A bullfrog, as fat as a fist, latched onto Lachlan’s forearm and dug in like it wasn’t planning on going anywhere anytime soon.

The suction the bugger managed to get on its toes hurt, and Lachlan didn’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing that the slime numbed the pain almost as soon as it appeared.

He pried the bullfrog off and sent it sailing across the room, but two more took its place like he had just made room especially for them.

"Windows in the hall!" Elias shouted toward Zubair, already on the move with a strip of torn curtain in his fists.

He slammed the fabric into the bedroom gap where glass used to be, nailed it with a broom handle and a heel, then braced his back to it as frogs hit from outside with the dull, ugly music of wet bodies meeting wood.

Luci whined, the sound real and very offended.

The frog on his head adjusted its grip until it almost held one of Luci’s ears in each hand. It croaked like a triumphant fanfare.

Another took up position on his spine like a child on a carnival pony. He shook again, violent enough to spray a circle of slime around him, not caring who it hit.

But the passengers on his back stuck.

He made a noise Lachlan had never heard out of him—half suffocation, half plea—and shoved his giant head into Sera’s shoulder like a horse demanding attention.

She hooked an arm around his neck. "Hold still. I’ll get them off." Her voice was soft and bright, like she wasn’t nearly as traumatized as the rest of them were, and yet somehow it managed to calm both Luci and Lachlan down.

She peeled one from Luci’s skull with careful thumbs, the thing’s feet coming free with a row of soft kisses.

It thumped to the floor and immediately tried to climb her shin, trying to regain its place in the hierarchy.

She scooped another off Luci’s back, then another, and another. She gently placed each one on the floor as if resetting a stubborn toy. Luci pressed closer, shivering at the indignity, his eyes rolling to catch hers with the most human appeal Lachlan had ever seen in an animal.

Zubair took a step in front of them both without looking like he had and let the next wave hit his boots.

He swept a forearm low to clear a path, muscle and intent and steadiness absorbing panic like a sandbag takes floodwater. His hand touched Sera’s hip a fraction of a second—check, claim, anchor—and then dropped away.

The noise inside and outside the farmhouse thickened until it was almost impossible to think over the sound.

The croaks were layered so tight that the house vibrated like a drum. Nails hummed; table legs hummed; Lachlan’s molars hummed.

Every breath tasted like the edge of a swamp. Slime climbed shin-bones and made the ground a treachery.

"Why are there so many of them if there is no water?" he threw at nobody, or maybe at the night itself. "Why are they here?"

"Heat source," Elias panted, kicking a cluster away from the power outlet. "CO₂. Movement. We’re the only thing warm enough, wet enough, loud enough to matter."

"Flattering," Lachlan grunted, even as a frog landed in his hair and tried to become a hat as it flattened itself on his head.

It was almost as if the frog thought that as long as it made itself as small as possible, Lachlan wouldn’t notice the slime.

Alexei used the flat of his blade to scrape a cluster off the stove controls, then snapped the gas closed with a quick twist.

"No open flame," flat as steel. "Vapors." He jerked his chin toward the broken glass. "This air is wrong."

Luci sneezed—a wet, offended blast that sent three small tree frogs tumbling away.

Two sprang away with mathematic precision; the third launched straight at Elias’s open collar and disappeared down his shirt.

Elias froze. "I hate everything."

"Don’t move," Sera told him, her eyes bright, as she stepped closer to him.

Her fingers went into the fabric, gentle, hunting by heat. She came out with a tiny yellow stowaway and set it on the floor. It climbed the toe of her boot and paused there like it had found a new branch.

Lachlan cleared room with the broom and pure need to get the frogs away from them. He carved a little island around Sera and Luci and Zubair that the next wave immediately tried to close.

He swallowed a laugh that would’ve come out wrong. "So, hear me out. I say that we have frog legs for breakfast tomorrow. Anyone interested?"

Elias shot him a look that would have melted steel on any other day. "If you cook that anywhere near me, I will burn this house down with you in it."

"We could do a tasting flight," Lachlan pushed on, because humor worked when nothing else did. "Tree, bull, cane, whatever those spotted ones are—"

"Leopard frogs," Elias snapped, then closed his eyes like he’d just punched himself in the brain for helping. "They shouldn’t—none of these species should even be in the same ecosystem. This is—"

"Night," Alexei repeated, calm as a blade on glass. "You keep trying to make it a classroom. It’s a riot."

A new force joined: the roof. Not hitting now—scrubbing.

The thousand tiny suction cups above them dug and slid and dug again, and the tin sheet gave a low groan at some seam it had learned to hate. Dust sifted down in a tired sigh.

Sera lifted the frog cupping her palm to her face and blew against its bulging throat.

It blinked slowly, unfazed, and pushed sticky toes against her wrist like a child testing a boundary.

"They didn’t come from water," she murmured, curiosity delighted. "Where did they walk from? Do frogs walk?"

"They hopped," Lachlan muttered, broom whistling. "Or they bloody flew like the witches that they are."

The couch started to slip on a river of bodies.

Zubair planted a heel and shoved back, jaw set, eyes flicking once to Sera’s mouth like he needed to see breath to remember how to do it himself. He turned his shoulder into the push. "We hold until light."

"Define light," Alexei returned with a sneer, because there was no dawn here and all of them knew it. "I seem to have forgotten my watch."