Chapter 6
Chapter Six
The walk back through the forest felt a lot longer than the walk in.
Ben kept his arm around Sidney’s waist, supporting her weight when her steps faltered, which was more often than he would have liked.
The encounter with the Dragon had drained too much from her; he could feel it in the way her bioelectric field dropped in and out, like a radio signal struggling to find its frequency.
The scars on his chest and arms pulsed in sympathy, a low ache that reminded him of the days immediately after the phoenix merge, when both of them had been so depleted that just getting out of bed had felt like climbing a mountain.
The green lightning had faded to a dull flicker by the time they reached the edge of the forest, and the oppressive silence had given way to the ordinary sounds of a Northern California evening — crickets, the distant call of an owl, the rustle of wind through the redwoods.
Normal sounds, comforting sounds. Ben found himself clinging to them the way a drowning man might cling to driftwood.
Sidney hadn’t spoken since they’d left the clearing.
Her face was pale in the dim light, her gray eyes distant, and he knew she was still processing what she’d seen…
what they’d both seen. The images the Dragon had projected were seared into his memory like brands — the golden web of ley lines, the spreading corruption, the inevitable cauterization that would wipe Silver Hollow from the map.
He’d experienced them secondhand, filtered through his connection to Sidney, and even that diluted version had been almost more than he could bear.
He couldn’t imagine what it had been like for her, taking the full force of that ancient consciousness directly into her mind.
The lights of her grandmother’s house glowed warm and yellow through the trees, and Ben felt something in him loosen slightly at the sight.
Home. The word had taken on new meaning over the past two months.
It wasn’t just a place to sleep, but a sanctuary, a refuge from the chaos that seemed to follow them everywhere.
The house with its creaking third stair and its temperamental windows had become the center of his world, and the woman beside him was the reason why.
They came through the back door into the kitchen, and Rebecca was on her feet immediately, her hand moving toward the weapon at her hip before she registered who they were.
“You’re back.” She strode over to them, her dark eyes scanning Sidney’s face with obvious concern. “What happened? We felt something about an hour ago — a tremor, smaller than this morning’s but different somehow. Finn said it felt like something settling rather than something waking up.”
“The Dragon,” Sidney said. Her voice was hoarse, and she cleared her throat before continuing. “We met it. Or rather, it met us.”
Finn appeared in the doorway to the kitchen a few feet behind Rebecca, his dark eyes fixed on his daughter with an intensity that made Ben want to step between them. But the older man didn’t approach, didn’t try to touch her. No, he only stood there and waited, his face carefully neutral.
“Tell us,” he said.
Sidney looked over at Ben, and he saw the exhaustion in her eyes, the way she was holding herself together through sheer force of will. He squeezed her hand and felt their bioelectric fields pulse together, gold and blue-white, steadier now than they’d been in the forest.
“Let’s sit down first,” he said. “And maybe get her some water. This is probably going to take a while.”
They gathered in the living room, Sidney curled into a corner of the worn leather sofa with a glass of water she’d barely touched, Ben next to her with his hand resting on her knee.
Rebecca had claimed the armchair nearest the door — old habits, he supposed, always positioning herself for a quick exit — and Finn had pulled one of the dining chairs into the room, sitting slightly apart from the rest of them as if uncertain of his welcome.
Once they were all settled, Sidney told them everything.
Ben watched the others’ faces as she described the Dragon’s emergence, the overwhelming flood of images, the ultimatum.
Rebecca’s expression grew grimmer with each detail, her jaw tightening until a muscle jumped beneath her skin.
Finn, by contrast, seemed to grow very still — not calm, but almost frozen, the way a rabbit freezes when it senses a predator nearby.
“Seven weeks,” Rebecca said when Sidney was done speaking.
“Seven weeks to dismantle a billionaire’s pet project, heal damage to a global magical network, and somehow convince an ancient dragon not to destroy the town.
” She let out a breath that wasn’t quite a chuckle. “I’ve had worse odds, but not by much.”
“The Dragon showed me the other guardians,” Sidney added, still in the same quiet but intense tone she’d used while relating what had happened in the clearing.
“They’re struggling, too — they can feel the corruption spreading, even if they don’t understand what’s causing it.
If we can stop Gregory, if we can heal the damage here…
.” She trailed off there and looked down at her hands, flexing them slightly as if to test their strength.
“It might give them a fighting chance,” Ben finished for her.
Finn stirred in his chair. “The images you saw — the ley line network, the corruption spreading from Welling Glen — can you show us? Maybe draw a map of what you saw?”
Sidney shook her head. “It wasn’t like that.
It wasn’t…spatial, not in any way I can translate to paper.
It was more like feeling the connections, sensing where they were damaged.
” She paused then, her brow furrowing. “But I can feel the other portals now, like distant lights at the edge of my awareness. Ireland, Japan, Peru, a few others. They’re all connected to Silver Hollow somehow, all feeding into the same network. ”
“That matches what Eric’s been tracking,” Rebecca said slowly.
“He’s been monitoring anomalous energy readings at sites around the world, places that folk legends associate with supernatural activity.
He thought they might be connected, but he couldn’t find a way to prove it.
” She pulled out her phone and started typing.
“I’ll ask him to cross-reference his data with what Sidney’s describing. If we can map the network….”
“We might be able to predict where the corruption will spread next,” Finn said. His expression was thoughtful now, that frozen quality giving way to something more calculating. “And figure out how to stop it.”
Ben looked between them — the former DAPI agent and the shadow operative who’d spent seventeen years watching his daughter from the darkness — and thought he sensed something beginning to change.
They weren’t exactly allies, not yet, but they were starting to think like a team.
Starting to see possibilities instead of just obstacles.
“There’s something else,” he said. “Sonya Rosenthal. What we saw at the camp today — she’s scared.
She knows what Gregory is doing is dangerous, but she can’t stop him on her own.
” He glanced over at Sidney and saw her jaw tighten at the mention of the woman’s name.
“If we could find a way to reach her, to convince her that working with us is better than watching Gregory destroy everything….”
“She tried to kill me,” Sidney said flatly.
“I know.” Ben turned to face her and took both her hands in his, squeezing them gently in reassurance.
The light between their palms flared briefly before it settled into a steady glow.
“I’m not saying we should trust her, and I’m definitely not saying that we should forgive her.
But she might be the only person inside that operation who understands what’s really at stake. If we can use that somehow — ”
“We might be able to stop Gregory without a direct confrontation,” Rebecca broke in, not rudely, but with a definite firmness to her tone.
She was watching them with an expression Ben couldn’t quite read — something between professional assessment and personal curiosity.
“It’s not a terrible strategy. Risky as hell, but not terrible. ”
Sidney didn’t respond right away. Instead, she looked down at their joined hands, at the soft blue-gold light pulsing between their palms, and Ben could practically see her weighing the options.
The pragmatic part of her — the part that had kept her family’s secrets for years, that had learned to make impossible choices in impossible situations — was fighting against the wounded part, the part that remembered the weapon and the pain and the man she loved stepping in front of a blast meant for her.
“We’ll discuss it more tomorrow,” she said at last. “Right now, I can barely think straight. I need….” She didn’t finish the sentence and instead looked up at Ben with eyes that were full of exhaustion and fear. “I need to not think about any of this for a few hours.”
He understood. “Come on. Let’s go upstairs.”
The bedroom was dark when they entered, with the only real light coming from the green flickers of lightning through the window and the soft glow of their intertwined hands. Ben didn’t bother with the lamp, because the darkness felt right somehow, a cocoon against the chaos of the day.
Sidney sat on the edge of the bed, and he knelt in front of her to unlace her hiking boots, pulling them off one at a time and setting them aside. It was a small act of care, intimate in its ordinariness, and he felt her relax slightly as he worked.