Page 1 of Postpartum Spells & Infant Hells

CHAPTER 1

"You're broadcasting again, and it's louder than the storm." Tarja's voice slid up through the dark of the house and into my skull. Every syllable was filed down to a point. "Whatever you're gnawing on up there, either talk it out with me. Or worry quieter. One of us in this family would like to remember what sleep feels like, and we both know it isn't going to be you, so by process of elimination, it had better be me."

I tucked Nyssa higher against my shoulder and pressed my mouth to the crown of her head, where her hair was coming in dark and fine as a cobweb. "You're the one carving a racetrack into my floor. I can feel every lap from up here, and I'm getting carsick from the ride."

"I am patrolling the ground floor, thank you very much. It’s a respectable thing for a familiar to do." She gave the word a wounded dignity that only a cat could manage at three in the morning. "A woman who spent twenty years taking strangers' blood pressure and wiping their rear ends should appreciate the difference between patrolling and pacing better than anyone."

She had never mentioned my time as a nurse. She was well aware of it because I met her when I became Hattie’s personal nurse. Something must be agitating her. What though? I sensed no danger nearby. Coming right out and asking her what it was would do neither of us any good. It was best to allow her to get there by herself.

"There's no difference at this hour. You've passed the front door eleven times since I sat down. You can either share what’s wrong. Or pace quieter." I rocked the chair with the ball of my foot and watched the rain come down the nursery window in ropes thick enough to braid.

The storm had been at it for two days. Long enough to turn the back acreage into a swamp. Seriously, Layla had come in the other day from patrol with muddy boots after it had swallowed her from toe to ankle. The tree line past the fence had stopped looking like our forest somewhere around midnight.

When Tarja remained silent, I decided to give her another nudge. "Seriously, what's got you doing laps, Tarja? You haven't worn a path in my floor like this since the babies were born."

The pause that came back down the bond was long enough that I had to fight the urge to start pacing before she filled it. When she spoke again, the bite had gone out of her voice. The new tone was worse than the sharpness. "Death is riding in on this rain. I have been able to sense it for a week or more. It leaves the taste of copper and wet earth at the back of my throat. And tonight it is closer than it was yesterday. I didn't want to tell you. It wasn’t all that long ago that I had my own new babies to worry about."

My breath caught in my throat when she shared what was bothering her. It made two of us taste things in the dark. It was disconcerting to say the least. Nyssa stirred against me as she finished nursing with a small wet sound. She then let out the contented sigh that meant she was full, warm, and entirely unbothered by anything her mother was worrying about.

Her shadows answered her mood the way they had started doing in the last few weeks. They lifted off her skin in a slow curl of gray, drew themselves up over her head into a small, dense ball that hung there. Then they turned, thinned out, and sank back into her like smoke pulled down a flue. The whole thing took the space of three breaths and left the air smelling faintly scorched. The way the inside of a cold fireplace smelled.

She was four months old. No baby should have been able to do that. Sure, my babies were gods, but they weren’t full-blooded ones. None of us was sure what exactly they were yet. They were more powerful than demigods, but couldn’t be at the same level as their father because I was their mother. My family and I were also freaks of the magical world. We had all been born mundies, but had become magical when the previous Pleiades, Hattie, had given me her magic. I’d undergone a couple of power boosts since then, and no one quite knew what I was.

Dr. Reeves had spent twenty careful minutes at their last visit being careful about what she shared with me. “Given their heritage, their power should be on par with your average witch at this age,” she had told me as she watched Melaina's temperature readout settle. “I've documented accelerated development in convergence-born infants before. I have never documented it like this. And never in all three at once. Not to mention your three have unique parents.”

When I had asked her what could make my babies develop that fast, she didn't have an answer. She’d vowed to do more research, as had Clio. So far, we’ve learned nothing more. It was like driving blind.

The cruelest part was how my pride and dread were braided so tightly I could not pull one loose without the other coming with it. Every time one of them did something they should not have been able to do, some small fierce animal in my chest wanted to crow about it. It wanted to shout, "That's my baby." Look what my baby can do! In the same breath, the nurse in me started running the differential on what that meant for my children.

I never wanted them to be ordinary. What I had hoped for after an eventful pregnancy was for boring, normal days when they were milk-drunk and unremarkable. That last part was naive of me, given they were a step above demigods. Still, I refused to give up the dream. We all deserved some downtime.

"She did the ball thing again," I murmured to the room, because saying it out into the dark felt safer than admitting it to anyone’s face.

"I am aware. Your stomach dropping out woke me from the one good nap I had managed all night," Tarja replied.

I wasn’t surprised. As my familiar, she was tuned into the babies and me. Her claws ticked the stairs in a rhythm I would have known in my sleep. She was coming to see us. A moment later, her green eyes met mine from the dark of the doorway. "I will tell you what you do not want to hear. And then I won’t bring it up again tonight. What your daughter is doing is a beautiful thing. And it is the most frightening thing in this house. You cannot force her to hide her powers or shove them down. It’s your job to understand them so you can teach her how to control them. If you choose to stick your head in the sand about them, all of your children will suffer. I know that’s not what you want."

A laugh started up my throat and died there when lightning split the sky open over the back fence. For one blinding half-second, the whole tree line stood out. Every soaked trunk and dripping branch came into sharp relief. And the woman standing in the middle of it stood out sharpest of all.

She was exactly where she had always been in the dreams I had been having. Right at the seam of the forest, where I knew our wards thickened to the point an ant shouldn’t have been able to cross them. She had a long coat hanging off her shoulders in heavy, waterlogged folds. Her hair was loose past her collarbones and somehow darker than the rain shedding off it. I couldn’t see her face.

The harder I pushed my eyes to focus, the more the details slid out from under me. It was like trying to read a name on the bottom of a pond while the surface kept moving. Her eyes were the one feature that gave me no such trouble. They threw the lightning back at me in two flat coins of silver. They were pointed at this window. Specifically, at the second floor where the nursery was located.

A dark weight settled in my chest. Every drop of fire I could wield came up under my skin at once. It was the immediate reaction to my babies being in trouble. It was hot and humming in my palms, with nowhere to go and nothing to burn. There was nothing I could do because the threat was forty yards away. And there was a wall of wood, glass, and weather between us.

Still, I was on my feet without deciding to stand. One palm cupped the back of Nyssa's skull, holding her to me. My heart was racing like I had sprinted ten flights of stairs. By the time the thunder finished rolling and my eyes adjusted back to the dark, she was gone. The tree line was only trees again.

"She was at the fence!" My voice came out as a shrill screech, nearly a whisper. It was a stranger's voice. "The woman from my dreams was at the fence, Tarja. I'm wide awake. What the hell is she doing here? Who is she? What is she? And why was she watching the baby? She was watching me hold the baby."

"Are you certain?" Tarja had frozen when she registered my alarm.

"Yes! I could never forget her. For five nights, I have dreamed about her. The details were all there. Down to the angle the rain is coming in at. What the hell is going on?”

I made myself take a deep breath. Freaking out would help no one. The feel of Nyssa's heartbeat tapping against my forearm was soothing. I counted it the way I used to count for my patients. "She never crosses the wards in the dream. She never casts a spell toward the house. She stands there and waits patiently."

Tarja crossed the room, and the next pulse of lightning lit her eyes up like green sparklers. "You’re not the only mother in this country seeing her face."

I turned so fast that Nyssa grunted in protest and shoved a fist against my collarbone. "What did you just say? And how do you know? I haven’t told anyone about the dreams. I didn’t understand what they meant."