Page 41 of The Bear Between Us

"She's been managing her own power since before either of us knew she existed," I say. "She doesn't need your assessment of what she requires."

Brennan arrives at my shoulder, slightly winded, and takes over Cyris's securing with a thoroughness that suggests he's not going to move again tonight.

I stand and look at the hollow.

The faction members still inside the shrine perimeter have stopped engaging.

Torin reads it immediately and shifts from combat to containment, and within three minutes the inner ring is secured.

Brennan's voice from beside the secured Cyris: "Outer lines confirm full retreat. They're pulling back toward the northern forest boundary."

"Let them go," I say. "We don't pursue tonight. Get a count on injuries and get the pack moving toward the territory boundary. I want everyone assessed and accounted for within the hour."

He nods and moves to it.

The hollow is quiet now. The ley line has settled fully, the residual charge dispersed, the ground under my feet carrying nothing more than the ordinary energy of old soil and old roots. The carved symbols on the altar stone have dimmed, the ritual's heat leaving them, and the crack down the center is just a crack now, structural damage in ancient stone rather than evidence of active power.

I go back to Elowen.

She's in the same position I left her, back against the altar stone, but her eyes are open and tracking and the mark on her wrist has changed in a way I couldn't see clearly in the ritual's light. The pattern is different. Still coiling, still luminescent, but the lines run differently now, something in the configuration altered. Not the Forest God's claim on her. Something more mutual than that.

I sit beside her on the ground because standing feels like the wrong posture for this moment.

The mate bond between us is deep and settled in a way it's never been before, the connection that was building since the shrine hollow four weeks ago fully realized now, solid in the way that things are solid when they've been through significant pressure and held.

I put my arm around her and she leans into it.

"Cyris," she says.

"Secured."

"The outer lines."

"Retreating. Brennan has it."

“The power is settled," she says. "It's not fighting me."

"I know."

"I didn't know if that was going to work."

"I know that too," I say.

She makes a sound that is almost a laugh, quiet and exhausted, and the forest around us is completely still and the sky above the hollow is showing the first grey edge of dawn at the eastern tree line, and the thing that has been building toward this moment for longer than either of us has been alive is finished.

Not gone. Finished. Resolved into something new that will require its own kind of management going forward.

But tonight it's finished.

I stay where I am beside her until Torin comes to tell me the pack is assembled and ready, and I tell him five more minutes, and he goes back to the perimeter without argument.

Five minutes in a hollow in the forest at dawn after the longest night of my life.

It's enough.

33

ELOWEN