Page 5 of The Bear Between Us

I stand still and breathe and try to locate myself by logic rather than instinct.

Instinct, right now, is pulling me forward.

"No," I say, out loud, to nothing. My voice comes back strangely, flatter than it should, like the forest has absorbed the edges of it.

I turn to go back the way I came.

The pull intensifies.

It isn't aggressive. That's what makes it hard to resist, the way you can resist something that grabs you. This is more like gravity, like a slope I didn't notice I was already walking down, and the moment I try to move against it my legs feel heavy and uncertain and the direction I want to go loses all its clarity.

I take three steps back toward the creek trail.

Then I stop.

Then, without deciding to, I turn around and walk forward.

I'm aware of it happening. I'm aware that my feet are moving and that I didn't choose this, and that awareness sits in my chest like a coal, hot and airless. But my body keeps walking, through the trees, off any trail I recognize, through a section of the forest I don't know, where the undergrowth is dense and the roots are enormous and old and the canopy closes overhead so completely that the flat light disappears entirely.

The shrine is in a hollow I've never seen before.

I would have said a thing like this couldn't exist in a forest I know this well. But here it is, a ring of stones barely visible under centuries of root and moss, the original shape still legible if you know how to look. At the center, a flat stone, larger than the rest, with carvings on its surface so worn by time that they're more felt than seen. Roots have grown through the carvings, thick ones, and the moss over everything is so old it looks almost structural.

My feet stop at the edge of the stone ring.

The pull releases, all at once, and I'm fully in my body again with my heart going too fast and my basket gripped in both hands and the absolute certain knowledge that I should leave.

The mark comes before I can move.

It doesn't build up. It arrives. A crack of magic from the flat stone, through the ground, up through both feet and into my left arm, and the pain is white and total and for a moment there is nothing in the world but the burning circle wrapping itself around my wrist.

I'm on the ground. I don't remember falling.

The last thing I see, before the light goes entirely, is the mark glowing against my skin. Thin lines like roots, like veins, coiling from my wrist toward my elbow and pulsing with something that feels vast and alive and very, very old.

Then nothing.

4

KAEDRIC

Ismell her before I see her.

It stops me at the edge of the hollow with one hand against a tree trunk and every instinct I have firing at once. Something warm and green, like rain on soil, like something growing. It shouldn't be notable. The forest smells like a dozen versions of that. But this is underneath everything else, distinct and specific.

I push that aside. File it. Deal with it later.

The hollow is smaller than I expected for the amount of energy it just discharged. A ring of old stones, mostly swallowed by root and moss, and at the center a woman on the ground beside the flat altar stone, unconscious, her basket spilled beside her with herbs scattered across the roots.

I'm down into the hollow before I've made a decision to move.

She's breathing. That's the first check, and the relief of it is sharper than I expect from someone I've never met. Her pulse is fast but steady when I press two fingers to the inside of her wrist, and then I see the mark and I stop.

It's still glowing. Faintly, the way embers glow when the fire has just gone down, the light pulsing in a slow rhythm that matches her heartbeat. The lines are thin and precise, coiling from her wrist up toward her elbow in a pattern that I recognize from the oldest documentation in the pack's archive. Drawings made by hand, copied from stone carvings, passed down through six generations of Alphas with a note in the margin of the original that said, in my great-grandfather's handwriting: if you ever see this, it has already begun.

I've looked at those drawings enough times that I can confirm what I'm seeing in about three seconds.

The Forest God has marked a vessel.