Now I was paying the price for that delay.
I pushed myself upright on shaking legs and moved to the cabin’s small kitchen, where I filled a glass with water I didn’t really want. My hands were still trembling badly enough that water sloshed over the rim, cold against my skin. I could sense the water’s electromagnetic properties, the way the molecules moved in response to temperature.
Where the hell had Rebecca Morse gone?
“Sidney?”
Ben’s voice made me turn around. He was awake and sitting up, his mid-brown hair mussed from sleep and his expression worried. The electromagnetic signature I could always sense grew warmer as he stood and crossed to me, and I felt my own abilities stabilize in response the closer he got. The trembling in my hands lessened slightly, although it didn’t disappear entirely.
“What happened?” He reached out and laid a gentle hand on my arm. “I felt something. Fear, I think. It woke me up.”
I set the glass down on the butcher-block counter before I dropped it. My fingers left wet prints on the scratched wood surface. “The phoenix showed me the full ritual. What I’ll have to do.”
Ben went very still, although his hand remained on my arm. Oddly, the pressure of his touch didn’t make my scars hurt. If anything, they felt a little better. “And?”
“And it requires a complete merge. Not just anchoring, but what I think is supposed to be a full consciousness integration.” The words sounded a lot steadier than I felt, and I was a little proud of myself for that. “I have to become part of the phoenix’s rebirth. If I can hold on to enough of my identity, I’ll separate at the end. If I can’t….”
I didn’t finish the sentence. Ben’s expression told me he understood exactly what I wasn’t saying.
“You’d be lost.” The words were quiet, almost flat. “Sidney Lowell would stop existing.”
“The entity that emerged would have my memories, maybe even some of my personality traits.” I picked up the water glass again, just to give my hands something to do. “But it wouldn’t be me, not really. It would be something else. Something that used to be human and used to be phoenix, merged into a new form that was neither.”
The chances of my coming out of such a terrible process still myself were not good.
My great-great-grandmother had nearly died anchoring a phoenix that was less than a third corrupted. Even as she healed, she realized that her abilities had changed permanently. She’d gained new sensitivities she never fully controlled, but lost other abilities. The experience had altered her forever, even though she’d maintained her identity throughout.
What I was attempting was so far beyond what she’d done, I didn’t even have a frame of reference to fully describe it.
“There has to be another way,” Ben said, echoing my earlier words to the phoenix. His hand moved down my arm so he could twine his fingers with mine. Again, with that touch came a soothing warmth, although nothing about our situation was remotely comforting.
“There isn’t. Not with the phoenix so horribly contaminated and less than eight hours to go before cascade failure.” I had to force out the rest of the words because even though they needed to be said, I hated to utter them out loud. “The phoenix is dying, Ben, and the portal network is collapsing. Every supernatural site on Earth is being affected by Rosenthal’s artificial gateway. I’m the only person who can anchor this rebirth because I’m the only one we know of who has both the electromagnetic abilities and the connection to the phoenix’s consciousness.”
“At what cost?” His voice had turned hard, and I sensed the way his electromagnetic signature spiked with emotion — anger, fear, frustration, all tangled together. “You’re asking me to watch you die and hope that what comes back is still you.”
“I’m not asking. I’m telling you what has to happen.” I pulled away from his touch, needing to put some distance between us, even though it hurt the second his fingers were no longer tangled with mine. “My mother and grandmother are on the other side of that portal. If the network collapses, they’ll be trapped forever. I don’t have any other choice.”
He made a frustrated gesture, but he didn’t try to touch me again, as if he knew I’d put that distance between us for a reason. “It’s always about duty with you. What about what you want? What about choosing to survive? What about us?”
That last word hit harder than I wanted to admit. Us. The relationship we’d been building toward since he’d arrived in Silver Hollow, even though I’d spent way too long keeping him in the friend zone. Our partnership that had turned into something much deeper, something I’d never thought I’d share with someone else.
“I want to survive. I want to come out of this still myself, still the person you fell in love with.” My voice cracked despite my best efforts to remain calm, and I had to swallow hard before I could continue. “But wanting doesn’t change what has to be done. This is the only way to save the phoenix and the portal network and my family.”
Before he could reply, I moved to the window and gazed out at the forest that surrounded the cabin. Dawn had just begun to break, a tentative pale light peeking over the foggy horizon. Somewhere beyond these woods was the forest that sheltered the original portal, the one that connected Silver Hollow to the dimensional realm where my family was stranded.
My electromagnetic senses could feel the disturbance, the way the power out there flowed wrong, pulled toward DAPI’s facility instead of moving naturally through the network. Every minute that the artificial portal stayed active, the damage to the natural system got worse.
If the cascade failure happened, it wouldn’t just be Silver Hollow’s portal that collapsed. It would be all of them. Every supernatural site on Earth would go dark at once, cutting off the dimensional realms completely. Thousands of creatures would be trapped on the wrong side, and hundreds of guardians would lose their connection to the very thing they were meant to protect.
My mother and grandmother would die on the other side, cut off from any help and unable to return.
“I’m terrified,” I said. The admission felt like pulling teeth. I was supposed to be tough, right? Ready to face anything that came my way, because that was what the women of my family had been doing for generations. But I couldn’t pretend anymore. Not with Ben. “I’m so scared I can barely think straight. But I don’t know what else to do.”
He came over and wrapped his arms around me, and that friendly warmth flowed around me again. I let myself lean back against him, let myself take comfort in his presence, even though it made the fear sharper.
Because if I didn’t survive the merge, this might be one of the last times I got to feel his arms around me. One of the last times I got to be just Sidney, not Sidney-phoenix or some hybrid entity that wore my face but wasn’t me.
“Tell me,” he said, his breath warm against my ear. “What specifically frightens you?”
