Page 39 of Postpartum Spells & Infant Hells

"How do we keep this from happening again?" The plea scraped out rougher than I intended. I shook my head before anyone could answer wrong. "I refuse to wrap my babies in a shield they can't so much as breathe inside of."

Nana hummed and tapped a crooked finger against her lips, the picture of a woman about to say something she absolutely should not. "Well," she drawled, eyes glittering with mischief that had no business surfacing at a moment like this, "there's always Hades' special little pocket room. Though I suppose locking the great-grandbabies in the underworld broom closet might be a touch frowned upon. Wrong, even. Allegedly."

“We aren’t doing that,” I informed her with a small smile, understanding that she was just as worried. “I want them safe more than anyone, but keeping them from experiencing normal life will backfire on us.”

We tossed ideas back and forth on how to keep them safe without ever moving more than an arm's reach away. We talked in low, frantic circles that never quite came to any conclusions. Twice more before noon, we caught the triplets doing something with their magic. Each time it stole the breath clean out of me. It was almost as if they'd rehearsed it in some dream I hadn't been invited to, because the choreography never once changed.

The way their power braided together was something else entirely. It was too old and too seamless to belong to anyone so small. It poured out of them and wove into a single bright current. Not once did any of them so much as wave a flag. Melaina yawned once, then went right back to gumming her own fist as though she hadn't just made the air dance with her siblings.

By dusk, I'd stopped being able to tell whether I was watching a miracle or a death sentence. I despised that I couldn't pull the two apart. I should have slept. Instead, I planted myself in the rocker with Tarja a heavy weight across my feet and watched the clock crawl forward.

When it ticked over to 3:33, the cold arrived first. It was the kind I associated with the echo children. Were they back? I was on my feet before I'd decided to stand. The corner of the closet where we had the cribs split open above the built-in shoe rack. It was a six-inch vertical tear. The wound poured out light the color of mercury under a low moon.

Through the tear, I caught a glimpse of a silver infinity. It was packed wall to wall with children. My chest constricted when I realized there were thousands of them. The faces were stacked on top of each other, going back farther than the eye could see.

The worst part was that every single one of them was aware. They knew where they were, and they knew they couldn't leave. A boy near the front turned his head and met my eyes. The connection that ran between us was like a current down a wet wire.

When I looked more closely, I noticed something was being built from lattices of stolen light. It was vast and unfinished. At its center sat a stillness so total it bent the glow around it. It was a patience that had been waiting longer than those children had been trapped, and it was nearly done. Every instinct in me screamed that was Orenthiel.

Before I realized what had happened, the tear sealed. It wasn’t the babies. They were sound asleep. My magic snapped back into my body then, taking my breath away.

I was on the floor, though I had been standing a second ago. Tarja had hooked her claws into my shirt. "You stopped breathing, Phoebe," her voice was frantic against my mind. “Breathe. Breathe for me."

I sucked in some oxygen when I realized she was right. "That was not good,” I croaked out as I stood and went to wake the whole house. Some things you don't deal with alone

Everyone got up and stumbled downstairs. Mythia had been staying inside the house and was up making coffee, while Selene grabbed energy drinks and snacks from the fridge. No one complained about being woken. They understood we were dealing with some serious bullshit right now.

By the time the coffee was poured, Selene had called Claire, and her face filled the laptop on the island. The Veiled Ones who'd been sleeping under my roof had crowded into the kitchen in pajamas like the rest of us.

Claire leaned so close to her camera that her face went soft at the edges. "What happened? Are the babies okay?" she prompted.

I quickly updated them on what happened in the closet. Aidon’s fury was a hot brand along my right side where he stood. He was upset that he hadn’t been there to help me. He was allowed to rest, though he would beat himself up for it now.

"In two hundred years of records, no Veiled One has ever seen into the Hollow,” Elena offered. “People have seen the gap and the children at the threshold, but nothing past it. Whatever the bridge did to you gave you sight that beats any ever documented."

“I'd like to return it for store credit." I quipped, making Nyssa grunt as she nursed. Aidon's palm was flat between my shoulder blades, offering some small relief from the headache squatting behind my eyes. "There is nothing good about seeing dead kids stacked up. It’s going to haunt me forever."

Wilhelm planted both forearms on the island and shifted his attention to me. "We need to know more about the center of the thing," he pressed. "The part you thought was Orenthiel. You said it stopped the light rather than bent it. You are certain of that?"

"Yeah. Nothing bent around it," I returned, shutting my eyes against the image still scorched there. "Everything was moving around it, and it just sat there. It was a gut feeling telling me it was Orenthiel. My instinct says we're closer to the end of this than the start."

Astrid shoved off the counter she'd been propping up, folding her arms tight across her chest. "A vision like that doesn't only run in one direction. Whatever let you stare into the heart of that thing that can feel you and was likely staring right back. We have no idea of the information it was able to glean during that time."

"Dios, Astrid. We haven't even finished our first cup of coffee," Elena complained. At the same time, her whole face softened.

Power built before anyone could respond. It rolled up through the floorboards a full breath ahead of my father-in-law. Between one blink and the next, Hades appeared in the middle of my kitchen with his scholars arranged at his back.

Aidon was off his stool before the air had finished settling. He crossed the tile to meet his father. "You've decided knocking is beneath you now?" he asked, though there was no real heat in it. I saw the wary read of a son who knew Hades didn't abandon the Underworld for anything small.

"I knock when there is time to knock," Hades returned, gripping the back of Aidon's neck once in that brief, bracing way the two of them had before he let go. His gaze swept the room and snagged on the babies. "There is no time, my son. I would not have risked Amelia’s shotgun by teleporting into the kitchen. She made it clear last time what would happen if I interrupted her cookie time."

Nana cocked her shotgun and smiled. “Make a note, Jean-Marc. Your Grimpops hadn’t lost his memory after all. We can cancel the sticky notes.”

Hades unleashed his smile on Nana. “I like sticky things. Just ask my wife.” He winked at her.

Rolling my eyes, I focused on the familiar scholars. Asphodos, Therion Veil, Lethea Mourne, and Mnemar were all with him. They’d helped us with the bridge. I suspected it was their involvement, rather than the Veiled Ones', that caused me to see what I did. It was the one difference I could pinpoint.

"Only in your mind would that be a good thing," Nana countered, not affected by his charm in the slightest. "You bringing back this entire set means somebody's about to ruin my whole entire morning, and the sun hasn't even come up yet." She pointed the barrel of her weapon at Mnemar without looking. "And that one's already counting our silver. You’re replacing it if he steals anything."