echoed my shock. We all stood there, staring at each other with wide eyes. All of us except for Anyan, who was thoroughly laving his fuzzie doggie balls with his tongue.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I shouted at the barghest, what little decorum I had left snapping like a twig. “Nell’s a… baby! We need your help!” I waited for that gravelly voice I knew so well to speak from the barghest’s throat. But instead he only panted at me, and then went back to his tongue bath.
Dread washed over me as a horrible thought raced through my head, but before I could pursue it, the baby started wailing. Iris and I looked at each other, and then walked forward. She picked it up, cradling it gently against her chest just as I felt a very foreign, yet distinctly familiar magic shimmer through the cavern.
With a very loud pop, Blondie appeared in the middle of the cavern. Her hair was still in a Mohawk, still tipped pink, and her tattoos glimmered in the light shining from the few forgotten mage lights we still had strewn about the cavern. She wore low-cut jeans, and a tight white wifebeater displayed her lithe, muscular form.
“What the hell happened?” the Original demanded, her magic sparking off her like enraged fireflies. “Is Nell dead?”
All of us in the cavern still standing on our own two feet looked at each other, not quite sure what to tell Blondie. It was like we were saying to each other, with our eyes, What we think happened couldn’t have happened, right?
“Because her Territory is now unprotected,” Blondie snapped, causing us all to freeze. I gulped, looking at the baby in Iris’s arms.
In that case, I thought, thinking of Blondie’s assumption that Nell had to be dead. I hope my worst fears are actually correct. Then I looked at Anyan, who’d moved on from his testicles and was now contentedly lapping at his own anus.
Or maybe not.
“Nothing’s happening!” I shouted for about the fourth time, the panic rising in my voice. Anyan was sitting, drooling on the floor and patiently waiting while Blondie tried various things to get him back into man-shape.
Since returning to Anyan’s cabin, and having gotten over the initial shock of what happened in the cavern and Blondie’s sudden appearance, I’d remembered the million things I wanted to ask the Original. But getting our friends back definitely took priority.
“I know,” she growled, throwing some more mojo into her attempts. I went to stand by her, offering her my own power. I felt Blondie funnel my force into her own and out toward Anyan, but still nothing happened.
“This can’t be happening,” I repeated, also for about the fourth time. Having Anyan trapped as a dog—a real dog!—was probably the scariest thing I’d ever seen.
“Shit,” Blondie said, lowering her arms and releasing my magic. “Nothing’s working.”
I looked at her, my face gone white, before turning to the others.
“So Nell is now a baby,” Iris said in her turn to repeat herself, for about the fifth time. “And Anyan is a dog.”
Blondie sighed and scratched at the exposed skin on the side of her head; it looked like she’d freshly shaved around her Mohawk that morning. Then she went and sat down by the fire Trill had built in his fireplace. I think the kelpie was just trying to keep busy—she hadn’t said anything since the cavern. She was probably even more freaked out than me, if that were possible.
Not that we weren’t all upset, so we’d returned to Anyan’s to regroup after what happened. Only to discover Gus had managed to lock himself in one of Anyan’s cupboards. The stone spirit was currently in Anyan’s kitchens, making himself a peanut butter, banana, and potato chip sandwich, a combo I found bold and intriguing, although everyone else seemed to think it was disgusting.
“What else could have happened?” the Original responded to Iris, stretching out her long legs. “We have one baby whose power signature reads ‘immature gnome,’ and a dog instead of a barghest.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” I pleaded, my voice a little hysterical. “How could this have even happened? And why a baby and a dog? It’s illogical!”
Blondie narrowed her eyes at me, as if she were thinking hard. Then a look came over her face like she might have figured something out, but her next words answered nothing.
“Sometimes there are too many players,” she said, cryptically, before staring off into the fire as if