West of Wicked

This adult fantasy novel reimagines The Wizard of Oz and ends on a cliffhanger.

Dorothy Gale arrives at a Kansas farmhouse as a small child during a violent storm, delivered by an unknown woman with blood on her face who begs the couple at the door, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, to take her. Dorothy grows up on their modest farm haunted by abandonment and a yearning for a life she cannot name. She has a romantic relationship with Edward Gilbert, a kind neighbor who proposes marriage repeatedly, but Dorothy deflects each time, privately admitting that his gentleness fails to satisfy a deeper hunger she cannot articulate. When Aunt Em asks Dorothy to imagine Edward engaged to someone else, Dorothy feels relief. Still, she decides to accept his proposal in the morning, reasoning that safety and love should be enough.

That night, a violent cyclone tears across the prairie. Dorothy chases her terrier, Toto, onto the porch, and before she can reach the storm cellar, the house is ripped from its foundation and swept into the sky with Dorothy and Toto inside.

In the land of Oz, a world shrouded in perpetual darkness due to magical curses from a long-ago war, a young woman named Cleo has spent her entire life as a servant to Delphine, the tyrannical Witch of the East. When the Witch of the West secretly provides Cleo with a signal of territorial encroachment, Cleo uses it to lure Delphine to a snowdrop field. The Witch of the West has orchestrated what comes next: Dorothy's house crashes down from the sky.

Dorothy wakes in the wreckage, injured. She opens the cellar door expecting Aunt Em but is attacked by Delphine, who survived the impact and accuses Dorothy of being an agent of the West. In self-defense, Dorothy stabs Delphine with a kitchen knife, killing her. Outside, a crowd of East Enders celebrates their liberation from a witch who had been sacrificing them to fuel her power. The Enders urge Dorothy to take Delphine's silver slippers, said to hold unknown magical power; when the shoes are removed, the body crumbles to dust. Lacosta, the Witch of the North, appears and directs Dorothy to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, where the Wizard of Oz can help her return to Kansas. The Enders warn of dangers on the road: forest beasts, the Witch of the West, and the Tin Woodman, a heartless mercenary.

Dorothy discovers the slippers have reappeared inside her wrecked house. When she puts them on, warmth floods her body and her injuries heal. She sets out with Toto along the Yellow Brick Road.

The Witch of the West, who hides her face behind a golden mask and possesses a prophetic third eye, uses her Sight to observe events in the East. She strikes a deal with the Tin Woodman, a feared mercenary whose cursed body functions without a heart. He requires regular injections of a drug called Oil to keep his partly mechanical body from locking up. If he retrieves Dorothy alive and unharmed, the witch will release his brother Gabriel, whom she has held prisoner for three years.

Walking the road through dark cornfields, Dorothy discovers a beaten man lashed to a pole like a scarecrow. She frees him and learns he has no memory of his identity. She names him Rook, and they travel together toward the Emerald City. They reach Glimming Hollow, a walled city where the guards hail Dorothy as the witch-slayer. The city's provost, Ana, provides lodging, and a fortune teller named Henrietta warns Rook that he has an enemy, the Tinman, who both loves and hates him. Privately, Henrietta warns Dorothy that her love "ignites everything it touches."

Dorothy and Rook grow closer, sharing a deepening attraction that makes Edward feel like a distant memory. At a celebration ball held in Dorothy's honor, they dance and kiss. But Rook has been keeping secrets: He overheard a corrupt council member named Fink conspiring with the Witch of the West to keep Dorothy at the ball while the Tinman closes in.

An alarm sounds. Fink's guards ambush Dorothy and Rook, but a sudden gust of wind, seemingly connected to Dorothy or the slippers, throws the attackers off their feet. They escape on horseback as the Tinman arrives with winged monkeys. Rook stabs the Tinman in the shoulder at the inn, and they flee through a hidden tunnel beneath the city wall. In the tunnel, Dorothy and Rook grow intimate, and she recognizes she cannot return to the passionless life she left behind.

Outside the wall, winged monkeys attack. Rook fights them off, but the Tinman buries his axe in Rook's back. Dorothy is carried by the monkeys to the Witch of the West's castle. The Tinman leaves Cleo, Delphine's former servant whom he pressed into service as a guide, to watch the body. After everyone departs, Cleo discovers Rook's body has vanished.

In the castle's dungeon, Dorothy meets Gabriel, the Tinman's brother. The Tinman enters Dorothy's cell to retrieve the slippers for the witch, but when he takes them, they vanish and reappear on Dorothy's feet, proving they can only be given, not taken. Gabriel notices pools of water forming in the previously dry dungeon and theorizes Dorothy created them during a panic attack. The Tinman reveals that water is the witch's secret weakness. Dorothy fills the Tinman's canteen with the water, and the two form an uneasy alliance.

Upstairs, the witch removes her golden mask, revealing a snow-white third eye. She immobilizes the Tinman with magic and causes him to hemorrhage. Dorothy tries to douse the witch with the canteen water but finds only ash inside. In desperation, she grabs the witch's wrists, and water pours directly from her own hands, causing the witch to crack and crumble. As the witch disintegrates, Dorothy recognizes her as the woman who delivered her to the Kansas farmhouse as a child. The witch's final words are an apology and a cryptic assurance: "Dorothy, you are home."

Dorothy finds a letter in the witch's clothing containing the golden mask, which commands the winged monkeys, and a warning not to trust the Wizard of Oz. The letter urges Dorothy to destroy him but is cut short.

While Dorothy kneels over the ashes, Rook appears alive in the castle. She rushes to embrace him. He leans close and whispers, "Can I tell you a secret, Kansas?" He reveals that he is the Wizard of Oz, then drives a knife into her ribs.

In the epilogue, the Tinman lies barely conscious on the floor. The wizard, holding the golden mask, addresses the Tinman as "brother," revealing that the wizard, the Tinman, and Gabriel are all siblings, and that the wizard cursed the other two. He explains he orchestrated everything: He needed Dorothy to kill the witches so he could obtain the mask and access Gabriel, whose inherited ability to find lost things is required to locate the Cardinal Gods, deities who once blessed Oz but mysteriously vanished. The wizard descends to the dungeon to take Gabriel. Dorothy lies silent in a pool of her own blood. In the fading darkness, the Tinman hears the distant roaring of a lion.

A bonus scene set before the main narrative reveals the wizard's manipulation from the start. Lacosta visited the Emerald Palace to propose marriage to the wizard, who deflected by telling her about the house from the sky and the girl inside. He instructed Lacosta to send Dorothy to the Yellow Brick Road, confirming that Dorothy's entire journey was engineered from the beginning.