There was a neat and clean living room to the right, stairs leading up in the middle, and a dining room to the left. At the back of the dining room was an arched doorway to a sunny kitchen. There was a man on the black and white tiled floor in plain view. He wasn’t moving, and he wasn’t Suyolak. Sad to say, that made him a low priority. Niko was ahead of me on the stairs, Robin beside me, and Rafferty and Catcher already out of sight above us. That’s when I heard a howl loud enough you would’ve thought it would have blown off the roof. It wasn’t terrified, but it wasn’t a whoopee-here-comes-the-ice-cream-man yodel either. Catcher was not happy about something up there and a moment later I got to be unhappy about it too. We all did. There was enough unhappy about the situation to go around.

It was in the nursery-it and the mother, along with stuffed Pooh Bears and Tiggers here and there and more of them and their friends dancing in a mural painted on the wall behind the crib. It was just like the outside of the house-all too perfect; all too good to be true. That’s what you get for being happy and having it all. That’s what happens. Someone or something like Suyolak comes to take it away.

Or worse.

She sat in the rocking chair by the big, bright window. Her head was down, a long sweep of chestnut brown hair, gleaming and thick, hanging like a curtain over her face. I’d bet that the first thing her husband had noticed about her when they first met was that hair. It made you think of wild horses and beaches. Why? I don’t know. It just did.

Her hands cradled a large mound of stomach and she was singing… in Rom. I knew only the curse words. Sophia had been free with those, even if I didn’t know anything else, but I certainly recognized the language when I heard it or an archaic version of it.

It was a lullaby. Anyone, Rom or not, would’ve known that. The lilting harmony, the warm love and expectation… if only it hadn’t had to gurgle its way through a throat full of blood. She lifted her head to smile at us with red-coated teeth. “It’s a boy.” The red fluid trickled out of both sides of her mouth as she said it. “A boy.” One hand moved in a slow circle over her stomach. “Snips and snails and puppy dog tails.”

“Oh shit,” I muttered. I already had my gun out. She was sick, she was a victim, but she smelled so wrong, I didn’t know how Catcher and Rafferty were still in the room with her. There was decay and death and a smell of… hell… a human gone off. Like bad milk. It was the only way to describe it.

She coughed and scarlet sprayed into a fine mist in the air, but she was beyond noticing or caring. “My precious baby boy.” Her eyes were on us and the whites were pure blood. Proud. She looked so proud and so absolutely insane. “Here he comes.”

She was right. He did come or he tried. Under the swell of her stomach I saw movement. It looked like tiny fists pressed against the flesh from the inside. Whatever was trying to be born, I didn’t think was wanting to do it the old-fashioned way. I knew, knew that if it had its way, it would rip its way to freedom and blood would splatter on the highly polished wood floor that matched the too-good-to-be-true living room, the too-perfect-to-exist dining room one. The wood gleamed brilliantly enough, you could almost see your reflection. I would’ve rather looked at that than looked at her, which with my past mirror phobia was saying something. But I didn’t. I kept my eyes up, because as much as I didn’t want to look, I didn’t want to die from carelessness either.

The woman in the rocker didn’t move as her stomach rippled, didn’t cry out in pain; she only kept smiling a beautiful, peaceful smile of joyful motherhood.

“Rafferty,” Niko rapped as Robin crossed himself; Robin, who was not only not Christian but one of the original pagan tricksters-pre-Christian and then some. I didn’t blame him. I wasn’t Christian either-I wasn’t anything, but if I’d known more than two lines of the Lord’s Prayer, I’d have been zipping right through it. Because this… this was horror-movie stuff where the devil was real, heads spun around, and Hell was just a zip code away.

“Do we kill it or not?” my brother demanded. His mouth was tight. He knew killing the baby-or what had been a baby-meant killing her as well, and he didn’t like it. But he would do it. Niko always did what he had to do, no matter the consequences to himself. He’d suffered enough consequences in his life for being a good man. If it came to that, I’d do it before I’d let him-but as it turned out, neither of us had to make the choice. Someone else did.

The healer shook his head and crouched a few feet away from her. His eyes unfocused and he shook his head again. “It’s not viable outside the womb, and she’s not viable for long either.”

No, she didn’t look it-twisted and warped, blood pouring out of her mouth, eyes, ears, dying from the poisonous thing inside her. And it was poisonous, as much as a truckload of cyanide. The Vayash had thought the same about me. If they hadn’t feared the Auphe so much, I was positive they would’ve dragged a pregnant Sophia off and made sure I never became a walking, talking reality. And I could understand that, believe it or not. If this was what they’d pictured, fuck… I wouldn’t have blamed them.

But I hadn’t turned out that way, so I still blamed them plenty, not for me, but for turning their backs on Niko. “You can’t heal her?” I asked, my gun still pointed. She was dying, a storybook mom in a fairy-tale house, and, damn, that sucked, but no way was I facing that thing inside her without a gun. I didn’t care what Rafferty said about its expiration date. If it got out… the last thing I wanted to face without a gun was a Suyolak mini-me.

“I could keep her alive, but I can’t heal her.” He ran a hand over his face hard enough to redden the skin, then reached over to touch her knee. Her eyes immediately went blank and she slumped forward limply. The thing inside of her still moved for a moment or two, distorting her stomach, but then it stilled too. Call me a chickenshit, but I was glad I hadn’t had to see it. I couldn’t imagine what it looked like now, but I was sure it was nothing like a newborn baby boy.

“What the hell kind of disease does this?” I dropped the muzzle of the gun to point at the blood splattered around her bare feet. There was a butterfly tattoo on her ankle, a color between red and pink. Rose-as rosy as her life had been before Suyolak had decided to play.

“Not a disease,” Rafferty responded as Niko ripped the sheer white curtains from the window and draped it over the woman’s still body. “Genes. Suyolak turned the fetus’s genes into a mirror image of his own.”

“Genetic tampering,” Nik said, turning to him. “You said he could do only so much in the coffin and that wasn’t much. Kill a few people with bacteria and viruses that already are available. Genetic manipulation is far beyond that.”

“He’s more than a thousand years old. How does he know about genes anyway?” I added, stepping back from the blood slowly pooling outward.

“First, genetic manipulation is assuming the patient lives. This… atrocity… never would’ve lived outside its mother and neither of them more than ten minutes. It was his mirror, to lure us here, and mirrors reflect, but mirrors don’t live or have the talent of what they imitate.”

“Easy to twist and destroy,” Robin said quietly. “Not so easy to remake a living creature and keep it that way.”

Catcher leaned against Rafferty’s leg as the healer said without emotion, “No. It’s not. As for genes, healers have known about genes since there were healers. Even if they didn’t know what to call them, they could still sense them, but there aren’t many strong enough to manipulate them.”

“Except for Suyolak?” Niko commented, leaving the “and you” silent. There was still another victim downstairs. Who the hell knew what he might do?