign of him. The boy was gone.
    I looked down at Star, who was perched on her haunches at my feet. “So what do we do now?” I asked, half expecting her to say something back.
    She didn’t need to. I knew the answer already: what I was going to do next was the same thing I’d been doing my whole life.
    I turned back. Just put one foot in front of the other. Nothing had changed except the color of the road.

Star and I walked, following the road, and when she seemed to get tired, I took her and placed her on my shoulder, where she perched patiently and looked out into the distance. She knew just as well as I did that we were very far from home.
    Despite my crash landing in Oz, my body was surprisingly free of bruises, aches, and pains. Actually, I felt pretty good. The headache I’d had when I’d first landed had subsided, and now I felt full of energy.
    I was hoping that the place would cheer up as I got farther away from the pit. I was still hoping for a tree that grew lollipops or a welcome committee of cheerful Munchkins—or anything cheerful, really. But as I walked down the road, the countryside remained as grim and desolate as before, everything cast in the eerie blue light that reminded me of the glow of a television from underneath the crack of a closed door.
    There were no singing birds. The only signs of life were the giant ravens that occasionally swooped overhead, startling me every time they crowed. There were no trees to be seen, but the air smelled vaguely of burning leaves.
    After a while, the bedraggled fields by the side of the road turned into huge cornfields on either side, with stalks as tall as my body. I was used to cornfields back in Kansas, obviously, but these were different: every ear was as black and shiny as oil. It looked like each one had been dipped in tar. Or like all the life had been sucked out of them and had something dead and evil pumped back in their place.
    Curious, I reached out to pull one of them from its stalk. Before I could even touch it, a black vine sprung up from the ground and curled around my arm like a whip, squeezing tight. It burned. I yelped and pulled away, managing to twist myself free, and retreated to a spot in the center of the road that I hoped was safely out of reach. I made a note not to go poking around at anything else here. This wasn’t Dorothy’s Oz.
    It was Oz, wasn’t it? The boy had called it that, and the fact that I was walking along a road made of yellow bricks was enough to convince me I wasn’t in Canada or Argentina. I just had no idea what this Oz had to do with the story I knew. It would have been nice if he’d given me a little more information.
    Or maybe he had: Suddenly I remembered what he’d said to me before he’d disappeared into the pit. “Don’t make the same mistakes she made.”
    Could he have been talking about Dorothy? “This is where it all began for her,” he’d said. Who else could he have meant? And what “mistakes” had she made?
    I thought about it some more. What if Dorothy had been here, just like the book said, but she had somehow gotten it wrong? Like, what if the witch had killed her instead of the other way around? If so, this depressing version of fairyland definitely felt wicked enough to be the result.
    It was a weird idea—so weird that I felt my headache coming back as I tried to wrap my head around it—but what if Dorothy had screwed everything up and someone had decided to bring over another girl from Kansas as some kind of do-over?
    I shuddered to myself. I had enough problems of my own back in Kansas. Why couldn’t I have been swept away to an imaginary kingdom where nothing was wrong at all—where I could just kick my legs up and enjoy a nice, relaxing vacation? I racked my brain, trying to remember if there were any books or movies like that ,and realized there weren’t any.
    Well, one thing was for sure—I didn’t have any magical