Page 37 of Postpartum Spells & Infant Hells

Aidon chuckled and nodded. “Yes, she’s grand. Snarky and chipper as ever.”

Once I finished brushing my teeth, I leaned on him as we made our way downstairs. The kitchen threw me for a loop. Every doorway had a shimmer. They were as faint as breath on cold glass. The cars I could see through the window were also similarly affected. This had better pass quickly.

My gaze drank in Nina as I looked her over. She'd done something to her hair. "Did you let Stella near you with scissors?" I lowered myself onto a stool next to her.

"I didn't cut it. I woke up like this. No idea what happened overnight." She turned her head so the lamplight caught the streaks. She looked like it had been highlighted. "Brenna says sometimes people who anchor a bridge go through changes. I'm keeping it."

"Are you sure you want it like that?" I countered, setting my mug down.

"Uh, yeah. I helped you hold a breach shut while a primordial creature screamed at me through it." She bit into a brownie without breaking my stare. "Don't you dare give me grief. I earned it."

Jean-Marc looked up from the laptop he'd been hunched over since before I came down, the smudges under his eyes telling me he'd traded sleep for research. "I've got something for you. It's the good kind and the worst kind at the same time."

"Lead with the good. I'm running on empty." I wrapped both hands around the coffee Mom slid in front of me without being asked.

"Since the bridge closed, the incidents have stopped." He turned the screen toward me. His tracking software had gone dark from Reno to Brisbane. "The families have reported things going back to normal. Nobody in this net has ever recorded a silence like it."

"What's the worst news?" I pressed when he didn't volunteer it.

"That's the part we haven't interpreted completely yet." He scrubbed a hand over his jaw. "Something like this either means that we ended it. Or it means the thing pulled back to lick its wounds and find a new door. I don't have the data to tell you which, but my gut tells me it’s the latter."

“We have calls in to the families to ask them for more information,” Stella added.

Melaina began crying in her arms. “I’d better feed her,” I observed as I extended my hands for my baby.

The first call came through before I'd finished settling Melaina against my breast. Stella set the laptop on the island, and faces filled the screen. For weeks, the parents had been nothing more than cities to me. It made it easier to do what I needed. Knowing more about them only added more pressure. This was the first morning I attached a name and a voice to any of them.

Yara from Brisbane spoke first, once introductions were done. "Tell me it's over, Phoebe. Tell me I can take the salt off my windowsills and let my daughter sleep in her own room again."

Every parent on the screen leaned toward their camera at once. Every face was waiting on the same answer. I could lie to them and tell them it was finished. I didn’t dare. I would be pissed if someone lied to me about something so important.

"I'm not going to lie to you, because you all deserve better than that." I handed Melaina to Aidon to burp while remaining focused on the screen. "We closed the tears that were reaching into all of our nurseries. That much is done. The immediate threat is gone for now. But closing a door isn't the same as ending the thing that opened it. I can't promise you it won't find another way in before we find a way to end it for good."

A man from Quebec scrubbed a hand over his face. "We have to remain as vigilant as ever."

"That's the only smart thing to do," I confirmed. "Keep the cold glass at every threshold. Keep your little ones within arm's reach. And call me the second anything feels off. I would rather answer a hundred false alarms than miss the one that isn't."

A woman named Beck cut in. "And if it does come back. What then? Do we go through all of this again? Or is there a plan that doesn't end with you or your daughter bleeding out in your backyard and our kids being taken?"

"If it comes back, we'll know right away. We won't be guessing the way we were this time," I told her, refusing to shy away from the question. "I'm not going to make you a promise I can't keep. We have the information now. Hades sent his scholars to help, so we aren’t running around blindly. I vow to you that nobody on this call faces it alone. That part doesn't change, whatever's coming."

"The least we can do is keep watch without complaining while you do all the actual work. Keeping our children close is easy. So is calling if anything happens," a woman named Esi interjected. "Rest now, Pleiades. You are going to need it for the hard part. I'm here to help if I can."

"Thank you. All I'm asking of any of you is to keep your babies safe. Doing the hard part is my job. It’s what my power was created to deal with," I told them, and meant it down to the marrow.

They thanked my family and me before Stella closed the laptop, ending the call. The quiet that dropped over the kitchen was uncomfortable. Everyone had an opinion, but I didn’t care about any of them. All that mattered now was finding Kaltherax and Orenthiel.

The call hadn’t been over long before I felt Hades arrive the way I always did. His power announced itself before the pressure rolled through the floorboards ahead of him. The triplets startled awake as one. The second he popped into our kitchen, he took Nyssa from Aidon and let her wrap a shadow around his thumb before he turned to me.

"You suffered more than I would have allowed, had I stood in that yard." Something close to grief moved under the ancient calm. It was also the nicest thing he’d ever said to me. I hadn’t been his favorite person when we met. He wouldn’t have batted an eye if I’d died early on. To hear him say this now baffled me.

"Persephone was upset with me for not putting my foot down and insisting I was here," he continued.

I was not about to argue with the god about the past. "Tell me what you came to tell me." I'd learned to read the set of his jaw. He had a doozy to unload. "You didn't cross realms to admire Nina's new hair."

"The bridge sealed the tears, and those forty-seven crossed over. Those seams will not reopen." He settled Nyssa against his shoulder and held my eyes. "But the veil is not a single sheet, and Kaltherax is not dead. Neither is Orenthiel. Kaltherax is wounded and patient. He has already begun opening new ones. These are smaller and quieter. And they’re in places none of you are watching yet. The silence on Jean-Marc's brilliant map will not hold the week."

"Fantastic. We did this to plug a leak in a dam that's already springing new ones." The coffee turned to silt in my stomach.