Chapter 5
Chapter Five
They returned just after four o’clock, Rebecca’s gray sedan that practically screamed “rental” pulling into the driveway while I stood at the kitchen window and watched the sky convulse with that sickly green lightning.
I’d spent the hours since they left trying to distract myself with work — sorting through the inventory spreadsheets for the pet shop, reviewing the notes Hope Hayakawa had sent me about a diabetic cat I’d been monitoring — but nothing had stuck.
Every few minutes, my attention had drifted back to the window, to the forest beyond the town, to the wrongness that pulsed beneath my feet like a second heartbeat.
Ben came through the door first, and something in his expression made my stomach clench in dread before he even said a word.
“What did you find?”
He crossed the kitchen and took my hands, and the familiar warmth of our bioelectric fields synchronizing did nothing to ease the cold dread that seemed to settle deep inside me. Behind him, Rebecca and my father filed in, their faces grim.
“Aetheris Dynamics,” Ben said quietly. “They’ve set up a drilling operation in Welling Glen. They’re tapping directly into the ley line.”
I listened as they explained what they’d seen — the drilling apparatus, the prefab buildings, the workers in their white coveralls.
Julian Gregory and his TED Talk smile, treating the destruction of something ancient and sacred like just another disruptive startup.
And Rosenthal, haggard and frightened, trying to warn a man who didn’t want to hear what she had to say.
“She knows,” my father said when they were finished with their story. “Rosenthal understands exactly what Gregory is doing. She’s just not in a position to stop him.”
“Then we need to find a way to give her that position,” Ben replied. “She’s the weak point. If we can get her to work with us — ”
“Work with us?” I pulled my hands free from Ben’s grip, the synchronization breaking with a faint crackle of static. “The woman who built a weapon to destroy me? Who would have killed both of us if you hadn’t stepped in front of that beam?”
“I know what she did.” Ben’s voice was steady, but I saw the way his hand moved unconsciously to his chest, to the scars hidden beneath his flannel shirt. “I’m not saying we should trust her. I’m just saying that we might be able to use her fear against Gregory.”
They continued talking — tactics and approaches and contingencies — but I’d stopped listening. The pressure in my skull was building again, the low-grade hum that had become my constant companion over the past three weeks. It was different now, though, piercing, almost insistent.
Something is calling me.
“Sidney?” Ben’s voice cut through the noise inside my head. “You okay?”
No, I wasn’t okay. If I was going to be perfectly honest, I was very far from okay. But I couldn’t explain what I was feeling, couldn’t put into words the way the ground seemed to be singing to me, the way every nerve ending in my body was screaming that I needed to be somewhere else.
“I need to go to the clearing,” I said.
Everyone went quiet.
“The portal site?” Rebecca’s voice was careful, neutral in that way she had when she was trying not to show how much something worried her. “Right now?”
“Something’s calling me.” I met her gaze, then Ben’s, and finally my father’s. “I can feel it. The Dragon — it’s not just stirring anymore. It’s reaching out. And I think….” I paused, trying to find the right words, not sure if they even existed. “I think it wants to talk.”
“Or it wants to kill you,” my father said flatly. “Sidney, we don’t know anything about this creature except that it’s ancient and powerful and angry. Walking into its territory alone — ”
“I won’t be alone.” I gazed at Ben and saw the fear and determination that warred in his expression, the same look he’d worn when he stepped in front of Rosenthal’s weapon.
“Ben will come with me. And the unicorn….” I trailed off there, not sure how I could possibly explain the intuition that had been growing in me all day.
“The unicorn will be there. I can feel that, too.”
The silence in the kitchen stretched for several heartbeats. Outside, thunder rumbled — not the normal kind, but something deeper and more resonant, like the earth itself was clearing its throat.
“This is insane,” my father said. But his voice had lost its edge, replaced by something that sounded almost like resignation. “You’re talking about walking into the territory of a creature that could destroy you with a thought.”
“I’m talking about facing what’s coming instead of waiting for it to come to me.
” I met his dark eyes, so different from mine, and saw the seventeen years of distance between us reflected there.
“Isn’t that what you’ve been doing all this time?
Watching from the shadows, trying to get ahead of threats before they could reach us?
This is the same thing. Just more direct. ”
He didn’t have an answer for that remark.
I didn’t think he would.
Ben stepped closer to me, and his hand found mine again. The light between our palms was steadier now, gold-tinged, and some of the tension in my shoulders eased.
“If you’re going,” he said quietly, “I’m going with you.”
“I know.” I squeezed his fingers. “I’m counting on it.”
The forest felt different at dusk.
I’d walked these paths hundreds of times over the years, had learned them the way you learn the rooms of your own house — by feel, by instinct, by the accumulated weight of memory.
But as Ben and I made our way toward the portal site, everything seemed as if it had shifted, like the world had tilted slightly on its axis.
The trees loomed taller and darker than I remembered, their branches reaching toward the bruised purple sky like supplicants.
The undergrowth was thicker and even more tangled, and the usual sounds of the forest — birdsong, the rustle of small animals, the whisper of the wind through the leaves — had been replaced by a silence so complete that our footsteps seemed almost obscenely loud.
The green lightning had intensified as the sun went down, no longer just crawling across the clouds but actively writhing, sending flickering shadows through the canopy that made it hard to trust what I was seeing.
My dimensional scars prickled beneath my sleeves, and I could feel Ben’s bioelectric field pulsing faster than normal, responding to the charged atmosphere.
We didn’t talk. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.
The closer we got to the portal site, the stronger the calling became.
It wasn’t a voice exactly, nothing so simple as words or language.
It was more like a gravity, a pull that tugged at something deep in my body, drawing me forward with an urgency that bordered on compulsion.
I found myself walking faster without consciously deciding to, my feet finding the path through the darkening forest with a surety that had nothing to do with memory and everything to do with the force that was summoning me.
We reached the glade just as the last light faded from the sky.
The standing stones were exactly as I remembered them — seven massive granite pillars arranged in a rough circle, their surfaces carved with Ogham letters that seemed to pulse with a faint inner light.
The bioluminescent moss that carpeted the clearing had spread since my last visit, creeping up the bases of the stones and spreading out across the forest floor in patterns that looked almost deliberate.
Where my mother’s and grandmother’s footprints had once been visible, there was now only a soft greenish glow.
And in the center of the circle, exactly where the portal had once appeared, the ground was cracking.
“Sidney,” Ben murmured. “Look.”
I was already looking. The cracks spread outward from a central point, jagged lines of amber light that pulsed in rhythm with the pressure building in my skull.
The earth beneath my feet was trembling again, not the violent shaking of this morning’s tremor, but something slower and more deliberate, like a great beast stirring from sleep.
Then the unicorn emerged from the trees.
It stepped into the clearing with the same impossible grace I remembered from our first encounter months ago, its coat gleaming like moonlight even in the absence of the moon.
Its horn caught the green lightning from above and transformed it into something cleaner, a soft silver radiance that pushed back the shadows.
When its dark eyes met mine, I felt the familiar brush of its consciousness — not words, but warmth and recognition, along with something that might have been encouragement.
You came, it seemed to say. Good.
“Is this what you’ve been waiting for?” I asked aloud. “The Dragon?”
The unicorn didn’t answer — it never did, not in any way I could understand. But it moved so it was standing beside me, positioning itself between me and the cracking earth, and I understood that this was all the answer I was going to get.
The ground split open.
Not violently, not explosively, nothing so dramatic as that.
It was more like watching a flower bloom in slow motion, the earth parting in great slabs to reveal something beneath that glowed with the deep red-gold of banked coals.
Heat rolled up from the opening, dry and ancient, and the smell that accompanied it was unlike anything I’d ever encountered — volcanic and metallic, yes, but also somehow alive, like the breath of something that had been sleeping since before the mountains were young.
And then the Dragon rose.