Page 7 of The Bear Between Us

I look down at my wrist.

The mark is still there. Of course it is. Part of me had been holding onto the possibility that it was a fever dream, something my brain produced under magical stress, but it's there in full daylight, the thin coiling lines still faintly luminescent against my skin even now, even hours later. I press my right hand over it automatically, which does nothing, and the mark pulses once in response to the contact. Warm. Deliberate.

"You know what it is," I say, not a question. Something in the way he looked at it when I first focused on his face.

"Yes."

"Then tell me."

He does. He's concise about it, which I appreciate even as the content of what he's saying lands like a series of small collisions. The Forest God. A mark that hasn't appeared in centuries. A beacon, he calls it, which means whatever left that mark on me has also announced my location to everything in the region that can perceive old magic. His territory, which we're currently inside, and which he is the Alpha of. The creatures that have been testing the boundary for weeks, growing bolder, now with a fixed point to move toward.

Me. The fixed point is me.

When he stops talking the room is very quiet.

"No," I say.

He doesn't react to that. "No to which part."

"All of it." I swing my legs off the cot and stand, which goes better than the sitting up did. The room is small, a single functional space with the cot, his chair, a table with my basket on it. Someone restocked the scattered herbs back into it, which is such an incongruous detail that it briefly derails my focus. "I appreciate you pulling me out of the forest. But I'm not in danger from my own wrist, and I'm not staying in pack territory, and I don't need an Alpha telling me what my own magic means."

"That mark isn't your magic," he says. "That's the point."

"I'm aware of the distinction, thank you."

He watches me pick up my basket. He hasn't moved from the chair, which is either patience or strategy or both. "The first attack will come tonight," he says. "Maybe sooner. Whatever is drawn to that mark won't wait."

The mark pulses, hard, at the word attack. I keep my expression level and my hand away from my wrist.

"I've been managing supernatural threats in this town for five years," I say. "Without pack involvement."

"You've been managing the edges," he says. "This isn't the edges."

"I understand you have a territorial interest in this situation. I don't share it." I find my jacket on a hook near the door, which means whoever brought me here also thought to bring my jacket, which means this was organized, which means he was expecting to have this conversation and prepared for it. That irritates me more than any of the rest of it. "Thank you for the information. I'll take precautions."

I open the door.

"Elowen."

I stop because the sound of my own name in his voice is unexpected. Not because it's threatening. Because it isn't. It's quiet.

I don't turn around.

"The mark will hurt more the farther you get from the shrine," he says. "That will ease in a day or two. It isn't permanent at that level."

It's such a practical thing to tell me that for a moment I don't know what to do with it.

"Thank you," I say, and walk out.

The territory outside is unfamiliar and I spend ten minutes finding the direction of town by the position of the sun, which my grandmother taught me and which I have never been more grateful for than right now. The mark aches steadily as I walk, a low insistent pressure that does not ease the farther I get from the building.

He was right about that.

I walk faster.

6

KAEDRIC