She could still hear them fighting, and that was the worst part.

Lucan had moved her so fast the world had simply skipped, one moment road and chaos and Victor’s wings filling the sky, the next the dense green quiet of the scrub fifty yards back, his hand already over her mouth before she’d processed the transition, she hadn’t screamed. She was proud of that. There was only the sound of the battle carrying through the trees and the particular agony of standing still while the people she loved were bleeding for her.

"Don’t," Lucan said against her ear, quiet and absolute, his arms locked around her from behind. He hadn’t moved his hand from her mouth even after she’d stopped needing it there. She suspected he knew that. She suspected he didn’t care. "Don’t think about going back, don’t even think about thinking about it."

She peeled his hand away from her mouth with two fingers, carefully. "I wasn’t going to run back into the fight."

"You were absolutely going to run back into the fight."

She opened her mouth.

"Felicity."

She closed it.

His grip tightened, one arm across her shoulders and one low across her stomach, a position that was protection and possession in equal measure and left no room to argue about which was which. She could feel the tension running through him like a current, the way he was tracking every sound from the road, every shift in the undergrowth, his body doing seventeen things at once while his voice stayed perfectly level. Lucan’s particular brand of unhinged was the quiet kind, the kind that counted and catalogued and never stopped running the numbers.

"Your heart rate is too high," he said.

"We’re in the middle of an ambush."

"It needs to come down."

"Lucan, we are literally hiding in a bush."

"I know where we are its okay, breathe."

She breathed. Mostly because arguing with him while he had both arms around her was logistically complicated, but also because he was right and she hated that, and she was not going to tell him that.

The fight on the road was shifting; she could hear it in the way the sounds were changing, the particular quality of chaos settling into something more directional, more controlled, which meant her husbands were finding the shape of it and starting to own it, which meant Victor was approximately thirty seconds from ending something significant and dramatic.

"They’re going to be fine," she said, to herself as much as him.

"Yes," Lucan said. "Because you’re here and not there, which means none of them has to split their attention."

She hadn’t thought about it that way. She turned that over for a moment and didn’t say anything.

The undergrowth to their left moved, and Lucan had her behind him before she’d registered the sound, his whole body shifting from still to ready with a smoothness that had no business being that fast, and she pressed her back against the nearest trunk and watched his hands and waited.

A possum beastman stumbled through the tree line, low level, terrified, clearly not part of the ambush, and tripped over his own feet and kept going without looking at them, and Lucan exhaled once and rolled his shoulders and came back to her as if nothing had happened.

"You moved fast," she said.

"I always move fast."

"You moved faster."

He looked at her for a moment with an expression she didn’t have a clean name for. "You’re pregnant," he said simply, as if that explained the physics of it, as if the fact of her carrying a child or children had somehow rewritten the upper limit of what his body was capable of. Maybe it had. She was starting to think that was how it worked with all of them, that she kept raising the ceiling without meaning to, that love expressed itself in these men as a constant upward revision of what they were willing to become.

The sounds from the road had changed again. Quieter now. The kind of quiet that came after.

She pushed off the tree. "We should go back."

"One more minute."

"Lucan."

"One more minute, Felicity, just give me one more minute where I know exactly where you are and nothing is trying to kill you. I am asking for sixty seconds."

She stopped. She gave him his sixty seconds, and she counted them out in her head, and when she got to sixty, she touched his arm once, and he exhaled and nodded, and they turned back toward the road together.

"Stay small, Fel," Lucan whispered, the sound barely a vibration in the air. His hand rested on the hilt of his dagger, his eyes tracking the movement of the ferns a few yards ahead.

They had taken four steps when the figure stepped out of the undergrowth directly in front of them, and she knew immediately it wasn’t one of theirs. The hyena moved with the particular loose confidence of a man who had been circling the long way around while his people made noise at the front, who had never intended to win the fight on the road, who had always been heading here.

His eyes went straight to her stomach and stayed there.

"There she is," he said, almost gently. "The supreme sends his regards."

Lucan moved, and the hyena power was something that hummed with a frequency that made her back teeth ache, a dampening magic sort of like the nullification, and Lucan staggered, his teleportation stuttering, his speed suddenly halved, and the hyena smiled.

As he drew closer, a wave of nausea rolled over Felicity. It wasn’t just fear, it was a physical weight, a dampening frequency that seemed to sink into her bones. It made her back teeth ache with a sharp, piercing thrum, vibrating through her jaw until she wanted to scream just to break the rhythm.

"Found you," the Hyena man sneered.

A hand came down on the hyena’s shoulder from behind. Large, and it was turning white and furry.