“We fight,” Brigid said, her Irish accent sharp with determination. “We stand between that thing and the town, and we fight with everything we have.”
“That’s suicide,” Ben said.
“Perhaps.” Kenji’s voice was calm, almost serene. “But it is also our duty. We are guardians. This is what we were born to do.”
The other guardians were spreading out, taking positions, preparing for a battle they couldn’t possibly win. Ben watched them with a mixture of horror and admiration. These people had come from around the world to answer Sidney’s call and were now ready to throw themselves against an ancient god to protect a town most of them had never even seen before tonight.
And Sidney was watching, too, her expression shifting as something seemed to click into place behind her eyes.
“No,” she said softly. Then, louder, “No. This isn’t right. This isn’t how we win.”
“Sidney — ” Brigid began, but Sidney was already shaking her head.
“The phoenix,” she said, and her voice had taken on a strange, distant quality. “When the phoenix was dying, corrupted by DAPI’s interference, I didn’t fight it. I didn’t try to overpower it or contain it. I merged with it. I became part of the fire instead of trying to stand against it.”
She turned to look at the Dragon, still advancing toward the town, its massive form casting shadows that stretched for hundreds of yards.
“You don’t fight fire,” she said. “You become the hearth.”
Ben’s blood seemed to turn to ice in his veins. “Sidney, what are you saying?”
She looked at him, and there was something in her eyes that terrified him, a certainty that went beyond determination, beyond courage, into something that looked almost like surrender.
“I’m saying I know what I have to do.”
Chapter Seventeen
The walk toward the Dragon was the longest of my life.
I left them all behind — Ben reaching for me, his voice breaking as he called my name…my grandmother’s sharp intake of breath…my mother’s sob…my father struggling to rise from where he’d collapsed against the fallen log. Brigid shouted something in Gaelic that might have been a curse or a prayer, and Kenji’s calm voice cut through the chaos, ordering the guardians to hold their positions. Even Sonya Rosenthal made some kind of noise, although I couldn’t tell for sure whether it was a sound of protest or despair.
I didn’t look back. I knew if I looked back, I might lose my nerve.
The forest floor was uneven beneath my boots, littered with branches torn loose by the shockwave of the Dragon’s emergence. My legs felt like they belonged to someone else — weak and trembling, barely able to support my weight after everything I’d channeled tonight. The scars on my arms pulsed with a faint golden glow, the only light I had to guide me through the pre-dawn darkness.
Each step took me farther from the people I loved and closer to something that could annihilate me without a second thought. I thought about all the mornings I’d woken up in the old house that I’d called home ever since I was ten, and the way sunlight streamed through the windows and the smell of coffee drifted up from the kitchen, where my mother or grandmother would be starting breakfast. And I thought about Ben’s arms around me in the darkness, the way our scars glowed when we touched, the future we’d started to imagine together.
All of it might end in the next few minutes. All of it might burn away, leaving nothing but ash and memory.
I kept walking anyway.
Ahead of me, the Dragon had paused.
It stood at the edge of a clearing maybe three hundred yards from the portal site, its massive form silhouetted against the hellish orange glow that still lit the sky above Welling Glen. Those burning eyes tracked my approach with an intelligence that made my throat tighten with fear. I was an ant walking toward a bonfire, a minnow swimming toward a whale. Every instinct I possessed screamed at me to turn and run.
I didn’t, though.
The heat intensified as I drew closer, a dry, ancient warmth that seemed to press against my skin from all directions. I could smell volcanic rock and something that reminded me of the way the air tasted during electrical storms — sharp and metallic, somehow wrong. My connection to the ley line thrummed with the Dragon’s presence as each step brought me deeper into the sphere of its awareness.
The ground beneath my feet was scarred with cracks from the Dragon’s emergence, amber light still pulsing faintly in their depths. I stepped over them carefully, aware that one wrong move could send me tumbling into fissures that might lead down to places no human was meant to see. The standing stones of the portal site were visible off to my left, the ancient letters of their inscriptions blazing with borrowed fire, and I felt their familiar pull tugging at my consciousness. So close to home, and yet so impossibly far.
At fifty yards away, I stopped.
The Dragon’s head lowered, those enormous eyes fixing on me with an intensity that threatened to dissolve everything I thought I knew about myself. I felt its consciousness brush against mine through the ley line, vast and ancient and utterly inhuman, a mind that had existed long before the first humans looked up at the stars and wondered what they were. The weight of all those millennia pressed against my awareness, and I staggered slightly before I could steady myself.
You return, it seemed to say, although the communication wasn’t words so much as concepts pressed directly into my awareness. The child of fire who begged for time.
“I return,” I said aloud. My voice sounded thin and small in the presence of something so immense, but I made myself continue anyway. “And I’m asking you to listen.”
