Page 31 of The Bear Between Us

The sound from outside starts before I reach it. Not the sound of a fight, which I've learned to recognize over the past three weeks, but the sound of something more organized than a fight. A controlled engagement, multiple points simultaneously, the escort being managed rather than simply attacked.

I pull my magic up and it comes fast and large the way it does now, the mark blazing up my forearm, and I push Nessa toward the back room. "Lock the back door and stay down," I say, and she goes, because Nessa when it matters doesn't argue.

I get through the front door and the street has been cleared. Not emptied naturally, cleared, the few pedestrians who were there minutes ago absent in a way that required coordination. Two of Torin's team are down, not dead, restrained with something that glows faintly at the wrists, a binding I don't recognize. Torin himself is engaged at the corner with two figures in dark clothing moving with a precision that isn't natural.

I throw a ward out wide and it catches and I feel it immediately start to be dismantled from the outside, methodically, by someone who knows exactly what they're doing. Not overwhelmed. Taken apart. They've been watching me build wards for two weeks and they know the construction.

I rebuild it differently, pulling from the ley line under the street rather than my own reserves, and it holds three seconds longer before that gets dismantled too.

They've prepared for me specifically.

Something hits the ward from behind simultaneously with the frontal dismantling and the structure collapses completely and the mark screams up my arm and I throw everything I have outward in a raw unstructured burst that clears the immediate space around me but costs me the precision to do anything more controlled in the next few seconds.

Those seconds are what they needed.

There are four of them around me when my vision clears, positioned at exact intervals, and what they're holding between them is a constructed circle, not physical, magical, thin lines of something old and specific that I can feel pressing against the mark from all sides simultaneously. Not painful. Suppressive. The mark's output drops by half and then by half again as the circle tightens.

Torin calls my name from the corner and then stops calling it.

I fight the circle with everything the mark has left at this output and it isn't enough and I know it isn't enough and I fight it anyway because the alternative is stopping, and I don't stop.

They bring me through the forest edge as the light goes.

The shrine is exactly as I remember it from the day that started all of this. The ring of stones, the moss, the carved flat altar stone at the center with roots grown through it. It looks the same. But the air around it has changed, charged with something that has been building here for weeks.

They bring me to the center and the circle holds and the mark fights it silently and continuously and I stand at the altar stone and breathe and I don't let myself feel the fear that is present and correct and entirely reasonable.

A man steps out of the tree line.

Polished. Pale. Dressed in something that belongs in a boardroom rather than a forest, tailored and precise and completely unbothered by the incongruity. He looks at the mark on my wrist with something that is close to satisfaction.

"Ms. Briar," he says. His voice is even and unhurried. "You're exactly on schedule."

24

KAEDRIC

Torin's voice comes through the comms at six fourteen.

He sounds like a man who has just had something lifted off him that was pressing down hard, the specific quality of someone coming back online after forced shutdown. "Ambush. Town center, two blocks east of Briar and Root. Two down, bound, I'm clear now. Elowen is." A pause that lasts less than a second but contains a great deal. "Gone."

I'm already moving.

The drive into town takes eleven minutes. I spend them on comms with Brennan, who is pulling every available pack member to a staging point at the territory's eastern boundary, and with Torin, who is walking me through the ambush in real time as his head clears. Four attackers on the escort. Coordinated, prepared, using a binding method he hasn't encountered before. Elowen fought, he says, harder than the situation allowed for, and the mark was blazing when they took her through the forest edge.

Through the forest edge. North.

Toward the shrine.

Rourke's truck is already at the scene when I arrive, parked at an angle that blocks the mouth of the street from the main road, which is exactly the right instinct for containing civilian exposure. He's got two of his deputies managing a perimeter that looks, from the outside, like a routine incident response. Gas leak, probably. He's used that one before.

He meets me at the edge of the scene with his arms crossed.

"Three of your people down," he says. "Two are mobile, one is still working through whatever that binding was. I've got them in the back of my truck. Told anyone who asked it was a training exercise gone sideways."

"Thank you."

"The shop assistant." He holds my gaze. "She locked herself in the back room and called nine one one. I got there before my deputies took the call. She's shaken but physically fine. I told her it was a gas situation and that you'd be in touch."