“Finn Lowell,” she said flatly. “I pulled your file from DAPI’s servers before I burned them. Impressive work staying off the grid for almost two decades.”
My father tilted his head. “Agent Morse. I’d say it’s a pleasure, but we both know better.”
“You two know each other?” I asked.
“We’ve never met.” Rebecca dropped the duffel bag by the door and moved into the hallway, her movements casual but also filled with a certain coiled menace. “But I know who he is. DAPI had a file on him going back fifteen years. They could never pin anything concrete on him, but they knew he was out there, watching.”
“Watching and protecting,” my father said mildly.
“That’s one interpretation.” Rebecca’s tone made it clear she had others.
I stepped between them, holding up a hand. “Okay, everybody, just…stop. Rebecca, what are you doing here? I thought you were in Oregon.”
Her expression softened slightly when she looked at me, although I wasn’t sure whether that was because of the trauma that was no doubt reflected in my face, or the memory of the man she’d left behind. “The seismic spikes triggered every sensor Eric and I set up along the border. Whatever happened this morning, it registered on equipment two hundred miles away.” She paused there before adding, “Eric’s running comms from Grants Pass, but I thought I’d better drive down here and make sure you weren’t dead.”
“We’re not dead,” I said, summoning a tired grin. “Just…dealing with a lot.”
“I can see that.” Her gaze flicked to my father again and then back to me. “You covered your tracks well.”
“I had to.” Finn’s voice was quiet. “My daughter’s life depended on it.”
The kitchen fell silent. I could sense the tension between Rebecca and my father, the wariness that came from years of operating on opposite sides of a shadow war neither of them could fully acknowledge. But I could also feel something else underneath it, a shared understanding of what it meant to sacrifice everything for a cause you believed in.
“The tremor this morning,” Rebecca said at last, breaking the quiet. “What caused it?”
“The Dragon,” I said. “It’s awake. Fully awake, and rising.”
Rebecca’s expression didn’t change, but I saw her jaw clench slightly. “Eric’s readings suggested something big. He’s been tracking anomalies in the ley line network for weeks, but this morning’s spike was off the charts.” She paused, then went on, “But I don’t think either of us was expecting a dragon. So…how bad is it?”
“Bad.” I thought about the voice I’d heard in my head, that vast and ancient fury. “Whatever’s down there, it’s not happy. And I don’t think it’s going to go back to sleep on its own.”
“No,” my father said quietly. “It won’t.”
We all turned to look at him. He stood near the doorway, his dark eyes distant, and for the first time since he’d come inside the house, he looked truly afraid.
“I’ve been tracking the precursor signs for seventeen years,” he said. “I knew something was building toward this moment. I just didn’t know what.” He looked at me, his expression now haunted. “Ignis Aeternus. The everlasting fire. It’s not just a creature, Sidney. It’s a force of nature. And if it decides that humanity is a threat to the portal network….”
No point in finishing that sentence, not when we all could visualize for ourselves what might happen when a creature of vast power and vast indifference to humanity thought we were more trouble than we were worth.
“Then we need to figure out how to stop it,” I said. “Or at least how to convince it that we’re not the enemy.”
“That’s not going to be easy.” Rebecca moved past us into the kitchen, her low-heeled boots tapping faintly on the hardwood floor. “From what Eric’s been able to piece together, the Dragon — or whatever it is — has been dormant for centuries. Something woke it up. Until we know what that something was, we can’t predict what it’s going to do next.”
“The phoenix,” Ben said quietly. We all turned to look at him, and he went on, “The merge. When Sidney burned away the shadow corruption, she sent a surge of clean energy through the entire portal network. What if that surge is what woke the Dragon?”
It was the same theory we’d discussed that morning, but hearing him say it out loud in front of my father and Rebecca Morse made it feel much more real.
More damning.
“It makes sense,” my father said slowly. “The Dragon has been sleeping beneath the ley lines for centuries, drawing power from them, maintaining some kind of equilibrium. If something disrupted that equilibrium — a massive influx of clean energy, for instance — it might have been enough to rouse it.”
“So this is my fault,” I said.
“No.” Ben reached over and took my hand, and I felt the familiar warmth of his bioelectric field brushing against mine. “You saved the phoenix. You saved the entire damn portal network. You couldn’t have known — ”
“Couldn’t I?” I pulled my hand away from his, suddenly angry. “I merged with a creature made of dimensional fire and sent a shockwave through the entire global network. Was I really stupid enough to think there wouldn’t be consequences?”
“There are always consequences,” my father said quietly. “For every action, every choice. The question isn’t whether you made the right decision. The question is what you do next.”