Page 24 of Mating Her Dragon

"It wasn't a fluke," she said.

"No," Kara agreed quietly. "It was not."

Sydney studied the little Ward a moment longer, noticing something new this time. It had a kind of signature. Not identity, exactly. Not a fingerprint she could name. But a style. A texture. A particular tension in how the threads were tied off, like handwriting.

"Can you tell who made it?" Kara asked.

"No," Sydney admitted. "Not yet."

Not yet. She let that sit there, small and unfinished, and filed it away.

The something-wrong, when it came a few hours later, wasn't wrong the way the black thread had been wrong.

It was a little roadside chapel, white clapboard and a gravel lot, the kind of place that existed mostly for people passing through who needed five quiet minutes. Sydney felt the old protective Charm on the door the moment they pulled in– and she felt it unraveling, gently, at the edges. Not corrupted. Not invaded. Just old, and tired, and slowly coming apart the way anything did after enough decades of simply holding on.

She could fix it. She knew that the instant she looked at it, she'd feel the same clean certainty she'd felt with the campground Ward.

"It isn't mine," she reminded herself.

So instead of reaching for it, she found the caretaker– an older man sweeping the chapel steps, in no apparent hurry to be anywhere else– and asked if it would be all right. She told him, as best she could without sounding like she belonged in an asylum, that the old protection on his door was fraying, and she thought she might be able to help.

He looked at her a long moment. Then he said, "Please."

Sydney looked at the Charm, worn thin and threadbare after the Great Goddess knew how many decades, and thought, simply: Be whole.

It rewove itself. Slowly and deliberately, the threads drew back together like something exhaling. This time, she'd meant every bit of it.

"What did you do?" the caretaker asked, staring at his own door as if he'd never quite seen it before.

"Honestly," Sydney said, "I'm still figuring that out."

Garrett didn't say much about it until they were back on the road.

"You could have fixed it without asking," he said eventually.

"Yeah."

"But you didn't."

Sydney shrugged, watching the chapel disappear in the side mirror. "Wasn't mine."

He was quiet for a moment. She felt him turning it over the way he turned everything over, slowly and thoroughly.

"Power isn't permission," Sydney said, half to herself, testing the shape of the thought as it came together in her mouth.

Garrett went very quiet.

That wasn't only true of Wards and Charms and old chapel doors. It was true of everything– of Bonds, of Destiny, of thousands of years of Dragon tradition insisting a thing was simply meant to be. Power wasn't permission. Fate wasn't permission. Even love, as vast and certain as whatever sat between the two of them, wasn't permission.

Choice was.

Neither of them said anything else. They didn't need to.

"So," Sydney said, tracing a finger along the map spread across her knees, "campground, or push through to the coast?"

"Campground," Garrett said immediately. "It's getting dark, and I don't like the terrain on that last stretch."

"Okay."