case my brain had fallen out while I had slept, and I could no longer understand analogies unless they were given in threes.
“But how did you land on Rockabill?” I asked.
“It makes sense that Rockabill has something,” Anyan replied. “After all, why do you think this place has always drawn so many of our kind? And didn’t you ever wonder why Nell is so powerful? Gnomes are strong, but Nell is ridiculously so.”
The others thought about that, as Sarah Nahual nodded.
“Both Marcus and I became stronger when we moved here. Not a huge amount, but enough that we both noticed. We thought it was our partnership.”
“And why did you move here?” Anyan asked. “Why did any of you move here?”
Iris frowned. “I dunno. I was passing through, and I felt I had to stay in the area. I just liked it here. I couldn’t stay in Rockabill itself, as there weren’t enough people to feed off… but I wanted to be close, for some reason.”
Both Sarah and Marcus nodded, as if Iris had summarized how they felt. Minus the people to feed off, obviously.
“Yeah, it’s like I felt at home here. Even though it’s nothing like where I grew up,” Amy replied. “I only came out here to pick up some killer weed a friend had told me about, and I just knew I had to stay.”
As my friends talked, I started to get what they were saying.
“I was born here, because my mother showed up. But why Rockabill?” That question had always bothered me, ever since I’d been told my mother’s true identity. Now it was starting to make sense. “I mean, if she just wanted a… a mate, there are definitely better places to go. My dad was one of like five fertile men in all of Rockabill at the time. Everyone else was too old, too young, or too… problematic to have children by. So why not go to a place with more chances to find a baby daddy? Yet she came here.”
“Exactly,” Anyan said. “There’s power hidden in Rockabill—great power. It would be slightly masked by Nell’s presence. And if it is the power from the nursery rhyme, it’s a power so ancient, so foreign, we haven’t truly recognized it. But still it calls to us, power to power.”
We all sat in silence for a few seconds, contemplating Anyan’s words. It’s not every day that you discover your “choices” might have actually been made for you. Or, at least, helped along by forces outside of your control.
“So what’s the power?” I asked, eventually.
Anyan shrugged. “We don’t know, exactly. But that nursery rhyme has been around forever. It’s something old. Something strong. And something that shouldn’t be found.”
“You couldn’t have gotten all that from a nursery rhyme,” I said. “Especially one so vague.”
“No,” Anyan said. “Blondie’s been chasing up this myth for centuries. And that’s why she was following us. She wanted to use us as her invitation into Rockabill. She’d narrowed down her search to places like Rockabill—coastal cities with disproportionately large concentrations of supernaturals, and had been going down the list.”
I frowned, my brain pinging at the word “list.”
“Why didn’t she just introduce herself?” I wondered out loud.
“I asked her that. She said that she needed to know she could trust us before she told us what she wanted. If she’d just knocked on Nell’s door, Nell would have booted her into Canada, as a powerful stranger. So Blondie wanted to suss us out, make sure we were on the level, tell us what she wanted, and then use our help figuring out if Rockabill really does house the power the nursery rhyme talks about. If she’d just told us, and we were both evil and really sitting on the right site, she’d have had a hard time getting through Nell to stop us finding it.”
I thought of the times Blondie had stopped in to save us while we were traveling. Yeah, she seemed on the level, and I could see that Anyan and my other friends clearly trusted her. But why?
Before I could air my suspicions, Iris interrupted my thoughts: “But then you were attacked,” she said, solemnly.
“Yes. And Blondie thinks they’re connected,” Caleb rumbled.
I looked up sharply. “What?”
“Think about it,” Anyan said. “Blondie’s not the only person who was looking for that myth, and war is coming.”
“What does the war have to do with it?” I asked, confused.
“What does every war need?” Anyan asked, clearly rhetorically. I’d noticed that the barghest, while normally