Page 72 of Search for the Lost

Leo blinked, and comprehension dawned. “You’re me!”

The now-orange couch trembled and shrunk back against the wall, and the posters flashed through multiple changes like a kaleidoscope.

Oberon’s fear had returned, apparently multiplied threefold. The man scrambled backward, looking for an exit, but there were no doors in this strange version of Leo’s apartment. “No I’m not. You’re wrong. You’re always wrong, like that time you thought Susie Carlisle was totally into you and she was just waving at the captain of the football team⁠—”

“She was into me!” Leo reached out and grabbed the King’s dirty T-shirt in both hands. “And you will be too!” He pulled the doppelganger into a tight embrace and squeezed.

“No… don’t. Please don’t. You can’t…. Ceri needs me!”

“Where. Is. She?”

Oberon was shaking now. “She… she called me. She missed me.” His pleading look touched even Crispin’s scarred heart. “She just took a little bit of you….”

“Tell me where they took her.” Leo squeezed harder, and the King began to dissolve into the same gray mist his eyes were made of.

“I can’t tell you. They won’t let me… they blocked… bletherbloof….”

“Leo, let him talk!” They were so close to finding out where his mother had been taken, but words failed the King as his throat dissolved. Soon the rest of him did too, the gray mist flowing into Leo as if he were a vacuum cleaner.

As the King disappeared, Leo’s eyes went wide. His mouth shut and began to seal itself up, his lips closing and disappearing into a thin line that just as quickly smoothed over into a perfect expanse of uninterrupted skin. Leo looked as if he wanted to scream, but his mouth had vanished as if it had never existed.

Spike growled, looking around for the man who had offended his master, but Oberon was gone, and his secrets were gone with him.

That time she almost killed Leo… she must have stolen a piece of him, somehow….

“Mmmm. Mrrgg. Mmmmm!”

Crispin leapt to his lover’s side. “Leo, what happened?”

Leo clawed at his face where his mouth had been, his eyes wide with fear. “Mmmrrrpp!”

Great balls of Veezar. The whole thing was a trap. The Red Dukes must have bewitched the King with a spell of silence about their plans and left him in this world for Crispin and his cohort to find, and when Leo had… absorbed him, he’d also taken in the spell. “It’s okay, Leo. Here, let me try.”

Leo put his hands down at his sides, staring trustingly as Crispin as he put hands on Leo’s lower face, where his mouth used to be, and closed his eyes. He tried to Order things back to normal, but Leo’s face remained blank to his magick. Crispin’s shoulders slumped. “I… I can’t.”

Leo sighed in despair, and Spike licked his hand in sympathy, seeming to recognize his distress.

“We’ll figure it out,” Crispin said, taking his lover into his arms and squeezing him tightly. “It’ll be okay.”

Leo’s mumbling slowly quieted as Crispin rubbed his back to calm him, a gesture that Leo had always liked. When Crispin at last let him go, there were tears in Leo’s eyes.

“There, there, it will be all right.” Crispin wasn’t sure how, but they would find a way to fix this.

Leo shook his head miserably. “Mmmrmmm.”

Crispin’s human loved to talk. Leo was talk, sharing his constant observations about the world around him and asking sometimes pointless questions. It was part of his charm. Not being able to do so must be torture. They had to get back to the others and come up with a plan to fix this.

He pulled Thea out of his shirt pocket. “Thea, where are we?”

She was a little slow to answer, possibly awed by their Chaotic surroundings. “We’re in the Black Forest, boss.”

That was impossible. “We’re on Earth One. In Leo’s apartment….” Unless…. Maybe this was all a magical projection and they just needed to find their way out. “We need a wizard.”

Leo tapped him on the shoulder, then pointed at the wall. At the image on the TV screen, which hadn’t changed, of a man in a vintage bathing suit in Kansas. He pointed again, insistently. “Mmm… mmm!”

The Wizard of Oz!

It was the only part of the room that hadn’t shifted or morphed. Oberon must have been trying to tell them something. According to Leo, they’d already been in a place that looked like Oz. So that meant…. “We need to go to Kansas.”