Page 49 of The Bear Between Us

Today I choose it, knowing exactly what that means.

38

KAEDRIC

The ley line reading comes in wrong at dawn on the fourth day.

Maris flags it before anyone else catches it, which is consistent with her being the person who has been monitoring the forest's magical baseline most closely since the shrine. She brings the readings to the operations room before breakfast.

"The northern ley line," she says, spreading the documentation across the table. "The primary line that runs under the shrine. It's been settling since the night of the binding, the readings have been trending toward stable every six hours." She taps the most recent column of figures. "This reading is wrong. Not unstable in the way it was during the ritual buildup. Wrong in a different way. Like something underneath the settling is still active."

I look at the figures. I don't have Maris's technical framework for reading ley line data but I have fourteen years of reading this territory and the shape of what she's showing me is recognizable as something that doesn't belong in the aftermath of a resolved situation.

Brennan is beside me looking at the same data. "The corporation's land acquisition records," he says quietly. "The ones that went back eleven years."

"Yes."

"Eleven years is long enough to build something into the ley line structure itself. Not just surface preparation. Something structural."

We look at each other.

"Get Elowen," I say to Maris.

She's there in four minutes, still pulling her hair back, reading the documentation Maris hands her before she's fully through the door. She goes through it and she arrives at the same conclusion Brennan did in about ninety seconds.

"He built a contingency into the ley line," she says. "Before any of this started. Years before." She looks up. "If the primary ritual failed the residual charge from the binding would trigger a secondary sequence. It doesn't need him to activate it. It's already running."

"What does it do," Torin says from the doorway, where he's been standing since Maris came through.

Elowen looks at the data again. "It destabilizes the binding," she says. "The power I bound inward at the shrine, the integration. The secondary sequence is designed to reverse the direction of it. Force it back outward." She's very still. "It's trying to undo what I did."

The operations room is silent.

"Timeline," I say.

Maris checks her figures. "Based on the rate of the reading change, six hours. Maybe eight."

"Can it be dismantled from outside," Brennan asks, directing the question at Maris.

"Not conventionally. It's built into the ley line's own structure, not sitting on top of it. To dismantle it you'd need to work from inside the ley line's architecture, which means." She looks at Elowen.

"Which means me," Elowen says.

"Yes."

She puts the documentation down on the table with the specific deliberateness of someone making a decision and setting aside the information that led to it. "Where's the activation point."

"The shrine," Maris says. "It would be. He built everything from that site."

Elowen looks at me. Not for permission, I know that look well enough by now to read it accurately. She's giving me the information that she's going and she's doing it because she wants me to know rather than because she's asking.

"I'll come with you," I say.

"I know," she says.

We take Torin and two pack members for the perimeter, Maris for the technical support, and Brennan stays at territory to manage the operational picture from this end. The walk to the shrine is familiar in a way it hasn't been before, the northern forest trail that was wrong and shifting the morning Elowen was pulled off it now simply a trail through old trees in early morning light. The forest around us is quiet but not the held-breath quiet of the past month. The ordinary quiet of a place that is mostly at peace with something unresolved underneath.

The shrine hollow looks smaller in daylight than it did the night of the ritual.