Except this was war. Shaped like love, a moment ago, but it was the crucial battle in a war. The enemy had stolen a march on him, was suddenly in a place where he wasn’t supposed to be.

Now he has control of a gatemage.

But he doesn’t, thought Danny. Because I can still think these thoughts. I can still …

Danny tried to make a gate and pass himself through it, to see if he could shed this creature like a disease.

“Uh-uh-uh,” his own throat said, the glottal stops that said, No no no. “Let’s make a gate for her, to send your little girlfriend home.”

In that moment Danny learned several important things. The Dragon had no idea that Danny really had just gated his girlfriend home—the real one, the one that he hadn’t had sex with. The Dragon also had to use Danny’s mouth to talk to him—it couldn’t just put thoughts into his head. So it wasn’t completely in control, and didn’t even have complete access. He controlled movement and he controlled speech. But that was all a matter of muscles.

Except he could block Danny from creating the gate he wanted to create. Could he make Danny create one?

No, no, that’s not the question, not the question at all.

Inside Danny’s hearthoard, he now realized who had been warning him, screaming at him. Loki’s gates.

Loki knew. Loki had never been possessed, so his outself could not remember having been possessed by Set. That meant Loki was observing him from the outside. From another planet, however many lightyears away it was, Loki had realized what was happening, had seen past the fog in Danny’s mind, past the belief that it was an erotic dream, into the truth.

But what Loki’s gates did remember was being given. They knew how one Gatefather could give the obedience of his gates to another.

And so Danny tapped into their kinetic memory, and with their consent, Loki’s gates obeyed him and showed him how to give them back to Loki.

The act of giving back the gates didn’t move them or make them. Those would have been physical acts, apparently, and the Dragon who possessed him could have felt such an action, could have blocked it. But in all likelihood, the Dragon had never possessed a gatemage who gave a gate to another. It had no idea what was happening.

He felt his control over Loki’s gates slip away.

But now he knew how to do it.

So, again without moving or making his gates, leaving them wherever they already were, Danny gave all of his own gates, every one of them, to Loki.