Page 51 of The Bear Between Us

"Sheriff." I stop beside him. "You could have come to the shop."

"Could have," he agrees. "Wanted to see the boundary work first." He looks at the tree line behind me. "Kaedric said the readings have been clean for four days."

"Five now."

He makes a note. "I want to establish a direct line," he says. "Between you and my office. Not through Kaedric, not through the pack. Direct." He looks up. "If something happens in this town that crosses into your area of authority I want to be able to reach you without an intermediary."

"Agreed," I say. "Same in the other direction. If the boundary work produces something that's going to be visible on the human side I'll give you enough notice to manage it."

He extends his hand. "That's the arrangement then."

I shake it. It's such a plain and practical thing, a handshake at a tree line in the morning, and it settles something about the new shape of things. This is how Dunmore works, has always worked, the management of what's real happening in plain language between people who can be trusted with it.

He goes. I go back to the territory to find Maris.

She's in the workroom she's been using, packing the last of the monitoring equipment into its cases, and she looks up when I come.

"I'm going back to my shop on Friday," she says.

"I know."

"You don't need me here anymore. That's not a criticism, it's an accurate assessment." She sets a case aside and looks at me directly. "What you're doing with the power, the boundary work, the integration into your practice, you've moved past what I can teach you from a standing start. You need practice now, not instruction."

"You'll still consult," I say. It isn't a question.

"Constantly," she says. "You're the most interesting magical development I've encountered in my entire career and I have absolutely no intention of being hands-off about it." She smiles, the real one. "But from my own shop, on a schedule that doesn't require me to live out of a bag."

I cross the room and I hug her, which surprises her slightly and then doesn't, and she hugs me back with warmth.

"Thank you," I say. "For coming when he called. For not making it smaller than it was."

"Thank you for surviving it," she says simply. "That part was yours."

The joint meeting happens at midday in the main building, pack members on one side of the operations room and three town representatives Rourke has brought in on the other, people who have been managing the human-facing reality of Dunmore's supernatural adjacency for years and who need to understand the new arrangement in terms concrete enough to work with. Kaedric runs the operational side of it and I run the magical and boundary side and we do it without stepping on each other, the division of it natural rather than negotiated, each of us covering the ground we know best.

Brennan sits at Kaedric's right and takes notes. Torin stands at the back of the room. Maris sits beside me and doesn't speak much and doesn't need to.

The town representatives ask practical questions and receive practical answers. Not everyone in the room is entirely comfortable. Comfort isn't the metric. Functional and honest is the metric, and by that measure the meeting is a success.

Afterward Kaedric and I stand in the operations room after everyone else has filtered out and the room has the specific quality of a space where something that needed to happen has happened.

"That went well," he says.

"It did," I say.

"How are you?"

It's a question he asks daily and means genuinely and I've stopped giving him the management version of the answer.

"Good," I say. "Actually good." I look at the changed mark on my wrist, settled and quiet. "I had a moment on the boundary this morning where the work just." I look for the right word. "Flowed. Without me pushing it. Like it knew where to go."

"Is that new."

"Yes." I look at him. "It's going to keep changing. What I am now, what this is." I hold his gaze. "I need you to be comfortable with that being an ongoing thing rather than a fixed point."

"I'm comfortable with it," he says, without hesitation and without qualification.

I believe him. That's the thing about the past five weeks that I couldn't have predicted from the first morning I woke up in a pack territory room furious and displaced. I believe him.