Caldera opened the wardrobe door to reveal Leo huddled in the corner. “We’re leaving,” she told him. “Stay close.” She pulled him out.

Leo’s eyes lit on the body of the icecat and his face went pale. “Oh God.”

“Just stay with me.” Caldera dragged Leo downstairs.

The fight with the icecat had been so fast that I hadn’t had the chance to draw a weapon. I pulled out my phone and started typing, trying to search through the futures at the same time. Danger flickered through the possibilities, getting closer. I hit Send, shoved the phone back into my pocket, and followed Caldera.

Caldera was down in the living room behind the dividing wall, crouched low and holding on to Leo tightly. Leo was huddled into a ball, breathing fast. “Where are they?” Caldera said quietly.

“Don’t go out the front,” I said, keeping my voice down. From our position we could barely see the front door, and couldn’t see the back at all, but I knew what would happen if we went there. “There’s someone covering the front door. We step through it, we’re going to eat a spell to the face. Something else too . . .”

“The back?”

“More icecats.” I scanned future after future in which we left the house. In most of them we got shot the instant we came into view. “A mage as well.”

“So we’re surrounded.”

All around us, the house was dark and silent. After the brief flurry of the battle, there had been no sound from outside; only my divination let me know that anything was there. I could hear Leo’s rapid breathing, and the whites of his eyes showed in the gloom. “Don’t let her take me back,” he said, his voice high and scared. “I’ll do whatever you what. Just don’t let her, please—”

“No one’s taking you anywhere,” Caldera said, then looked at me. “Can you tell when our backup’s going to be here?”

I’d been scanning the futures for exactly that. “No.”

“Shit. Where are they?”

“I don’t know, but if you’re expecting the cavalry to come riding to the rescue, you’re going to have to wait.”

“If we break out the back?”

“We’ll go right into a fight,” I said. “Two icecats, the guy controlling them—ice mage, I think—and something else. Something bigger.”

Caldera was silent, and I knew what she was thinking. Caldera might be able to beat that many, but she couldn’t protect Leo at the same time. “All right,” she said at last. “We hold here and wait for backup. I’ll try the com disc—”

“Forget that bloody focus. It’s not helping.”

“You have a better plan?”

“I called for backup too. We just need to hope these guys wait long enough—” The futures shifted and I trailed off. All of a sudden the ones with violence in them were much closer. “Shit.”

“What?”

“We’ve got incoming.” Movement from the back. Had they left the front exposed? No—if we made a break for it that way, we’d still run straight into fire and—