Page 40 of Postpartum Spells & Infant Hells

Ignoring Nana, I shook my head and plowed ahead. "What are they here for, Hades?" I pressed, shifting Melaina higher on my hip. “Talk to us."

Hades lifted Nyssa from my mother's arms and let the baby snare his thumb in a curl of shadow. The way the hard line of his shoulders eased told me more than I wanted to know. "Because I sensed when you disrupted things. I know you saw into the gap. The creature you saw is Orenthiel. My scholars are the only ones left who can explain it to you," he explained, sparing nothing.

"We have researched the missing children for centuries, thanks to the gaps in the soul intake. Children who died should have come through processing. But they arrived in a place we couldn’t reach. We didn’t give it the weight it deserved until recently. There is only so much we can learn." His ancient gaze pinned me where I stood. "You see, we have never once encountered a witness. You are the first, Phoebe."

I huffed out something that wasn't quite a laugh, because there'd been a stretch of time where this man wouldn't have crossed the room to hand me a glass of water. Now here he was looking at me like I was worth something. "That’s got to be the first useful thing I've ever done in your eyes, I'm guessing," I muttered and smiled when the flicker of something warm and almost fond crossed his face.

“No, that would have been giving me my grandchildren," Hades replied as he wrapped his free arm around Nina’s shoulders and smiled at Jean-Marc. “That tops everything.”

Warmth filled my chest and had me beaming for a second before I sobered. "What happens now? How do I get rid of this vision?”

Lethea was turning a device slowly in her hands. "If he succeeds, the exile breaks," she explained, giving the instrument another half-turn. "Orenthiel has been bound outside the weave for millennia. The construct is a key cut from the raw potential of children, strong enough to turn it. When he gathers what he needs, the binding will fail."

She looked up, and her eyes were as empty and smooth as the river she was named for. "He will then remake the world to his designs."

CHAPTER 16

"You need to stop telling me how this ends, and start telling me how I stop it." I hauled Melaina higher against my hip and looked at the four scholars Hades had brought back through the veil.

"You've been looking into this for centuries," I waved my free hand. “Granted, you weren’t studying it exclusively, but I've had about twenty minutes and don’t have the foggiest idea where to start. One of you needs to give me something I can actually do to stop this."

"I'm not going to give you a lie to get you through breakfast, Phoebe," Lethea promised, and after the night that we'd had, I could've kissed her for it. “There's no door to Orenthiel. He's bound outside the weave. As we said earlier. None of us has ever stood there. To our knowledge, none of the gods have either. The trigger that will let him out is sitting right there next to him.”

Therion gestured to Nana's shotgun. “You can't walk up to him and shoot him. There’s no way for you to waltz up and smash his face in. That's the truth, and it's an ugly one."

"You hauled the four smartest scholars in all creation into our kitchen before the coffee's even gone bitter to tell us that?" Nana hadn't set the shotgun down since Hades turned up in our kitchen. She set it on the island in front of her as if she were making a point with it. "I could've read 'we're cooked' off the back of a cereal box and slept another hour. My great-grandbabies could've told us that, and two of them can't find their own feet yet."

Mnemar's grin had too many teeth in it to comfort anybody. "Nobody said cooked, Amelia. We said she can't win it this morning. That's a long way off from can't win it at all."

"Then quit being cute and tell us what we can do." I didn't have the patience for bullshit. "Use small words. I've been up all night."

Therion set a hip against my counter. "He's not finished because he hasn't taken enough. To set that key, he needs the strongest possible convergence. The strongest anyone's seen in four hundred years are in this room." There wasn't a scrap of the professional demeanor he'd had when we began working on the bridge together. We’d been through a lot already, and it showed in how plainly he talked to me now.

"Keep them out of his hands, and he can't get free. Hurt Kaltherax badly enough, and Orenthiel has to pull him back to heal. While he's mending, he can't steal another child. That buys you months. Could be a year. That's the time you'd use to go find a real answer."

"You’re saying I can't kill it? I don’t like that answer. They’d still be out there threatening our kids," I complained as I looked over at Aidon, who had Thaniel asleep against his chest.

Aidon growled low in his throat. "If I kill Kaltherax, it puts him at a bigger disadvantage. All it would take is one hit with everything I've got, and he’d be down."

"You can't unmake him, Aidon. You need to poison what he's built from." Asphodos replied from next to Hades. "Pouring death magic in while he's gathering turns the whole process rancid. He'll knit back together, but that will mean diverting his energy away from turning the key. That's your window. It's thin. It's also the only one you're likely to get, so I'd take it."

"We can build the window and make him bleed. Not a problem," I promised. "But none of it matters if he ducks around Aidon and goes straight for the babies. We might not be able to move fast enough. We need to plug that hole. How do I make three convergence babies quiet enough that he can't pick them out of a crowded yard?"

"You can't, not entirely." Nina pushed a thin braided band down the island toward me. It had white-gold threaded through it. "Jean-Marc and I have been working on these for the past day. They will mask their shine. They don't smother it. We tried covering their power entirely and cooked the first one. The best we've managed is to quiet them. We can take it down eighty percent, give or take."

"Twenty percent of a beacon is still a beacon," Hades pointed out as Nyssa's shadow looped around his hand. "When my son drives him back, he won't run. He'll lunge for the brightest convergence it can reach. Quieted or not, that's these three babies. Dampers were a good idea, granddaughter, but it won't keep him away. Only a louder light will."

I'd gotten as far as opening my mouth to tell him there wasn't a louder light when Morrigan pushed off the windowsill she'd been sitting in. She set a compass of bone and pale crystal on the counter. The needle twitched toward something the rest of us couldn't see.

“That'd be me." She rested two fingers on the compass like she was taking a pulse off it. "Kaltherax took my baby years back. I felt the exact second it took her from me, and I've spent every year since building this relic out of what she left behind. It still carries her. It’ll be loud enough to bury three babies' signals for the time you will need to take him out. It'll be the brightest thing in that yard by a mile."

"He’ll drag you back with it." I'd stood beside enough dying people to know the face of one who'd already accepted it was happening. Talking her out of putting herself at risk would've been a waste of time. She’d made up her mind. "You realize that, right?"

"I am aware." Her eyes stayed dry, which was harder to look at than crying would've been. "I didn't only cross your threshold for the warding, Phoebe. I came to ensure he pays for what he’s done. Don't take that away from me."

Morrigan was known to lie. I didn’t think she was lying about this. Her plan was written all over her face. I gave her a nod because she'd earned that much. Then I made myself ask the thing that had been clawing under my ribs. "How do we lure him in? Or get to him?"

Mnemar lifted one shoulder. "Lethea's right—nobody's ever found a way to reach him, and nobody living has one now. Something on the other side found you. For centuries, our people have stared through the gap, and nothing has ever once looked back. Today, not only did a child in there catch your eye. You connected to Orenthiel."