Page 43 of Postpartum Spells & Infant Hells

"Watch me," he tossed over his shoulder before he walked outside. That turned out to be the last ordinary thing either of us got to say to each other.

The detector died first. Instead of the long climbing wall I'd braced for, we got nothing. The lights went a heartbeat behind it. Room by room, everything went dark as if someone were walking through the house and pinching out candles. The dark that rushed in to fill the space pressed against my eardrums the way deep water does when you've dived too far too fast.

"Jean-Marc, talk to me," I demanded into the black.

“It's completely dead.” His reply was followed by the frantic scrape of his finger on a keyboard.

Silver came up through the grain of the floorboards beneath my palms then. It was cold enough that Brenna hissed through her teeth. The pale light pearled along the seams of the walls and bled down out of the ceiling. It was mercury-bright and rising from more directions than I could whip my head around to follow. It was gathering itself out of the very bones of my house.

"It's not coming through the door, Phoebe," Brenna warned, her hand snatching my wrist and gripping it hard. "It isn't using a door at all. That's why it never came to the yard."

All those hours of planning, every line we'd argued over and burned into the mud out back, were for nothing. We'd built the entire thing around a creature that could get around it. The curve of its smooth pewter face surfaced first. It was drawn up out of the pooling light, not even an arm's length from Nina's shoulder. It was featureless, unhurried, and already standing well inside the only walls I had left between it and my children.

CHAPTER 18

"Don't you dare look at it, Phoebe." Brenna's nails were still buried in my wrist.

Stella burst through the front door then, her headlights illuminating her shocked face. “I told you I should have stayed!”

Rolling my eyes, I tried to pull my wrist free of Brenna. “Yes, because that’s what we should focus on right now.”

"No, we should be remembering what Hades said. Keep your eyes down, magic up, and pretend that face isn't four feet from your daughter," Brenna shouted.

"My eyes are exactly where they need to be." I flattened both palms harder into the boards and shoved everything I had into the magic we’d set earlier. "Get over here, Stella.”

The rushed click of Stella’s shoes told me she was heading our way. “Worry about yourself. I’m right here."

The pewter hand chose that exact second to push out of the kitchen wall, fingers first. The plaster bulged around the knuckles like wet paper before they broke through and curled. The thing wasn't crossing my wards. I'd have felt it the same way I'd felt Lyra punch through them, what felt like a lifetime ago.

This was worse. It was unpacking itself inside the house one limb at a time. It was choosing which wall to be born from. A second arm moved as if underwater. The smooth face I'd watched turned a slow degree toward the pantry door.

"Wilhelm, the kitchen!" Astrid's voice cracked across the dark. She was already on her knees in the doorway between the two rooms. There was a frost-blue light webbing out from her hand. When it touched the silver, it crackled and seized. "I'll hold the hallway. You take the kitchen before that arm adds an elbow."

"I’m getting to it, woman. Stop narrating my work." Wilhelm moved faster than he had before. Bone ash hissed where it met the half-formed hand in the wall as he flung it. The pewter fingers locked mid-curl like something flash-frozen in the act of grabbing. "That one won’t be causing a problem for a bit. Every piece we freeze means he will shove harder through the walls we have not reached. We’re not going to be able to stop him entirely."

"We need to make sure he arrives in the box we built for him." I found Stella across the living room. Both of us were anchored to opposite points of the design we'd burned into the floor that morning. The look she shot me was the one she'd worn at eighteen right before we'd handed a bouncer two pieces of cardstock and prayed. "You with me, Stells? On three, or we're going to be very embarrassed in the afterlife."

"I refuse to die embarrassed. I dressed for this." Stella drove her palms down, and her magic answered. It was green and growing. I swear she channeled the smell of cut grass and turned soil somehow. "One."

A smile curved my lips. My best friend was a badass who never hesitated. She jumped in with both feet, and it bolstered my courage. "Two." My power came up under my ribs. It was a bright, dangerous thing that wanted to burn first and think never. I leashed it into the shape we needed instead of the fire it begged to be. "Three. Now, Stella!"

Her power was in action before I said her name. The cage went up between us in a lattice of living green and white-gold light. It threaded from her anchor to mine and up the walls in ribs that pulsed like something with a heartbeat. The silver pouring into the center of the room hit it and recoiled. For one breath, I let myself believe the planning had been worth the sleep I'd traded for it.

"Phoebe." Morrigan's voice came from the window. She lifted the compass of bone and pale crystal off its cord. Her gloved hands were cupped around it, and every tear bleeding silver into my house tilted toward her at once like iron filings finding a magnet. "Whatever you mean to do with that cage, do it quickly. I can pull his eye off your babies, but I cannot stay standing in your living room for very long."

"We are doing it, but you need to sit down, you stubborn old crow. Preserve all the energy you can!" I called out as the color drained out of her face. The silver flooded across her eyes until there was no white left. There was nothing human looking back at me. She was filled with the mercury light that filled the gap.

"Morrigan! Stop. You're being pulled through. Drop it." I couldn’t allow her to sacrifice herself. There was still hope we could do this without her dying.

"I’m not dropping it," she insisted. She had thinned somehow. Like a photograph left too long in a window. "He’s looking at me now instead of the pantry. That is the entire point. Don’t waste it asking me to stop."

My heart lurched despite her being a liar. I couldn't help her. The second I lifted a hand off the cage it would buckle. Stella couldn't hold the whole thing alone. The worst part of being the one with the most power was that it chained you to the center of the room while a woman sacrificed herself a few feet away.

Needing to look away from Morrigan, my head turned to the back window, searching for my mate. We needed him to make a move and hurt Kaltherax as soon as the opportunity opened. I might have told myself I was checking to see if he was ready. The truth was that I needed him to keep my head in the game. I still had insane levels of hormones running through me postpartum, and this woman killing herself for us was wrecking me.

"He's at the sigil," I reported to the room. "Brace yourselves. Whatever he does out there, it's going to be felt in here."

Aidon dropped to his knees at the center of the burned design and plunged both hands wrist-deep into the carved earth. I felt the death magic leave him in a wave that had everything to do with endings. The house pitched like a boat. Plaster dust rained from the ceiling. Half the tears bleeding silver into my rooms slammed shut at once. The sound was almost deafening. The pewter limbs already pushed through began coming apart at their edges. They frayed into smoke that smelled of struck matches and rotten honey.