Page 10 of The Bear Between Us

I throw what I have at it.

The magic discharges badly, skewing left, scorching the doorframe instead of the creature. It doesn't flinch. It moves toward me and I back into the workbench and throw again, better this time, and it connects but does nothing I can identify as damage. The creature keeps coming and I'm out of backward space and the mark is screaming up my arm and I pull hard for anything more and what comes up is wild and sourceless and too big to aim and I know that I cannot control it well enough to use it safely in an enclosed space.

The creature is close enough that I can hear it now. A sound like breathing but slower, like bellows, rhythmic and patient.

The front window explodes inward.

The thing that comes through it is enormous and dark and moves with a speed that my eyes can barely follow. It hits the creature broadside and the impact shakes the floor under my feet and suddenly there is a fight happening in my front room that is going to destroy everything I own and I can't look away from it.

It's over in seconds.

The creature makes a sound I don't have a word for and then it doesn't make any more sounds.

The thing that killed it straightens, shifts, and becomes a man.

Kaedric Voln stands in the wreckage of my front display, breathing hard, glass on his shoulders, and looks at me with an expression that isn't quite I told you so.

It's worse than that. It's relief.

"Are you hurt?" he asks.

I look at the creature on the floor of my shop. At the shattered window. At the display shelf Nessa spent an entire evening installing, now in three pieces on the ground.

"No," I say.

My hands are shaking. I put them in my pockets.

8

KAEDRIC

The creature is already degrading.

This is consistent with what the archive documents describe about entities called across significant magical distances. Without the pull of the mark actively sustaining them in this form they revert, the borrowed shape releasing back into whatever it was assembled from. Within the hour there will be nothing on Elowen's floor that a civilian would recognize as anything other than a dark residue, organic in appearance, unidentifiable without specific knowledge of what to look for.

I crouch beside it anyway and look at it carefully while I still can.

The joint configuration is wrong for anything native to this region, or any region. It's been constructed rather than born, pulled together from old magic and intention and aimed at a single target. The orientation of it even in death is toward Elowen, toward the mark specifically, the way a compass needle points north regardless of what happens to the compass.

I stand and turn to where she's still standing in the doorway to her back room with her hands in her pockets.

"We need to move you," I say.

"I'm not leaving my shop."

"Your shop has a missing front window and something dead on the floor. You're not staying here tonight regardless."

Her jaw tightens. "I can ward it."

"You tried to use magic on that creature and it didn't respond." I keep my voice level, not unkind, because this isn't a moment for unkindness, but I don't soften the facts. "The mark is interfering with your control. You felt that."

The slight shift in her expression tells me I'm right and that she doesn't want me to be.

Before she can answer, headlights sweep across the broken window and I hear the particular sound of Rourke's truck, the exhaust note I've learned to identify over years of calls like this one. He's faster than usual tonight, which means Torin already reached him before I did.

Sheriff Alden Rourke strolls through the front door. He takes in the broken window, the dark residue on the floor, me, and Elowen, in that order. Then he pulls out a small notebook and clicks a pen.

"Animal attack," he says. It isn't a question.