"But the wards—" Mom started.
"Didn't even register it." Aidon's voice came out dangerous and low. "Whoever did this knows exactly how to slip past magical defenses without triggering alarms."
I held Melaina tighter, her heat seeping into my chest while her cries gradually subsided to hiccupping sobs. Across the room, Thaniel's sparks were calming in Aidon's arms. But Nyssa wouldn't stop wailing. Her shadows were still defensive and agitated.
"She can't see them," Nina realized suddenly. "Look—her eyes keep tracking toward Thaniel and Melaina, but the shadows are blocking her view."
"Move the cribs," I ordered, already shifting toward the center of the room with Melaina. "Put them in a triangle so they can see each other."
Mom grabbed Thaniel's crib while Aidon helped Nina maneuver Nyssa's. Within minutes, we'd rearranged the nursery so all three cribs formed a triangle. The moment we settled the babies back down where they could maintain visual contact with their siblings, the crying tapered off.
Melaina's temperature returned to normal. Thaniel's sparks faded to gentle flickers. And Nyssa's shadows retracted. However, they didn't disappear completely. They pooled protectively around her blanket.
"They're guarding each other," Tarja observed, her tail swishing slowly. "The probe frightened them, and their first instinct was to form a defensive unit."
"That is seriously impressive," Mom whispered with a smile.
Aidon moved to the window, and his expression hardened to stone. "Phoebe. Come here."
The tone in his voice made my stomach clench. I crossed to him, leaving Melaina with Nina. I followed his gaze to the window frame. “Shit.” The curse escaped when I saw the fresh scorch marks. "That's not from Melaina's heat."
"No." He reached out, and his shadows probed the marks at the same time my magical senses did the same thing.
My magic confirmed what I had already suspected. "Someone stood within sight of this window and used magic to burn through the protective layers."
Aidon's jaw clenched. "The magical residue matches Ember's sample."
My hands curled into fists. "The Scythe."
"They used it to scan the babies through the wards without triggering them." Aidon's shadows darkened, spreading across the floor like oil. "They somehow managed to catalog our children's power while we slept twenty feet away."
Rage and terror warred in my chest, making it hard to breathe. "How long were they out there?"
"Based on the residue degradation?" Tarja padded to the window, her green eyes narrowed. "At least an hour. Possibly longer."
An hour. Someone had stood outside my babies' window for an hour, studying them, mapping them, preparing to harvest them. The violation of it made bile rise in my throat.
I swallowed the lump in my throat and asked the question I might not want the answer to, but had to have. “Can they take the babies’ powers the same way?”
Tarja lifted her head and met my watery gaze. “No. Excising someone’s power requires proximity and line of sight.”
"That means we can protect them. I'm waking Selene so she can take a shift keeping a barrier inside the room," Mom said, already pulling out her phone. "And Clio. I want to know if that scan did anything to them."
No one argued with that. Aidon and I wanted the reassurance as well. The rest of the night passed in tense vigilance. We took turns holding the triplets. None of us was willing to put them down even after they'd fallen back into restless sleep. By the time pale dawn light filtered through the curtains, my eyes felt gritty, and my arms ached. Melaina was warm and solid against my chest, and that was all that mattered.
Clio arrived just after seven, summoned by Mom's urgent call. The healer swept into the nursery with the focused intensity that made her both comforting and terrifying. "Walk me through what happened," Clio said as she took Thaniel from Selene to examine him first. She laid him in his crib and lifted her handsabove his sleeping form. Her magic pooled around her fingers in soft amber light.
I explained everything while she worked. I told her about their screams and how they wouldn’t settle until they could see one another. What I felt from the residue, and how Tarja and Binx sensed the probe. Clio's expression grew grimmer with each detail.
Clio paused her exams and looked at Tarja. "Can you share the exact signature of the probe?"
“I can do that,” Tarja agreed before she went very still.
"Shit," Clio breathed after a long moment. "That's not good."
"Define 'not good’. It’s incredibly vague and infuriating. Nothing about this is good," Aidon demanded from where he stood guard at the window while I grabbed my phone and texted Stella and Jean-Marc an update.
“That wasn’t the first time that happened.” Clio moved to Melaina and began examining her. "Someone has been scanning the babies regularly for weeks. I noticed trace magical signatures during my previous visits, but I dismissed them as normal developmental monitoring. I figured Phoebe’s power was doing passive scans to ensure the children were progressing safely. It’s something I could see her magic doing without her even knowing." Her jaw tightened. "Knowing the magical signature, I can now match it to the Thessmark. They were cartographic exams. They mapped every aspect of their power with surgical precision."
