Page 5 of Postpartum Spells & Infant Hells

“No,” Aidon said. “No portal opened, nothing crossed the inner boundary, and the wards didn’t register an attack.”

“Fantastic,” I muttered. “A handprint no one could’ve reached and a barefoot child who skips twenty feet at a time. I love getting good news first thing in the morning.”

I looked at the four people who’d spent the night searching the property while I’d been inside with my family.

“Thank you,” I added. “I mean it. It helps knowing you’re out here watching over us.”

The chill had worked its way through my clothes, so I turned and went inside. The babies began waking as I stepped through the back door.

The kitchen had filled while we stood outside in the mist.

“Morning, everyone,” I greeted as I headed toward the stairs.

“What had the five of you standing out there looking like you were plotting revenge?” Nana asked.

I stopped long enough to explain what we’d found. As I spoke, I took in the room. Mythia stood at the stove with her wings tucked flat against her back and three pans going at once. She handled a house full of frightened people by feeding them before they had to ask.

Selene sat at the end of the island with her laptop open. Half a dozen message threads filled the screen as she searched the coven network for anything that might explain a handprint no one could reach and footprints that vanished mid-stride.

Mom stood at the island helping Mythia without getting in the pixie’s way. My seventeen-year-old, Nina, had bags under her eyes. She had Thaniel on her hip with his fist wound into her ponytail. Her tablet was propped against the fruit bowl with the family crisis line still scrolling.

"Before everybody starts theorizing, you should hear the overnight log. It is genuinely unhinged." Nina did not wait for permission to share what she wanted. It was something she had been doing since she was thirteen.

"There are three more babies showing odd symptoms,” she explained. “They’re all under a year old, and they live in different cities. One was in Reno. Another from somewhere outside Atlanta. And the last was from a town in Saskatchewan.

“Every single one of them spiked a fever overnight," she continued. “They were a hundred and three. It remained that high for hours. There are no signs of an infection. The parents could find nothing to explain the symptoms. And every single one of them dropped back to normal the second the sun came up. To the actual second, the sun rose over the horizon. In two of the three cases, the parents were pacing with their babies next to windows, trying to distract them."

She hitched Thaniel higher and made a face at him. "Fevers don't punch a clock. And aren’t affected by lunar cycles. I looked it up. That's not a thing fevers do."

"You’re right. It’s not a thing fevers do," I agreed. The nurse in me bristled before the mother could catch up. "A fever doesn’t watch the horizon for sunrise and decide its shift is over. That's not how illness works, baby. That's something else entirely. It’s likely magical."

"I was thinking the same thing. There's more, though. And it's the weird kind of weird, not the scary kind." Nina turned the tablet around so the room could see it. "A family in Tucson sent this in about twenty minutes ago. They have a four-month-old water elemental, and they walked into his nursery this morning to find the ceiling doing this."

The photo showed a baby's room in the early morning light. Across the whole ceiling over the crib hung beads of water. There were hundreds of them. Each was about the size of a small marble. They were fixed in the air in one wide unbroken ring. And they caught the gray light. They held their round shape despite gravity.

“Is this normal for water elementals?” I asked.

“Not at this age. This doesn’t come until much later. The parents swear that the boy did this in his sleep. The mom caught him reaching up from his crib toward a ceiling he could not possibly have touched.”

"So, he’s showing advanced abilities as well." I shivered as the cold came back into the room, and it had nothing to do with our resident ghost, Evanora. "Maybe somebody was standing over the crib showing him what he could do.”

Nana came in on the tail of that. She had her shotgun broken open over one forearm. Her reading glasses were shoved up into the white cloud of her hair. She took one long look at the ring of hanging water before she snorted. "That was changelings," she pronounced with the flat certainty of a woman who had buried three husbands and most of her enemies.

"I’ve been doing a lot of reading. It seems as if some Fae steal a human babe out of the crib and leave one of their own in its place. The swapped child does uncanny things in the night, scaring the whole household halfway to the grave. Sure, it’s an old wives’ tale, but there is some truth to it. My grandmother salted every windowsill in our house against exactly this. I spent nearly ninety years thinking she was a superstitious old crank. I would like to formally apologize to her ghost this morning."

"It is not changelings, Mother. I love your input, but our property is filled with Fae. One of them would know." Mom crossed and took the tablet from Nina. She studied the ring of water with the same patient focus she gave a potion, she meant to take it down to its bones so she could make it better.

"A changeling glamour leaves a residue I would know with my enhanced vision. I’ve also read it leaves a taste like a struck match. There is not a trace of it in here. Nor is there in a single one of these reports. Selene can confirm what she found on the network."

She glanced over at Selene, who nodded. "Whatever has been in these nurseries is not trading our children for theirs. It’s not laying a finger on the children at all. It’s teaching them. This stopped being fifteen frightened mothers and a string of bad dreams sometime in the last three days. Somebody is messing with babies in a hundred nurseries all across this country. They’re doing it well enough that not one ward anywhere has been tripped. Wards read intent. Whatever this is, it is not coming with the intent to harm."

My phone buzzed against my hip, and I opened it right away. Half of my mind was still on the photo. I was expecting the crisis line or one of the families calling back. The number on the screen was not one I knew. There was no name attached to it and no greeting in the thread. The message contained six words that chilled my blood.

“Count them before you trust them. They are coming.”

CHAPTER 3

"Phoebe, put the phone down before you crack the screen. I can hear your fingers turning white from across the room." Mom's voice cut through the kitchen, but I didn’t move.