Welcome to a Nightmare

Chapter 46: The List

"What are you thinking?" Henry asks quietly.

Both he and Crystal are huddled around the TV in the living room, watching the coverage of the hunt for Belle. Even though the house is hidden by a magical cloaking spell, there were also protection spells cast, all the curtains and shades are drawn to give them a sense of security that no one is peering in through the windows. The constant "live" news reports have put them on edge... it's bad enough that Belle is being hunted by the police, but now they are implicated in the crime, even if their faces cannot be seen distinctly.

"I don't really know," Crystal shrugs. She downs a bottle of water. "It's obvious that we can't walk around freely any longer."

"Like we were able to do that in the first place?" the young author asks skeptically.

"Point taken, but with the risk of being recognized so much higher now, I honestly just want to stay in the house and wait for everything to blow over."

"You know we can't do that. We may have managed to save one member of the family, but the rest are still out there in this city in god knows what kind of conditions."

"I know..." she sighs. "The Black Fairy has made her move, now we have to counteract it."

She then stands up and in a puff of smoke transforms into someone totally different. Her hair is now blonde with dyed turquoise tips, her blue eyes are now brown, and she wears biker leather with knee-high boots and fishnet stockings.

"Too much?" she asks.

Henry tries not to cringe. "A little, but at this point, we might need to turn into hipster goth bikers."

The two smile over the shared joke. Then a thought enters Henry's mind.

"Do you think that we can just find a city directory and try to find them in there?"

"You mean like a phone book?"

"You sound very old," he teases.

Crystal sticks her tongue out at him playfully. "Just because you were born after the new millennia, doesn't make me that much older than you. There were still phonebooks in 2001. I was a later nineties kid so don't pull that."

The two of them laugh again. The daughter of Rumpelstiltskin then conjures up a Stygian phone book, which is still extremely thick despite the population of tiny Storybrooke most likely being the only permanent residents.

"Do you think the curse changed their identities completely or recycled old ones?"

"Well, my mom Regina is working as a bartender at The Rabbit Hole since the Black Fairy is the mayor."

"Shut up really?" Crystal gasps. Her mind flashes back to her being in the bar with Aurora and Ashley/Ella. She didn't see Regina there and she's kind of bummed that she didn't see the former Evil Queen, the woman who truly understood what it was like to have darkness inside of oneself and she also filled the surrogate mother role for Crystal as well. "When were you there?"

"I was there with Violet the day after the curse was cast."

"You found Violet?"

"Y-yeah, I kind of ran into her by accident. Fiona forced me to go back to school in the afternoon the curse hit, and I saw her go into the boy's bathroom. Turns out there's a hole in the foundation that she uses to sneak out and smoke behind the school."

"Doesn't really sound like Violet."

Henry swallows and nods, fighting back tears. "Anyways, she took me on her motorcycle, that she named after her actual horse Nicodemus, the one who liked pumpkin. We then went to the bar and Violet paid my mom for some booze and then she took me to the impound lot to meet her gang buddies and drink."