Chapter 1 #2
“Sidney.” His voice was quiet, but I still heard the subtext beneath it, the fear he was always working to control. I knew he’d never be able to forget the way he’d almost lost me during the merge. “The unicorn’s coming tomorrow. Whatever is building out there can wait another day.”
“It’s been building for three weeks.” I turned to face him, and the light between our joined hands flared brighter for a moment before it settled back to a dim glow. “All I want to do is get out there where I can really listen. If something’s changed in the forest, then I need to know before — ”
My words broke off as the house shook.
It wasn’t an earthquake — I knew what those felt like, had grown up with the occasional rumble from the Cascadia fault and knew what to expect.
This was different. It came from underneath my feet, from the bedrock below Silver Hollow, a deep subsonic vibration that rattled the dishes in the cupboards and sent a crack racing up the hallway plaster.
At the same time, my global sensing screamed.
The portal network, that constant background murmur I’d grown used to, blazed white-hot in my awareness.
Every ley line that ran beneath Silver Hollow lit up at once, a web of fire spreading outward from a single point deep in the old-growth forest. The sensation drove me to my knees, my coffee cup shattering on the hardwood floor as my hands went to my temples.
I was distantly aware of Ben catching me, of his voice calling my name, but the signal drowned everything else out.
It was a voice, I realized then. It wasn’t speaking in words or anything as simple as language. But I could sense intent and intelligence, vast and ancient and absolutely furious.
AWAKE.
The sensation lasted for about ten seconds.
Then the presence retreated, pulling back into whatever deep place it had stirred from, and the network settled into something approaching its new abnormal.
I found myself on the kitchen floor with Ben’s arms around me.
Distantly, I became aware that my nose had begun to sluggishly bleed onto the collar of my flannel robe.
“Sidney.” His voice was steady, but I could feel the rapid beat of his pulse where his wrist pressed against my shoulder. “Talk to me. What the hell was that?”
I wiped my nose with the back of my hand and stared at the blood there — it was bright red and human, ordinary enough.
Not that there was anything ordinary about the current situation.
“The Dragon,” I said. My voice sounded hoarse, as if I’d screamed myself raw, even though I’d barely spoken.
“He’s awake. Fully awake.” I looked up at Ben, at the fear and determination that warred in his expression, at the faint glow of our scars where his hand still gripped my arm. “And he’s rising.”
The Craftsman house had been in my family for four generations. My great-grandmother had raised her daughter here, and her daughter had raised my mother, and my mother had raised me — well, until she and my grandmother had walked into the forest one February afternoon and never came back.
I stood in the hallway now, tracing the new crack in the plaster with my fingertip.
It ran from the baseboard to the ceiling, jagged as a lightning bolt, splitting the wall just to the left of my grandmother’s portrait.
Emily Thompson, gray-haired and still pretty, looking out from her frame with the the cool gray eyes all the women in our family seemed to share.
“The plaster can be patched.”
I turned. Ben stood in the doorway to the living room, two fresh cups of coffee in his hands.
He’d changed while I was lost in thought and had traded the T-shirt he slept in for a worn flannel shirt and jeans, his feet still bare on the hardwood.
The silver tracery of his scars peeked out from his collar, catching the grayish light from the windows.
“It’s not the plaster I’m worried about.
” I accepted the coffee and let its warmth seep into my palms. “Ben, we know that thing has been down there the whole time, but we don’t know anything else.
My grandmother’s diaries mentioned it, but there’s nothing helpful about how to deal with it, what it’s capable of. ”
Nothing good, I thought, remembering how its angry intent had reverberated in my brain. But I needed to focus, because doom spiraling wasn’t going to help.
“And now it’s waking up.” Ben leaned against the doorframe, ankles crossed, projecting a calm I knew he didn’t entirely feel. I could sense the elevated rhythm of his bioelectric field, the way it pulsed slightly faster than normal. “Do you think it’s because of what happened with the phoenix?”
“Maybe.” I thought about the merge, those endless moments when I’d dissolved my consciousness into dimensional fire and burned away shadow corruption at a metaphysical level.
A surge of clean energy had rippled outward through the network, destroying Rosenthal’s artificial portal and stabilizing the system.
At the time, it had seemed like a victory.
Now I could only wonder if we’d traded one crisis for something worse.
“Or maybe it was already stirring, and we just gave it the final push. I don’t know. ”
I hated not knowing. Over the past few months, I’d worked very hard to learn the rules of my strange inheritance — the lunar cycles that governed the portals, the creatures that crossed through, the careful balance my family had maintained for generations.
Now the rules were changing, and I was basically making it up as I went along.
The house creaked around us, settling in like old houses always did, and I caught myself listening for something beneath the ordinary sounds.
The Dragon’s presence had retreated, but I could still feel it at the edges of my awareness, a banked heat and a patience that had nothing to do with human timescales.
“I need to call Rebecca Morse,” I said. “She and Eric Hargrove set up sensors all along the Oregon border after everything that happened with DAPI. If this registered on their equipment, she’ll want to know what caused it.”
“And if it didn’t register?” Ben asked.
“Then we have a different kind of problem.” I stared at the crack in the plaster, at my grandmother’s portrait hanging just to the left of it. She looked back at me with those cool gray eyes, offering no answers. “Either way, I don’t think we’re going to have the luxury of waiting much longer.”
Outside, the green lightning crawled across the sky, and the earth beneath Silver Hollow hummed with something vast and ancient and patient.
The Dragon was awake. And sooner or later, he would rise.