Black Spring

I didn’t want to explain that I had been married only a few short months before, and that my husband had been killed by my father. It seemed like the sort of thing that might end up on Jack’s blog—if he ever lived to blog again, that was.

We rounded a curve of the staircase and suddenly there was a small landing and a door directly in front of us. It looked like a plain, ordinary metal safety door, like the kind that are in emergency exits in tall buildings. But there was something different about it. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I put my hand on Jack’s shoulder.

“Wait a second,” I said.

I landed on the stair behind him and then nudged my way past. I reached out with my power, looking for a trace of a magical signature.

And boy, did I find one.

“That’s no ordinary door,” I said. “It’s booby-trapped with magic.”

The doors downstairs had been so easy to open because of this. I knew that Lucifer wouldn’t have allowed anyone he considered a threat to be locked up with so little security.

I just hadn’t thought there would be quite this much security elsewhere. Right away I could tell that the spell on the door would trigger at the slightest touch. There had to be a way to disable the trap from the other side so that the prison guards could come and go.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to wait for Lucifer to decide to give us bread and water. We needed to get out of this stairway immediately. My contractions were getting closer together and more painful. However, I wasn’t certain I could break down the spell without making everything go kablooey. It was a complex work of magic, and a highly dangerous one.

“I need Nathaniel,” I said again. “Life would be a lot easier if I wasn’t wearing pajama pants.”

Jack stared at me, his eyes blank and tired. He was coming down hard from the effects of the magic. “What do pajama pants have to do with anything?”

“If I wasn’t wearing pajama pants, I would have my cell phone,” I said. “And if I had my cell phone, I could just call Nathaniel and have him come and get us out of here instead of trying to rely on a very tenuous emotional link through magic.”

“I still don’t understand what that has to do with your pajamas,” Jack said.

“Never mind,” I said. I concentrated hard on Nathaniel, on the connection between us. Now that I was out of the depths of the mansion, I was hoping it would be easier to sense him, and for him to find me.

Nathaniel, I thought. I didn’t know if it would work or help, but I tried to send a mental picture of where I was and what I needed. It felt slightly silly. Even with all of the things I had seen and done that involved magic, telepathy seemed like it was still an “out-there” concept.

After a few minutes I had to stop. It was hard to concentrate on sending Nathaniel an S.O.S. when it felt like my stomach was being ripped in two.

And as soon as I stopped, I heard him.

I’m coming.

“Wow, I can’t believe that actually worked,” I said.

“Can’t believe what actually worked?” Jack asked.

He had sat down on the stairs with his back against the wall while I did my human-telephone act with Nathaniel. His face was white and covered with sweat, and he was shivering. I probably did not look much better. It was a struggle to stay upright, and a couple of times I saw black dots in front of my eyes, like I was on the verge of fainting.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “The cavalry is on its way. Unless I’m hallucinating Nathaniel’s voice in my head. Which is entirely possible.”

“You know, I’m starting to wonder how you have such a powerful reputation,” Jack said, his eyes closed. “You seem like kind of a flake.”

“You’d seem like kind of a flake if you were trapped in a stairwell with an unhelpful blogger while you were in labor,” I said.

I wondered whether I had really managed to reach Nathaniel, and whether he would understand where I was and how to get rid of the booby trap on the door. I wasn’t really sure what our options were otherwise. There was not nearly enough time for me to try to take apart the spell from this side. If I tried blasting through the wall that surrounded the stairwell, I would most definitely alert Lucifer and his goons. I was still hoping that we could find some way to sneak out of the house.

How long should I wait, though? I thought. How long could I wait? I didn’t really know anything about having a baby (somehow I’d never gotten around to reading the pregnancy book that Beezle and I had bought a billion years ago), but it seemed to me that the whole process was moving pretty fast. I should have expected this, since the baby had grown unusually large in a short amount of time. In fact, I wasn’t anything close to a normal term for a human pregnancy, and yet here he was, on his way.