She couldn’t feel bad for leaving Mara and Buick to fend for themselves. It wasn’t them the Suuke was after. She wasn’t sure why she believed that was true but felt it as surely as she felt the ice-wind tearing at her cheeks and neck, the cold light of the stars.

The mothers were warned not to let the children go, though they had transformed. Chance’s words rang through her ears as she plunged forward through the brambles, her gut throbbing, lungs ripping as snow-heavy branches clawed at her and Eunjoo. She gasped for breath as she came to a clearing, the gravel driveway, across which lay the path to Loren’s house and Mara’s truck. She was scared to cross the clearing, stagnant and tar-black as night water.

Some mothers were frightened and let go.

The children were lost to us.

The Suuke would come and rip the babies out. Is that what it wanted of her? Her belly sinking, she clutched Eunjoo tighter through the frozen horehound marking the gravel’s edge, the prickling globe mallow. The footsteps behind her grew louder.

She’d have to sprint across the driveway.

If she could have cried out in pain she would have. It took every ounce of strength to put one foot in front of the other and not collapse. They did not die but joined the ko’ko in the sacred lake, gateway to Kothluwala’wa.

Eunjoo’s bird whisper, “It’s coming, Phoenix’s mama. Hurry.”

The girl’s face was buried in Calliope’s sweater. How could she see the monster?

Calliope turned.

On the porch outside the front door a hundred feet away a massive figure towered; it was the first Suuke, the one with snakes around its neck, glinting knife in hand.

It turned.

It had spotted her.

Like its feathered partner, the Suuke locked its swollen eyes on her.

She gasped for breath, clamped her arms tighter still around Eunjoo, and kept running.

The Suuke leapt from the banister to the snow below.

Something grabbed Calliope. A knobby hand unrooted from the ground, grasping her tightly. Her ankle twisted and she fell forward, keeled her body to the side so she wouldn’t land on Eunjoo or the babies. She kicked furiously at whatever had grabbed her, the Suuke’s claw? She was throbbing in pain, scrambling as quickly as she could toward Eunjoo, barefoot and half dressed, sprawling on the gravel.

The girl pulled Calliope’s hand, motioning her to stand.

The Suuke was gamboling toward them.

Calliope loosened her foot from her boot, caught in the grooved tree root that had tripped her. Freed and shoeless, she heaved herself up, and, Eunjoo’s hand in hers, they clambered forward. She could see the truck parked in the gravel in front of Loren’s cabin.

They wouldn’t make it.