Page 23 of The Bear Between Us

"I'm fine. I'm sorry about the texts, it's been busy."

"Busy." I can hear her processing that. "The window is fixed, by the way. The guy Rourke sent was actually really good, you can't even tell. And I've been running the shop, the Thursday appointments rescheduled fine, Mrs. Calloway asked about you and I told her you were at a supplier thing, which I realize is vague but I didn't know what else to say."

"That's perfect. Thank you, Nessa."

"Are you coming back soon?"

The question is simple and she means it simply, and I don't have a simple answer for it. "I don't know yet," I say. "Things are still being sorted out."

A pause. "Elowen. Is this about the mark on your wrist?"

I go very still. "What do you know about that."

"I know you've been covering it since you came back from the forest that morning. And I know the thing that came through the window wasn't a dog." Her voice is steady, which surprises me. Nessa runs warm and expressive as a baseline but right now she sounds like someone who has had several days to think something through and has arrived at a position. "I'm not an idiot. I just didn't want to push."

"No," I say. "You're not an idiot."

"Are you safe?"

I look at the reinforced ward line running along the territory boundary, solid and integrated, holding. I think about Kaedric on the creek path in the dark. I think about Maris sitting beside me on this log with her particular quality of calm competence.

"Yes," I say, and mean it more than I expected to.

After I hang up I sit for a while longer at the boundary's edge. The mark has been quiet all morning during the ward work, occupied, almost, like a tool being used for its intended purpose. But as the afternoon light shifts it starts again, that directional awareness I've been noticing for the past few days. Not the alarm quality of the creek path or the shop. Something slower and more deliberate, like a compass needle settling.

It's pointing north. Deeper into the forest.

Not toward the shrine exactly. Somewhere beyond it.

I press my thumb against the mark and feel it pulse back, steady and certain, and I think about the journals in my workroom and my grandmother's note and the word ready.

Who I was before the shrine is still present. I can locate her when I look carefully. But she's standing at some distance now, and the distance is growing, and I'm no longer certain whether that's loss or transformation.

I'm not certain those are different things.

I get up and walk back toward the main building, and I don't tell anyone about the direction the mark is pointing.

Not yet.

18

KAEDRIC

The land acquisition records go back eleven years.

Brennan puts them on the operations table in two neat stacks, legal filings and survey records on the left, a timeline he's built himself on the right, and he walks me through it.

"It started with the parcels on the northern forest edge," he says. "Small acquisitions, individually unremarkable. Agricultural land, some forestry rights, one decommissioned hunting property. All purchased through different holding entities with no visible common ownership." He taps the timeline. "It took me most of yesterday to trace them back to a single parent corporation because they were structured specifically to avoid that being obvious."

"What's the corporation?"

He slides a filing across the table. "Registered in three states, primary operations listed as conservation and land development. They have a public profile, a website, some legitimate-looking environmental work. The kind of organization that doesn't attract attention because it looks exactly like what it says it is."

I read the filing. The language is clean and unremarkable, the kind of corporate documentation that is designed to be processed and filed and forgotten. But the pattern Brennan has mapped underneath it is not clean and not unremarkable. Eleven years of systematic acquisition in a ring around the forest, tightening incrementally, always just inside the boundary of what would trigger regulatory scrutiny.

"They've been building access," I say.

"To specific sites." Brennan overlays a map of the acquisitions against a topographical map of the forest. The correlation is immediate and obvious once you see it. The acquired parcels cluster around three locations. The shrine is one of them.