‘Yes,’ came Iris’s voice from the stairway. ‘We’ll all help. And we will figure it out.’
I twisted my upper body to see all of my friends, old and new, peering around Iris. Lord knows how long they’d been waiting there.
Overcome with emotion, all I could do was hold out my arms. And then they were there.
Grizzie crowded in, smothering both my dad and me in her ample, enhanced bosoms. My dad looked alarmed, but I was used to it. Tracy was behind her wife, her arms wrapped around us as much as she could, considering her huge, pregnant belly. Iris and Caleb did their part and took the other side. Nell and Trill were in front and back, the gnome levitating herself to sling an arm around our necks. Only Gog, Magog, and Hiral stood back, looking a bit flustered at all the emotion. They were British, after all.
When we’d hugged and cried and everyone had said something about his or her own feelings of loss, we still stayed as we were, hugging each other tight.
Finally, my dad spoke.
‘So, are we ready to figure this out?’ he asked.
‘Hell yeah,’ Grizzie said, her husky voice growling.
‘We’re getting Anyan back,’ Iris told me. I noticed her voice was nearly honeydew again, and I could only grasp her hand tightly in response.
‘We need snacks,’ Tracy said, making her way downstairs, undoubtedly to rustle up some grub.
‘I like these people,’ said Hiral, following Tracy to the kitchen.
‘I like them, too,’ I said to no one in particular as we made our way downstairs. For we had some planning to do.
Operation Get Anyan Back was in full effect.
‘So what exactly happened?’ Grizzie asked as we all settled around Anyan’s large, open-planned living room. Iris made tea while Tracy put the finishing touches on the snacks she was preparing.
My stomach rumbled like a monsoon was about to hit, and I realized I was starving. Keeping one eye on Tracy’s progress, I turned Grizzie’s question around on her.
‘I want to know the same thing,’ I said. ‘How much do you know, and how do you know it?’
Grizzie gave me a finger waggle. ‘You should be in trouble, miss, but your dad explained everything. Keeping secrets from us…’
I hung my head. It had always bothered me that I couldn’t tell Grizzie and Tracy about my supernatural life, but it had been as much for their sake as the sake of the secret. The more they knew, the more vulnerable they were, and I wasn’t about to risk their getting kidnapped and tortured just because I couldn’t keep my gob shut.
Speaking of gobs, my stomach sounded again, rolling over and over in its emptiness. Everyone gave me a queer look as I clamped a hand to my belly.
‘Sorry. I don’t think I’ve eaten in a few days. Er, weeks.’
My dad shook his head; as if that was the craziest thing he’d heard in the past week. Not me fighting a dragon, as I had in Paris, but me not eating.
‘So how did it all come out?’ I prompted, still wanting answers.
‘You fought a dragon on television,’ Tracy said drily as she placed a platter of sandwich halves in front of us. I picked up what I thought was turkey and cheddar, biting into it gratefully.
‘There was that,’ I said around my mouthful of food. It came out, ‘Der wad dat.’
‘And then your ex showed up, with Caleb and Iris, and they whisked us out to the cabin we thought belonged to our famous local artist, Juan Besonegro, but actually belongs to another of your kind named Anyan, who is apparently something called a “barghest”.’ Grizzie was really glaring at me now. It was one thing to keep my secret identity from her, another thing entirely to keep secret any single scrap of information regarding my love life.
Griz had priorities.
‘Sowwy,’ I mumbled through another huge bite of sandwich.
Tracy set down a platter of sliced-up fruit and a bowl of potato chips, both of which I helped myself to like a toddler confronted with a limited supply of Cheerios.
Tracy took a seat next to Grizzie, and finished what her partner had started. ‘Your dad explained everything. And he told us that he had only just found out, which made us feel a bit better. I think Ryu would have wiped all of our minds again, but Iris and Caleb talked him out of it, since everyone and their mother had already seen the dragon footage with you in it.’
I swallowed the bite I’d been chewing, then looked at both Grizzie and Tracy.
‘I hated lying to you, I really did. But it was such a big secret, and it would have sounded so crazy.’ Grizzie looked ready to protest, and I knew she’d tell me that I could tell her anything.
‘But more important,’ I said before she could interrupt, ‘I didn’t want you involved, because everything about this new world is so dangerous. If the psychos we’re dealing with thought you knew something important, then gods only know what they would have done to get it out of you. I didn’t want to risk your safety just because I wanted my friends.’
That seemed to pacify both women, and Tracy was staring at her distended, very pregnant belly. She and Grizzie were having twins, and that probably put a different spin on things for the two women.
‘But I did want my friends,’ I added, my voice small. ‘I wanted them very much, and I’ve hated not being able to ask for their help, or their advice.’
‘And now you can,’ Grizzie said, her eyes glazing suspiciously as she placed a hand on Tracy’s stomach.
Tears burned again in my own eyes as Nell’s voice came from her rocking chair, which she’d set up, as usual, near Anyan’s big fireplace.
‘Now tell us what happened, child.’
And so I did. I told them all about our trip to the UK, and how everything had started out so straightforward. I felt something akin to shame as I talked about how easy I thought it would be. All we’d had to do was keep the Red from recovering the relics, the bones, from which she could cobble together her consort, the White. But between our constantly being a step behind and the political machinations of the Great Island, what the humans called Britain, what should have been easy never was.
And then I told them about that last, horrible day in the seaside town of Whitby, when we’d been betrayed by one of our own. The rebel leader’s own beloved brother, Lyman, had not only freed Graeme, the rapist-incubus, to warn Morrigan of our plans, but had delivered her chosen vessel, my arch-enemy Jarl, to become the White.
Even in those first, chaotic moments after Lyman’s betrayal, things seemed to be going our way. Blondie killed Jarl, and I thought it was over.
Which was very stupid.
I’ll never forget telling my friends, in a dark, grief-stricken voice, about the Red’s tail lashing out to strike Anyan’s shields, or how he flew through the air to land on the bones, or how she chanted something and it was like a nuke went off in our midst.
When I told them how I’d struggled up from where I’d fallen, my older friends – my father, Grizzie and Tracy, Iris and Caleb, Nell and Trill – all cried for me. My new friends, Magog, Gog, and Hiral, who either had been at the site or had helped mop up the carnage, sat quietly with inward-looking eyes.
I’d sat up to find Anyan sprawled out, and I’d thought he was dead. I told them of my relief when he sat up. But then he’d turned vivid green eyes on me, and I’d felt my world torn from under my feet.
Then he shapeshifted into a dragon and flew away, and I’d discovered that our greatest ally, Blondie, the Original, was dead. She’d bled out from a cut made by the Red, whose claws made wounds that couldn’t be healed.
When I’d finished talking, everyone sat in silence. My dad had long since put his arm around me, and I was grateful for its weight.
‘Well, shit,’ Trill said. That seemed to sum the situation up for everyone.
‘We need to start at the beginning,’ Nell said, her sage little grandmother’s face looking into the fireplace as she thought. ‘First of all, we need to list our assets. What do we still have?’
‘We have all of us, here,’ Iris said. ‘And we all have special knowledge and stuff. Plus Jane’s the champion.’
‘And we have the creature,’ I said. ‘It’s with me all the time now.’
‘With you?’ Caleb asked, his craggy face startled. ‘Like … living inside of you?’
I nearly said yes, till I realized everyone was looking at me with horrified expressions, and I put what I’d just said together with what we’d been talking about.
‘Ohmygod, no, the creature isn’t like the Red or the White. He’s not like in me in me.’
‘Then what is it?’ my dad asked, obviously affecting calm.
‘It’s like…’ I tried to put into words what the creature and I were, but it had changed so much so quickly that I realized I wasn’t sure myself. ‘Before Whitby, it was like the creature was just somewhere else but we could reach out to each other if we wanted. If I needed it, I’d call, or it would pop in to say “hi”.
‘Now, after Whitby, it’s like we … have a Bat Phone to each other,’ I said, finally hitting on the metaphor I wanted.