Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
The walk toward the Dragon was the longest of my life.
I left them all behind — Ben reaching for me, his voice breaking as he called my name…
my grandmother’s sharp intake of breath…
my mother’s sob…my father struggling to rise from where he’d collapsed against the fallen log.
Brigid shouted something in Gaelic that might have been a curse or a prayer, and Kenji’s calm voice cut through the chaos, ordering the guardians to hold their positions.
Even Sonya Rosenthal made some kind of noise, although I couldn’t tell for sure whether it was a sound of protest or despair.
I didn’t look back. I knew if I looked back, I might lose my nerve.
The forest floor was uneven beneath my boots, littered with branches torn loose by the shockwave of the Dragon’s emergence.
My legs felt like they belonged to someone else — weak and trembling, barely able to support my weight after everything I’d channeled tonight.
The scars on my arms pulsed with a faint golden glow, the only light I had to guide me through the pre-dawn darkness.
Each step took me farther from the people I loved and closer to something that could annihilate me without a second thought.
I thought about all the mornings I’d woken up in the old house that I’d called home ever since I was ten, and the way sunlight streamed through the windows and the smell of coffee drifted up from the kitchen, where my mother or grandmother would be starting breakfast. And I thought about Ben’s arms around me in the darkness, the way our scars glowed when we touched, the future we’d started to imagine together.
All of it might end in the next few minutes. All of it might burn away, leaving nothing but ash and memory.
I kept walking anyway.
Ahead of me, the Dragon had paused.
It stood at the edge of a clearing maybe three hundred yards from the portal site, its massive form silhouetted against the hellish orange glow that still lit the sky above Welling Glen.
Those burning eyes tracked my approach with an intelligence that made my throat tighten with fear.
I was an ant walking toward a bonfire, a minnow swimming toward a whale.
Every instinct I possessed screamed at me to turn and run.
I didn’t, though.
The heat intensified as I drew closer, a dry, ancient warmth that seemed to press against my skin from all directions.
I could smell volcanic rock and something that reminded me of the way the air tasted during electrical storms — sharp and metallic, somehow wrong.
My connection to the ley line thrummed with the Dragon’s presence as each step brought me deeper into the sphere of its awareness.
The ground beneath my feet was scarred with cracks from the Dragon’s emergence, amber light still pulsing faintly in their depths.
I stepped over them carefully, aware that one wrong move could send me tumbling into fissures that might lead down to places no human was meant to see.
The standing stones of the portal site were visible off to my left, the ancient letters of their inscriptions blazing with borrowed fire, and I felt their familiar pull tugging at my consciousness.
So close to home, and yet so impossibly far.
At fifty yards away, I stopped.
The Dragon’s head lowered, those enormous eyes fixing on me with an intensity that threatened to dissolve everything I thought I knew about myself.
I felt its consciousness brush against mine through the ley line, vast and ancient and utterly inhuman, a mind that had existed long before the first humans looked up at the stars and wondered what they were.
The weight of all those millennia pressed against my awareness, and I staggered slightly before I could steady myself.
You return, it seemed to say, although the communication wasn’t words so much as concepts pressed directly into my awareness. The child of fire who begged for time.
“I return,” I said aloud. My voice sounded thin and small in the presence of something so immense, but I made myself continue anyway. “And I’m asking you to listen.”
Listen. The concept held something that might have been amusement or might have been contempt.
It was hard to tell with a being whose emotional landscape bore no resemblance to anything human.
Your kind has spoken much and done little.
The one who wounded me is dead, but his poison still flows through my veins. Why should I listen to more words?
“Because words aren’t all I have to offer.”
I reached for the ley line, not to draw power this time, but to open myself, to make my consciousness transparent to the ancient intelligence that regarded me with such cold patience.
It was terrifying, stripping away barriers I’d spent my whole life building, letting something so vast and alien see every part of who I was…
every fear, every doubt, every moment of weakness I’d tried to hide from the world.
The Dragon would see it all, would judge me by the full measure of my humanity, not just the brave face I tried to present.
But I did it anyway. I didn’t have any other choice.
Show me, the Dragon commanded, and I obeyed.
I started with Ben.
I let the Dragon see him as I saw him, not just the man with the silver scars and the hazel eyes, but everything underneath.
The cryptozoologist who had chased mysteries across the country because he couldn’t stop believing that the world held far more than what ordinary people saw.
The stranger who had walked into my shop back in May, pretending to need binoculars for birdwatching, and had somehow become the center of my entire existence.
The partner who had stood beside me through shadow stalkers and corrupted phoenixes and government conspiracies, never once asking for more than I could give.
I showed the Dragon the night Ben had stepped in front of Rosenthal’s weapon.
The creature needed to see the moment when the beam had been charging, when I’d known with terrible certainty that I was about to die, followed by the impact of Ben’s body against mine as he threw himself between me and destruction.
I let the Dragon feel what I had felt in that moment — the horror and the gratitude and the desperate, overwhelming love that had crystallized into something unbreakable.
And I showed it the aftermath. Ben in the unicorn’s healing light, his body covered in silver burns that would never fully fade, the dimensional fire seared into his flesh because he had chosen my life over his own wholeness.
The weeks of recovery, the way his scars glowed when we touched, the new abilities that had emerged from his transformation, abilities he’d used tonight to protect people he barely knew, absorbing the electromagnetic weapon’s frequency even though it might have killed him.
The Dragon’s attention sharpened as I showed it that moment in the forest, Ben on his knees with blood streaming from his nose and ears, his scars blazing white-hot as he drew the pain of an entire assault into himself.
I let it feel the choice he had made, the choice to suffer so that others wouldn’t have to.
A conduit, the Dragon observed, although its inner voice was so neutral that I couldn’t tell for sure if it thought that was a good or a bad thing. One who carries fire he did not choose.
“One who carries it anyway,” I said. “Because that’s what love looks like. Not just the easy parts — the flowers and the sweet words and the comfortable silences. The hard parts, too. The sacrifice. The willingness to burn if it means the person you love doesn’t have to.”
I felt something shift in the Dragon’s consciousness. I wouldn’t have called it a softening, but it did seem like a kind of recognition, as if it had seen something unexpected, something that didn’t fit the narrative it had constructed about humanity’s fundamental corruption.
Before that recognition could fade, I showed it my father.
This one was harder. The wounds here were older and deeper, tangled up with seventeen years of anger and grief and desperate, unanswered questions. But I made myself open those wounds anyway, let the Dragon see the little girl I’d been when Finn Lowell walked out the door and never came back.
I showed it the birthday cards that had arrived for a few years and then stopped.
The way I’d waited by the mailbox for days after each one, hoping for something more — a letter, a phone call, any sign that my father still loved me.
The slow, painful process of accepting that he wasn’t coming back, of building walls around the part of my heart he’d occupied so his absence wouldn’t hurt so much.
I showed it the canceled checks I’d found in my grandmother’s files, the ones that had seemed like proof of blackmail.
The fury I’d felt when I realized he’d been taking money from my family for years, the way that fury had curdled into something cold and permanent.
The seventeen years I’d spent hating a man I didn’t understand, mourning a relationship I thought had been a lie.
And then I showed it the truth.
The surveillance network Finn had built, the web of contacts and equipment and carefully cultivated relationships that had protected us from threats we never even knew existed.
The night in the San Francisco bar when he’d dropped my graduation photo, knowing that Ben would find it, hoping the cryptozoologist’s curiosity would lead him to Silver Hollow.
The months he’d spent watching from the shadows, intercepting dangers before they could reach us, sacrificing any chance of a relationship with his daughter so she would be safe.