Page 9 of The Bear Between Us

Testing.

I reach for my phone and text Torin a single word: east side.

His response is immediate: Confirmed. Two minutes out.

I push off the wall and cross the street.

The sun is almost down.

7

ELOWEN

Imake it through the afternoon on stubbornness alone.

It's a renewable resource, fortunately. I have a lot of it and I've learned to ration it effectively over the years, deploying it in measured amounts where it will do the most good. This afternoon it goes toward standing behind my consultation table and being present and useful for three clients who need me to be present and useful, while the mark on my wrist pulses at irregular intervals and I keep my left hand in my lap or behind my back or wrapped around a pen so that the motion of pressing my thumb against it looks like fidgeting rather than management.

It works, mostly. Nobody notices, or if they notice they don't ask.

Nessa notices.

She doesn't say anything directly, which is unusual enough that it tells me she's choosing her moment. She watches me between clients and twice I catch her looking at my wrist before she looks away. She restocked the back shelves this morning and would have seen my basket already sitting on the workbench when she arrived, which I hadn't planned for. I told her I came back early from the forest run. She accepted that with a nod that contained several unasked questions.

At four-thirty she puts on her coat and pauses at the door.

"I can stay," she says.

"I'm fine. Go home, Nessa."

She looks at me for a moment with those bright, too-perceptive eyes. "Text me when you lock up?"

It's not something she usually asks. "Sure," I say, and she goes.

The shop is quiet without her. I finish the last of the afternoon tidying, restock the front display, count the till. Normal things in their normal sequence. The mark has been relatively quiet for the past hour, just the low background ache that I've already started thinking of as its resting state, and I let myself believe, briefly, that the worst of the day is behind me.

I'm in the back room when it changes.

The mark goes from ache to alarm in the space of a single heartbeat, flaring hot up my forearm, and I spin around with my hands already raised on pure reflex. Nothing in the room with me. Just my workbench and my jars and the familiar smell of herbs and beeswax.

But the sensation doesn't ease.

It's directional, I realize. Pointing, the way a compass points. Toward the front of the shop.

I lower my hands slowly and stand very still and listen.

A sound from the front room. Not the settling creak of an old building, not the street noise that filters through the front glass. Something deliberate. Something moving with a specific and unhurried intention through the space between the display shelves.

I reach for my magic and it comes up wrong.

This has been happening all day, brief moments where what should be a smooth and practiced reach produces something jagged instead, the mark interfering with the signal like a second voice talking over the first. I've been managing it in small applications all afternoon. Now, with adrenaline in my system and my concentration fractured, what I pull together is unstable and too large and I have to clamp down hard to keep it from discharging into the workbench.

The door between the back room and the front creaks open.

What comes through it is difficult to look at directly. Not because of the dark, though the front room is dim with only the street light coming through the window. Because the thing itself resists focus, like my eyes don't have the right framework to process what they're seeing. Large, roughly quadrupedal, with too many joints in the wrong configuration. The smell of it reaches me a moment later, something burnt and ancient and deeply wrong.

It has no eyes that I can see.

It doesn't need them. It orients directly toward me, toward the mark on my wrist specifically, with a precision that is worse than if it had looked at me.