Page 16 of Mating Her Dragon

"Yeah."

"What did you just do?"

"I have absolutely no fucking idea."

That, at least, hadn't changed. She wasn't suddenly omniscient. She wasn't suddenly in command of some vast new arsenal of Spells and Incantations. She'd simply looked at something that didn't belong and told it so, and it had listened. She had exactly as much understanding of why as Garrett did.

Which was none.

And then it came back– that same electric awareness she'd felt back in Valentine when she'd taken Garrett's hand, walking back from the Airstream. Except this time, she wasn't touching him. He was thirty feet behind, tense and watchful in the light of the fire he’d built– and the feeling came anyway. It slid through her like a current through water.

Far away. Somewhere beyond the fence line, beyond the road, beyond anything she could point to on a map, there was a ripple.

Not a voice. Not words. Just recognition– the unmistakable sense of something turning its head. Looking directly at her.

“It knows,” Kara said quietly.

“Knows what?”

“That you can see it.”

Sydney stood very still in the dark desert. Ash still settling at her feet, she felt the full weight of that recognition somewhere behind her ribs.

Garrett was scared. Turning, she could see it plainly– in the set of his jaw, in the way his hands hadn't quite unclenched, in the careful stillness of a man holding a great deal in check by sheer force of will.

But he didn't say, We're going back. Instead, he asked, "Do you want to leave?"

Sydney looked west, toward a horizon she couldn't see in the dark but knew was out there, patient, unhurried, still waiting for them. She looked at their little silver Airstream, catching the last of the light of the fire Garrett had built reflected in the side. Then she looked at Garrett.

"No. Do you?"

He looked at the small drift of ash on the gravel where the black thread had been. Then back at the road, invisible now beyond the fence line, running west toward an ocean he'd never seen.

"No."

They chose it again. Together. Same as before.

Later, inside the Airstream, with Garrett either asleep or doing an excellent impression of it beside her, Sydney lay awake in the dark, Kara unusually, uncharacteristically quiet in the back of her mind.

“You really couldn't see it?” Sydney finally said, not quite a question.

“No.”

“The Ward, though. You felt that much, right?”

“I could sense the Ward. I have always been able to sense Wards– that is not new, and it is not remarkable.” A pause, longer than Sydney liked, then she added, “But the threads themselves. The construction of it. No. I could not see that.”

Sydney lay there in the dark, turning it over, feeling the shape of something enormous settling slowly into place just beyond her reach.

“So, what does that mean?”

The silence that followed went on long enough that Sydney started to wonder if Kara meant to answer at all.

“I do not know,” Kara said at last.

She paused. Sydney waited, trying– and failing– to be patient.

“But I believe, my girl, we are only now beginning to understand why they call you the Special One.”