Page 43 of Saving Her Dragon

As night fell, the cottage became a silent, high-tech observation post. Darcy had meticulously rigged her specialized neurological monitors to the headboard. Their faint blue lights pulsed in perfect rhythm with the green indicator of the security camera in the corner.

Grey was back in his heavy wooden chair in the hallway, his posture rigid and alert. The thermos of coffee Sydney had made him close by, with a bag of doughnut holes right beside.

Garrett lay flat on his back beneath the sheets, his mind perfectly calm– not because the terror had faded, but because the Warrior had successfully cataloged the parameters of the threat. They were collecting data now. They were hunting the blind spot. Sydney climbed in beside him, her fingers wrapping firmly around his hand, anchoring him to the mattress.

"Coffee tomorrow?" she whispered into the quiet room.

"Absolutely," Garrett murmured.

Closing his eyes, he let his breathing slow as he prepared to step onto the battlefield of his own subconscious. He waited for the heavy world of dreams to take him under.

“Lad.”

The mental voice was a sudden, sharp whisper that vibrated from the absolute floor of his soul. It wasn't Han's usual grumpy rumble. It was thin, tight, and completely shaken.

Garrett went entirely rigid beneath the blankets, his conscious mind freezing at the very edge of sleep. “What is it, Han? What did you find?”

Through the Bond, Garrett felt the phantom sensation of a massive wall cracking open, a final, isolated fragment of last night's missing dream bleeding through the structural blockage. Han hadn't recovered a face, a location name, or a Magical rune.

He had recovered a terrifying physical perception.

“There was a door,” Han whispered into the dark of his mind, his voice trembling with a chilling, systemic dread.

Garrett’s heart hammered against his ribs. “A door? Where? What was behind it, Han?”

A long, agonizing silence stretched through their shared consciousness, the moonlight outside the window casting long, skeletal shadows across the bedroom floorboards.

“You were,” Han whispered.

10

Sympathetic Connections

Ginnie stood by the stove, leaning against the counter as she watched the group of exhausted idiots gathered around her kitchen island. She loved them fiercely, but in that moment, they looked like an ad for a sleep deprivation experiment.

Garrett looked the worst. His jaw was tightly clenched, a heavy shadow of exhaustion bruising the skin beneath his light, lavender eyes. It was no wonder. Nobody in the cottage trusted the concept of sleep anymore.

Right beside him, Sydney was practically mainlining her third mug of coffee. Her hands were wrapped so tightly around the ceramic that Ginnie was sure it was the only thing keeping her upright.

Across from them, Grey had already managed to eat half the platters of bacon and eggs meant for the entire room. Apparently, he was an emotional eater.

“Wish I had that metabolism,” Ginnie thought with a chuckle. “If I even look at a third piece of bacon, my hips get wider. Dragons definitely burn through calories.”

At the end of the counter, Dr. Darcy Thorntree stared at her tablet, her sharp Timberwolf features pinched into a mask of pure irritation. Her beautiful, high-end monitoring equipment, which she had spent an hour meticulously rigging to Garrett’s headboard the night before, had recorded eight hours of absolutely nothing useful.

"Congratulations," the doctor announced, glaring at the digital readout before snapping her tablet shut. "You slept."

Garrett let out a cold, humorless scoff, his voice gravelly. "I feel like there should be a certificate."

"I'll make you one," Grey mumbled through a mouthful of toast.

While the rest of them spent the morning obsessing over the physical void, the mysterious door inside Han’s memory, the 3:42 AM timestamp, and the flatlined neurological readings, Ginnie had been thinking about something entirely different. She had been pondering the idea of the objects.

That was her world. As a Necromancer, she understood the heavy, invisible weight that ordinary matter could carry. She knew that physical things weren't always just things. Something about Emma’s casual comment to Carrick on the video call the day before kept bouncing against the walls of Ginnie’s mind: Each is unique to the Dragon it came from. No two pieces are ever exactly alike. That's what makes them personal.

Emma had said it as part of the beautiful Lore of Dragonkin and a tribute to her craft. But Ginnie knew something the Jeweler didn't need to consider. Personal objects mattered in certain forms of Magic. They weren't just tokens…

They were anchors.