Page 36 of The Bear Between Us

Not explosively. The fracture is internal, the designed outcome and the actual outcome diverging past the point where the ritual's construction can hold them both, and I can feel the moment approaching where I'm going to have to commit completely to the redirection, no partial measures, no pulling back, all of myself into the channel and the direction I've chosen and the outcome I'm refusing to give up.

It's going to be the hardest thing I've ever done.

I know that with the same certainty I know the mark on my wrist and the ground under my feet and the signal moving through the mate bond from the edge of the hollow where Kaedric is fighting his way toward me.

I take one breath that is entirely mine.

I stop resisting and I start.

28

KAEDRIC

The six faction members between me and the altar stone are not the obstacles I give them credit for. I solve them in sequence, fast and without the energy expenditure of drawn-out engagement, and I'm through the outer ring of the stone circle in under two minutes with nothing worse than a deep cut on my left forearm that I don't have the attention to spare for.

The ritual's energy this close is physical. Not metaphorical, not a perception, a genuine pressure against my skin and my chest and the base of my skull, the kind of force that makes the air feel wrong and the ground feel uncertain. The ley line under the shrine is running at a level I've never felt in fourteen years of reading this territory, a deep subsonic vibration that I feel in my back teeth.

At the center of it, Elowen.

The mark is blazing past her shoulder now, up the side of her neck, and the light of it is white gold and constant rather than pulsing, which tells me something has changed in the ritual's dynamic since I cleared the outer ring. Her face is set with total concentration, inward, the expression I know as her working face, the one she gets when she's doing something that requires everything and she's giving it everything and she knows the cost and has decided to pay it.

She's not being consumed.

She's doing something.

I don't know exactly what and I don't need to. I need to reach her and I need to hold whatever position she needs held while she does it.

Cyris steps between me and the altar stone.

Up close he is different from the composed figure I saw at the hollow's edge. The composure is still there, it's structural in him rather than situational, but underneath it something has shifted. The ritual is not behaving as designed and he knows it, and the knowledge has produced a specific quality of urgency that his controlled exterior is working hard to contain.

He's not just an administrator.

I feel the power come off him before he deploys it, old and dense and practiced, the kind of magical capacity that has been developed over a very long time by someone who understood exactly what they were building. This is not the constructed faction magic of the boundary creatures or the binding on my team in town. This is personal and deep rooted.

It hits me like a wall.

I go back two steps and find my footing and come forward again because going back is not a direction I'm moving in tonight.

"You understand what she's trying to do," Cyris says, and his voice has lost some of its boardroom evenness. Not much. Enough. "She can't hold it. The power is too large and the redirection will collapse and when it does the backlash will be significantly worse than the original ritual outcome."

"You're telling me this because you're concerned for her welfare."

"I'm telling you this because you reaching her disrupts the only stable outcome available." He brings the power forward again, shaped this time, more precise. "The ritual completes or the backlash kills her. Those are the options."

"Those are your options," I say. "She's working on different ones."

I go at him directly.

He's powerful and he's practiced and the fight is not clean or fast. He uses the ritual's own energy as extension, pulling from the ley line the way I've watched Elowen pull from the territory, and the difference is that he has been doing this for decades and knows every angle of it. He hits me twice with force that would have ended a less experienced opponent and I stay standing both times through the specific combination of physical resilience and absolute refusal that is the only strategy I have available.

I hit him back harder than is tactically elegant and it works better than the tactical approach would have because Cyris has spent years being the most powerful person in any given room and hasn't had to absorb that kind of direct physical force in a long time.

He recalibrates.

Behind him, the ritual fractures.

I feel it through the mate bond before I see it, a shudder in the power moving through Elowen, not a collapse but a redirection completing a significant increment, the vast force of the ritual turning against its own designed direction. The altar stone cracks down the center, a sound like something structural giving way, and the light from the ritual's anchor points shifts from the even gold of controlled activation to something less steady.