It was my grandmother who broke the silence.
“She’s right,” Emily said, her voice filled with the same authority it had always possessed, even now, when she was exhausted and gray-faced from nine months in limbo. “Sidney isn’t the girl we left behind, Josie. She’s something else. Something we need to understand if we’re going to fight this war together.”
She came over to the place where I sat and took my hands from my mother’s grip, turning them over so she could examine the scars that traced my forearms. Her touch was clinical, professional, but I felt something else almost hidden underneath — a grandmother’s concern and a guardian’s assessment and a scholar’s curiosity all tangled together.
“A full phoenix merge,” she murmured as she traced one of the fern-like patterns with her fingertip. “I didn’t know that such a thing was even possible.”
Oh, it was possible…barely. Although I’d tried to push those memories to the back of my mind, I couldn’t stop myself from remembering the merge and that terrible moment when I’d felt my consciousness begin to dissolve into the phoenix’s fire. But Ben’s voice had called me back, and his bioelectric field had wrapped around mine like an anchor. If he hadn’t been there, if our connection hadn’t been strong enough to hold me….
“But you survived,” my grandmother continued, her sharp eyes meeting mine. “More than survived. The fire rewrote you, Sidney. It didn’t destroy you — it transformed you into something new.”
She released my hands and stepped back, her gaze sweeping over me with an intensity that made me want to squirm.
“Stand up,” she commanded. “Let me see you properly.”
I obeyed, pushing back my chair and rising to my feet. My mother and father watched in silence as my grandmother circled me slowly, her gaze tracking details I couldn’t see.
“The bioelectric field is completely restructured,” she said, half to herself. “The dimensional energy is integrated at the cellular level, not just channeled through the nervous system like it is for the rest of us. And the resonance….” She paused in front of me, her head tilted slightly. “You’re broadcasting on frequencies I’ve never encountered before. No wonder the Dragon spoke to you directly. No wonder the other guardians felt your call across the void.”
“What does it mean?” my mother asked, her voice tight with concern.
“It means she’s not entirely human anymore.” My grandmother’s words were blunt, clinical, but I heard the wonder underneath them. “The merge didn’t just give her access to dimensional fire — it made her part of it. She’s a hybrid now. Part guardian, part…something else.”
“Part phoenix?” I asked, remembering the ancient creature’s consciousness merging with mine, the flood of memories and sensations that had threatened to drown my sense of self.
“Possibly. Or part of whatever force created the phoenixes in the first place.” My grandmother shook her head slowly. “It’s hard to say, since we have no real context for this sort of thing. Possibly, the other guardians would know more, since their lines go back farther than ours. Mary Welling might have become a guardian more than a hundred and fifty years ago, but there’s still so much we don’t know. The only thing I do know is that Sidney isn’t the same woman we left behind nine months ago.”
“Emily.” My mother’s voice was sharp with warning. “She doesn’t need to hear — ”
“She needs to hear all of it.” My grandmother’s tone was firm enough that my mother subsided, even though her expression remained troubled. “The transformation is already complete, Josie. We can’t undo it even if we wanted to. All we can do is help Sidney understand what she’s become and hope she has the strength to bear it.”
I thought of the Dragon’s ultimatum, of the fire burning in my blood and the network of portals glowing in the back of my mind. “I’m not going to become a monster,” I said.
“No.” My grandmother’s expression softened slightly, the clinical assessment giving way to something warmer. “No, I don’t think you are. You have so many anchors to keep you you — your connection to Ben, your love for this town, your stubborn insistence on seeing the best in people even when they don’t deserve it.” A faint smile touched her lips. “You get that from your mother, by the way. She was always too soft-hearted for this work.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” my mother said dryly.
“It was meant as one.” My grandmother reached out and cupped my face in her hands, the gesture achingly familiar from a thousand childhood moments. “You’ve done well, Sidney. Better than I had any right to hope for when we left. Whatever happens next, I want you to know that.”
Tears burned at the corners of my eyes, and I blinked them back. “We’re not done yet. Julian Gregory is still out there, still drilling into the ley lines. And the Dragon — ”
“The Dragon will wait.” My grandmother released me and stepped back, brisk again. “We have time, not much, but enough to plan properly. Tomorrow, we’ll gather the other guardians and begin mapping the contamination in the ley lines, and we’ll figure out exactly how much damage Gregory has done and how we can begin to heal it.”
“And tonight?”
She glanced at the window, where the first gray light of dawn was beginning to creep across the sky. “Tonight is already over. Get some sleep, Sidney. All of you.” Her gaze moved to my mother and father, still sitting in their separate corners of the kitchen like boxers in opposite corners of a ring. “We have difficult days ahead, and we’ll all need our strength.”
She swept out of the kitchen without waiting for a response, her footsteps retreating toward the stairs and her old bedroom, which still awaited her on the second floor. In all the months she’d been lost to the portal, I’d barely ventured in there, only to dust and to open the windows when the weather allowed so the space wouldn’t get too musty.
After she was gone, I looked over at my parents, feeling those seventeen years of silence and secrets hanging between them like a fog. There was so much more that needed to be said, so many wounds that needed tending. But my grandmother was right — the night was over, and we were all running on fumes.
“We should sleep,” I said, and I could hear the weariness in my voice.
My mother nodded, then rose from her chair and came over so she could press a kiss against my forehead. “Your old room?”
I nodded. “Yes, Ben and I are in my room. Your room is still waiting for you.”
Something flickered across her face at the mention of Ben sharing my bed, but she didn’t comment. “And Finn?”