Chapter 8 #2
“Phoenix fire,” she murmured. “It rewrote your bioelectric structure at the cellular level. You’re not entirely human anymore, Sidney. You’re something new.”
“I know.” The words sounded steady enough, even though the reality of them still sometimes hit me at odd moments — when I accidentally shorted out an appliance by walking too close to it, or when I sensed an approaching car from over a mile away.
“The merge changed me. I can feel the whole portal network now, like a map burned into my brain. I can sense when the connections are strong and when they’re weak.
” I hesitated before realizing I needed to tell them everything I could.
“I can feel the corruption spreading from Welling Glen.”
“The Dragon’s vision,” my grandmother said, her voice sharpening. “You mentioned that it showed you the infection. How much did you see?”
“All of it.” I remembered the overwhelming flood of images, the golden web of ley lines going black and gangrenous, the other guardians struggling against an illness they couldn’t understand. “The corruption is spreading faster every day. If we don’t stop it at the source — ”
“Cauterization,” my grandmother broke in, her voice grim. “The Dragon will burn away the infected section to save the rest.”
“Yes. We have until the Winter Solstice, no more.”
Another silence, but this one felt different — filled with purpose rather than weighted with grief. I could feel my grandmother’s mind at work, sorting through possibilities and discarding them, searching for the angle that would give us the best chance of success.
“The man responsible who’s responsible for all this,” she said. “Julian Gregory. Tell me more about him.”
“He’s some kind of tech billionaire,” I told her. “He’s drilling into the ley lines near Welling Glen, trying to extract dimensional energy for some sort of power source. He’s recruited Dr. Rosenthal to help him, but she knows it’s dangerous — she’s scared, even if she won’t admit it.”
“What else have you found?”
Not a lot, unfortunately, but the little we had was better than nothing.
“We have someone on the inside of his computer network. A scientist named Eric Hargrove — he used to work for DAPI before Rebecca convinced him to defect. He’s been tracking Julian Gregory’s progress and feeding us intel.
” I paused for a second, realizing how much had changed since they’d disappeared.
“A woman named Rebecca Morse is helping us, too. She’s former FBI, former DAPI.
She’s the one who turned against Rosenthal during the phoenix incident. ”
“You’ve built quite a team.” There was something almost like approval in my grandmother’s voice. “And your father?”
The question caught me off guard. “You know about that?”
“We felt it when he returned to Silver Hollow…the edges of his consciousness brushing against the portal’s energy, even though he has no abilities of his own.” Another pause, and then she said, “He’s been watching for a long time, hasn’t he?”
“Seventeen years.” The old hurt rose inside me, but it felt distant now, muffled by everything else that had happened. “He says he left to protect us, that being a mundane made him a liability.”
My mother spoke next, her voice soft and sad. “He wasn’t wrong. It was one of the reasons our marriage fell apart, even before he left. He couldn’t be part of our world, not really, and it ate at him. He hated the helplessness of watching us face dangers he couldn’t understand, let alone fight.”
“He’s fighting now,” I said. “He and Rebecca have been planning tactical approaches to Gregory’s camp, figuring out how to disrupt the drilling operation.
He’s — ” I broke off there, not sure how to describe the complicated tangle of emotions I felt toward the man who had abandoned me and then spent seventeen years watching from the shadows. “He’s trying.”
“Then we’ll give him a chance to prove himself.” My grandmother’s voice was brisk, practical. She had no time for dwelling on the past when there was a future to save. “Sidney, there’s something you need to understand about this place. About the Waiting Place.”
“The Waiting Place?” I echoed.
“It’s what the guardians have always called it.
The space between dimensions, where consciousnesses can exist without physical form.
” She gestured at the silver mist around us, although “gesture” was perhaps the wrong word for the way her presence shifted and indicated. “We’re not the only ones here.”
As if her words had summoned them, the mist around us began to change.
The silver luminescence brightened, taking on hints of other colors — gold and green and deep purple, shades that reminded me of the glimpses I’d caught through the gap in the veil.
And within that brightening light, I sensed other presences beginning to gather.
They came from all directions, emerging from the mist like ships materializing out of a fog bank.
I felt them before I saw them, consciousnesses that bore the same resonance as my mother and grandmother, the same connection to the portal network that ran in my blood.
Guardians, I realized. Other guardians from other portals, drawn by the signal Ben and I had created when we opened the way.
“They felt the call,” my grandmother said quietly. “The Dragon’s distress signal, amplified by your connection to the phoenix fire. They’ve been gathering at the boundaries of their own waiting places for weeks, hoping for exactly this opportunity.”
The first person to fully materialize was a woman maybe a little younger than my grandmother, with fiery red hair gone silver at the temples and eyes the color of storm clouds.
Her presence felt like standing too close to a bonfire, warm and fierce and slightly dangerous.
When she spoke, her voice had an accent I immediately recognized as Irish.
“Emily Thompson,” she said, and there was something like respect in her tone. “We felt the call. The old fire, waking after all these years.”
“Brigid Callahan.” My grandmother inclined her head in greeting. “It’s been a long time.”
“Too long. The last gathering was before either of us took up our mantles.” The Irish woman’s gaze shifted to me, and I felt the weight of her assessment like a physical pressure. “This is the one? The child who merged with the phoenix?”
“My granddaughter,” my grandmother said. “Sidney Lowell. She’s holding the portal open from the other side.”
“Holding it open?” Brigid’s presence sharpened with interest. “With what anchor?”
“A man,” my mother said softly. “A good man, who loves her.”
“Interesting.” Brigid circled me — or rather, her consciousness did, flowing around mine like water around a stone. “The resonance is strong. I can feel him even from here, burning steady as a lighthouse. Where did you find such a one?”
“He found me, actually.” I thought of Ben, still kneeling in the clearing with his hands clasped around mine, pouring everything he had into keeping me tethered to the physical world. “It’s a long story.”
“Stories can wait.” These words came from a new voice, calm and precise, with the stillness of deep water.
A man with dark hair and serene features stepped forward, his consciousness as controlled and disciplined as a master calligrapher’s brushstroke.
“The portal will not hold forever, and there is much to discuss.”
“Kenji Tanaka,” my grandmother said, introducing him. “Guardian of the Aokigahara threshold.”
“The corruption has reached our borders as well,” Kenji said, addressing me directly. “Three of our lesser portals have already failed. The sickness spreads faster with each passing day.”
More figures were emerging from the mist now, their presences adding to the growing chorus of power that surrounded us.
A family who moved together, their consciousnesses so intertwined that it was hard to tell where one ended and another began — three generations, I realized, like my own.
Their combined presence had the weight and patience of mountain stone.
“The Quispe family,” my grandmother said. “Guardians of the threshold at Machu Picchu. They’ve protected that portal since before the Spanish conquest.”
“The corruption has touched us as well,” the eldest of them said, a woman with silver-streaked dark hair and eyes dark with centuries of knowledge. “Our ancestors spoke of such a sickness long ago. They called it the Withering. It nearly destroyed the network then.”
“How did they stop it?” I asked.
“Fire,” she said simply. “They found the source and burned it out.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. Fire…the Dragon’s solution, the cauterization that would destroy Silver Hollow and everyone in it. Was that the only way? Had humanity faced this threat before and found no better answer than destruction?
“There were guardians who died in that burning,” my grandmother said quietly, as if reading my thoughts. “Portals that were lost forever. But the network survived. The question is whether we can find a better way this time.”
More guardians were gathering now, emerging from the mist in ones and twos and small family groups.
A pair of twins from somewhere in Scandinavia, their consciousnesses so perfectly matched that they seemed to speak with one voice.
An elderly man whose presence felt ancient and deep as the roots of mountains — African, I thought, although I couldn’t have said from where on that vast continent.
A young woman from India, her consciousness bright with barely contained power, flanked by an older man who carried himself with the bearing of a warrior.
By the time the last of them had materialized, I counted nearly twenty guardians gathered in the mist around us.
Twenty families who had kept their secrets as carefully as mine had kept ours, who had protected their own portals while the rest of the world remained ignorant of the web of magic that connected them all.