Page 29 of Mating Her Dragon

"Close."

She didn't say it louder this time. Didn't strain. She simply spoke like a woman who knew, with absolute certainty, exactly where she belonged and exactly what belonged on the other side of that line. The seam slammed shut.

The black thread burned away from its edges in a thin curl of dark smoke. The older, elegant Elven construction remained further down. It was embedded deep enough that closing the seam hadn't touched it. There was a residue, a signature, something to investigate later rather than something that came loose with the rest.

Then something hit the other side.

Garrett felt it rather than saw it. The seam, closed now, bowed inward like a door under a fist. The whole boundary shuddered with the force of it. Something enormous, on the other side of that door, was furious.

A second impact. The seam held.

A third began building, and Sydney stepped forward, planted her feet, and said, simply: "No."

The entire boundary went absolutely still.

She was shaking afterward. Not collapsed, not bleeding, nothing as dramatic as that, but her hands trembled when Garrett got her sitting down on a flat rock, and her breathing took longer than he liked to even back out.

It had cost her something. More than the Ward. More than the chapel Charm. He noted that with the same grim attentiveness he applied to everything that threatened her, filing it away: power has scale, and scale has consequence.

He got a bottle of water into her hands. He checked her pupils, because he was Garrett and some habits never fully retired.

"If you ask me what day it is," Sydney said, voice a little unsteady but her eyes sharp, "I am going to bite you."

"What day is it?"

"Tuesday, you enormous menace."

He was satisfied. Mostly.

He called Carrick from the edge of the overlook, Sydney still catching her breath on the rock behind him.

He laid it all out clean: Sydney could apparently see the boundaries between Realms. Someone had been tampering with one, using the same black Magical signature they'd first encountered in New Mexico. Beneath the black signature, Sydney had found an older, more refined layer of Ancient Elven construction, in a style consistent with what little they knew of Keevandrie's work. And something from the Abyss itself had actively resisted the seam's closure, striking the boundary three times before Sydney shut it down completely.

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

"Well, shit," Carrick said.

"That was my reaction as well."

Carrick was quiet another moment, and when he spoke again, his voice had shifted into something Garrett recognized– the tone of a man deciding something had grown too large for the room it was currently sitting in.

"This isn't staying inside the Guard," Carrick said. "The Supernatural Council needs this. They keep records on illegal Realm breaches, ancient Spell signatures, every rogue Magical offender anyone's ever managed to catalog. If someone's been working a seam this deliberately, they'll want to know, and they may already have Wardens equipped to deal with containment on a scale we're not."

Garrett absorbed that. "Send it."

"I will." A pause. "Do you want to come back?"

Garrett looked over his shoulder at Sydney, still sitting on the rock, color slowly returning to her face, jaw already set in the exact expression that meant she'd already decided the answer before he'd finished asking her anything.

"No," Sydney said, loud enough for the phone to catch it.

"Didn't think so," Carrick said. “Keep going. Just stay reachable, and do not open anything else.”

"I didn't open it," Sydney called out.

"That sentence did not reassure me even slightly," Carrick said, and hung up.

The callback came that evening, after they'd made camp. The fire burned low, and the desert was quiet around them.