Chapter One
The electromagnetic pulse hit at a little after three in the morning, yanking me from sleep as effectively as though someone had grabbed me by the arm and thrown me to the floor.
The digital clock went dark, while across the room, my phone gave a single panicked flash before it, too, went black. The table fan on the dresser died at the same moment, its faint hum stopping so abruptly that the resulting silence pressed against my eardrums, a heavy, unnatural pressure that made my panicked breath sound like a roar.
But that silence lasted only a heartbeat before my electromagnetic sense — the strange gift I’d apparently inherited from generations of similarly talented women — erupted in a burst of agony.
I sat upright in bed and pressed both hands to my temples as wave after wave of distorted energy crashed through my body. This wasn’t the familiar background hum of Silver Hollow’s portal or the gentle pulse of the forest’s natural electromagnetic field. I’d gotten mostly used to those over the past few weeks, even though I knew it would take much longer than a few short weeks to truly accept them as part of myself.
No, whatever I was sensing now was chaotic and desperate. Dying.
Something in the forest was screaming.
For a moment, I sat in the utter darkness of my bedroom — a room without even the faint glow from the digital clock to illuminate the void — and tried to process what I was feeling, even as my brain shrieked at me to go take some ibuprofen or something, anything that might dull the agony even for a few minutes.
The terrible, shredded sensation was unlike anything I’d experienced before. It had texture and depth, layers of meaning my mind struggled to interpret, something that felt completely foreign. There was pain, yes, and desperation, absolutely. But underneath those surface emotions, I sensed something older and far more complex. I wasn’t picking up on a rabbit entangled in a snare or even a bear caught in an illegal trap. This was something ancient, something that had existed long before human civilization and was now crying out for help in a language my abilities could barely comprehend.
My nose began to bleed, an unwelcome warmth dripping down onto my upper lip.
I grabbed a tissue from the nightstand and held it to my face as I stumbled through the dark hallway. The big Craftsman house felt far too empty at night, even though I’d been living here alone since February, and now it was the middle of August. For my entire life, this house had been filled with my grandmother’s presence — the way she hummed in the kitchen as she prepared that evening’s meal, the cheery sound of her voice as she asked how my day had gone, the soft rustle of journal pages as she recorded her observations about the portal and the incredible creatures that sometimes crossed through from the other side.
Now she and my mother were both gone, trapped on the other side of an interdimensional crossing, lost in a realm I could barely comprehend and couldn’t reach. The house was mine by default, filled with furniture and memories but empty of the people who’d made it a home.
I forced myself to shake off the melancholy, even as I made my way down the dark stairs to the first floor, the Kleenex still pressed against my nose. No time for brooding now. Whatever was screaming in the forest needed help, and the distress call felt as if it was getting weaker by the second. Every instinct in my body screamed that if I didn’t reach the source soon, I’d be too late.
When I opened the front door, the night air that greeted me was cold and damp, chilly enough to make me pull in a shocked breath. Stars wheeled overhead in an unusually clear sky, and the new moon meant the darkness was absolute beyond the pale illumination the porch light sent out into the yard. I went back inside long enough to jam my feet into my hiking boots — which I’d left near the coat rack in the entry — and grab the heavy-duty flashlight from the entry table.
The pull in my chest was like a fishhook lodged behind my sternum, tugging me toward the forest with increasing urgency. I’d never felt anything like this before. Sure, I could always sense when the unicorn was near, and I’d also been able to feel it when the griffin stranded temporarily in Silver Hollow needed my help, but this was utterly different.
I paused on the porch, one hand on the railing, and tried to center myself. Lately, I’d been doing my best to teach myself techniques for managing electromagnetic overload — grounding exercises, visualization methods, ways to filter the constant barrage of electronic noise that plagued modern life. But those techniques were designed for everyday interference, not for whatever was happening now. I might as well have been using a garden hose to fight a forest fire.
The distress call pulsed again, stronger this time, and my knees buckled. I grabbed the porch railing with both hands, and the flashlight clattered to the wooden planks. Blood dripped from my nose onto the floor, missing the toes of my hiking boots by less than an inch. It looked black in the starlight.
“Come on, Sidney,” I muttered to myself. “Pull it together. Whatever’s out there needs you.”
I forced myself to breathe slowly, counting to four on the inhale, holding for four, exhaling for four. The technique didn’t stop the electromagnetic assault, but it gave me enough control to function…sort of. I pressed the Kleenex I held against my nose and was relieved to see that at least the bleeding seemed to have stopped, so I bent and retrieved the flashlight and made my way down the porch steps.
The gravel driveway crunched under my boots as I hurried toward the closest trailhead, about a quarter-mile from the property. My mother’s old Subaru sat in its usual spot in front of the garage, and for a moment, I considered taking it. The forest roads were rough, but I could get to the portal site much faster by car than on foot.
But no — the electromagnetic pulse had killed the power in my house, which meant it had probably fried every electronic device within a significant radius. The car wouldn’t start even if I tried. Sure, the thing was almost twenty years old, but it still had an electronic ignition.
I was maybe fifteen yards down the street when headlights swept across me, and Ben Sanders’ truck came skidding to a stop only a few feet away.
Relief flooded through me so intensely that my eyes burned. I hadn’t realized until that moment how much I’d dreaded facing this alone. Ben was here, the man who’d seen me at my worst over the past few months and who’d watched me develop these strange abilities without running screaming in the other direction…the man who’d somehow become the most important person in my life without either of us quite meaning for it to happen.
He was out of the driver’s seat before the engine stopped, his hair sticking up at odd angles and his battered old field jacket thrown on over what looked like pajama pants and a T-shirt that read “Bigfoot Doesn’t Believe in You, Either.” The laptop bag slung over his shoulder bounced against his hip as he jogged toward me, and I could see the glow of active equipment through the mesh side pocket.
“Tell me you felt that,” he said, slightly breathless. His hazel eyes were wide with the same mixture of worry and excitement I recognized from every other supernatural crisis we’d faced together this crazy summer. “My equipment went insane. Every sensor I have just registered a spike that shouldn’t be possible. I’m talking about magnitude readings that would require a solar flare or a nuclear detonation, but somehow localized to maybe a two-mile radius. Sidney, what the hell is happening?”
“I felt it.” My nose had started dripping again. I lifted my abused Kleenex and wiped blood from my upper lip. “Something’s dying out there, Ben. Something big.”
His expression shifted when he saw the blood, his excitement at this new phenomenon immediately replaced by concern. He closed the distance between us and gently tilted my chin up so he could examine my face in the beam of his flashlight. “You’re bleeding. How bad is the overload?”
I didn’t see much point in lying to him, so I simply said, “Bad.”
There was an understatement. The electromagnetic ebbs and flows of the forest had affected me before now, but my body had never reacted in such a viscerally physical way until this point. “But I can function. We need to move. Whatever’s out there, it’s connected to the portal. I can feel it. If it dies….”
I didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t need to.
