Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
The ravine opened into a shallow basin where the creek had carved a natural amphitheater from the stone over millennia of patient erosion.
We emerged from the water and scrambled up the bank, my boots sliding on wet leaves as I pulled myself over the lip and reached back to help Ben follow.
His face was gray with exhaustion, his scars flickering erratically beneath his soaked shirt, but he managed a grim smile when our hands connected.
“Almost there,” I said, even though I wasn’t entirely sure that was true.
The Dragon’s agony still pulsed through the ley line, a constant throb at the base of my skull that made it hard to think clearly.
Gregory’s drill was still operating — I could feel it, a wrongness boring deeper into the earth with every passing second — but the feedback seemed to have stabilized somewhat, or maybe I’d just grown numb to the pain.
Either way, we were running out of time.
My mother and grandmother came up behind us, Priya close on their heels.
The young Indian guardian’s dark eyes were wide in a face that was far paler than it should be, but she moved with steady purpose, her hands tracing subtle patterns in the air that left faint trails of protective light.
Whatever she was doing, it seemed to be helping; the relentless pressure of the electromagnetic weapon had faded to a distant buzz since we’d left the ravine.
“How much farther to the portal site?” my mother asked. Her voice was strained, and I noticed the way she favored her left side — a twisted ankle from the scramble through the creek bed, probably, or maybe just the accumulated toll of running for her life through a forest that wanted her dead.
“Quarter mile, maybe less.” I oriented myself by the pull of the ley line, that magnetic tug toward the place where the standing stones waited. “If we cut through the old logging road — ”
A branch snapped somewhere behind us.
I froze, my hand tightening on Ben’s. The forest had gone quiet, the usual night sounds of owls and rustling creatures conspicuously absent.
Rain dripped from the canopy in a steady patter, and somewhere in the distance, I heard a faint rumble of thunder that might have been natural weather… or might have been something far worse.
“They circled around.” Ben’s voice was barely audible. “The diversion didn’t hold them all.”
He was right. I could feel them now — bioelectric signatures at the edge of my awareness, moving through the trees with coordinated precision.
Three of them, maybe four, coming from the northwest, where the terrain sloped upward toward the ridge.
They must have split off from the main pursuit group and looped around while we were splashing through the ravine, anticipating exactly where we’d emerge.
Gregory’s people were smart. I’d give them that much.
“Can you tell how many?” my grandmother asked. She’d moved closer to me, her hand resting on my arm, and I felt her consciousness brush against mine — ancient and practiced, offering support I couldn’t afford to refuse.
“Four. Armed.” I reached deeper into my connection to the ley line, pushing past the pain to get a clearer picture.
The effort made my nose threaten to bleed again, that familiar but unwelcome copper taste at the back of my throat.
“They’ve got the electromagnetic weapon, too.
I can feel its frequency signature — it’s dormant for now, but if they activate it… .”
“Then we’ll deal with it.” Ben’s jaw was set, his exhaustion momentarily masked by determination. “I can absorb the frequency again if I have to.”
“You nearly died the last time.”
“Nearly isn’t the same as actually.”
I wanted to argue with him, wanted to tell him that I couldn’t watch him sacrifice himself again, couldn’t bear the thought of those silver scars digging themselves further into his flesh while I stood by helplessly.
But there wasn’t time for that conversation, and we both knew it.
The mercenaries were closing in, and we were exposed in this clearing with no cover and nowhere to run.
“We need to move,” Priya said, her voice tight. “Now, before they — ”
A muzzle flash lit up the treeline to our left, accompanied by a crack that echoed off the stone walls of the basin. I felt the bullet pass close enough to ruffle my hair, close enough that I could smell the hot metal as it tore past my cheek.
“Down!” I shouted, already moving, dragging Ben with me as we dove for the minimal cover of a fallen log. My grandmother hit the ground beside us, her movements surprisingly agile for a woman her age, and Priya threw herself flat with a cry of alarm.
But my mother didn’t move fast enough.
Josie was still standing in the open when the second shot rang out — standing frozen, her eyes wide, looking in the direction of the muzzle flash as if she couldn’t quite process what was happening.
I saw the shooter emerge from the trees, a black-clad figure with a rifle raised to his shoulder, the barrel tracking toward my mother’s center mass.
Time seemed to slow. I tried to reach for my power, tried to channel something — anything — that could stop what was about to happen, but my connection to the ley line was sluggish, the Dragon’s pain interfering with my ability to focus.
The bullet was going to hit her. There was nothing I could do.
And then my father came out of nowhere.
I hadn’t even known he was there. He must have broken off from the diversion team, must have been tracking the mercenaries’ movements while we fled down the ravine, his surveillance instincts overriding whatever tactical plan Rebecca had laid out.
One moment, the shooter was lining up his shot on my mother, and the next Finn Lowell was diving through the air, tackling Josie to the ground as the rifle cracked for a third time.
They went down hard, my father’s body covering my mother’s, and I heard him make a sound — a grunt, really, something between a gasp and a moan that carried clearly across the clearing even over the rain.
“Finn!” My mother’s voice was raw with shock. “Finn, no — ”
More shots now, coming from multiple directions as the other mercenaries opened fire.
I pressed myself against the wet bark of the fallen log and reached for Ben’s hand, felt our bioelectric fields surge together as we tried to coordinate some kind of response.
Emily was chanting something under her breath, her words in a language I didn’t recognize, and I felt a shimmer of protective energy begin to form around us — weak, fragmented, but better than nothing.
Through it all, I couldn’t take my eyes off my father.
He was still lying on top of my mother, still shielding her with his body, but something was wrong.
His movements were too slow, too uncoordinated, and there was a darkness spreading across the back of his jacket that the light rain couldn’t explain.
As I watched, Josie pushed herself out from beneath him and turned him over, and I heard her scream.
The bullet had taken him in the lower back, just above his hip.
In the dim light, I could see the wound — ragged and wet, pumping blood at a rate that made my veterinary training kick in automatically, calculating survival odds that I didn’t want to acknowledge.
He’d been hit in the kidney, maybe, or the inferior vena cava. Bad.
Very bad.
“Cover fire!” I shouted at Ben, not caring if the mercenaries heard me. “Keep them back!”
He nodded grimly and raised his hands, and I felt him reach for the strange resonance ability that the phoenix fire had burned into his nervous system.
Even depleted, even damaged, he could still project enough electromagnetic interference to disrupt their targeting systems, to make their rifle scopes glitch and their radios crackle with static.
It wouldn’t last long, but it might be enough.
I scrambled across the clearing toward my parents, staying low, my knees and palms scraping against wet rock and sodden leaves.
Emily and Priya followed, my grandmother grabbing Finn’s legs while Priya took his shoulders as they dragged him toward the minimal shelter of a rocky outcrop at the edge of the basin.
My mother crawled alongside them, her hands pressed against the wound in Finn’s back, her face streaked with rain and tears.
“Apply pressure,” I said, my voice sounding much steadier than I felt. “As much as you can. Don’t let up.”
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Josie didn’t look at me. Her eyes were fixed on Finn’s face, on the gray pallor that was spreading across his features, on the way his breath came in shallow, rattling gasps. “Sidney, tell me the truth.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Instead, I pulled off my jacket and wadded it into a makeshift compression bandage, pressing it against the entry wound while Emily secured it with a length of torn fabric from her own shirt.
The blood soaked through almost immediately, hot and thick, and I felt something twist in my gut at the sight of it — my father’s blood, the blood of the man who had walked away from me seventeen years ago and spent every day since watching from the shadows.
He’d come back. In the end, when it mattered most, he’d come back.
“Sid….” His voice was a harsh whisper, his dark eyes finding mine with obvious effort. “Josie…is she….”
“She’s fine.” I gripped his hand, felt how cold his fingers were despite the warmth of the blood that soaked through my jacket. “You saved her, Dad. She’s fine.”
A wavery smile touched his lips. “Good. That’s…that’s good.”