Aidon deposited me on the edge of the bathtub, where the water sprites immediately began swimming circles behind me. Their bluish forms glowed brighter as they sensed the approaching threat. Their magic wrapped around me like a warm blanket.
"Thank you," I told them softly as I reached out and ran a hand along the back of one.
The house erupted into controlled chaos. Through the open bathroom door, I could see Mom coordinating the hedge witches, while Nina and Jean-Marc worked frantically to maintain a connection with the anchor network. I have no idea where our visiting gods went. I couldn’t see them, although I could feel their power, so they were still nearby.
"The first wave is down," Murtagh's voice carried from outside. It was accompanied by the distinctive roar of Tseki in his dragon form. "More are coming."
"Dimensional instability is detected," Jean-Marc called out. "Whatever's coming next, it's not fully in our reality."
Pushing myself up, I waddled to the door and stuck my head out. It was pandemonium. It was hard to fight the urge to start throwing my magic around to take out the threat. I’d been fighting ever since I was given my magic. Hell, I had learned how to use it by fighting creatures bent on taking me out.
"They’re phase-shifted creatures," Artemis called out from behind me, making my head swing around. "She's sending things that exist partially in other dimensions. They can bypass physical barriers."
"How do we fight something that's only half here?" Stella demanded, her voice cracking as she sprinted from the kitchen.
"You don't," Artemis replied, flat as week-old soda. "You survive and hope they lose interest."
The house suddenly felt wrong, like someone had swapped out all the oxygen for molten lead. My lungs seized, and every instinct I'd ever ignored started screaming at once. The floorboards beneath my feet started vibrating, and the familiar scent of home—coffee, vanilla candles, that weird cleaning product Mythia loved—got buried under something that smelled like burnt copper and dying roses.
Things began seeping through our walls. Holy shitballs, I was going to need to burn my house and rebuild after this. These creatures weren't the corrupted creatures they'd been battling in the yard. They were Lyra's personal collection of nightmares. This was part of the reason she needed so much power for her plan. What used to be human, or close enough, before she'd decided to play God with a side of sadistic creativity.
These phasers, as I called them, moved through brick and drywall like water. Their bodies existed in multiple states simultaneously. Arms that were solid one second turned to vapor the next. Faces that held human expressions stretched and warped into configurations designed to make you pee your pants.
One turned its head toward me, and where its eyes should have been, twin flames of copper fire burned. There was an intelligence in them. And I swear the thing remembered being mortal. With a scream, I threw some magic at it and ducked.
Alright, that was an exaggeration. I moved, but my upper body had nowhere to go. My belly wouldn’t allow it. I didn’t see if my spell did anything, but I heard a garbled scream.
When I turned my face, I saw a vaguely humanoid shape stretching in my direction. Its limbs extended and contracted as it moved, like watching rubber bands snap back and forth in slow motion. Another flickered between being a massive cockroach and something that might have been a former witch. Its magical signature was a discordant mix of human desperation and alien hunger.
"Get the pregnant woman," one of the creatures told another. "The vessel must be preserved for the ritual."
My stomach dropped straight through the floor. I was apparently the vessel now. That sounded about as pleasant as having my leg sawed off while I watched. I needed to get out of there, but I was stuck in this bathroom.
"Over my dead body," Aidon snarled. I felt his power form a protective barrier around me.
The creatures didn't seem particularly interested in fighting their way through his defenses to get to me. Instead, they began moving in and out of the walls in the same place. The water sprites behind me suddenly went rigid. Their glow dimmed. I took a step toward them to figure out what was happening when Vera shouted from somewhere, giving me the answer.
"They are feeding on our magic!" she shouted. Somehow, her voice carried clearly through the house. "Every spell we cast just makes them stronger!"
Well, that explained why the sprites looked like someone was slowly draining their batteries. Those phasers were siphoning magical energy, and these little guys were dying right in front of me. Not on my watch.
"No," I gasped as I cast a protective barrier around them, hoping to help. Nothing happened, and I reached out to touch the nearest sprite. The moment my skin made contact with its translucent form, the triplets' magic erupted outward.
Golden, blue, and purple light blazed from my belly. It formed a protective dome that cut off the creatures' ability to drain anything within its boundaries. The sprites immediately began glowing brighter. Their magic intensified as they found themselves shielded from the attack.
"The babies can cut the draining effect," I called out, pouring more power into the protective dome. "But I cannot cover the whole house."
"You do not need to," Thalia said, appearing in the bathroom doorway with her hands already glowing with her silver-white Pleiades magic. "I can extend your barrier using my bloodline connection to yours."
Her power flowed into mine like warm whiskey. The sensation was intoxicating at first. I got a rush of strength.And then felt the connection. It made me feel like I could take on anything the universe wanted to throw at me. Then the energy amplified the protective dome until it encompassed the entire bathroom and began spreading down the hallway like a slow-moving wave of salvation. Wherever our combined magic touched, the creatures could no longer continue draining the others. For approximately fifteen seconds, I thought we might actually win this thing.
Then the floor beneath me began to crack. The ceramic tiles fractured and split apart. It moved deeper. The very foundation of what kept this dimension separate from all the others was starting to buckle under pressure I couldn't see but could feel in my bones.
My heart hammered against my ribs as the sound drilled through my skull. This was more than just another magical attack. This was something big. Something that required the kind of power that left scorched earth in its wake.
"A portal is opening directly beneath our house!" Jean-Marc screamed from somewhere outside the bathroom. His voice barely cut through the supernatural shriek of alarms that sounded at the same time. "It is targeting Mom's location! We need to protect her."
Before I could suck in a breath, the bathroom floor dissolved like sugar in boiling water, not far from my feet. Opening my mouth to scream, I gaped at the swirling vortex of absolute darkness beneath me. It reeked of ozone and what I could only describe as the smell of burning magic. The water sprites began chittering. Their voices sounded like pure panic. Their healing pool, also known as my bathtub, began emptying into the dimensional rift. Their tiny forms began tumbling toward the void like leaves caught in a hurricane.
