Page 10 of Postpartum Spells & Infant Hells

"Already done," Nana said without missing a beat, refilling her coffee. "Did it while you were upstairs pretending you weren't on the verge of going nuclear. Which, speaking of things being handled before they get worse—" Her gaze drifted pointedly down the island. "Whatever's on that screen, Selene, that has had you grinding your teeth since Mollie made the second pot. Out with it."

"What do you have, Selene?" Stella’s hair was still skewered with the chopstick she'd walked in wearing two hours ago, which somehow made her more menacing, not less. "You’ve been making your I-am-about-to-ruin-everyone's-morning face. Show us before Aidon comes back inside. We need to see if we can soften it before he does something rash like bring his father here. The last thing we need is Hades going on a killing rampage."

Aidon came through the door on a draft of cold salt air before Selene could open her mouth. I prayed this wasn’t bad. Hades and Persephone brought their own problems when they tried to help. If I thought they could handle this without innocent bloodshed, I would have moved them into the house after the first attack. That wasn’t how it worked with them.

"Show me whatever you have been talking about. I’m not going to fly off the handle. And we aren’t at the point where my father is needed," Aidon directed as he came up behind me and settled his palm flat between my shoulder blades. "I’m in control, Selene. And I’d like to point out that the trees are still standing. Now, walk us through it."

Selene sighed and nodded her head. "I don’t think it’s going to set you off. There are twenty-three families as of the call I just took. They’re scattered from Reykjavik to Brisbane to a pueblo outside Albuquerque. Every household has found the same kind of mark you cut out of your cribs upstairs," she reported as she swung the laptop so the whole island could see. "I have photographs from nineteen of them. The other four are sending images as soon as they finish their search. None of them had sensed their presence and didn’t know to look until I informed them."

"I want to look at the one from the witch in Quebec first, the one where the parents caught movement on the monitor," Clio interjected, leaning across me to tap the trackpad herself. "I asked her to send me the clip. I want to know if it’s the same thing Phoebe saw."

The clip played in night-vision green, turning the baby in the crib into a small, pale fish at the bottom of a tank. My heart started racing, and my breath caught when a small figure moved to the side of the rail. It wasn’t an adult. And it wasn’t a toddler. He wasn't facing the camera, so it was impossible to see any features.

Aidon’s hand tightened on my shoulder as it bent at the waist. It pressed the heel of one small hand to the underside of the wood. “Is it carving the sigil?” We got the answer to my question before anyone responded when it straightened and walked backward out of the frame.

"Play it again, and pause it where the wrist meets the rail, please," I requested, as I thought I saw something.

"I will play it as many times as you need, but I want you to look at its gait before you fixate on its hand," Aidon countered. His shadows began pooling at his feet in a thin dark rim he was not entirely controlling. "It doesn’t have a smooth stride. And it’s moving backward as if it knew where the camera was located."

"A child raised by someone up to no good would teach their child to avoid cameras. So would people who have been hunted," Layla cut in from the doorway, where she had come in. "I learned what a security camera was the same week I learned what a spoon was. Myrna made sure we could avoid being caught when she sent us on her little missions."

"I’m sure it was taught to avoid detection, but that doesn’t matter as much as what it is. It's not human or human adjacent. Its wrist does not bend the way ours does," I pressed, hitting pause myself on the frame I wanted.

"I’ll give you that. But that’s not the part that’s going to keep me up tonight," my mother interjected. "Clio, hand me the yellow curl from upstairs, the one we pried out from under Nyssa's rail. I want to test something while we still have it intact."

My head swiveled around to her. “You kept part of the wax?”

“I figured we could learn more from it,” Mom insisted.

Clio lifted a small plastic container from her bag and dumped the contents into my mother’s palm. "You think it will tell you something?"

"I think it will tell us everything. The carving was the base for the magic, but the wax was a vital part of the working," my mother replied, pinching a measure of salt from the jar and dusting it across the dish in front of her. "Watch the grains. If I’m wrong, the wax will sit on the salt. If I’m right, it will melt into them, and we can find out who made it."

Tilting her palm, she dumped the wax onto the salt. It didn’t sit on top. It dissolved into it, like a sugar cube in tea. The smell that rose from the dish was of copper warmed in a pot with something flowery and slightly moldy.

"What the hell just happened? What does that mean?" I prompted as Nyssa unlatched, and I handed her to Aidon for burping. Melaina had begun fussing, so I took her from Stella after securing the breast Nyssa had drained. She grabbed hold of my boob the second I exposed it.

"It’s definitely blood magic. We will need to run additional tests to gather more information. I want to think about the best ones to do given our limited supply," Mom replied.

“We definitely want to be smart about what spells we run on this. But first, I want to test something,” Clio interjected, setting her palm an inch above Nyssa’s head where it rested on Aidon's shoulder while he patted her back.

Nyssa opened her eyes and looked at the healer with the steady attention of a much older child. Watching that made my stomach churn and sour. Was I imagining this?

"You are about to tell me you found something that we missed when we cut the marks out of the cribs," I guessed, because Clio was clearly looking for something.

"I’m confirming the marks were not for surveillance," Clio admitted, her expression shuttering as she lowered her hand. "The marks took a measurement of the children’s power. Basically, a sample of their magic. They also left a thread behind in the children themselves. It’s barely more than a hairline. More of a lien, if I’m being honest. It’s a way for whoever placed the sigil to find these three again, no matter where you move them."

"What exactly are you saying? Were they claimed after all?" Aidon growled as the air around us went two degrees colder and then hotter as his anger took over.

"Not in the way you think. It’s a temporary magical tattoo. It’s sleeping right now. And before you ask, I can't clear it out of her. I can’t even cut it out of her with a salted scalpel," Clio replied as she met my eyes. She would never look away from me when she was about to give me the worst news of the morning. "If I cut it without knowing more about the structure of the claim, I might cut something else with it. We each have countless magical threads tying us to family and friends. I’m not willing to be the one who decides which thread in your daughter is safe to sever."

"How long do we have before whoever placed it pulls on it," I asked, because that was the only question that mattered.

"I have absolutely no idea. It feels like there’s an urgency attached to the thing, which makes me lean toward days. That could be my imagination getting away from me, though." I loved Clio for the way she told me the truth. It pissed me off and made my stomach even worse. But I had the information, and we could go from there.

“We need to get to Lilith’s house.” I sighed and handed Melaina to Mom to burp as I put my boob away. I felt like a cow being milked every couple of hours, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. It made me feel close to my babies.

"She’s expecting us. I restocked your regular bag, since I figure you’ll leave the babies here," Stella confirmed, holding said bag out to me. “She’s wanted to help protect the babies. This will make her feel like she's contributing.”