The scabs pulled when I flexed my fingers, and underneath them I could sense something wrong with the tissue itself. The dimensional energy had affected the cellular structure and left patterns that my electromagnetic senses read as foreign, unnatural.
A physical sign of the cost of loving Ben Sanders, of refusing to leave him in Rosenthal’s custody.
I’d make the same choice again without hesitation, but that didn’t stop the burns from aching, a dull throb deep inside that I didn’t think would go away any time soon.
Ben was asleep on the floor beside the couch, one hand still loosely holding mine even in slumber. I could sense his electromagnetic signature the way I might sense a warm fire on a cold night — steady and grounding. His presence made my abilities much more focused. If he hadn’t been there during the facility breach, I would have died pushing that pulse. My nervous system would have shorted out completely and left me brain-dead on the forest floor while DAPI’s security teams closed in.
Gently, I pulled my hand free, not wanting to wake him. He needed rest after everything Rosenthal had put him through. The bruises on his wrists from the restraints they’d used to bind him had begun to fade to yellow-green, but I could still see the marks, and I still remembered the fury I’d felt when I saw him held captive, knowing they were using him as leverage against me.
DAPI had understood our electromagnetic connection better than we had. They’d known that threatening Ben would make me reckless and desperate, willing to push past every safe limit to get him back.
They’d been right.
The phoenix stirred near the woodstove, and I felt its attention turn toward me. Our connection allowed it to transmit a kind of desperate urgency mixed with something that seemed almost like an apology.
I went over and knelt beside the creature, my bare feet silent on the cabin’s worn floorboards. The wood was cold against my skin, and I could sense the electromagnetic signatures of the building’s old wiring running through the walls. Nothing unusual. Nothing that suggested DAPI had found us yet.
Small mercies, I supposed.
I studied the shadow veins that now covered most of the phoenix’s feathers. Only small patches of clean fire remained, concentrated around its head and chest. The rest was corruption so thick I could feel it pulling at my consciousness whenever I touched the phoenix’s mind. It was like standing too close to a cliff edge, that vertigo sensation of something vast and wrong trying to drag me over.
“I know,” I whispered, reaching out to stroke one of the few remaining clean patches. The feathers were warm under my fingers, but not the comfortable glow of healthy phoenix fire. This heat burned like someone with a raging fever. “We’re almost out of time.”
The phoenix’s response came as a pulse of warmth, and I felt it reach deeper into our connection. This wasn’t just surface contact anymore. It wanted to show me something — something I probably wouldn’t like, based on the apologetic undertone to its consciousness.
I pulled in a breath and let my defenses drop, allowing the creature’s consciousness to merge more fully with mine.
The rebirth ritual exploded into my awareness with perfect, terrible clarity.
This wasn’t going to be like my grandmother’s experience, maintaining an anchor connection while the phoenix transformed. That was for clean rebirths, where the phoenix’s consciousness remained intact throughout the process. Under normal circumstances, the creature could guide its own transformation, burn away its old form, and rebuild from the ashes while the anchor held the pattern of what phoenix fire should be.
But with the corruption spreading through almost all of its body, the creature’s sense of self was now almost gone. It couldn’t guide its own transformation anymore. The contamination had eaten away too much of its identity and left it unable to distinguish between clean fire and twisted energy. If it tried to rebirth on its own, it would just re-create the corruption, building a new body from the same poisoned template.
The ritual I was seeing required something else entirely. A complete merge. Not Sidney-and-phoenix, two consciousnesses working together. It had to be Sidney-phoenix. One being. One consciousness. One existence.
I would have to die and be reborn with the phoenix.
My brain didn’t want to acknowledge what my heart already understood. When I pulled back from the connection, I realized my hands were shaking, and I had to press them flat against the floor to steady myself. The dimensional burns protested the pressure and sent fresh pain shooting up my arms.
“No,” I said out loud. “There has to be another way.”
But the phoenix’s only response was patient certainty. With corruption this extensive, the creature needed much more than a simple anchor. It needed a consciousness that could hold the pattern of what clean fire should be and let the corrupted parts burn away completely. Only then could it rebuild from that clean core.
And the only consciousness that understood both phoenix fire and a human form was mine.
I would dissolve into dimensional flame, my sense of self fragmenting as I merged with the phoenix’s dying consciousness. I would hold the pattern of clean fire while the corruption burned away, maintaining that image through pain and dissolution and the complete loss of everything that made me Sidney Lowell. Then we would rebuild together, phoenix and human merged into something new.
If the process went perfectly, if I held on to enough of what made me Sidney, I would separate at the end. I’d be changed but still myself, still the woman who owned a pet shop and loved Ben Sanders and was on her third rewatch of Gilmore Girls.
If I lost myself in the fire, though, I would stay merged forever. Sidney Lowell would cease to exist, and something else would emerge instead. It would be an entity with my memories, my knowledge, but utterly different at the same time.
Something that used to be human but wasn’t anymore.
My grandmother’s journals had never mentioned anything like this, but that didn’t surprise me too much. She’d never had to face such a terrible conundrum.
No one had.
No guardian in my family’s history had ever faced a phoenix this corrupted. They’d always intervened much earlier in the process…if there had even been any contamination at all…and had helped the creatures through clean rebirths before the corruption could spread this far. But I’d been occupied with shadow stalkers and DAPI’s surveillance and protecting Silver Hollow from dimensional incursions. I’d had no idea what was happening in the woods, and by the time the phoenix had let its anguish flare to a point where I could pick up on its suffering, it was already far too late for a simple anchoring.
