12. Behind the Door
Behind the Door
The smooth, amused voice echoing from the open doorway of his mind did not break Garrett.
After decades of suffocating fear, blind confusion, and the paralyzing shame of believing he was a lethal liability to the woman he loved, the truth brought an absolute, crystal-clear clarity.
It wasn't a structural neurological failure.
It wasn't a broken mind fracturing under the weight of trauma.
It was Leviathan.
The clinical terror that had gripped Garrett’s throat for days evaporated, replaced instantly by blinding, white-hot rage.
He didn't flinch, and he damn sure didn't retreat. He locked his jaw, his mental presence straightening within the smoky dark of his mind’s eye until he stood like iron against the threshold.
“Get. Out,” Garrett commanded, his voice dropping into a flat, lethal register.
Deep inside, the Dragon King with whom he shared his soul awoke with a vengeance. “GET OUT!” A massive wave of Dragon Fire slammed against the open stone door, the sheer force of their shared anger rattling the very foundations of Garrett's consciousness.
For the first time since his rescue, the entity on the other side of the seal answered him while he was wide awake. The sound was terrifyingly fluid, cutting through his conscious mind with the effortless arrogance of a master thief entering a house he had already broken into.
“You were always such an obedient little doorway, Garrett,” Leviathan murmured, the voice dripping with an elegant, sickening amusement.
The insult hit Garrett like a physical blow. The soldier in him surged forward, his instincts demanding he charge straight through the stone door to tear the emerald fire out of the Demon Lord's face.
“No, lad,” Han intervened instantly, a massive, heavy claw extending within their shared mind to pin Garrett back from the threshold.
The Winged Warrior’s pride was bleeding, but the strategist was wide awake.
“We do not enter a battlefield we cannot see. The bastard wants you furious. He wants you impulsive. Do not give him the terrain.”
Outside the confines of his skull, everyone in the room had gone completely still.
Sydney stared directly into his face, her fingers dug tightly into the fabric of his sleeve. Through the raw, exposed channels of the Mating Bond, he knew she felt the turbulent, radiating heat of his fury, and beneath it, the unmistakable static of a foreign frequency vibrating against his soul.
"He's talking to you," Sydney said, her voice a sharp, definitive statement.
Garrett nodded once, his eyes fixed on the opposite wall.
Carrick stepped into the Guardsman’s line of sight. His heavy hand settled onto Garrett's shoulder, scanning the room for a physical manifestation. "Garrett. Can the bastard hear us?"
Garrett took a shallow breath, his jaw tight. "I don't know." He shrugged, his mind still listening to the low, pulsing hum behind the stone door.
"Let's test the parameters," Carrick commanded.
Turning his face toward the empty air of the room, his deep voice dripped with deliberate, mocking contempt.
"Leviathan is a pathetic, broken coward who can't execute a single tactical maneuver without hiding behind another's skirts. He’s an absolute embarrassment even to Lucifer’s court. "
Garrett listened internally. There was no shift in the hum. No ripple of anger from the other side of the door.
Ginnie stepped up beside her husband, her sharp vision tracking the ambient Magic. "Yeah, schoolyard taunts are about all that bag of hollow bones deserves anyway. He’s a non-variable."
Still nothing. The baseline behind the seal remained perfectly smooth, entirely deaf to the physical sounds bouncing off the cottage walls. Leviathan wasn't tapping into Garrett's ears. He was tapping into his energetic architecture.
Then, Sydney closed her eyes. She didn't speak aloud. Instead, she gathered the full, brilliant weight of her conscious energy and fired it directly through the Mating Bond straight into Garrett’s heart. “Get away from my Mate, Monster.”
Instantly, the hum behind the stone door shattered.
“Ah,” Leviathan chuckled inside Garrett’s mind, the smooth tone rippling with a sudden, sharp interest. “The little Dragon Queen finally learned how to roar. And she is significantly stronger than before. I am intrigued.”
The reaction was instantaneous. Leviathan didn't sound surprised to find her there. After all, he had spent years monitoring them, but her specific frequency intersected the road perfectly.
Through the Mating Bond, Garrett felt Kara lose her absolute damn mind.
A blinding, explosive flare of pure White Dragon Magic erupted from Sydney's hands, its raw heat so intense it left a localized smell of ozone and scorched air in the bedroom.
Garrett felt the massive weight of the Dragon Queen slam against the internal barriers of the bond, ready to tear the spiritual road to shreds.
Sydney maintained a brutal, white-knuckled control over the Dragon Queen with whom she shared her soul, forcing the white fire back beneath her skin. Her jaw was set, her blue eyes flashing. They didn't need to destroy the bridge yet. They needed the blueprints. They needed information.
Watching from the opposite side of the room, Ginnie rapidly analyzed the mechanics of the collision and the Magic. Stepping toward the desk, the tips of her fingers traced the columns of Garrett's notebook.
Ginnie stared at Garrett's notebook for a long moment, her fingers tracing the pattern of the anchors. “I think we've been looking at them backward.”
Carrick frowned. “Meaning?”
“What if the anchors aren't destinations?”
Garrett's tactical brain snapped onto the distinction. “Then they're access points.”
Ginnie looked up at him. “Or permissions.” The word settled heavily over the room.
Carrick's expression hardened. “Permissions to what?”
Ginnie turned the notebook so everyone could see it. “I don't know yet. But look at what was taken. None of these objects are random, and none of them carry the same kind of connection.”
Garrett moved closer.
“Sydney's ribbon,” Ginnie continued, tapping the first point with the tip of her finger. “If I'm right, years of contact with Sydney– and through her, Kara– could have taught the road to recognize their Dragon Queen frequency.”
Sydney's face tightened.
Ginnie's finger moved to the next point. “Alastair's scale carries an unmistakable Dragon King resonance. The road may be using that connection to recognize the kind of Magic tied to Carrick and Alastair.”
“Council wards?” Carrick murmured.
“Maybe,” Ginnie cautioned. “Or Dragon King protections. Or both. I don't want to pretend we know more than we do.”
Her finger shifted again. “My fountain pen is saturated with Heatherton Necromancy. If the pattern holds, it may have given the road a way to identify threshold and Death Magic.”
Grey stared down at the final mark. “And my knife?”
Garrett answered before Ginnie could. “Family.”
Grey's gaze snapped to his.
Garrett swallowed. “Your resonance. Our bloodline. And something I gave you myself.”
Silence stretched through the room.
Ginnie nodded slowly. “Four different connections. Four different kinds of Magical recognition.”
Garrett looked toward the invisible door inside his mind. “And all of them lead through me.”
Carrick's jaw tightened. “Because the wards trust you.”
Garrett went still.
Ginnie turned toward him. “That's what I'm afraid of. If this road is using your Magical signature as its center, then whatever it's touching may not recognize it as hostile.”
“Because it looks like me,” Garrett said.
“Maybe,” Ginnie replied softly. “Or close enough to you to get farther inside than Leviathan ever could on his own.”
Garrett looked at the four points in the notebook again, dread settling deeper into his gut. They still didn't know exactly what Leviathan had built.
But for the first time, they were beginning to understand what the anchors might be doing.
"How did he move the physical objects if he wasn't possessing my limbs?" Garrett asked, his voice raw as he looked at the empty space on the dresser.
“Maybe the escalation explains it,” Ginnie said slowly, her fingers tightening around the edge of the notebook.
“When the road was weak, Leviathan may have needed your physical body to establish the correspondence. That would explain the sleepwalking—the creek bed, the vanity, the things you remember physically touching.”
Garrett looked toward the empty space on the dresser. “And Grey's knife?”
“By then, four anchors were in place.” Ginnie shook her head. “I can't prove it yet, but the pathway may have become strong enough to move the object without moving you.”
"And the timing," Sydney picked up, her eyes wide as she looked at the digital clock on the nightstand. "3:42 AM. Why is the connection always keyed to that exact minute?"
Dr. Darcy Thorntree snapped her tablet open, her fingers rapidly scrolling through Garrett's neurological readings.
“The consistency bothers me,” she said.
Garrett frowned. “Meaning?”
“Neurological events don't usually care what time is on the clock. Something else does.” Darcy looked up from the screen. “I don't know why yet, but 3:42 isn't behaving like a symptom. It's behaving like a trigger.”
Garrett went entirely still.
FLASH.
A cold, white ceiling grid.
The bitter scent of burning chemicals.
The metal restraint table digging into his spine.
And directly above him, mounted on the laboratory wall, a digital clock.
03:42 AM.
Garrett sucked in a sharp breath as the rest of the memory slammed into place. He had been staring directly at those glowing green numbers when the stone door clicked shut inside his head. “It happened at 3:42.”
Darcy's eyes snapped to his. “What did?”
Garrett swallowed. “The door. That's when he put it inside me.”
Ginnie went still. “Then the time may be part of the Spell itself. Like a ritual scar reopening at the same energetic point every night.”