Chapter 16 #2
“Then I’ll crawl.” She pulled away from him and took two stumbling steps toward the Dragon before her knees buckled.
He caught her again, felt the tremor running through her body, the way her bioelectric field flickered and sputtered like a dying flame.
“Ben, there are more than two thousand people in that town. My friends, my neighbors. Eliza and Hope and the Hendersons and everyone who’s ever bought dog food from my shop or waved at me on the street. I can’t just — ”
“I know.” He held her close, felt her struggling against him even as her strength failed. “I know, Sidney. But getting yourself killed won’t save them. We need another way.”
“There is no other way.” Her voice cracked as she spoke, but she made herself continue anyway. “The Dragon gave us until the solstice to stop Gregory, and we failed. We didn’t stop him in time. The drill reached whatever it was trying to reach, and now — ”
“The drill is gone.” Finn’s voice was weak but steady, and Ben turned to find Sidney’s father watching them with dark eyes that held something unexpected. Not defeat, but calculation. “Julian Gregory is dead, and the operation is destroyed. Whatever the Dragon was angry about, it’s over.”
“But the corruption isn’t over.” Sidney shook her head, her hair plastered to her face with rain and sweat. “The ley lines are still damaged. The network is still — ”
“But it can heal now.” Emily had moved closer, her expression thoughtful despite the fear that deepened the lines around her eyes.
“Sidney, think about what you told us — about the infection spreading from the drilling site. With the source removed, the network can begin to repair itself. The Dragon’s fire might have actually cauterized the wound, just like it threatened to do. The violent way, yes, but effectively.”
“That doesn’t matter if it burns Silver Hollow.” Sidney’s voice was rising toward something that sounded dangerously close to hysteria. “A quarter of the portals in the network are anchored to that site. If the Dragon destroys the town, destroys the standing stones — ”
Ben found himself speaking before he’d fully formed the thought. “Then we need to convince it not to. You said it gave you a deadline. That means it was willing to negotiate. It was willing to wait and see if humans could solve the problem ourselves.”
“And we failed.”
“Did we?” He turned her to face him, hands gentle on her shoulders as he forced her to meet his eyes.
“Gregory’s dead, Sidney. His operation is destroyed.
The drilling has stopped. Yeah, we didn’t do it ourselves — the Dragon did.
But the end result is the same. The threat is neutralized, and the network can heal. ”
“The Dragon doesn’t see it that way.” Her voice was quieter now, but no less despairing.
“I can feel what it’s feeling through the ley line, Ben.
It’s not just angry about Gregory anymore.
It’s angry about all of it — the violence, the weapons, the way humans keep hurting each other even when something bigger is at stake.
It saw those mercenaries trying to kill us.
It saw my father get shot. It sees humanity as a disease, and Silver Hollow is just the first symptom it’s going to burn away. ”
The Dragon had covered half the distance to the town now, its massive form moving through the forest with a grace that seemed impossible for something so large.
Trees bent away from its passage, and the ground trembled with each step, and behind it, the glow of the destroyed drilling site painted touched the low-hanging clouds with garish orange and crimson.
Even though he knew it was probably hopeless, Ben couldn’t keep his mind from racing, searching for options, for angles, for anything that might give them a chance.
Brigid and Kenji were still in town with their guardian teams, but what could they do against something like this?
Rebecca was somewhere in the forest with Priya’s uncle, assuming they’d survived the Dragon’s emergence.
Eric Hargrove was monitoring from Oregon, probably watching satellite feeds in horror as his worst predictions came true.
None of them could stop the Dragon. None of them could even slow it down.
“We need to get to the portal site,” Sidney said, and there was something new in her voice—a desperate determination that made Ben’s stomach tighten with fear. “If I can reach the standing stones, maybe I can — ”
She didn’t finish the sentence, because that was when the vehicle came crashing through the underbrush.
It was one of the Aetheris SUVs, battered and scorched, its windshield cracked and one headlight dangling from its socket like a gouged eye.
It skidded to a stop twenty feet from where they stood, throwing mud and damp leaves everywhere, and the driver’s door flew open to reveal a figure Ben had never expected to see again.
Sonya Rosenthal stumbled out of the vehicle and collapsed to her knees in the mud.
She looked like death. Her gray hair was singed and wild, her face streaked with blood from a gash on her forehead, and her clothes were torn and blackened from whatever inferno she’d escaped.
But she was alive — impossibly, inexplicably alive — and in her hands, she clutched a device that Ben didn’t recognize.
It was small and cylindrical, covered in buttons and switches, with a faint blue glow emanating from one end.
“The Dragon,” Rosenthal gasped, her voice raw and broken. “I can stop it. I started building this after the phoenix. I finished it three days ago, before Julian locked me out — ”
She raised the device toward the Dragon’s retreating form and pressed something on its surface.
A light flickered, and Ben held his breath, hoping against hope.
But then the light went out.
Rosenthal stared at the device in her hands, her expression shifting from desperate hope to dawning horror. She pressed the button again, then again, her movements growing more frantic with each failed attempt.
“No,” she whispered. “No, it should work. The frequency calibration was perfect, the power source was — ”
“It’s not going to work.” Sidney’s voice was flat, exhausted, devoid of any satisfaction at watching her enemy fail. “Whatever you built, it’s not enough. The Dragon isn’t like the phoenix. It’s not a creature that can be disrupted or contained. It’s the source. It’s where all of this comes from.”
Rosenthal looked up at her, and Ben saw something break behind the woman’s eyes — the last remnants of the certainty that had driven her for decades, crumbling in the face of something she couldn’t control, couldn’t predict, and definitely couldn’t stop.
“Then what do we do?” she asked, and her voice was small, almost childlike. “What can we possibly do?”
Before anyone could answer, new figures emerged from the forest — Brigid Callahan and Kenji Tanaka, leading a group of guardians who must have come from the town when they felt the Dragon rise.
Their faces were grim, their hands already tracing the patterns that would summon whatever power they could muster.
“We fight,” Brigid said, her Irish accent sharp with determination. “We stand between that thing and the town, and we fight with everything we have.”
“That’s suicide,” Ben said.
“Perhaps.” Kenji’s voice was calm, almost serene. “But it is also our duty. We are guardians. This is what we were born to do.”
The other guardians were spreading out, taking positions, preparing for a battle they couldn’t possibly win.
Ben watched them with a mixture of horror and admiration.
These people had come from around the world to answer Sidney’s call and were now ready to throw themselves against an ancient god to protect a town most of them had never even seen before tonight.
And Sidney was watching, too, her expression shifting as something seemed to click into place behind her eyes.
“No,” she said softly. Then, louder, “No. This isn’t right. This isn’t how we win.”
“Sidney — ” Brigid began, but Sidney was already shaking her head.
“The phoenix,” she said, and her voice had taken on a strange, distant quality. “When the phoenix was dying, corrupted by DAPI’s interference, I didn’t fight it. I didn’t try to overpower it or contain it. I merged with it. I became part of the fire instead of trying to stand against it.”
She turned to look at the Dragon, still advancing toward the town, its massive form casting shadows that stretched for hundreds of yards.
“You don’t fight fire,” she said. “You become the hearth.”
Ben’s blood seemed to turn to ice in his veins. “Sidney, what are you saying?”
She looked at him, and there was something in her eyes that terrified him, a certainty that went beyond determination, beyond courage, into something that looked almost like surrender.
“I’m saying I know what I have to do.”