Chapter 9 #2
“Finn,” she said, her voice neutral but pointed, “you’ve been watching my family for seventeen years…
protecting us from the shadows, if what Sidney tells me is accurate.
But you never told us you were there. You never reached out, never let us know we had an ally in the darkness.
” She paused there, letting the words settle. “Why?”
My father was quiet for a moment, his eyes fixed on the tabletop. When he finally spoke, his voice was tight, as if the words were being dragged out of him against his will.
“Because I knew you’d tell me to stop.”
“Would we have been wrong?”
“Yes.” He looked up then, meeting my grandmother’s gaze with something that might have been defiance.
“You would have been wrong. Emily, you know what I am, what I’ve always been.
A mundane in a family of guardians, a liability waiting to happen.
When Sidney was young, that didn’t matter as much.
But as she got older, as her abilities started to emerge, I could see what was coming.
Threats I couldn’t fight, dangers I couldn’t even understand.
If I’d stayed, I would have been a weak point. A target.”
“So you left,” I said, and I was surprised by how steady my voice sounded. “You decided that protecting us from a distance was better than being present.”
“I decided that keeping you alive was more important than keeping you happy.” His eyes met mine, and I saw the cost of that decision written in every line of his face.
“I knew you’d hate me for it, Sidney. I knew Josie would hate me.
But I also knew that if something came for this family, I couldn’t be the reason it succeeded. ”
The kitchen fell silent. I could hear the muffled sounds of the guardians settling in elsewhere in the house, the creak of old floorboards, the whisper of the night wind against the windows. All normal enough sounds, domestic sounds, utterly at odds with the conversation we were having.
“You could have told me.” My mother’s voice was quiet, but it cut through the silence like a blade.
She hadn’t moved from her position at the counter, her untouched tea growing cold in her hands.
“Finn, you could have explained instead of just vanishing…instead of leaving me to tell Sidney that her father didn’t love her anymore. ”
“Is that what you told her?” His voice cracked on the words.
“What else was I supposed to say?” Now there was heat in her tone, the first real emotion she’d shown since we’d entered the kitchen.
“You left a note, Finn. Three sentences. ‘I have to go. Don’t try to find me. I’m sorry.
’ That was it. That was all you gave us after ten years of marriage, after building a life together, after— ” She stopped herself there, pressing her lips together as if she was physically holding back the rest of the words.
“You knew.” My father’s voice was a rough murmur. “You knew I was watching. The checks — ”
“Of course I knew.” My mother set down her tea with an audible clank.
Some tea splashed on the tile counter, unheeded.
“My mother told me about the arrangement a year after you left. The surveillance network, the monthly payments, all of it. She said you’d asked her to keep it secret, but she thought I deserved to know that my husband hadn’t just abandoned us.
” She paused, something painful flickering across her face.
“That he was still out there somewhere, keeping us safe in the only way he knew how.”
I stared at her, feeling the ground seem to shift beneath my feet. “You knew? All this time, you knew he was watching, and you never told me?”
“You were a child, Sidney.” My mother’s voice softened, but it didn’t make the words any easier to hear.
“A child who was already struggling to understand why her father had left. How was I supposed to explain the rest of it? The surveillance and the secrets and the impossible choice he’d made?
You would have wanted to find him, and that would have put both of you at risk. ”
My mouth thinned. “So instead, you let me think he didn’t care.”
“I let you think what was simplest.” She came over so she was standing in front of me, her hands reaching for mine. I let her take them, even though part of me wanted to pull away. “I let you be angry because anger was easier than the truth. And I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for all of it.”
I looked down at our joined hands — her fingers slim and familiar against mine, her skin unmarked by the dimensional burns that traced my own forearms. She’d protected me, or at least had tried to.
They’d both tried to protect me, in their own broken, inadequate ways.
And somehow, despite everything, I’d survived.
I’d grown into the person sitting at this table, scarred but whole, with fire in her blood and the weight of worlds on her shoulders.
“I’m not a child anymore,” I said quietly. “And I’m not going to break because the truth is complicated. So stop protecting me from it. Both of you.”
The words hung there, a challenge and a plea wrapped together. I felt my mother’s grip tighten on my hands, saw my father lean forward in his chair, something almost like hope flickering in his dark eyes.
It was my grandmother who broke the silence.
“She’s right,” Emily said, her voice filled with the same authority it had always possessed, even now, when she was exhausted and gray-faced from nine months in limbo.
“Sidney isn’t the girl we left behind, Josie.
She’s something else. Something we need to understand if we’re going to fight this war together. ”
She came over to the place where I sat and took my hands from my mother’s grip, turning them over so she could examine the scars that traced my forearms. Her touch was clinical, professional, but I felt something else almost hidden underneath — a grandmother’s concern and a guardian’s assessment and a scholar’s curiosity all tangled together.
“A full phoenix merge,” she murmured as she traced one of the fern-like patterns with her fingertip. “I didn’t know that such a thing was even possible.”
Oh, it was possible…barely. Although I’d tried to push those memories to the back of my mind, I couldn’t stop myself from remembering the merge and that terrible moment when I’d felt my consciousness begin to dissolve into the phoenix’s fire.
But Ben’s voice had called me back, and his bioelectric field had wrapped around mine like an anchor.
If he hadn’t been there, if our connection hadn’t been strong enough to hold me… .
“But you survived,” my grandmother continued, her sharp eyes meeting mine. “More than survived. The fire rewrote you, Sidney. It didn’t destroy you — it transformed you into something new.”
She released my hands and stepped back, her gaze sweeping over me with an intensity that made me want to squirm.
“Stand up,” she commanded. “Let me see you properly.”
I obeyed, pushing back my chair and rising to my feet. My mother and father watched in silence as my grandmother circled me slowly, her gaze tracking details I couldn’t see.
“The bioelectric field is completely restructured,” she said, half to herself.
“The dimensional energy is integrated at the cellular level, not just channeled through the nervous system like it is for the rest of us. And the resonance….” She paused in front of me, her head tilted slightly.
“You’re broadcasting on frequencies I’ve never encountered before.
No wonder the Dragon spoke to you directly.
No wonder the other guardians felt your call across the void. ”
“What does it mean?” my mother asked, her voice tight with concern.
“It means she’s not entirely human anymore.” My grandmother’s words were blunt, clinical, but I heard the wonder underneath them. “The merge didn’t just give her access to dimensional fire — it made her part of it. She’s a hybrid now. Part guardian, part…something else.”
“Part phoenix?” I asked, remembering the ancient creature’s consciousness merging with mine, the flood of memories and sensations that had threatened to drown my sense of self.
“Possibly. Or part of whatever force created the phoenixes in the first place.” My grandmother shook her head slowly.
“It’s hard to say, since we have no real context for this sort of thing.
Possibly, the other guardians would know more, since their lines go back farther than ours.
Mary Welling might have become a guardian more than a hundred and fifty years ago, but there’s still so much we don’t know.
The only thing I do know is that Sidney isn’t the same woman we left behind nine months ago. ”
“Emily.” My mother’s voice was sharp with warning. “She doesn’t need to hear — ”
“She needs to hear all of it.” My grandmother’s tone was firm enough that my mother subsided, even though her expression remained troubled.
“The transformation is already complete, Josie. We can’t undo it even if we wanted to.
All we can do is help Sidney understand what she’s become and hope she has the strength to bear it. ”
I thought of the Dragon’s ultimatum, of the fire burning in my blood and the network of portals glowing in the back of my mind. “I’m not going to become a monster,” I said.
“No.” My grandmother’s expression softened slightly, the clinical assessment giving way to something warmer.
“No, I don’t think you are. You have so many anchors to keep you you — your connection to Ben, your love for this town, your stubborn insistence on seeing the best in people even when they don’t deserve it.
” A faint smile touched her lips. “You get that from your mother, by the way. She was always too soft-hearted for this work.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” my mother said dryly.
“It was meant as one.” My grandmother reached out and cupped my face in her hands, the gesture achingly familiar from a thousand childhood moments. “You’ve done well, Sidney. Better than I had any right to hope for when we left. Whatever happens next, I want you to know that.”
Tears burned at the corners of my eyes, and I blinked them back. “We’re not done yet. Julian Gregory is still out there, still drilling into the ley lines. And the Dragon — ”
“The Dragon will wait.” My grandmother released me and stepped back, brisk again.
“We have time, not much, but enough to plan properly. Tomorrow, we’ll gather the other guardians and begin mapping the contamination in the ley lines, and we’ll figure out exactly how much damage Gregory has done and how we can begin to heal it. ”
“And tonight?”
She glanced at the window, where the first gray light of dawn was beginning to creep across the sky.
“Tonight is already over. Get some sleep, Sidney. All of you.” Her gaze moved to my mother and father, still sitting in their separate corners of the kitchen like boxers in opposite corners of a ring.
“We have difficult days ahead, and we’ll all need our strength. ”
She swept out of the kitchen without waiting for a response, her footsteps retreating toward the stairs and her old bedroom, which still awaited her on the second floor.
In all the months she’d been lost to the portal, I’d barely ventured in there, only to dust and to open the windows when the weather allowed so the space wouldn’t get too musty.
After she was gone, I looked over at my parents, feeling those seventeen years of silence and secrets hanging between them like a fog.
There was so much more that needed to be said, so many wounds that needed tending.
But my grandmother was right — the night was over, and we were all running on fumes.
“We should sleep,” I said, and I could hear the weariness in my voice.
My mother nodded, then rose from her chair and came over so she could press a kiss against my forehead. “Your old room?”
I nodded. “Yes, Ben and I are in my room. Your room is still waiting for you.”
Something flickered across her face at the mention of Ben sharing my bed, but she didn’t comment. “And Finn?”
I looked at my father, who was still sitting at the table, his dark eyes unreadable. “There’s a sleeping bag in the hall closet. The den couch is probably the only spot left.”
He nodded and rose to his feet. For a moment, he and my mother stood facing each other across the kitchen, close enough to touch but separated by an ocean of history.
“Josie,” he said quietly. “I know this isn’t the time, but — ”
“You’re right.” She cut him off, but gently. “It isn’t the time. But soon, Finn. Soon we’ll talk. Really talk.”
He nodded again, something easing in his expression. “Soon.”
They parted ways in the hall — my mother climbing the stairs to her old room, my father heading for the den with the sleeping bag tucked under his arm. I watched them go and tried to figure out what I was feeling.
My family, fractured for so long, was finally beginning to heal.
Ben was waiting for me in the bedroom, sitting on the edge of the mattress with his elbows on his knees and his head bowed. He looked up as I entered, and even through my exhaustion, I sensed how the familiar warmth of our connection kindled between us.
“How did it go?” he asked.
“About as well as could be expected.” I came over to the bed and sat down next to him, letting my head drop onto his shoulder.
“Seventeen years of secrets, laid bare in about twenty minutes. My grandmother thinks I’m part phoenix.
My parents might actually speak to each other again someday.
And apparently, I’m either going to save the world or become a monster. ”
“No pressure, then.”
I laughed, the sound watery and strange. “No pressure at all.”
He wrapped his arm around me and pulled me close, and I felt the last of the night’s tension begin to drain away. Whatever came next — Gregory, the Dragon, the impossible task of healing a wounded world — we would face it together.
“Get some sleep,” Ben murmured against my hair. “Tomorrow, we save the world.”
“Tomorrow,” I agreed, and let my eyes drift closed.