He nodded grimly and raised his hands, and I felt him reach for the strange resonance ability that the phoenix fire had burned into his nervous system. Even depleted, even damaged, he could still project enough electromagnetic interference to disrupt their targeting systems, to make their rifle scopes glitch and their radios crackle with static. It wouldn’t last long, but it might be enough.
I scrambled across the clearing toward my parents, staying low, my knees and palms scraping against wet rock and sodden leaves. Emily and Priya followed, my grandmother grabbing Finn’s legs while Priya took his shoulders as they dragged him toward the minimal shelter of a rocky outcrop at the edge of the basin. My mother crawled alongside them, her hands pressed against the wound in Finn’s back, her face streaked with rain and tears.
“Apply pressure,” I said, my voice sounding much steadier than I felt. “As much as you can. Don’t let up.”
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Josie didn’t look at me. Her eyes were fixed on Finn’s face, on the gray pallor that was spreading across his features, on the way his breath came in shallow, rattling gasps. “Sidney, tell me the truth.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Instead, I pulled off my jacket and wadded it into a makeshift compression bandage, pressing it against the entry wound while Emily secured it with a length of torn fabric from her own shirt. The blood soaked through almost immediately, hot and thick, and I felt something twist in my gut at the sight of it — my father’s blood, the blood of the man who had walked away from me seventeen years ago and spent every day since watching from the shadows.
He’d come back. In the end, when it mattered most, he’d come back.
“Sid….” His voice was a harsh whisper, his dark eyes finding mine with obvious effort. “Josie…is she….”
“She’s fine.” I gripped his hand, felt how cold his fingers were despite the warmth of the blood that soaked through my jacket. “You saved her, Dad. She’s fine.”
A wavery smile touched his lips. “Good. That’s…that’s good.”
Another burst of gunfire erupted from the treeline, closer this time. I felt the bullets tear through the air above us, felt Ben’s electromagnetic shield falter as the strain of maintaining it pushed him toward his limits. We were running out of time. If we didn’t do something in the next few minutes, the mercenaries would overwhelm us, and everything my father had just sacrificed would be for nothing.
I looked down at him — at the man I’d spent seventeen years hating, seventeen years mourning, seventeen years trying to understand. He’d left me. He’d missed my graduations and my heartbreaks and all the small moments that make up a life. He’d watched from the shadows instead of standing in the light where I could see him.
But he’d also protected me. In his own broken, inadequate way, he’d done everything he could to keep me safe. And now he was bleeding out on the forest floor because he’d thrown himself in front of a bullet meant for my mother.
I’d been holding back ever since the phoenix merge, ever since I’d learned what I was capable of and what it might cost me to use that power without restraint. The dimensional fire that lived in my blood was dangerous — I knew that, had seen what happened when I pushed too hard, had felt the way it threatened to burn away everything that made me human. So I’d been careful. I’d rationed my abilities like a miser hoarding gold, afraid of what might happen if I truly let go.
But my father was dying. My mother was sobbing. And the men who had done this were still out there, still advancing, still threatening everyone I loved.
I stood up.
“Sidney, what are you — ” my grandmother began, but I wasn’t listening anymore.
I reached for the ley line.
Not carefully this time, not with the cautious, measured approach I’d been using since the merge. This time, I grabbed it with both hands and pulled, drinking in the dimensional energy like a woman dying of thirst finally finding water. It poured into me, golden and vast and ancient, the accumulated power of millennia, the fire that had burned since before the mountains were young.
The Dragon felt me do it. I sensed its attention shift, its massive consciousness turning toward the tiny speck of awareness that was me, recognizing the piece of its own fire that lived in my blood. For one terrifying moment, I thought it might strike me down, might decide I was just another human meddling with forces beyond my understanding.
But instead, it gave me more.
The power that flooded through me was beyond anything I’d experienced before — beyond the phoenix merge, beyond the Halloween ritual, beyond every desperate channeling I’d ever attempted. It filled every cell of my body, lit up pathways I hadn’t known existed, turned my scars from faint traces of gold into blazing lines of pure light. I felt my feet leave the ground, felt my hair lift around my face in a corona of static electricity, felt my voice emerge as something barely human when I opened my mouth.
“Get away from my family.”
The mercenaries were still advancing, still firing, still convinced that their weapons and their training gave them the advantage. They didn’t understand what they were facing. They couldn’t.
I raised my hands, and the world bent around me.
It wasn’t electromagnetic interference this time, wasn’t the focused disruption I’d used against surveillance equipment and targeting systems. This was older and stronger, the raw force of dimensional energy expressing itself as pure kinetic impact. A wave of pressure rolled outward from where I stood, invisible but irresistible, carrying with it the weight of ancient mountains and sleeping dragons.
The first mercenary was lifted off his feet and thrown backward into a tree trunk. I heard the impact, heard the breath driven from his lungs, heard his weapon clatter to the ground next to his unconscious body. The second and third went down together, caught by the edge of the wave and sent tumbling across the clearing like leaves in a hurricane. The fourth — the one who had shot my father — tried to run, tried to disappear back into the trees, but I wasn’t feeling merciful.
I reached out with my awareness, found the thread of his bioelectric signature, and pulled.
He came flying backward through the air, his arms pinwheeling, his scream of terror cut short when I slammed him into the ground at my feet. He lay there gasping, his rifle somewhere behind him, his eyes wide with a fear that would have satisfied me deeply if I’d had any room left for petty emotions.
“The electromagnetic weapon,” I said. My voice still didn’t sound like mine. It was too resonant, too layered, as if multiple versions of myself were speaking in harmony. “Where is it?”
He stared up at me, his mouth working soundlessly. Blood trickled from his nose and ears, the burst capillaries evidence of the force I’d exerted to bring him down. Behind me, I could feel my family watching — my mother still pressing her hands against my father’s wound, Ben on his knees with exhaustion, Emily and Priya frozen in the act of providing first aid.