The others were outside, with only Candy at the door, watching and waiting for her sister’s return.

I flew outside and up to a point where I still had the house to my back but I could see over the others’ heads. We were surrounded, but they were managing. Parian had threads going out in every direction, hampering the potential attackers, Lord of Loss was having to pull a clawed extremity from the side of the house where it had been nailed down, and it looked like he was reconfiguring into a form—three giant heads and multiple arms were drawing back into a central mass.

“I wasted juice,” Candy was telling Chastity. “Lord of Loss doesn’t feel it.”

I could have told you that, I thought. That was a shame. “Nursery. If you can hit Nursery, do it. Just—nothing permanent.”

Candy looked up at me, then nodded.

As horrifying as that woman is, I thought. Foil was still assisting Parian, who was hunched over atop a spider. Her being there made using the large crossbow difficult, but Foil did her best.

The Heartbroken hurried toward Parian and Foil. Aroa got tangled in threads that Parian was manipulating, and Parian had to devote attention to maneuvering the spider, rotating it so she could see Aroa, and then disentangling her.

With the damage to her throat, it was apparently easier to use cosmic power to telekinetically fill a spider made of fabric, then manipulate that spider to turn around, than it was to twist herself around.

Lord of Loss reached out with a clawed extremity, spikes still embedded in it. Closer to his main body, that limb was unfurling, but there was still enough anchoring for it to move and manipulate things.

The claw reached, and I flew to put myself between the others and the hand. I’d block and fend it off—

The length of the arm hid a lance within it. It passed through a gap in the palm of the claw, thrusting toward me and toward the others. I used the Wretch to grab it, but the banding of white stone-like or metal-like strips ran along the length from tip to base, twisting it to give it a kind of rifling. Not something I or the Wretch could get a hold on.

Instead, while it skidded past me, scraping by the Wretch and numerous invisible, super-strong hands, I pushed it off course.

The lance dissolved. I had to maneuver to keep the strips from catching or slicing at me as they withdrew.

I couldn’t get in close, because that put me in reach of another three claws. Five claws if I considered the dissolving ones.