Page 56 of Mating Her Dragon

"Probably."

"You won't kill me."

"No."

"Weakness," Keevandrie said, almost gently, like she was disappointed on Sydney's behalf.

"No," Sydney said. "Choice."

Because it wasn't mercy forced on her by some rule she hadn't chosen. It was Sydney deciding, deliberately, what happened next. It was the same principle that had governed every piece of Magic she'd touched since a fraying Ward back in New Mexico. Power wasn't permission.

Neither was victory.

Carrick's voice came through the speaker of Garrett’s phone as the Council team led Keevandrie out. He confirmed what Sydney already expected. The highest-security Magical containment, the same institution they'd first mentioned back at the desert campground, was finally being given something worth holding.

Not dead. Not redeemed. Contained. For now.

When the room finally emptied, Sydney and Garrett stood alone among the old diagrams. The crystal and stone still glowed faintly with centuries worth of careful, patient design.

Sydney studied the architecture a while longer. She traced the same patterns she'd recognized on Garrett's scar back through their earlier, cruder forms. Keevandrie's work had refined over years, before it had ever been used on anyone at all.

Then she noticed something else. A thin residue of black along one edge of the original Elven design. It was subtle enough that she might have missed it if she hadn't already known exactly what to look for.

It was the same signature from New Mexico.

It had been here. Recently. Not physically, necessarily, but it had touched the network, brushed up against the very blueprint of the road Keevandrie had built.

"Leviathan," Garrett said.

"Probably," Sydney said.

Garrett gave her a look.

"What? We're being responsible now." But she got serious quickly enough, because the shape of it mattered too much not to.

Keevandrie was captured. Contained, finally, after everything she'd built and everyone she'd hurt to build it. That was real. That mattered. But whatever was still knocking from the other side of the Abyss remained connected to Garrett's road. It was patient and waiting, exactly as it had been since New Mexico.

Now, standing in the middle of Keevandrie's own control room, surrounded by diagrams centuries in the making, Sydney and Garrett finally had something they hadn't had before. They had the original blueprint.

Sydney looked at the architecture. At Garrett, whole and solid beside her, scar and all. At the road Keevandrie had built with such careful, patient cruelty, and she understood, with a slow, settling certainty, that they might finally have enough information to redesign exactly where that road led.

Keevandrie had built the door.

Leviathan intended to use it.

Sydney Kavanaugh was about to change the locks.

13

They made it back to the bluff by nightfall.

Keevandrie was locked away. The Council had teams still combing through the old control room, cataloging over a century’s worth of careful, terrible design. Garrett, by any reasonable measure, should have been able to relax for the first time in days.

He absolutely could not. Every nerve ending was on high alert.

Sydney sat at the little Airstream table, surrounded by notes, coffee gone cold at her elbow. There were sketches of Magical architecture spread out in a chaos only she could apparently navigate, alongside copies of whatever the Council had managed to photograph of Keevandrie's own diagrams before sealing the room.

Garrett had been standing in the doorway for some time, watching her work, before she finally spoke without looking up. "If you're going to hover, at least bring snacks."