Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
The five days that led up to Halloween went by so quickly that I barely noticed the time passing. I was too preoccupied with preparation, with doing everything I could to make sure everything went right.
After all, we wouldn’t get any second chances.
We gathered around the dining room table each morning so we could pore over Finn’s maps and Rebecca’s tactical assessments while Eric fed us data from Oregon.
The electromagnetic readings grew more chaotic with each passing day, the spikes and valleys on his charts looking less like scientific measurements and more like the fever dreams of a dying system.
The Dragon’s disruption of the lunar cycle was accelerating, and somewhere in that chaos lay our opportunity.
Assuming we didn’t screw it up completely, of course.
Ben and I spent hours practicing our synchronization, pushing our bioelectric fields to merge more deeply than we ever had before.
The intimacy of it was almost overwhelming, not just the physical closeness, but the way I could feel his thoughts brushing against the edges of mine when we were fully connected…
his fears, his hopes, his absolute certainty that we would find a way through this.
Sometimes I wasn’t sure where I ended and he began, and that should have scared the crap out of me.
Oddly, though, it felt like coming home.
My father kept his distance during these sessions, watching from doorways or through windows but never interrupting.
I caught him staring at me sometimes with an expression I couldn’t quite read, a jumble of pride and regret.
We hadn’t talked about the seventeen years he’d been gone, not really.
There hadn’t been time, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to pull the scab off that particular wound.
But I noticed the way he threw himself into the planning, the meticulous attention he paid to every detail of our approach.
Whatever else he might be, Finn Lowell was not a man who did things halfway.
Rebecca, for her part, had become our tactical coordinator.
She’d spent two days scouting the forest between the house and the portal site, identifying sight lines and choke points and places where Gregory’s drones might be watching.
Eric had hacked into Aetheris’s surveillance network — something he assured us was “technically legal, given the circumstances,” although I had my doubts — and now we knew their patrol patterns, their sensor ranges, their blind spots.
We also knew that Julian Gregory had increased security around the drilling site. Whatever he was trying to accomplish, he was pushing hard toward some kind of deadline of his own.
On the morning of October thirty-first, I woke to find Ben already gone from our bed.
The space next to me was still warm, and I could feel the faint echo of his bioelectric field lingering in the sheets.
I lay there for a moment and stared at the ceiling, trying to quiet the fear that had taken up permanent residence inside me.
Tonight. We were doing this tonight.
I found him downstairs in the kitchen, standing at the window with a cup of coffee in his hands.
The sky outside was gray and heavy again, the ever-present blanket of unnatural clouds pressing down on Silver Hollow like a weight.
The green lightning had faded over the past few days, replaced by something that felt almost like anticipation — the world holding its breath, waiting to see what would happen when the veil grew thin.
“Couldn’t sleep?” I asked as I came over so I could stand next to him.
“Bad dreams.” He took a sip of his coffee but didn’t look away from the window. “I kept seeing the corruption spreading. The other portals going dark, one by one. And then….” Rather than finish the sentence, he went quiet, his jaw tightening.
“And then?” I prompted.
“And then I woke up.” He turned to face me, and I saw the shadows under his eyes, the tension in his shoulders. “Sidney, are you sure about this? We could wait, maybe try to find another way — ”
“There is no other way.” I took his free hand and sensed how our bioelectric fields synced automatically, the familiar pulse of gold and blue-white steadying us both. “The Dragon gave us a deadline, and the portal will be accessible tonight. If we don’t try now, we might not get another chance.”
He studied my face for the space of a few breaths, searching for something there. Whatever he found seemed to satisfy him, because he nodded slowly and squeezed my fingers.
“Then we’ll do this together,” he said. “Just like always.”
I managed a smile. “Just like always.”
The trick-or-treaters started appearing around five o’clock, small figures in bright costumes darting between houses as parents trailed behind with flashlights and candy bags.
I watched them from the living room window, feeling a strange sense of disconnection from the ordinary world they represented.
These families had no idea what was happening beneath their feet, no clue that the town they called home was balanced on the edge of annihilation.
Maybe that was for the best. Some burdens just shouldn’t be shared.
Rebecca’s voice came from behind me. “Ready?”
I turned to find her dressed for combat in dark tactical gear, her blonde hair pulled back in a tight braid, a rifle case slung over one shoulder.
She looked nothing like the severe FBI agent who’d first shown up in Silver Hollow months ago, investigating Victor Maplehurst’s death and asking questions that cut too close to the bone.
Now she looked like what she’d probably always been underneath the suits and the badges.
A soldier preparing for war.
“As ready as I’m going to be,” I said.
She nodded, sharp dark eyes assessing my expression. “Eric’s monitoring Gregory’s communications. So far, they haven’t detected anything unusual. Their sensors are focused on the drilling site, not the portal clearing. We should have a window.”
“‘Should have,’” I repeated.
“It’s the best I can offer.” A faint smile touched her lips. “In my experience, plans never survive first contact with the enemy anyway. The trick is being ready to improvise.”
Ben came down the stairs, his footsteps pausing on that familiar creaky third step.
He’d changed into dark clothes as well — jeans and a black sweater, practical boots.
The silver tracery of his scars was hidden beneath his collar, but I could feel them pulsing faintly, responding to the charged atmosphere.
My father emerged from the kitchen, a tablet in his hands. “Eric just confirmed that the electromagnetic readings are spiking. The veil is thinning faster than the models predicted. If we’re going to do this, it needs to be soon.”
I looked around at the three of them — my partner, my reluctant ally, my estranged father — and felt the weight of what we were about to attempt settle on me.
In a few hours, I would try to reach through the barrier between worlds, to find my mother and grandmother and bring them home.
If I succeeded, we might have a chance to stop Gregory and heal the damage to the ley line network. If I failed….
I pushed that thought aside. Failure wasn’t an option. Not tonight.
Not ever.
“Then let’s go,” I said.
We left through the back door, slipping into the forest as the last light faded from the sky.
The trick-or-treaters were still out in force, their laughter and excited shrieks providing a strange counterpoint to the tension coiled deep inside me.
A group of children dressed as superheroes ran past the end of our street, their capes fluttering behind them, completely unaware of the real battle that was about to begin.
I’d walked the forest paths hundreds of times, but they felt different tonight, filled with the kind of energy I could sense even without trying.
The trees seemed to lean closer, their branches reaching toward us like curious fingers, and the usual sounds of the forest had been replaced by a silence so complete that our footsteps seemed almost sacrilegious.
Rebecca took point, moving with the graceful ease of someone who’d spent years navigating hostile territory.
She’d memorized every twist and turn of the route we’d planned, every potential ambush site and escape route.
Behind her, Ben and I walked side by side, our hands clasped together, our bioelectric fields already beginning to merge in preparation for what was to come.
Finn brought up the rear, scanning the shadows with an intensity that reminded me he wasn’t just a distant observer anymore. He was part of this now, for better or worse.
We were about halfway to the portal site when Rebecca held up a fist, signaling us to stop.
“Drone,” she breathed, pointing toward a gap in the canopy. “Two o’clock, about a hundred yards out.”
I looked where she indicated and saw it — a small dark shape hovering against the gray sky, its navigation lights blinking in a slow, steady rhythm. One of Gregory’s surveillance units, patrolling the forest edge.
“Can you take it out?” Ben asked quietly.
“Not without alerting the others.” Rebecca was already unscrewing the rifle case, her movements quick and efficient. “But I can blind it. Give me thirty seconds.”
She assembled the weapon with brief, almost careless movements.
It wasn’t a traditional rifle, I realized, but something that looked almost like a spotlight mounted on a stock.
Eric had designed it, cobbling together components from half a dozen different sources to create what he called an “electromagnetic dazzler.” The theory was that a concentrated burst of EM radiation would overwhelm the drone’s sensors without triggering the automatic alerts that a physical attack would cause.
That was the theory, anyway. We were about to find out if it actually worked in the real world.