“Then get it out of our house,” Thomas ground out.
The baby’s face screwed up, her lower lip trembling. Before she could get out her first cry, Arianna came hurrying back into the nursery. “Let me have her. She hasn’t been fed yet.”
Arianna had a bottle of milk in one hand, and Patrick got out of her way. Arianna deftly swooped the baby into her arms, cutting off the distressed cry before it fully formed with quiet, wordless shushing noises. Arianna bounced the baby in her arms as she fed her, holding her how any mother would.
Looking at them, all Patrick could think was that orphans weren’t born, they were made, and that the changeling would be given up more times than she had been kept in her short life. Discarded by the fae who’d left her in the arms of a strange family, bound by glamour and destined to lose parental love in the face of cold reality.
No child of any species deserved that.
Patrick turned to face the Wisterias and opened his mouth to speak. “I can call—”
The nursery windowshatteredas if a bomb had gone off, the home’s threshold buckling beneath the blow, but it didn’t break. Glass exploded through the room, the lights above going out, and Patrick reacted without thinking. He ripped his shields out of his body, expanding them to engulf the people around him. Arianna screamed and hunched over the baby whose real name Patrick still didn’t know.
The explosion allowed cold winter wind and rain to enter the home—but that wasn’t the only thing that came inside.
The roar of the wind twisted into screams as a deep cold filled the nursery. Patrick conjured up a mageglobe in his left hand while yanking free his gods-given dagger with the other. His breath puffed white in the air from the cold, skin stinging from the supernatural chill.
Gliding into the nursery through the jagged hole in the building came the spirits of the restless dead.
Their forms flickered between the corporeal and ghostly, lightning outside backlighting the horde. Their faces were inhuman expressions of souls who only experienced an eternity of pain, while their hands resembled claws more than fingerbones. They were nightmarish and difficult to look at for long.
Shuffling around them were creatures more solid, more real, than the specters who came to haunt the home. Fat, with the bodies and legs of spiders that curved into human torsos. Genderless, with long black hair and mouths that opened on glistening, poisonous fangs, the creatures clattered forward along the floor and walls and ceiling.
Patrick’s magic burned with a particular sensation that only meant fae to him.
“Wild Hunt,” Patrick said. When that name got no reaction, he tried again. “Sluagh.”
The dead and the creatures who guided them responded to being named with screams that made the nerves in Patrick’s teeth tingle. Patrick strengthened his shields and pulled them in, forcing Thomas, Margeaux, and Arianna closer to his position. It meant giving up ground to the Sluagh, but it was less space overall that Patrick would have to defend. He was a combat mage; his affinity didn’t lend itself toward defensive wards. Offensive spells were more his specialty.
One of the spider creatures came forward, its eight legs ending in hook claws making no noise on the wet carpet. Its eyes were an iridescent, sickly green, gaze focused not on Patrick, but on someone behind him—the changeling.
“Let them take it back!” Thomas shouted.
“Oh, fuck you, I’m not giving a baby up to the Sluagh,” Patrick snapped.
The Sluagh screamed their defiance to those words, their ghostly hands clawing at his shields.
“I cast you out.”
The snarled words made the hairs on the back of Patrick’s neck stand on end. He spared a glance over his shoulder, taking in the rigid way Margeaux stood, her eyes glittering with magic. Bright red blood slid down her arm from the long line she’d cut up her wrist using the sharp-looking athame. Her blood dripped onto the nursery floor, staining the cream-colored carpet.
The athame was made of gold, and it took the sacrifice offered under the Three-Fold Law as its due.
“I cast you out.”
The wind picked up, and the restless dead screamed to be heard over it. The Sluagh pressed in close around them, Patrick’s shields burning bright in the dark nursery. The entire building began to hum as witch magic poured through its foundation. Patrick kept hold of his mageglobe, letting his magic spin against his palm without a spell to shape it. He knew better than to interrupt a casting by someone else in their hearth and home.
“I cast youout!”
The words came out on a scream that carried more than Margeaux’s voice. The power of the Wisteria Coven sang through her words, a joining of witches and warlocks buried in the threshold that surrounded the family’s home rising up to defend. The walls might be broken, but magic built and called by blood would always stand strong when a threshold sought to keep out unwanted guests.
Patrick’s stomach twisted uncomfortably as the room seemed to fold in on itself at the edges. A ripple flowed through the Sluagh, their forms flickering in the glow of Patrick’s magic. No matter a magic user’s strength—from a witch to a mage and all the ranks in between—a threshold was never to be ignored, especially not one built by a coven.
The Sluagh was sucked out of the building through the hole they’d made, cast out by Margeaux’s command. Lightning flashed outside, the thunder that followed in its wake so loud Patrick’s ears popped. The sound the Sluagh made when they retreated through the storm made him want to cover his ears.
Cold wind blew rain into the nursery through the hole. Dark shapes crawled around the jagged edge of the building, and Patrick nearly killed a gargoyle or two with magic before recognition of their presence stayed his hand.
Sirens pierced the rumble of the storm, getting louder as the lights flickered, sputtering back on. Patrick waited a couple of seconds before he slowly retracted his shields, drawing them back into his bones. He turned to look at Margeaux, who now stood wrapped in her husband’s arms. The wound on her arm still bled, and Thomas was murmuring about getting her a potion and poultice.
