Page 44 of Mating Her Dragon

The moment of silence before she continued was deafening.

"Help me come back."

Something in Garrett's chest broke open and rebuilt itself, all in the same instant. Sydney wasn’t dismissing his fear. That was Sydney handing him a place inside it– a role in the one part of this entire nightmare scenario that he could actually control.

He didn't have an answer for that. Not yet. But he felt the shape of one starting to form.

They didn't decide to do it. Not yet, not that day, and Garrett made sure of it before the conversation went any further.

"We investigate," he said. "That's all. No opening the Mating Bond. No testing the route. No crossing anything, not until we understand exactly what we're dealing with. We have to know exactly what activates the threshold."

He also wanted to know: Whether Sydney could redirect it without completing the Mating at all. Whether the Ceremony itself could somehow be structured to open the path outbound instead of inbound. Whether the scar could ever be sealed afterward, closed for good once whatever needed doing was done. Whether the Supernatural Council had any actual means of containing Keevandrie once they found her.

A great deal, still, that neither of them knew.

"Agreed," Sydney said. "For now."

Garrett did not love the addition of those two words. He let it go anyway, because it was the most he was going to get. He'd learned, over the last several weeks, exactly how much that particular concession from Sydney Kavanaugh was actually worth.

Carrick called back that evening. Three times in one day seemed excessive, but Garrett knew the Elder would only call if he had to… Which he did. This time his voice had lost whatever careful steadiness it had held that morning.

"The Council ran a check on Keevandrie's known signatures," he said. "One of her old containment markers– keyed specifically to her Magic– activated. Somewhere in the Mortal Realm. Let me reiterate, those markers don't wake on their own."

Garrett's blood went cold.

"Where?"

The pregnant pause that followed made the little hairs at the nape of his neck stand on end.

"California."

Not their exact location. Not yet, not precisely. But close enough that the coincidence stopped being a coincidence. It was close enough that whatever had been quiet for weeks was, apparently, quiet no longer.

Keevandrie wasn't ancient history. She wasn't a name in a Council file, a threat theoretical enough to investigate at leisure.

She'd touched something. Now. Here, or near enough to where they were that it mattered.

Garrett stood outside after the call ended, staring at the Pacific as the last light drained out of it. Sydney came to stand beside him a few minutes later, close enough that her shoulder pressed against his arm.

"We found our place yesterday," Garrett said.

"Yeah."

"Today we found the road to Hell."

"Technically," Sydney said, "Hell found us first."

Garrett closed his eyes. "That does not improve the situation."

She laughed, soft and a little tired, and slid her hand into his.

Garrett felt their Mating Bond where it lived, closed and guarded and waiting between them, patient in a way that no longer felt entirely safe. He thought about the scar sitting just beside it, about the road leading somewhere he'd spent a hundred years trying to forget existed.

Then he thought about the woman standing next to him, who had looked directly at that darkness and immediately started figuring out how to make it obey her instead of the other way around.

Leviathan had left Sydney a road.

Garrett intended to make damn sure it led her home.