Chapter 5
The kitchen had become ground zero shortly after the Forgotten One and wolves vanished.
Documents covered every surface like confetti after a really depressing parade.
Coffee rings now stained ritual diagrams. And Nana's handwriting was bleeding across pages that probably cost more than my car payment.
We'd argued about timing, consumed enough caffeine to fuel a rocket launch, and debated the finer points of ancestral politics until my brain felt like scrambled eggs.
By the time Aidon had finally carried my exhausted ass upstairs—because walking had become a theoretical concept—I was about as useful as a chocolate teapot. But did I get to sleep? Ha. What a joke.
I'd spent the remaining hours of darkness doing my best impression of a rotisserie chicken.
I tossed and turned from side to side while my belly hosted a rave.
Every position was wrong. Every angle was torture.
Finding comfort with a magical baby bump was like trying to find a unicorn in a Walmart parking lot.
It was theoretically possible, but you'd probably die waiting.
Dawn crept in through the kitchen windows with all the enthusiasm of a tax audit long after I had gone back down.
Now, I was sitting there staring into a cup of tea that had gone cold sometime around the Renaissance.
My reflection in the dark liquid made me wince.
I was pretty sure my hair had achieved its own gravitational field.
"I've been thinking about the connections," Nina murmured, making me jump.
My daughter had appeared beside me like a caffeinated ninja. Her hair stuck up in a hundred different directions. She also had a gleam in her eyes that preceded either brilliance or the kind of disaster that made national news.
"At five in the morning?" I croaked, grateful for company that didn't involve my spiraling thoughts. "Why aren’t you asleep?"
She slid into the chair next to me with enough energy to power a small city. "Sleep is overrated when you're having epiphanies about magical loopholes."
"Please tell me this epiphany doesn't involve more ancestral politics or ritual components that sound like a grocery list from hell."
"Actually..." Nina's grin was the kind that made me want to hide under the table.
"It's worse. I couldn't sleep either. But I had an idea.
" She pulled out her phone and showed me a recording app.
"What if we try to spy on Lyra through the parasitic bonds?
Similar to you wanting to use it to attack, but reverse surveillance instead. "
I blinked at her, my sleep-deprived brain taking a moment to process the suggestion. "You want me to intentionally connect with the psychotic witch who's trying to steal my babies?"
"Not exactly. I was thinking you could use mirror-sight. Use the bonds she created as a window to see what she's doing." Nina's eyes lit up with the kind of excitement that reminded me she was my daughter. "If we know what she's planning, we can stay ahead of her."
The idea had merit. Though it sounded like the magical equivalent of poking a sleeping dragon. "That's actually not terrible. But what if she detects me? What if it makes the connections stronger?"
"Your magic is stronger, and the babies can help protect you if something goes wrong," Nina replied as she squeezed my hand.
I sipped my cold tea and considered the proposal.
The rational part of my brain—admittedly not the part that had been making most of my decisions lately—screamed that this was dangerous.
But the desperate part of me was tired of being reactive.
I wanted to be proactive, and it was that part that found the idea compelling.
"Alright," I said finally, because arguing with a determined teenager was like trying to stop a freight train with a pool noodle. "But we do this carefully. And we stop the second anything feels wrong."
Nina's grin could have powered the entire Eastern seaboard. "I'll get the scrying bowl."
She bounced out of the kitchen and thundered down the basement stairs like a caffeinated gazelle.
I'd barely had time to contemplate where exactly I'd gone wrong in the parenting department—most kids her age were worried about homework and boys, mine was excited about communing with a murderous witch—when she came bounding back with an armload of supplies.
"Got everything!" she announced breathlessly, dumping her magical haul onto the kitchen island.
I relegated myself to supervisor while Nina transformed our island into something that looked like a cross between a New Age shop and a crime scene.
She arranged protective herbs around our silver scrying bowl.
It was a work of art. It had been crafted by one of the pixies who lived on our property.
There were delicate engravings all around the outside.
Nina positioned it in the center of everything, then carefully poured what looked like ordinary water into its depths.
"Vervain for clarity," she announced, sprinkling dried leaves in a careful arc around the bowl. "Sage for purification." More herbs joined the growing circle. "And devil's claw for—"
"Let me guess," I interrupted, eyeing the twisted black roots that looked like they'd crawled straight out of a horror movie. "Keeps away the bad guys."
Nina nodded cheerfully. "It's protection against malevolence. I figured we could use it. I’m going to build a ward on them to add another layer that will keep you hidden from her."
“That’ll make Clio and Aidon feel better when they hear about this.” I smiled at her and got ready to cast the scrying spell.
"Remember," Nina said, settling beside me, "don't try to push through the connection. Just follow it gently, like you're tracing a thread back to its source."
Nodding, I placed my hands on my belly, feeling for the parasitic bonds. They were there, just beneath the surface of my consciousness. And they pulsed with malevolent energy. Taking a deep breath, I let my magical senses follow one of the threads backward.
For a moment, I thought it was working. The mirror's surface began to shimmer, and I caught glimpses of stone walls and flickering candlelight.
But then something slammed into my consciousness like a brick wall.
The blocking magic hit me with enough force to make my vision double.
Pain seared through my skull as layers of enchantments unfolded like a poisonous flower.
Each one was designed to cause maximum agony to anyone trying to spy. My connection shattered.
"Shit," I gasped, pressing my palms against my temples as the world tilted sideways.
"Mom!" Nina's hands landed on my shoulders. "What happened?"
"She was ready for it," I managed through gritted teeth, feeling like I'd just French-kissed a live wire.
"Or something like it. There were blocks in place specifically designed to hurt anyone trying to spy on her.
We should have known that bitch would have magical booby traps. I feel like an overcooked chicken."
"Well, that was spectacularly stupid of us," Nina said, white-knuckling the edge of the kitchen island like she wanted to strangle it. Or me. Possibly both. "If she's blocked mirror-sight, we need to find another way to test these connections."
The thundering footsteps from upstairs announced the cavalry's arrival. Jean-Marc appeared first in the doorway, looking like he'd been electrocuted by a vindictive toaster. His cheek bore pillow lines that suggested he'd been face-down in dreamland when my magical mishap hit.
"I felt that magical backlash from two floors up," he said, still blinking away sleep. "Whatever you did, it rattled the whole house."
"Same here," Mom announced. "That energy spike nearly launched me out of bed. Do you have any idea how dangerous—"
"She knows," Aidon interrupted as he narrowed his eyes on me. "That’s why she didn’t tell anyone before trying it. What did you do to send shockwaves through every ward in this house?"
"I felt it all the way in the guest room," Vera added as she, Iris, and Tansy joined us. "It felt like a powerful counterspell."
"The resonance was off the charts," Clio said, joining the growing crowd with her scowl in place. "Are you having any contractions?"
"No, the babies and I are fine," I assured the healer.
Not taking my word for it, she walked over and placed her hand on my abdomen.
Jean-Marc grabbed an energy drink from the fridge while Nina and I caught everyone up on my attempt at magical reconnaissance.
I leaned into Aidon and sank into his warmth.
For a second, all I wanted to do was have him take me upstairs and ravish my body.
Sighing because that was not an option, I asked, "Does anyone have any ideas so we can turn the tables on this bitch? Because I'm done being her magical buffet."
"We already tried using the parasitic connections to spy on her," Nina said, shooting me a look. "We need to find a way around Lyra's magical traps."
Jean-Marc perked up like a golden retriever spotting a tennis ball. "Actually, what if we use something to fool her detection spells? I remember reading about dreamshade root. It's supposed to make magical signatures unrecognizable to tracking magic."
Lifting my head, I looked at my son’s excited gaze. "How so?"
"Well," Jean-Marc began, "dreamshade doesn't just hide your magical presence. It makes you appear as something else entirely. To Lyra's traps, you'd look like ambient magical energy instead of an intruder."
"That might actually work," Vera said thoughtfully. "Let me check what I brought."
She moved around to the small table in the breakfast nook.
Her collection was spread across the surface like someone had dumped the contents of Hogwarts' lost and found onto it.
Every surface in my house seemed to be covered in magical items nowadays.
It said more about the state of our lives than anything else.