Page 52 of Mating Her Dragon

"Yes."

They were preparing to leave when Sydney went suddenly still, staring toward where the original filament had waited, dormant for hours.

"What?" Garrett asked.

Something had changed. Not activation. Not another message. It had gone slack. Completely, finally dead. He saw it all through the Mating Bond.

"She knows," Sydney said.

"Knows what?"

Sydney studied the dead filament a moment longer.

"That I didn't follow."

Not that Keevandrie necessarily knew about the second location, the silent marker, the plan taking shape around it. Only that the Special One she'd expected hadn't walked obediently down the trail she'd laid out.

Which meant the game had already changed.

Garrett looked at the map. He focused on the obvious location, the silent one, the whole shape of it laid out in front of them, and felt Han rise up behind his eyes, steady and ready.

Keevandrie had expected the Special One.

She was about to meet a Dragon Guardsman and Sydney Kavanaugh instead.

12

The forest was silent in a way that felt deliberate. The silence was deafening. It had a deep, throbbing undertone.

Old-growth trees rose up on every side, thick with moss. The fog hung low enough to blur the boundary between ground and air. No traffic. No people. Not even much birdsong, as deep in as they had to go. The Council's decoy Force was miles away by now, moving loudly and visibly toward the obvious Elven sanctuary, while Sydney, Garrett, and a small, quiet containment team worked their way toward the marker that had never woken up at all.

Sydney felt it before she understood it. Nothing.

No marker. No Ward. No trace of Elven signature anywhere in the fog around them. Which was, on its face, impossible.

"It's gone," she said quietly.

"The marker?" Garrett asked.

Sydney studied the empty ground, the empty air, the empty everything. "No. It's hiding."

Her sight had grown sophisticated enough, somewhere over the last several weeks, that she didn't always need to see Magic directly anymore. She could see where Magic should be and wasn't. She immediately identified the shape of an absence, the way a missing word left a hole in an otherwise ordinary sentence.

"She's not hiding the place," Sydney said slowly, turning in a slow circle.

"Then what is she hiding?"

"The fact that there's anything here to hide."

That was so much nastier than a simple glamour. A glamour said, don't look here. This said, quietly, patiently, to anyone with any sense at all for Magic: there is nothing here worth noticing.

It was elegant… Layered… Sneaky as hell.

“Exactly,” Sydney thought, “like Keevandrie.”

Eventually, she found the construction. It wasn’t a Spell laid over the top of something else, but something folded inward, deliberately collapsed so thoroughly that even the fact of its own existence had been tucked away.

Concealment. Misdirection. Obscurity, all wound together with a thin thread of recognition buried at the center. That thread was the something that would recognize its own maker, if she ever came looking.