We had less than two months.
The images cut off abruptly, and I found myself on my knees in the moss, Ben beside me with his arms around my shoulders, the unicorn standing over us both like a shield. My nose was bleeding again — I could taste copper at the back of my throat — and my head felt like it had been hollowed out and stuffed with broken glass. Every nerve in my body was screaming, and for a long moment, I couldn’t remember my own name.
“Sidney.” Ben’s voice, raw with fear. “Sidney, come back. Stay with me.”
I clung to him, to the warmth of his bioelectric field, to the anchor of his presence. Slowly, painfully, I pulled myself back together.
The Dragon was watching us. It hadn’t moved, hadn’t attacked, hadn’t done anything except wait. And as my vision cleared, I realized that the unicorn was positioned between us and the massive creature, its horn raised and glowing, and something was passing between them. A negotiation, I thought. A bargain between two intelligences I still could barely comprehend.
I pushed myself upright, still leaning heavily on Ben, and met the Dragon’s ancient eyes.
“I understand,” I said. My voice was cracked and broken, barely audible over the pounding of my own heart. “The infection has to be removed. Gregory has to be stopped.” I paused, gathering the shreds of my courage. “But we need time. My family has protected this portal for generations. Give us a chance to fix this ourselves.”
The Dragon didn’t respond — not with images, not with any sense I could interpret. But its huge head turned toward the unicorn, and I felt something pass between them, a communication in a language older than humanity.
Then the unicorn stepped forward and touched its horn to my forehead.
The contact was gentle, barely a brush of pressure, but the effect was immediate. Warmth flooded through me, burning away the headache, the nausea, the ragged edges of my consciousness. The bleeding stopped, and my thoughts cleared. And when the unicorn stepped back, I felt something new in my mind — a connection, thin but unmistakable, linking me to the vast presence of the Dragon.
It wasn’t communication, at least not in any way I recognized. No, it was more like a timer, a countdown I would feel in my bones, ticking away the seconds until the Winter Solstice.
You have been given a chance, the unicorn’s presence seemed to say. The Dragon has agreed to wait. But the deadline is absolute. There will be no extensions, no appeals, no second chances.
“I understand,” I repeated, and this time, my voice was stronger.
The Dragon held my gaze for one more endless moment. Then, with a movement that seemed almost reluctant, it began to sink back into the earth. The great slabs of stone closed over it like doors, the amber light fading, the heat receding. Within moments, there was no sign that it had ever been there except for the pattern of cracks in the ground and the faint smell of volcanic heat that still lingered in the air.
The pressure in my skull eased. The green lightning overhead seemed to dim slightly, returning to its slow, sick crawl across the clouds. The forest sounds began to return, tentatively at first, then with growing confidence, as if the creatures that lived here were emerging from hiding now that the danger had passed.
The unicorn turned to look at me one last time, its dark eyes unreadable. Then it walked into the trees and disappeared, as silent and graceful as it had arrived.
I sagged against Ben, suddenly exhausted in a way that went far deeper than simple physical fatigue.
“Did that just happen?” Ben’s voice was hoarse with worry and wonder. “Did a dragon just give us an ultimatum?”
“Yes.” I closed my eyes, feeling the phantom weight of the deadline settling into my bones. “We have until the Winter Solstice to remove Gregory’s operation and heal the damage he’s done to the ley line. If we don’t….”
I didn’t need to finish the sentence. Ben had seen the images, too — I could tell from the way his bioelectric field was pulsing, fast and erratic with residual fear.
“Two months,” he said quietly.
“Less.” I opened my eyes and looked at the sky, at the green lightning that was the visible symptom of everything going wrong. “The Solstice is December twenty-first. That gives us about seven weeks.”
And in that time, we’d need to stop a tech billionaire with unlimited resources and no understanding of what he was doing. We’d need to somehow convince Sonya Rosenthal to turn against her only ally, the person who’d kept her from ending up in federal prison. Seven weeks to heal damage that had been accumulating for months.
And if we failed, everyone I’d ever loved would die.
“We should get back,” I said, pushing myself upright and trying to ignore the way my legs wanted to buckle beneath me. “The others need to know what happened.”
Ben nodded, his arm steady around my waist as we turned away from the clearing. But I could feel him looking back over his shoulder at the cracked earth where the Dragon had emerged, and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was.
The countdown had begun.
Chapter Six
The walk back through the forest felt a lot longer than the walk in.
Ben kept his arm around Sidney’s waist, supporting her weight when her steps faltered, which was more often than he would have liked. The encounter with the Dragon had drained too much from her; he could feel it in the way her bioelectric field dropped in and out, like a radio signal struggling to find its frequency. The scars on his chest and arms pulsed in sympathy, a low ache that reminded him of the days immediately after the phoenix merge, when both of them had been so depleted that just getting out of bed had felt like climbing a mountain.