Theo’s final instructions on how to get into Riell had been a little foggy.  Jillian couldn’t blame him, not with him rapidly losing blood and consciousness, but all the same, here she was, stuck on the side of the road with no obvious magical portal.

Drive until the GPS says it’s recalculating, Theo had said, and then stop by the white tree.

Done and done.  But he’d left her with the impression that someone would materialize to fetch her into Dragon Valley, and so far, no one had.  And they were going on half an hour now in the same spot.

Under other circumstances, this could have been romantic.  There was no traffic.  No light pollution to stifle the starriness of the night sky.  The weather was warm, the breeze cool.  Jillian could smell the heady sweet perfume of wildflowers, zinnias and poppies and black-eyed susans.  Occasionally an owl would give a soft and lonesome call.  It would have been a perfect place to sit and think.  To sit and hold Theo’s hand.  But there was the problem.

It wasn’t that she was running out of patience.  It was that Theo was running out of time.

She couldn’t wake him up.  She’d tried three times already, her blood running colder at each attempt, but she hadn’t gotten anywhere.

If it was not good asking him what to do next, she still had to do something.  Doing something was what she did, wasn’t it?  It didn’t matter if the newfound love of her life was out frighteningly cold in the blood-soaked passenger seat, it didn’t matter if she suspected her dad had been the one to put him there.  She needed to be the person she’d spent her whole life becoming.  Needed to do instead of be done to and done for.

No one was coming to rescue her.  So she would have to buckle down.

What did she know about dragons?  If she were a whole community of dragons and she had to hide her valley from a bunch of violent, know-nothing humans, what would she do?  And what would be the way around whatever she did?

Dragons could hide themselves if they wanted to.  But Theo had said they could hide themselves from humans—he hadn’t mentioned anything about them hiding from other shifters.  So maybe Colby or Martin could see Riell?  She put that thought in her back pocket for now.  The drive from Sterling was such that she didn’t know that she could afford to wait.

Besides, dragons might or might not trust other shifters.  The only people she knew for sure they trusted were other dragons.

So maybe only a dragon could help her see Dragon Valley.

She’d been standing on Theo’s side of the car with the door open, keeping an eye on him at the same time as she kept an eye on the horizon, and now, her heart in her throat, she reached down and clasped his hand in hers, bare skin against bare skin.

No magical vista revealed itself.

Right.  Of course, she’d touched him before she’d even gotten out of the car.  Stupid.  Besides, that was no way to protect against hostiles.  Anybody, maybe, could grab a passed-out dragon and make skin-to-skin contact.

If it were her, she would make the password into Riell something no dragon would give up without a fight.  Something personal.

Gold.

She could feel Theo’s rings against her fingers.  In the pale glow of the dome light, she found which ones were gold and tried to work one off him.

After everything, that was what made him stir.  That gave her some hope.  All he did was pull back, curling his hands into fists, and it didn’t last long, but still, his instinctive response to protect his hoard had been so powerful it had snapped him out of what was almost a coma.

“I’m sorry,” Jillian said.  She wrested one gold band free.  It had looked like plain gold, but it seemed heavier than that.  She could feel the finest, thinnest engravings in it under the pad of her fingers.  “I wouldn’t be robbing you if I didn’t think I needed to.  Some second date, right?”

She slid the ring on.  Nothing happened.

Fuck.

Then, bizarre as it was, she thought about Theo’s slightly antiquated way of talking, the habit he couldn’t quite shake.  Whatever culture had taught him to intermittently sound like a nineteenth-century gentleman was one that would value pronouncements.  And then if this didn’t work, she would call Martin back.  Or even drive Theo to the nearest hospital and take her chances.

Tears stung her eyes.  She held her hand up towards the silvery-white tree.  Even in the moonlight, it had a kind of ethereal gleam to it.

“This ring is from the hoard of Theo St. Vincent.  He’s a citizen of Riell and he’s hurt.  I am his mate, wearing his gold, and I ask for entry.”

There was a faint creaking sound.  At first she thought it was just the wind blowing the tree branches around.  But then she saw it.

The white tree was splitting apart from its highest branches down to its roots, its bark and wood peeling away to both sides like leaves coming off a stem.  In between was a light so bright it almost blinded her.  It fell on her and Theo and bleached them out, making them look like they were caught in some kind of nuclear blast, and then she saw that it was caught particularly on the ring—on Theo’s ring on her finger.  It looked like she was wearing a band of starlight.

Then all at once, the light went out.  She was just standing beside the road, beside her own parked car, on a peaceful summer night.

Only now there was another road.  This one led straight into the woods and seemed to be dipping downwards.  The valley.  Riell.

She didn’t have time to be thankful.  She got back in the car and gunned it.

Riell came into view slowly.  Even as distracted as she was, it was breathtaking.

The architecture was a seamless blend of every style she had ever admired.  Somehow each building had the delicacy and grace of a Grecian temple, the deeply-felt beauty of a Gothic cathedral, the overwhelming sprawl of a castle, and the picturesque order of an English manor.  The only thing the houses lacked was hominess.  She couldn’t imagine any block parties in Riell.  No backyard barbecues, no kids with lemonade stands, no sidewalk chalk hopscotch courts.  It looked like velvet ropes should have been strung up warning her not to touch.

Even though she wanted to, they didn’t have to worry about her right now.  Right now, all that mattered to her was finding that doctor Theo had mentioned, the one who had taught him to drive.

If only she could find something resembling a hospital!

She was driving over cobblestones and the car kept jostling them and making Theo’s hair drop over his forehead.  She was worried that all the bouncing around might be bad for his concussion, and thinking that sealed the deal.  If she couldn’t go get help, she’d make help come get her.

She parked and laid on the horn.

Birds took flight from every tree and housetop.  They didn’t look like any she was familiar with: mostly these were a rich violet and bottle-green, like starling-sized peacocks.

The sound of the horn was like a hammer smacking into her head.  If she’d needed more reason to be worried, and she didn’t, the fact that Theo was sleeping through it would have done the trick.

Doors opened up on both sides of the street and suddenly Jillian had half-a-dozen sleepy dragons on her hands.

Correction: angry dragons.

“What on earth or heaven has brought a human to our door?”  This was from an elderly man who eyed her like she was something form out of a zoo.  “You’re neither wanted nor welcome.”

“How did she even get in?”

Jillian stepped out of the car.  “I’m Theo St. Vincent’s mate.  I’m human, yeah, but he’s one of you, and he’s hurt.  His wings were hurt, so he said it wouldn’t do any good to take him anywhere else.”

There was a general hum of chatter:

“The St. Vincent boy?”

“Cousin Theo?”

“I thought he died.”

“No, his parents died.  He left.”

“He left,” Jillian said, her voice steely, “and now he’s back.  If he were you and you were him, he wouldn’t let you die.  Theo has honor.  Find your own.”

“Well-said, honored mate of Theo St. Vincent.”

This was a woman’s voice, so calm that it sounded as if she’d never been ruffled or upset a day in her life.  Jillian picked her out from the crowd: a Latina woman in her mid-fifties.  She wore a stunning ivory silk robe beaded with pearls, but her long hair—lustrous black except for a single white streak—was slightly disheveled, as if she’d been woken up by the horn.  Was that her bathrobe?  She wore it as though it was nothing remarkable.

The crowd parted around her, its low hum of aggression not quite fading.  The girl Jillian thought had called Theo her cousin, a girl with Rapunzel-long hair, was the only one who had her mouth shut.  She was watching silently, her eyes huge.

The woman in white walked through the mob like a queen.  With no more ado than that, she opened up the passenger side door and reached in to check Theo’s pulse.  Her eyes met Jillian’s over the hood of the car.

“How long has he been unconscious?”

“About two hours.”

“His skin is clammy.  This won’t make sense to you, but for a dragon, that essentially means he’s feverish.  Does he have an infection?  The cuts and bruises I’m seeing wouldn’t account for this.”

“His wings.  They were badly torn.  I’m sure they wound up getting irritated by the debris, but I didn’t think that would work this fast—”

“It wouldn’t have, if he had stayed a dragon.  But the poor sweet fool took dirty, bloody gashes and brought them into his body to go who knows where when he took on this form.”

Jillian bristled.  “He had to shift back to get us out of the house.  There was a bomb.”

“Yes, well, I’ve known your mate since he was no taller than my knee, and he always seems to find a way to neglect his own injuries.  It was hell itself getting him to recuperate from his appendectomy.  If I shift, will you please help him onto my back and then climb on yourself?  I need to get him to my office.”

“You’re a doctor?”

She nodded.  “Sonia Mendoza.  Is that a yes on the ride, or would you prefer to take your chances elsewhere?”

One dragon ride more or less wouldn’t alter the strangeness of the last day or so.  Jillian nodded.

Dr. Mendoza shimmered into dragonskin.  Her coloring was much more golden than Theo’s, her only real touches of red being some russet-colored scales at her tail and ruff.  There was a smooth, narrow place on her back that seemed like the only available spot, so Jillian eased Theo up.  She was able to cradle him back against her.

He was so cold.  She pressed her face against his shoulder.  Was this the shoulder with that curve of flame-colored tattoo?  Was it her imagination, or did it feel a little hotter, a little more normal, than the other one?

She wrapped her arms around him.

“You saved me,” she said to him, holding him more tightly as they lifted up into the air.  “Now heal up and save me from losing you.”