Page 45 of Mating Her Dragon

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Garrett had gone Full Guardsman.

He hadn't ordered Sydney anywhere– she gave him credit for that much, growth being what it was– but somewhere between the previous night's phone call and this morning's coffee, the Airstream had apparently acquired defenses Sydney hadn't known it possessed. Extra perimeter checks. Weapons relocated to somewhere within instant reach. She caught him checking the door latch a third time in under ten minutes.

"We're camping, Garrett. Not defending Helm's Deep."

"I don't know what that means."

"I have failed you educationally."

He didn't smile, not quite, but she felt the corner of it try. Underneath the joke, though, Sydney understood exactly what he was doing, because she felt the same low hum of it in her own chest. Keevandrie wasn't somewhere in history anymore. She was nearby. Close enough that a containment marker the Council was monitoring had activated and gone quiet again within the same night, close enough that the coincidence of California had stopped being a coincidence at all.

Carrick called with a location a little after breakfast. It was an old coastal ranger station an hour or two inland. This fire lookout structure had probably stood empty for decades, sitting, entirely unaware of itself, over something far older than the humans who'd built it. The marker had gone dormant again shortly after activating.

A Council team was already inbound. Sydney and Garrett, unfortunately, were closer.

"Observe," Carrick said, with the specific flatness of a man who expected to be argued with. "Do not engage. Whatever you find, you wait for the team."

Garrett repeated it to her the second the call ended, jaw set. "Observe."

"I heard him."

"I need to know you understood him."

"Those are different things."

Garrett closed his eyes briefly. She knew he was gathering patience, but she meant what she said– mostly– and he seemed to accept that, because they were in the truck within the hour.

She knew it was wrong the second they pulled off the access road.

Not Hell-wrong. Not the black thread wrong she'd felt in New Mexico, the sense of something reaching that had no business reaching at all. This was different. Older. Elegant in a way that made her skin crawl precisely because it was beautiful.

It was Keevandrie-wrong.

Sydney could see the construction before they'd even reached the old station. It was layered, ancient, built with a kind of patient artistry that made the black thread look crude by comparison. Also, it had recently, unmistakably, been awakened.

"It's not just a containment marker," Sydney said slowly, studying the shape of it from twenty feet away. "There's newer work woven through the old structure. Recent."

"Added for what?" Garrett asked.

She studied it a moment longer, feeling the precise second the answer settle into place. "To listen."

The marker was part containment structure, part beacon. It was old bones wearing something new stitched carefully over the top, designed to do more than simply hold whatever it had been built to hold.

The Magic noticed her looking at it. The architecture shifted.

Threads Sydney had been quietly cataloging turned, slowly and deliberately, rearranging themselves around her attention like a plant angling toward light. Nothing attacked. Nothing lashed out. It simply reorganized itself, sat there patiently and curiously, in direct response to the fact that she was studying it at all.

"It's looking back," Sydney breathed.

Garrett had, by every visible measure, had entirely enough of California already. He was holding on by the skin of his teeth. She could see, but didn’t have time to reassure him that everything would be okay.

"I can feel it reacting," Kara said, her voice tense. "I still cannot see what you see, but something has changed."

Sydney understood, watching the threads settle into their new configuration, exactly what Keevandrie had built. Not a trap meant to catch any Witch, any Dragon, any stray piece of Magical curiosity that happened to wander close.

A trap meant to catch someone who could see the way Sydney could see. The marker hadn't only been activated to announce Keevandrie's return. It had been activated to find out whether Sydney would come.