Page 40 of The Bear Between Us

The power settles.

It doesn't leave. That was never the option I was working toward. The Forest God's power is in me now in the same way the mark is in me, integrated rather than imposed, present rather than passing through. But it's settled. It has found the shape of the space I've made for it, and the shape is mine, defined by my will and my architecture and the boundary I just held at considerable cost, and it fits.

The ritual structure around me collapses completely.

Not violently. The anchor points simply release, the designed manifestation pathway dissolving because there is nothing left for it to carry, and the ley line under the shrine exhales in a long slow settling that I feel through the soles of my feet like something enormous relaxing a tension it has held for a very long time.

The mark on my wrist changes.

I feel it rather than see it, the lines shifting, the coil that ran from wrist to shoulder redistributing into something different, still present, still luminescent, but the pattern altered. No longer just the Forest God's claim. Something that goes both directions.

My knees go.

Not all the way. Kaedric's arm is around me before I reach the ground and I end up against the altar stone with him beside me and both of us breathing hard in the sudden quiet of a forest that has stopped trying to tear itself apart.

The power is still. The ritual is gone. The shrine around us is just old stones and moss and the carved altar stone with its crack down the center from the ritual's fracture.

I'm still here.

I take a breath and then another and I find the boundary of myself exactly where I held it and I confirm, with the specific care of someone checking something important, that everything on my side of it is still mine.

It is.

"I'm still here," I say, out loud, to no one in particular.

Kaedric's arm tightens around me slightly.

"I know," he says.

32

KAEDRIC

Cyris is not where Brennan left him.

I should have anticipated that. A man with his resources and his decades of preparation doesn't get secured by a single pack member and stay that way, not while there's residual ley line energy in the ground and a ritual structure that hasn't fully dissolved. I turn from Elowen, who is stable against the altar stone and breathing steadily, and I find him at the northern edge of the stone ring.

He's on one knee, both hands pressed flat to the ground, and what he's doing is immediately clear. The ley line under the shrine is still warm, still carrying the residual energy of everything that moved through it tonight, and he's pulling at it with specific focused intent.

He's trying to reactivate the anchor sequence.

The ritual's designed structure is gone. Elowen dismantled it from the inside. But the ley line itself is still charged and a sufficiently powerful practitioner with sufficient knowledge of the original ritual construction could potentially use that residual charge to force a partial reactivation, not the full manifestation, but enough to destabilize what Elowen has just bound into herself, enough to break the boundary she held at such cost and let the power move in its original direction.

Brennan is across the hollow dealing with two faction members who haven't gotten the retreat signal yet. Torin is at the outer ring. There's nobody between Cyris and the ley line but me.

I cross the hollow at speed.

Cyris looks up when he hears me coming and he doesn't stop what he's doing, which tells me he thinks he can complete the reactivation sequence before I reach him. He's wrong by approximately four seconds, which is the margin I've been working with all night and which has been enough every time.

I hit the ground beside him and break his contact with the ley line physically, both hands pulling his away from the soil, and the partial reactivation sequence collapses without the anchor. He fights me for it, old power flaring, and I hold his hands away from the ground until the residual charge in that section of the ley line disperses without anything to pull it into structure.

It takes about forty seconds.

At the end of those forty seconds Cyris stops fighting.

Not because he's given up. Because he's run out. The power he's been drawing from the ley line all night has a cost and he's been paying it continuously since the pack broke his outer lines, and what's left in him now is quiet.

"She'll need to be managed," he says. His voice is level but thin. "What she's bound into herself, it won't stay stable without containment. You understand that."