With a final cut, the cord snapped against the blade.

"About blessed time," the ancient one said. She passed the boy into a gray blanket held by another. This woman swaddled him in it, folding it like origami with her dainty white gloves. Military-style, the way Rosalee's father made his bed. At the birthing, the others had called her Geraldine.

Finally, mercifully, little Stephen stopped crying.

It was only then that Rosalee realized how eerily quiet the night was. Not a croak of a frog, a chirp of a bat, nor the mournful howl of a loon to be heard. As if the animals themselves were afraid to make a sound in the presence of these hags.

And how cold it suddenly was, as though it wasn't midsummer at all but the dead of winter.

"There," the ancient one said. "Safe and swaddled. Isn't that better, child?"

Shivering and uncertain, Rosalee still managed a nod.

Snick! She turned at the sound. The awful sound. The deadly sound.

A fourth woman approached, holding a pair of silvery knitting needles like weapons. She was ruddy-faced and plump, her eyes full of mischievous glee. During the birthing, she'd been wearing a fancy hat. They called her Mavis.

The ancient woman said, "Deal with her."

Helpless, Rosalee backed away. She tripped. Her legs tangled in the umbilical cord still spooling from her insides. She landed on her butt with a startled exhale.

Baby Stephen resumed his cries.

Rosalee looked back over her shoulder, watching the ancient woman's white robe recede with her child into the darkness. Clarity returned. Sanity. She couldn't let them take him—how did she let them take him?

"No, please! Please! Don't hurt him! Don't you hurt my Stephen!"

Swollen, weeping from the pain and the loss of her son, knowing she would soon lose her own life, Rosalee turned to face her adversaries.

Eight menacing eyes fell upon her, their lined and wrinkled faces scarcely visible under the hoods. Each woman scraped a knitting needle over and under the other like sharpening knives as they approached.

Rosalee crawled backwards on her hands and feet. The slippery, veined umbilical cord dragging along beneath her, slithering like a snake, chasing her like the memory of the thing that ravaged her among the stones.

Someone grabbed her by the hair. Her scream echoed. A white-gloved hand covered her mouth, smothering her cries. Baby powder-scented silk against her lips. She struggled, kicking out at them with what little strength remained.

No use. Despite their age, they were far stronger.

"Hold on, kiddo," Helen said in her ear. "This is gonna hurt like hell."

A knitting needle swished out in the gloved woman's hand, glinting as it caught the light.

Rosalee's pretty green eyes—eyes her father described as "perfectly Irish"—widened in sheer terror. The needle pierced the soft tissue of her left temple, gouged through bone and into the tender meat of her brain.

She slumped sideways on the asphalt. Blood trickled down her cheek into her Irish eyes, the left bulging against the pressure of the needle.