"Again," Zubair commanded, his eyes never leaving the creatures on the other side of the window.

Everyone pushed the couch even closer to the window without saying a word.

The pane complained. A dozen frogs popped off the outside like grapes under a thumb and splatted down the face. New bodies took their place instantly, as if the night had an unending supply to throw at them.

The croaking pitched higher, as if some conductor had lifted a hand.

Something thumped the chimney cap, then came the sound of bodies churning down the brick chimney like some sort of fucked up Santa.

Elias grabbed for the flue lever and yanked it shut, but it was already too late.

Three small green frogs shot out of the hearth gap anyway, landed among kindling, and sat there like damp jewels that had just remembered they could move.

"Don’t touch them," Elias blurted, then looked at his own hand covered in a faint sheen of slime from the glass. His mouth thinned, not in panic more so as a math problem gone wrong.

They should be dead.

And yet, he didn’t feel even the slightest bit of dizziness or nausea.

Sera crouched down without permission and put two fingers to the floor near the little red triangles with giant eyes.

They turned their heads toward the warmth of her skin with a soft, mindless eagerness. She laughed under her breath, bright and small, as the frogs rubbed themselves against her like a cat. "They don’t know they’re not supposed to be here."

"Apparently, that is the new normal," Alexei murmured. It wasn’t judgment. It was weather.

The roof sang with the squeak of a thousand tiny grips. The house answered with a creak from a joist past its patience. Lachlan felt the hair lift along his arms.

The couch wasn’t going to hold.

Cracks laced the glass in a pale brittle map.

The frogs nearest the hub bulged their throats blindly against the white lines and croaked with the stubbornness of anything that had only ever known forward.

Zubair shifted his weight, lending his shoulder to the couch as if he could post the entire wall with bone and intent.

Lachlan planted beside him, his boots braced, and both palms flat against the threadbare fabric.

Elias put his shoulder in too. Alexei didn’t move from the flue; his knife hand tracked the hearth like the world had narrowed to that square.

Luci lunged once when a frog smacked through the vent hood and thudded to the stove.

His teeth closed over nothing—instinct checked at the last inch—and he snorted hard, offended at himself, then planted again, his eyes on the window.

The croaking reached a pitch that felt like it might peel paint.

"Now?" Lachlan grated, not sure what he was asking for. Permission to be scared, maybe. Permission to laugh anyway.

Zubair’s jaw set. "Hold."

The pane bowed even more.

A slow curve of glass turned into a bubble. A bubble turned into a blister. The blister reached for some way to ease the pressure it was under.

One more thunk from above. One more squeal-slide along the roof.

The blister fractured with a delicate, crystalline sigh.

The window exploded inward.

Frogs hit like the rain in the middle of a storm.

Slime and glass and wet, kicking bodies poured through, and the sound inside the house became a single enormous living note that swallowed everything else whole.

More windows burst and the night poured inside the farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.

Frogs hit the couch, the table, the floor. Wet bodies slapped the wood, glass hissed over boards, and slime found everything at once.

The sound crushed all languages: croaks, squeals, the rubbery squeak of a thousand tiny mouths clinging to surfaces they didn’t own.

Just behind the sound, the smell hit the five human occupants of the room. Stale pond, rotting weeds, a nick of ammonia, and electricity tinning the back of the tongue.

Lachlan took the first wave in the chest. Something cold wedged under the collar of his shirt and thrashed like a fist without bones.

He flung it out, his palms slick, and his boots already sliding across the floor.

Elias collided with his shoulder; the two of them braced into the couch as Zubair drove it harder against the shattered frame to slow the tide.

It slowed, but it didn’t stop.

Bodies squeezed through every gap the size of a coin.

Alexei pivoted off the hearth and used his knife like a baton, not stabbing, just batting creatures off the flue lever as they pinballed down brick.

Three popped into the grate in quick succession, sat there stunned, throats swelling like balloons, then launched at the room as if the world owed them purchase.

Luci roared.

The sound jammed itself under Lachlan’s ribs.

The dire wolf was already huge in a space too small, head up, shoulders high.

Frogs hit his muzzle and bounced to the ground.

One landed square between his ears, its suction like toes clung to his fur, and croaked like it had found the highest rock on the river.

Luci shook his head hard enough to make the cupboards chatter, but the frog rode it out like a champion.

Another leapt onto his back.

And then another.

Soon there were four, then six, their suction toes buried deep in his thick coat, their throats working in wet chorus.

"Don’t bite them," Sera warned without turning her head.

She’d moved to the worst of the breach with the kind of calm that made Lachlan want to laugh and knock his own idiot teeth out.

Her black boots didn’t seem to have any trouble with the slime as she crouched in a wash of lantern glow from their own lights.

It painted a lavender glow onto her skin and black into her eyes. Her hand lifted slightly and frogs came to it like it was heat in winter.

One sat in her palm and didn’t move, steady pulse under slick skin, throat blooming and falling like a soft engine.

"Cane toads," Elias managed, voice muffled by his sleeve. "Bufotoxin. Contact can kill—cardiac arrhythmias, seizures—do not touch your face." He checked his own hands, went paler when nothing burned. "This makes no sense."

"Welcome to night," Alexei muttered, flicking another away from the stove knobs. "Common sense not invited."

The flood kept coming.

The windowsill vanished.

The floor took on movement like water skimmed with oil—bodies over bodies, new ones using old ones as stairs, a writhing carpet that tried to learn humans as terrain.

Lachlan swung the broom he had found in a tight arc, shoving a swath back long enough for Zubair to shoulder a broken chair against the lower pane and wedge it with his weight.

The window pane bowed again anyway, its mouth opening as even more frogs spilled into the farmhouse.