Page 71 of Mating Her Dragon

"Then you bring me home."

Not because he was stronger. Not some rescue fantasy she'd never once let herself believe in. It was his job in this particular Magical plan, the only job that had ever mattered, since the first night on that Arizona highway when she'd realized what his hand around hers actually did.

Direction. Anchor. Home.

"Still yes?" Garrett asked. Not dramatic. Just quietly, and steady, and hers.

"Still yes."

She turned inward, toward the road, and thought one word with everything she had.

“Open.”

Not Leviathan's side. Hers.

Her feet stayed on the bluff. She could feel that clearly. The wind still moved her skirt. Garrett's hand was still wrapped around hers. The low murmur of everyone behind her had become completely silent. And at the exact same time, impossibly, she was also somewhere else.

The road stretched ahead of her– not stone, not dirt, not anything her eyes had a name for. It had to be Magical, given its direction. Behind her: ocean, sunlight, Garrett, home, close enough to reach back and touch. Ahead: heat that had no source, darkness that swallowed light instead of merely lacking it, pressure like the whole Abyss leaning against the far end of a very thin door.

“I am with you, my girl,” Kara said, closely and warmly, because Kara was literally woven into Sydney's soul and had no intention of letting her walk this alone.

“I know,” Sydney told her.

Then she saw him.

Leviathan wasn't handsome. He wasn't some smoldering Demon Lord out of a romance novel cover. Sydney was almost grateful for that, in the one detached corner of her brain still capable of being grateful for anything.

He was old. Enormous. Like nine and a half or ten feet tall. He was wrong– Dragonlike enough that she finally understood exactly where the name Dragon of the Abyss had come from and warped so far past anything that belonged in the Mortal Realm that her eyes kept sliding off the actual shape of him. Black scales, or something like armor. Smoke that moved like it had a mind of its own. Fire that gave off no light at all. Something so ancient that looking directly at him felt less like looking at a face and more like standing too close to a landslide.

But Sydney saw what nobody else ever had. His Magic. The architecture underneath the Demon Lord, the personification of Envy.

And she understood, all at once, something that rearranged everything she thought she knew about the last hundred years: he'd been reaching through that road for so long because he couldn't have Garrett any other way. He needed the threshold. He needed Keevandrie's work. He needed the Mating Bond, and the road it would finally activate.

Leviathan had spent thousands of years borrowing other people's doors, because he didn't have one of his own. Then, he thought Garrett was his ticket… Until she woke him up and brought him back to the land of the living.

"Special One," he said, his voice sounding like the slow, measured, gravelly sound of stone grinding in a deep crypt… And something in his voice was delighted, hungry, already certain of how this ended.

"Yeah," Sydney said. "Everybody keeps calling me that."

“You will come willingly…” He told her, pleased with himself. “Sooner rather than later.”

"That's the part you should be worried about," Sydney said.

Because there was a massive difference between being dragged somewhere and choosing to reach into it while still holding the controls to the door.

Dark Sorcery blasted down the road toward her– so thick, so oily, that it hit her like a physical wall, and for one sickening second she could taste it: rot and ash and something older than rot. He tried to take her anyway. Of course he did.

His Sorcery came racing toward her like a living thing, hungry and fast, and the instant it got close enough to be seen clearly, she knew. The same unctuous black thread she'd been chasing since New Mexico, except now it wasn't a thread– it was a flood, barreling straight at her, and there was no mistaking the signature underneath it. Not similar. Not probably.

Identical.

The black thread had been Leviathan's all along.

It hit the consent boundary and stopped dead– slammed into it so hard the impact rang through her like a struck bell, a shockwave of pure fury with nowhere left to go.

Leviathan pushed harder. Threw everything he had at it. The boundary didn't so much as flicker.

She could feel his confusion from here, hot and disbelieving, and she let herself enjoy exactly one second of it before he spoke again.