9. The Space Between
The Space Between
Garrett didn’t move.
The darkness behind his eyelids felt wider. It was as if it was expanding into a vast, empty canyon that threatened to swallow him whole. Inside his mind, the silence that followed Han's admission was deafening. A Dragon King’s soul did not lose its grip on reality. It did not forget.
“Nothing?” Garrett pushed, dropping his consciousness deep into the hidden, fiery structures of his psyche. “Think, Han. Dig for it.”
He could feel the Winged Warrior trying.
Truly trying. Trying with all his might and Magic.
Through their shared Bond, Garrett experienced the internal phantom sensation of a massive predator clawing at a smooth, unyielding wall.
It didn't feel like the hazy, fleeting frustration of a human simply forgetting the details of a morning dream.
The memory was there. Access to it wasn't.
There was no shimmering barrier of Sorcery visible in his head, and no foreign runes scripted across his thoughts, but the obstruction was absolute. There was an invisible, impenetrable wall standing between the Ancient Dragon King and what he desperately needed to see.
“There is a memory, lad,” Han rumbled, his voice rough, vibrating with a rare, frustrated vulnerability that made Garrett’s chest tighten. “I can feel the physical shape of it resting in the dark. I simply cannot reach it.”
Garrett’s tactical mind immediately began cataloging the variables, trying to find a defensible perimeter. “Did you dream during the thirty seconds Sydney felt the void? At 3:42 AM?”
“I do not know,” Han admitted heavily. “I remember the descent into sleep. Then... something. It was as if there was a fracture in the quiet that left a scar. Then I recall waking the exact second your eyes opened to see Sydney standing over us.”
“Did you feel afraid?” Garrett questioned, his mental voice sharp. “Was there pain? Were we threatened?” He was in full integration mode.
The Dragon King hesitated. His great golden eyes blinked slowly in the center of Garrett’s Mind’s Eye, processing a phantom sensation. “No. There was no pain, nor any threat.” The Winged Warrior paused, a deep, uneasy tremor rippling through the Bond. “It was cold.”
Garrett’s breath hitched in his throat. “Cold?”
“Impossibly cold,” Han whispered, his huge head slowly nodding up and down.
The word settled into the pit of Garrett’s stomach like a stone.
It was a familiar anchor. His mind instantly flashed back to the sterile, freezing concrete of the Leviathan research facility, the numbing chill of the containment cells where they had pumped the air full of chemical sedatives.
And he couldn’t forget the years submerged in freezing water.
It was a perfect, logical explanation. The trauma was finally surfacing.
Maybe Han wasn't experiencing anything supernatural at all.
Maybe he'd simply had a nightmare rooted in their captivity.
The memories were simply bleeding through the cracks of their Bond.
Maybe this was simply another stage of Healing—their broken psyche finally knitting itself back together.
"Garrett?"
A soft, sleepy voice shattered their internal dialogue.
Sydney shifted beside him. Under the blankets, her fingers gently tightened around his arm.
Garrett and Han hadn't been communicating out loud, but the sheer, turbulent energy roaring through the Mating Bond was far from quiet.
It was like a radio broadcasting a static storm into her head – and Garrett felt bad for waking his Mate.
"What's cold?" she murmured, rubbing her eyes as she propped herself up on one elbow in the moonlit bedroom.
Letting out a slow, steady breath, Garrett turned his head to meet Sydney’s gaze. “I’m sorry. I should have…”
“No worries.” She smiled. “Go ahead. Fill me in on what’s got y’all up.”
Giving her a quick kiss on the cheek, Garrett laid out exactly what Han had just told him. He made sure to keep the explanation quiet and clinical. He went in precise, chronological order: the block, the missing dream, the phantom sensation of freezing air.
Sydney sat straight up, the sheets pooling around her waist as the remaining fog of sleep instantly evaporated from her face.
Within her soul, the shift was instantaneous.
Kara woke up. The Dragon Queen didn't offer any dry humor or light sibling banter.
She was not her usual playful self. Her presence flared behind Sydney's eyes with absolute, unblinking alertness.
“Han,” Kara’s voice echoed directly into the shared draconic channel, sharp and demanding. “Cold like weather? A storm on the ridge?”
Han’s response was slow, weighted with centuries of experience. “No.”
“Like Magic?” Kara pushed. “Like the frost of a rogue intruder?”
A long, agonizing pause stretched through the quiet room. With every passing second, Garrett grew a little more anxious. Then the Dragon King spoke, and he didn’t feel any better.
“I don't know,” Han whispered.
Nobody had an answer. The mystery refused to give up its secrets, remaining just out of reach, a maddening splinter in the dark.
Throwing back the covers, Garrett swung his legs out of bed.
His boots were clean, the deadbolt downstairs was locked, and the security camera was still humming silently in the corner, but he didn't care about the physical baseline anymore.
He walked over to the desk by the window, pulled open the drawer, and dragged the leather-bound notebook into the pale silver light of the window.
He didn't trust his own memory enough not to document everything that had just come to light. Uncapping the pen, he pressed the tip firmly into the clean white page, building his evidence file:
Han dreamed. Blocked. Cannot reach memory. Sensation: Impossibly cold. Timestamp 3:42 AM? Unknown.
He closed the book with a definitive snap, staring out into the dark night sky. He was collecting the data, building the parameters of the problem piece by piece. But as he looked down at his own handwriting, a heavy, suffocating certainty settled over his shoulders.
The expert was arriving at sunrise. Dr Darcy Thorntree was a certified genius, one of the legendary Thorntree Luna Timberwolves, and an elite physician.
She was coming to examine his mind, and Garrett already knew, with absolute tactical certainty, that he was going to categorically hate being treated like a broken patient again.
Sitting at the island with a mug in his hand, Garrett prepared for the doctor’s arrival. He was thinking she would be clinical, soft-spoken, and carefully sympathetic.
And he could not have been more wrong…
Sydney had warned him Darcy Thorntree wasn't anyone's idea of a soft-spoken country doctor.
Raised by Cheveyo after losing her parents in a Hunter attack, she'd grown into one of the formidable Thorntree Luna Timberwolves– and an elite physician with the Magical sensitivity necessary to treat Others.
It made her uniquely qualified to examine a Guardsman whose mind, Magic, and soul were permanently Bonded to an Ancient Dragon King.
"Which one of you is the idiot refusing to sleep?" she demanded without a single note of introduction.
Garrett didn't hesitate. He raised his hand and pointed straight at Grey.
"Him," Sydney countered immediately, pointing right back at Garrett.
Garrett cut his eyes to his Mate. "Traitor."
A microscopic smirk touched the corner of Darcy’s mouth as she set her bag on the island with a heavy clack. Instantly, Garrett liked her slightly more. Just slightly. At least she wasn't treating him like a fragile, broken victim.
Garrett wasn't merely a man with neurological trauma; he was a man with Magical abilities who was structurally bonded to a Dragon King.
Therefore, Darcy was uniquely qualified to dissect the intersection of neurological damage, deep-sleep disorders, and the complicated physiology of a Man-Dragon King Bond.
"Alright, everyone who isn't the patient or the Mate, clear out," Darcy commanded, pulling a heavy silver penlight from her pocket.
Grey opened his mouth to argue, but Darcy leveled him with a deadpan stare. "Go play with your chicken coops, Dude. I'm working."
Grey choked on a laugh, throwing his hands up as he and Carrick retreated to the porch. Sydney slid into a chair at the island, watching with absolute fascination. She already loved Darcy.
“Before you leave, you’re gonna have to teach me how to do that,” Syd chuckled.
“Gotcha covered, Sister.” With a nod, Darcy added, “Now, let me see what’s up with your Mate.”
The examination was thorough, methodical, and entirely devoid of comforting bedside manner. Garrett sat on a stool, forcing his jaw to remain unclenched as Darcy checked his reflexes, tracked his pupils with the sharp beam of her light, and tested his motor control.
Then came the cognitive processing tests, and Garrett hated every single second of it. He tried not to grind his teeth, but failed miserably and decided to give up before he broke a tooth.
"Three words," Darcy said flatly, tapping a tuning fork against her palm and placing it near his ear. "Apple. Candle. River. Repeat them."
Garrett rolled his eyes. "I'm not concussed, Doctor. My memory is—"
"Wonderful. Repeat the three words."
"Apple. Candle. River," Garrett grunted.
Moving behind him, her fingers pressed firmly into the base of his skull. He knew she was tracking the neurological pathways where his spine met his brain, but it didn’t mean he had to like it.
"Good,” Darcy remarked. “Now, give me your language patterns. Count backward from one hundred by sevens."
"Ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine..." Garrett muttered, his knuckles turning white against his knees.
Ten minutes later, while she was checking the coordination in his wrists, she popped the question without looking up. "What were the words?"
"Apple, candle, river," Garrett snapped, his patience wearing dangerously thin. "Can we stop playing games now?"