Page 49 of Saving Her Dragon

She ran along the road. She breached the threshold. She reached out, her Magical consciousness sprinting toward the hidden center…

And she hit a wall. A massive, towering obstruction of cold stone.

The instant her Spell touched the barrier, the entire structure reacted. A violent burst of Magic slammed back through the connection with the force of a battering ram.

Thrown backward like an abandoned ragdoll, Ginnie’s chair screeched against the floorboards as she was launched off her feet. Carrick breached the room in a blur of motion, catching her in his massive arms before she could collide with the wall.

"Ginnie!" he roared, his eyes flashing with his Dragon King’s fire.

The bedroom erupted into absolute chaos. Darcy was shouting over the alarms blaring from her spiked monitors. Grey rushed to the dresser, his hands sweeping the empty wood where his knife had been a heartbeat before.

Garrett’s eyes snapped open. He sat straight up in bed, a sharp, ragged pocket of air bursting from his lungs as the Mating Bond slammed back into his chest.

"It's gone," Grey growled, his voice turning dangerous as he stared at the empty dresser. "He didn't move, and it's gone."

Garrett suddenly clutched his head.

Ginnie barely had time to move toward him before he went still. Not unconscious… listening.

“Han?” he whispered. The longest second of his life ticked by. “What do you see?”

Garrett's face drained of color.

“There are four now.”

Ginnie stared at him. “Four?”

His lavender eyes lifted to hers.

“Only one place remains dark.”

11

The Last Anchor

"Only one place remains dark," Garrett whispered into the dead quiet of the bedroom.

Nobody moved. The world seemed to stall in the seconds following the blast. The air was thick with the invisible aftertaste of ozone from short-circuited Magic. Ginnie was still leaning heavily against Carrick’s chest, her breathing shallow, her face as white as a sheet. On top of the dresser, the empty space where Grey's pocketknife had been a moment ago felt like an open wound.

In the corner, Darcy's monitoring equipment was practically screaming, its digital gauges flashing red and yellow as numbers scrambled across the screens. Sydney sat frozen right beside him on the mattress, her blue eyes wide, staring at him with a raw, unadulterated terror that tore right through the freshly restored lines of their Mating Bond.

“Five stones, Lad,” Han’s voice rumbled from the bottom of his psyche, a heavy, devastating echo.

Garrett clutched his temples, his jaw locking so hard it ached. “You said there were more stones than lights, Han.”

“There are.”

“How many?”

A long, agonizing pause stretched through the shared spaces of their mind. “Five.”

“Four anchors are burning,” Garrett calculated rapidly, his heart slamming against his ribs. “One remains.”

Carrick immediately stepped forward, overriding the chaos with the booming, unyielding authority of a renowned Guardsman and the Head Elder. "Inventory lockdown. Right now. Grey, get some of the new Guardsmen training to be Scouts on the horn. Nobody leaves this property. Nobody goes to sleep. Nobody touches a single damn thing unless it is structurally necessary. We need to audit every room and determine what the fifth anchor is before Garrett's subconscious hits the next REM cycle."

"No," Ginnie interrupted, her voice weak but entirely steady as she pushed herself up from Carrick’s arms. Wiping a bead of cold sweat from her forehead, her sharp Necromancer eyes locked onto Garrett. "We're thinking about this backward. We've spent days asking what object the mechanism will target next. We need to look at what the four stolen objects have in common."

"They're personal trinkets," Grey grumbled, his hand still hovering over the empty wood of the dresser.