“Good lord,” I whispered. “A month?” No wonder my limbs felt all tingly and weird still. Feeling was coming back, but slowly.
“Yep. And we thought we were going to lose you quite a few times. Your power kept draining. Dr. Sam says that if”—and here my dad again made that same series of bizarre sounds he’d made earlier.
“Gesundheit,” I interrupted.
“Sorry?”
“You sneezed.”
My dad laughed. “No, that’s your friend’s name. With the tattoos.”
I blinked at him, and then it hit me. “You mean Blondie? With the Mohawk?”
“Yes, that’s not a sneeze. It’s her name.”
“Hmmm,” I said, trying to figure out what he’d said and how he’d said it. “I think I’ll stick with Blondie.”
Especially since, although everyone keeps telling me she’s my friend, I have yet to determine her status for myself.
For, while I’d once told the barghest I got a good vibe from the Original, that was before she showed up right before we were attacked in Anyan’s driveway. Yeah, she’d saved me, but was it all just a clever trick to gain our trust?
Chuckling again, my dad shook his head ruefully. “I had some time to practice while you were sleeping. Anyway, yeah, if she hadn’t been here, you would be dead. It was her power that kept you going.”
“Hmm,” I said, wondering what the Original’s motives were in keeping me alive. Not to mention, when had everyone become such chums? Last thing I’d known, Blondie was a stranger. And that’s what she was to me, until I could talk to her myself.
In other words, Blondie and I needed to have a little chat.
“And Dr. Sam is the…” My voice trailed off, still not able to say the word in front of my dad.
“The goblin?” he asked, his grin infectious. “Yep. A friend of Anyan’s. Both of them have been wonderful.” My dad started to make that funny combination of sounds, and then he stopped himself. “Er, Blondie did most of the healing, but you needed to be kept fed and everything. Dr. Sam also did things to keep your muscles from atrophying. You’ll still be a little weak for a few days, but he said that if you woke up and had a swim, you’d be almost as good as new.”
My dad said “if you woke up” so casually that my heart broke. After everything he’d been through, he must have really thought I might die. He didn’t deserve to worry like that; he didn’t deserve that fear and pain.
I nearly started crying again, but he stopped me with what he said next.
“He healed me, Jane.”
“What?” I asked, confused. When had he gotten hurt?
If those motherfuckers hurt my dad…
“My heart. It’s as good as new. Like I was never sick a day in my life.”
My breath caught in my throat. My dad’s condition had been a part of our lives for so long that I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have him heart-whole and healthy.
“Really? Really healed?”
“Completely. And Anyan went with me to my doctor, so that he could… What do you call it? Glamour?”
I nodded.
“So he could glamour everyone, and he found someone to change everything in the system. Even followed me around so that all of Rockabill knows me as ‘Calvin True, that guy who has always been healthy.’ ”
“Oh, Dad. That’s marvelous…”
“It’s been strange,” he interrupted, as if he didn’t really want to discuss the issue. “Such a blessing at such a terrible time.”
I nodded, knowing he would need a while to think through what had happened over the past month. I was, after all, something of an expert on getting over pretty big shocks to the system.
Before we could talk more about how he felt about his sudden return to health, the door to my room burst open as a girl with pearl-gray skin and hair the color and texture of seaweed entered.
“Jane!” Trill shouted, her voice as dark and eerie as an oil slick. But the smile that took up her strange, flat-featured face was so joyful that she was beautiful.
And just as instantaneously she was crowding past my father to wrap her arms around me—arms that smelled of brine. My sea, I thought, desire swamping over me as irresistibly as thirst or hunger.
“Don’t smother her, kelpie,” came a gentle, grandmotherly voice from the other side of Anyan’s massive bed. When I managed to extricate myself from Trill’s grasp, I moved to greet the little woman I knew was waiting.
Nell Gnome’s enormous gray bun floated above the mattress, the rest of her plump, two-foot-tall little form revealing itself as I leaned over to the other side of the bed. When our eyes met, she smiled at me, illuminating her fairy godmother features. Features that all but disappeared in a thousand kindly crinkles.
“We thought we’d lost you, little halfling,” she said, as she levitated herself onto the bed to give me her own hug.
“I’m apparently not all that easy to kill,” I said to her, laughing as she patted me on the cheek as if to convince herself I was really there.
“No. You Trues are made of tough stuff. Calvin,” she said, nodding cordially toward my father.
“Nurse Ratched,” he intoned drily, twitching an eyebrow at me that caused me to blush. I’d left my father in Nell’s care a few times, under a glamour that convinced him she was a nurse, rather than a gnome. A nurse I’d named Ratched, in a moment of pure insanity.
I made an I’m sorry face at him before turning to Nell.
“Okay. I need to know what happened.” Then I made a face as my bladder suddenly made itself known.
“Gottapeegottapeegottapee!” I chanted, moving over to the edge of the bed. Trill helped me stand on shaky legs, and then she practically carried me to Anyan’s bathroom. Once she’d propped me up on the toilet, I shooed her away, but when I was finished, I only just managed to haul myself up by using the sink as leverage.
Staring at myself in the mirror as I washed my hands, I was greeted with quite a shock. My hair, first of all, was insane. For some reason it had grown exponentially, hanging down to my hips in undulating black waves.
Undulating is polite for greasy, I thought, making a face at my grubby self.
The hair was going to need to be cut stat, not least because my bangs were halfway down my face. And I was very thin, far thinner than I’d ever been in my life. The sweatpants and T-shirt I was dressed in draped off my frame like I was some jankie old hanger. As someone who enjoyed being curvy, I didn’t like what I saw. Plus, I figured I lived enough of a knock-around life that I needed some padding.
I pulled down the sweatpants a little bit to poke at one of my hip bones in disbelief, unsure if I’d ever even known I had hip bones till that moment. Raising up my T-shirt, I realized I also had ribs! Sticking out from my middle!
Running my hands down my sides under the shirt, I decided I was not a fan of ribs on girls. At least, not on this girl.
When I returned to the bedroom, someone had rustled me up chips and a sandwich, which waited for me on a really cute breakfast tray table. Anyan must be a fan of breakfast in bed, I thought, an idea that pleased me on about four hundred levels.
Pausing before getting back into bed, I eyed the tray.
“Are you sure I can eat this?” I asked. I felt hungry, and my tummy was rumbling like an irate bear cub, but if I’d been asleep for a month…
“Doc Sam says you’re good to go. If you feel like eating, you probably can. Just try to take it slow.”
I got back into bed and Trill laid the tray on my lap before sitting down next to it facing me. Nell echoed her position, her little legs kicking in the air. My father and Dr. Sam must have gone downstairs, as I heard them talking about what I’d need, care-wise, in the coming weeks.
But what I need right now is this sandwich, I thought, as I proceeded to shove it into my face as if emulating a foie gras goose. So much for taking it slow.
At some point during tearing apart my meal like a rabid wolf, I’d mumbled at Nell that I still wanted catching up. The gnome had backed away a step—probably nervous I’d finish my sandwich and then start in on her—before filling me in.
“You were attacked by humans—mercenaries. They were very, very professional and very, very expensive. And whoever hired them was smart. I would have detected anything magical coming into my Territory, unless they were ridiculously strong, like your friend the Original, or one of the handful of factions with powerful camouflaging powers, like the nagas.”
I was too busy shoving food into my face to remind Nell that Blondie was no friend of mine. Not yet, at least.
“And there aren’t many nagas left,” Trill said, with a nasty little grin.
“As I was saying,” Nell said, clearly admonishing her seaweedy friend. “Whoever hired the humans was smart. Even if a race can camouflage, the second they use magic I’d know it. And it’s hard for powerful beings not to use magic, especially in an attack. We can do it for a short time, like I know you did when Anyan took you on that raid, but that was only no-magic for about ten minutes. Most supes accidentally break and do a little magic after a little while, and from what we were able to determine, those soldiers were kicking around Rockabill for at least a full day to enact that ambush. Not to mention, if you have strong magical offensive skills, why on earth would you practice such extensive, physical offensive skills?”
