Page 38 of Postpartum Spells & Infant Hells

“No one needs your sarcasm.” Hades glowered at me. "You saved forty-seven children and bought the living ones time." His voice gentled the way it only did for the babies. "Do not let the size of the war shrink the size of what you have already accomplished. You’ve never been one to be so pessimistic. I remember the mortal who marched into my house, determined to infiltrate Tartarus to save the love of her life. She didn’t balk at the fact that no one had survived such a trip before.”

My phone went off on the island. When I looked, I saw it was Claire's name on the screen. I almost let it go to voicemail. I already knew she was going to have bad news. Hades had arrived like the portent of doom.

"Tell me it's good," I answered, scrubbing my face dry.

"It isn't. You need to be sitting. Is Aidon there with you?" Her words were clipped.

Aidon stepped behind me. “What’s going on?”

She sighed and ran a hand over her forehead. "I've spent every hour since the ritual cross-referencing your reports against every Veiled Ones’ record any of us ever kept. Ava's, Wilhelm's, Margaret's journal, and Caolinn's burned page. I found a pattern nobody alive has ever assembled. Mainly because nobody alive had all of it in one room before now."

"Okay. Are you going to tell me the pattern?" I wondered as I met Stella’s gaze.

"Kaltherax doesn't only hunt convergence children. He harvests them." She shook her head. "He prefers the strong ones. The ones like yours. He samples them and stores what he takes. He had been seen as a predator feeding. That isn't what he’s doing. He's gathering raw material."

"Material for what?" Aidon's hand had landed on my hip, and Hades stepped closer.

"There's a phrase in the oldest records. The ones every scholar waved off as a grief poem." Paper rustled hard on her end as she picked up a piece of paper. "The Convergence of All Potential. The theory is that enough concentrated stolen potential, gathered in one place and run through a single point, could remake reality itself. Everyone who ever read it called it a metaphor."

"You don't think it's a metaphor anymore," I guessed.

"I'm certain it isn't." Claire's voice fell to almost nothing. "Phoebe, I think Kaltherax is building something out of the children it takes, and I think he's building it for Orenthiel."

CHAPTER 15

" Hey, Pheebs." Stella caught my elbow at the foot of the stairs. "I know you're not going up there to sleep. You're going up there to stare at the ceiling and make yourself crazy. If you do that, you'll come back down meaner. Sit with me instead."

"I'm fine," I muttered, trying to pull free.

She rolled her eyes but smiled at me without letting go. "I know you better than anyone. Except Aidon, maybe. You've said about four words since Claire hung up. That's not fine. That's you losing it quietly. You’re hoping the rest of us can't catch you doing it. It’s not a good idea to stew alone and work yourself up."

"I was told my kids are raw material for some monster's craft project twenty minutes ago, Stells." The words came out sharper than I meant. "Give me a minute before you start managing me."

"Take the minute down here," Aidon countered as he came down the last two steps with Thaniel against his chest. The baby's fist was twisted into his collar. "Not in a bed where you'll lie awake. Stella’s right. The worst thing for you right now is to be alone. Hold one of them. You always tell me it helps. Time to follow your own advice."

It did help, and I hated that he was using it against me. I let Stella steer me back into the warm kitchen. Mom had spread the quilted play mat across the living room floor and was lowering Nyssa onto it as if she were made of glass. The sight of her doing something so ordinary in the middle of all this crap melted me. I crouched and set Thaniel down beside his sister, then took Melaina from Nana and laid her in the gap between them.

For one breath, the house was nothing but rain on the glass and the smell of Mythia's buttery treats baking. Then the air over the play mat folded in on itself. It started as a shimmer. The same ripple I'd been seeing since the bridge. This one brightened until the edges drew together into a vertical seam no wider than my smallest finger. Through it bled a sliver of light. It wasn't a reflection from the lamplight or the gray morning.

My heart slammed against my ribs, and I lunged across the floor toward them while shouting, “Grab them!”

My heart seized in my chest. I wasn't going to make it. Nyssa's arm came up first. One of her tiny fists pointed at the seam. Melaina’s arm was a split second behind her sister’s. She splayed her fingers, and the air above the mat went warm enough to feel it from three feet back. A tiny bolt of lightning sparked from Thaniel. The single white thread snapped between his thumb and forefinger. After that, the tear flared brightly enough to throw shadows on the wall before it snapped shut and vanished.

I collapsed next to them on my hands and knees. My chest was heaving like a bellows. Of course, my babies stared up at me like I was the one behaving oddly.

I stayed crouched with my heart trying to pound its way out. "Tell me you saw that," I rasped.

"I saw it," Aidon confirmed. He was frozen mid-stride with Thaniel's blanket clutched in one fist where he'd grabbed for him. "They shut a fucking rift. The three of them worked together. And they did it before either of us moved a single step."

Mythia flew over from the stove where she'd been checking whatever she was baking. Both of her small hands were pressed flat to her sternum. She landed on the coffee table and stared at the babies. "There's a name for what they just did. It’s more of a story parents tell their children on Eidothea to inspire or terrify them. I could never decide which," she murmured quietly. "I never thought I'd see it with my own eyes."

"That's never a comforting way to start a sentence in this house, Thia," I pointed out, shifting to sit on the floor while Nyssa kicked her feet and cooed happily.

“The first telling came from my great-grandmother,” Mythia explained as her wings shivered against her spine like leaves caught in a draft. "She called it 'tending the weave.' In the oldest stories, the convergence children mended the thin places. They stitched them closed before anything could claw its way through. They're so rare that the last pixie to show the gift did it over four hundred years ago." Her gaze dropped, and something heavy moved behind her eyes. "And the tales say none of them lived very long to begin with."

I pressed my mouth to the crown of Melaina's head, breathing in the warm-milk sweetness of her. The gesture was more for me than for her. The cold knot in my chest pulled tighter as I straightened. "Of course they didn't," I snarked. "Because where's the fun in being able to send Fiona or Aislinn through the portal to drag a few weave tenders back here to help my babies? That would be far too easy for the way our lives insist on rolling."

"I have heard of these convergence children," Elena spoke from the doorway, ignoring my snark. Her shoulder was braced against the frame, drawn—like Mythia and all the rest—by the flare that had ripped through the house. She crossed to us with that unhurried grace that made me feel like a flailing newborn deer by comparison. "Your children are beyond anything this world has ever seen, mija. They're stunning, and beautiful things draw eyes," she murmured, brushing a knuckle along Melaina's cheek. "We have been breaking ourselves bloody just to keep that attention turned away from them."