Nobody said anything for a long while; Danielle just clung to her mother, not knowing what to think about pretty much anything anymore. Her mother held her, gently stroking her hair and rubbing at the base of her ears, which she found oddly soothing. It felt strange that even though she was still thirteen, she was so dwarfed by her mother; it made her feel like a little child.
Danielle kind of felt that way anyway, scared and lost in a strange new body and a strange new world hiding behind the borders of the familiar old one. Nobody was what she had thought they were, and it seemed like not even she could be counted on; if her mother could so convincingly grow into a woman in just a few years, what might time do to her?
Her thoughts were interrupted by a yelp from Kat. Danielle looked up to see her sister scowling at Emily, who had rather unceremoniously prodded her in the back with a twisty silver wand. "You were right, Jill," she said. "Not an iota of magic anywhere in her, past, present,or future. Whatever that transformation did severed her ties clean."
Danielle's mother sighed. "I was afraid of that. Any idea as to why?"
Emily shrugged. "That's the weird part. I thought about what you suggested, the children's no longer being direct descendants, but as near as I can tell they're still just as much your children as they were before. Don't ask me how the timeline sorted that out; I don't know. It seems like it just plain cut their ties to the family magic."
"W-what does that mean, Mom?" Danielle asked.
Jill frowned. "Well, girls, it could be worse, and I'm glad you're still the kids I gave birth to as well as raised. But it does mean that you're not going to get your witch powers like this, not even once you're eighteen again. And that means that any hope we have of getting you back to normal rests on getting the witch locked in that caster's battery to change Kat back so she can undo her spells."
"And on that note," Emily said, "I've got the circle prepared for that. Jill, if you wouldn't mind, I could use a hand keeping things contained and focused."
Danielle's mother nodded, and the two women moved over to the circle on the floor and sat down on either side of it. Kat and Danielle followed, curious, and parked what they thought was a safe distance away. The witches joined hands around the circle and closed their eyes. Danielle could see her mother's mouth moving, but she made no sound.
As they continued, the little stone in the center of the circle began to glow and expand. It grew to many times its original size, and as it grew it tapered out at one end, taking the shape of...an egg?
The stone-turned-egg stopped growing at the size of a large beach ball, the glow fading from its surface. Emily opened her eyes and stared confusedly at it. "Oh, great," she groaned. "Something about this Tanya Moonstone's essence is just driving transformations plum crazy today."
"Is...is it going to hatch?" Kat asked. Moments later, her question was answered as there came a tapping from within the egg. The two rabbit-girls rushed up for a better look. The egg began to crack open from the inside, and it wasn't long before most of the shell had broken away. Laying in the remains of the egg was a little girl, no more than eight years old. She was no ordinary human girl, though.
Judging by her non-human traits, Danielle thought she looked like a hybrid of the Velociraptors from Jurassic Park, which, she recalled, actually more resembled Utahraptor. But she thought they had been saying that raptors had feathers now, and this girl didn't? Oh well, it wasn't the most baffling thing she'd seen today by a long shot.
In any case, the girl was human from the waist up, except for scaly patches on the sides of her head where her ears should've been, yellow, cat-like eyes, and forearms that, while human in shape, had the scales and claws of a dromeosaurid. Below the waist, it was a different story. Her lower body was almost entirely reptilian in build, save for the mammalian-looking openings peeking out from in between the ventral scales that plated her underside. Her hips were broad for a girl her age, and anchored two very raptorish legs, tipped with the signature sickle-claws on her big toes. Completing the ensemble, a long tail, stiff like a riding crop, grew from the base of her spine.
The dinosaur-girl yawned, revealing a mouthful of teeth halfway between the human assortment and razor-sharp fangs. She blinked and looked around the room. "Where am I?" she asked. "Who are all you? Where's my mom?"
Emily groaned. "Oh, please don't let this be what I think..." she muttered under her breath. She turned to the girl. "I'm Emily. Who are you?"
The girl frowned. "I'm Tanya...um...I'm Tanya somebody? I can't remember my last name..."
Emily forced a smile. "All right, Tanya. You're safe here, and I'll see what I can find out about your mom if you'll just wait here."
Tanya nodded and sat back in the remains of the egg, fiddling with the bits of shell and apparently not noticing that she was naked, while Emily moved Jill and her daughters over to one side of the room.
"Dammit, I was afraid of this," she said. "Kat's spell was fueled by Tanya's essence; that's why she's a little girl now. I was hoping to retrieve a wanted witch, and now I've got a kid who doesn't even know she's committed a crime."
"Well, can't you just age her back?" Kat asked.
Emily snorted and shook her head. "Nope. This is a different matter than a simple magical de-aging. With someone like you, who turned eighteen but got de-aged, there's still eighteen years of accumulated life-essence locked away, just waiting for you to go back to being eighteen again. Hers got burned away fueling that spell, and probably in generating this new body for herself; the only thing attached to that body is the life of the little kid Tanya Moonstone was at that age. No aging spell can fake that life-essence back into existence."
Danielle shuddered at the thought, but had to ask anyway. "Does that mean...?"
Emily nodded. "Yep. We're going to have to wait for her to grow back up before she can get started on fixing this mess. And I'm going to have to find someone to raise her until then."
Grow back up? That would take years! She'd be in her twenties before this girl became a witch!
Danielle couldn't take it anymore. She burst into tears and threw herself into her mother's arms. "Oh Mom!"she sobbed. "No, no, no! I can't...I'm so small, and I'm not supposed to be a girl, and what's going to happen to me!?"
Her mother just held her, gently shushing her. "I know, dear," she said. "I know exactly how you feel."