“She knows,” my father said when they were finished with their story. “Rosenthal understands exactly what Gregory is doing. She’s just not in a position to stop him.”
“Then we need to find a way to give her that position,” Ben replied. “She’s the weak point. If we can get her to work with us — ”
“Work with us?” I pulled my hands free from Ben’s grip, the synchronization breaking with a faint crackle of static. “The woman who built a weapon to destroy me? Who would have killed both of us if you hadn’t stepped in front of that beam?”
“I know what she did.” Ben’s voice was steady, but I saw the way his hand moved unconsciously to his chest, to the scars hidden beneath his flannel shirt. “I’m not saying we should trust her. I’m just saying that we might be able to use her fear against Gregory.”
They continued talking — tactics and approaches and contingencies — but I’d stopped listening. The pressure in my skull was building again, the low-grade hum that had become my constant companion over the past three weeks. It was different now, though, piercing, almost insistent.
Something is calling me.
“Sidney?” Ben’s voice cut through the noise inside my head. “You okay?”
No, I wasn’t okay. If I was going to be perfectly honest, I was very far from okay. But I couldn’t explain what I was feeling, couldn’t put into words the way the ground seemed to be singing to me, the way every nerve ending in my body was screaming that I needed to be somewhere else.
“I need to go to the clearing,” I said.
Everyone went quiet.
“The portal site?” Rebecca’s voice was careful, neutral in that way she had when she was trying not to show how much something worried her. “Right now?”
“Something’s calling me.” I met her gaze, then Ben’s, and finally my father’s. “I can feel it. The Dragon — it’s not just stirring anymore. It’s reaching out. And I think….” I paused, trying to find the right words, not sure if they even existed. “I think it wants to talk.”
“Or it wants to kill you,” my father said flatly. “Sidney, we don’t know anything about this creature except that it’s ancient and powerful and angry. Walking into its territory alone — ”
“I won’t be alone.” I gazed at Ben and saw the fear and determination that warred in his expression, the same look he’d worn when he stepped in front of Rosenthal’s weapon. “Ben will come with me. And the unicorn….” I trailed off there, not sure how I could possibly explain the intuition that had been growing in me all day. “The unicorn will be there. I can feel that, too.”
The silence in the kitchen stretched for several heartbeats. Outside, thunder rumbled — not the normal kind, but something deeper and more resonant, like the earth itself was clearing its throat.
“This is insane,” my father said. But his voice had lost its edge, replaced by something that sounded almost like resignation. “You’re talking about walking into the territory of a creature that could destroy you with a thought.”
“I’m talking about facing what’s coming instead of waiting for it to come to me.” I met his dark eyes, so different from mine, and saw the seventeen years of distance between us reflected there. “Isn’t that what you’ve been doing all this time? Watching from the shadows, trying to get ahead of threats before they could reach us? This is the same thing. Just more direct.”
He didn’t have an answer for that remark.
I didn’t think he would.
Ben stepped closer to me, and his hand found mine again. The light between our palms was steadier now, gold-tinged, and some of the tension in my shoulders eased.
“If you’re going,” he said quietly, “I’m going with you.”
“I know.” I squeezed his fingers. “I’m counting on it.”
The forest felt different at dusk.
I’d walked these paths hundreds of times over the years, had learned them the way you learn the rooms of your own house — by feel, by instinct, by the accumulated weight of memory. But as Ben and I made our way toward the portal site, everything seemed as if it had shifted, like the world had tilted slightly on its axis. The trees loomed taller and darker than I remembered, their branches reaching toward the bruised purple sky like supplicants. The undergrowth was thicker and even more tangled, and the usual sounds of the forest — birdsong, the rustle of small animals, the whisper of the wind through the leaves — had been replaced by a silence so complete that our footsteps seemed almost obscenely loud.
The green lightning had intensified as the sun went down, no longer just crawling across the clouds but actively writhing, sending flickering shadows through the canopy that made it hard to trust what I was seeing. My dimensional scars prickled beneath my sleeves, and I could feel Ben’s bioelectric field pulsing faster than normal, responding to the charged atmosphere.
We didn’t talk. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.
The closer we got to the portal site, the stronger the calling became. It wasn’t a voice exactly, nothing so simple as words or language. It was more like a gravity, a pull that tugged at something deep in my body, drawing me forward with an urgency that bordered on compulsion. I found myself walking faster without consciously deciding to, my feet finding the path through the darkening forest with a surety that had nothing to do with memory and everything to do with the force that was summoning me.
We reached the glade just as the last light faded from the sky.
The standing stones were exactly as I remembered them — seven massive granite pillars arranged in a rough circle, their surfaces carved with Ogham letters that seemed to pulse with a faint inner light. The bioluminescent moss that carpeted the clearing had spread since my last visit, creeping up the bases of the stones and spreading out across the forest floor in patterns that looked almost deliberate. Where my mother’s and grandmother’s footprints had once been visible, there was now only a soft greenish glow.
And in the center of the circle, exactly where the portal had once appeared, the ground was cracking.