Page 27 of Mating Her Dragon

"You had Ceremony Face."

"I do not have a Ceremony Face."

"You absolutely do. It's very serious and slightly constipated."

He opened his mouth to argue and got no further than that, because Han went uneasy in the back of his mind. The ancient Dragon King wasn’t roaring and wasn’t panicking. He was just emitting a low, wordless unease that Garrett had learned, over centuries, never to ignore.

"Something is wrong," Han said.

Garrett's whole body changed before he'd consciously decided it should. Sydney caught it instantly.

"What?"

"The air," Han said, which told Garrett almost nothing and everything at once.

Then Sydney went completely still beside him. Not frightened. Focused, in the way he'd learned meant she was seeing something he couldn't.

"Oh," she said.

Over the last week, Garrett had developed a genuine, specific dislike of Sydney saying "oh" while looking at something Magical. "There's a door," she said.

Garrett scanned the empty air between two rock outcroppings twenty feet away. There was nothing there. No structure. No shimmer. Nothing at all.

"Where?"

She pointed at the same empty space he'd already scanned twice. "There."

"I can feel something," Kara offered, unusually careful through the Mating Bond she’d just opened. "Not see it. A pressure. As though reality itself has grown thin in that particular place."

Sydney stared at the empty air a long moment. Her expression shifted into something Garrett had never seen on her before. It wasn’t alarm, exactly, but a kind of dawning vertigo. It seemed as though she was looking at something too large to properly hold in her head.

"It's not built on the world," she said slowly.

Her split-second pause made him uneasy. Then she spoke, and he went on alert. "It is the world."

"Sydney."

"Yeah. I heard it when I said it."

She explained it to him in pieces, still staring at the empty air. Her voice was careful in a way that told him she was working out the shape of it as she spoke.

“It isn't a Ward,” she explained. “It’s not a Spell laid over the top of something, the way every piece of Magic I’ve examined so far has been.”

“Okay.”

“This is a seam. The actual place where our Earthly Realm has been stitched closed against another. It is ancient and structural, built into the world itself rather than added onto it… And it wasn't happening everywhere.”

Garrett needed to understand everything that was happening immediately, because the alternative– Sydney seeing torn seams behind every rock formation in the American Southwest– didn't bear thinking about. He had to know what was happening. It was the only way he knew to keep her safe.

Apparently, the seam Sydney was looking at in that moment had been disturbed. Someone had been working it. Testing it. Pulling at threads that had held for centuries, trying to work the seam open. And something had been woven through its damaged edge.

Sydney went very still. "It’s the same caster," she said.

Garrett's blood went cold. "You're certain?"

"Completely." She didn't look away from it. "It's the same ‘handwriting’ I saw in New Mexico. I don't know who they are. But this is them, too."

So, it hadn’t been a single isolated incident. Something– or someone– was working this seam specifically. Either they were following Sydney west or reaching toward her wherever she went.