I looked at Ben and saw my own uncertainty reflected in his eyes. But I also saw trust. He believed I could do this. He believed I could figure out how to save this ancient, suffering creature.
“Okay,” I said, then took a deep breath and immediately regretted it when that gulp of cold air made my head swim. “Okay. Ben, I need you to monitor everything. If something goes wrong — if I start channeling too much energy — you have to pull me back.”
“Sidney — ”
“Promise me.”
He hesitated, then nodded. “I promise. But we’re doing this together. I’m not going anywhere.”
I bent and picked up the clean feather, and the moment my fingers touched it, I understood what the phoenix wanted. The fire had memory. It had pattern. And somewhere inside this corrupted, dying creature, that clean pattern still existed — buried, but not destroyed.
If I could reach it with my electromagnetic abilities, if I could resonate with the clean fire and help it remember its true nature, then maybe I could start to burn away the corruption.
It was a long shot. It might not work. And even if it did, it might kill me in the process.
But looking into the phoenix’s ancient, pain-filled eyes, I knew I had to try.
“All right,” I said quietly. “Let’s see if the guardian’s daughter can sing the electric song loud enough.”
I pressed both hands to the phoenix’s wing and closed my eyes, then reached deep into those strange abilities that had surfaced over the past few months. The clean feather’s pattern became my guide, showing me what the fire was supposed to be. And slowly, carefully, I began to sing it back to the dying creature.
At once, its fire surged toward my touch like a drowning person reaching for rescue, and the clearing erupted in light.
Behind my closed eyelids, I felt Ben’s hand grip my shoulder, anchoring me, keeping me connected to the physical world even as my consciousness merged with otherworldly fire.
And then black flame swept over me.
Chapter Two
The phoenix’s corrupted fire cast shadows across Sidney’s unconscious face, and Ben didn’t know what scared him more — that she wasn’t waking up, or that his EMF reader had just risen past levels that shouldn’t exist outside a nuclear reactor.
“Come on.” He shook her shoulder again, harder this time. At first, he’d touched her almost timidly, but now his desperation made him rougher than he’d intended. “Sidney, please.”
Nothing. Her pulse was steady under his fingers, but her skin had gone clammy, and the blood from her nose had dried in dark tracks down to her chin. When he’d pulled her away from the phoenix ten minutes ago, she’d been convulsing. Now she was completely still.
The phoenix stirred, and the orange-black fire surrounding it pulsed brighter. Every time it moved, the corruption spread a little farther through those magnificent wings. Ben watched another feather succumb — pure gold transforming to sick amber threaded with shadow.
Definitely halfway contaminated now. Maybe a whole lot more.
Waiting hadn’t done a bit of good. Now he had no choice but to reach out for help. His fingers began to scrabble for his phone, buried somewhere in the satchel he’d brought with him, and then he remembered that the EMP must have fried every electronic device within a two-mile radius. Except, somehow, his equipment. The sensors he’d pulled from his laptop bag — some of which were pieces left behind by Dr. Rosenthal’s team — were all working, all screaming warnings about energy levels and electromagnetic interference patterns that violated every law of physics he understood. Which, he had to admit, wasn’t a whole lot. He’d been teaching himself as best he could, but his background was in archaeology and cryptozoology, not quantum electrodynamics.
What he needed right now wasn’t working sensors, though. He needed a hospital. He needed some kind of assistance, although he wasn’t sure whether modern medicine could even help Sidney.
He needed —
“Ben Sanders.”
He spun toward the voice, one hand already going to the knife on his belt before his brain caught up and recognized Agent Rebecca Morse as she stepped into the clearing. She wore cargo pants and a long-sleeved thermal shirt instead of the severe suits that had been her uniform when she was conducting her investigations in Silver Hollow, although her blonde hair was pulled back as tight as ever. Behind her, the forest was starting to show hints of approaching dawn, the black sky softening to charcoal gray along the eastern horizon.
“Agent Morse.” Ben didn’t lower his hand from the knife. After everything that had happened over the past few weeks — DAPI surveillance, government interference, Sidney nearly hauled away for “enhanced interrogation” — his trust in federal agents had worn pretty thin. He knew that Rebecca Morse had been disgusted by Sonya Rosenthal’s methods and had even taken a leave of absence after Rosenthal was safely relegated to a desk job three thousand miles away, but knowing and trusting were two very different things.
Rebecca Morse’s gaze moved from him to Sidney, then to the phoenix, and he watched her face cycle through several expressions too quickly for him to read. Shock, for sure. Maybe calculation.
Awe.
“Rebecca,” she said briefly, although Ben wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to think of her as anything except “Agent Morse.” She went on, “My equipment picked up an electromagnetic pulse three hours ago. I’ve been tracking the source since then.” She took two steps closer and kept her hands visible in an obvious attempt to soothe his jittery nerves. “Is she alive?”
“Sidney? Yes. But she won’t wake up, and I can’t — ” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat and forced himself to try again. “The phoenix is dying. When she tried to cleanse the corruption, it overwhelmed her nervous system.”
