6. Kaedric
KAEDRIC
Igive her a twelve-minute head start.
Not because I'm being generous. Because she needs to believe she made a clean exit, and if she looks back and sees me behind her in the first five minutes she'll spend the rest of the day focused on that instead of thinking clearly about what I told her.
I want her thinking clearly. I need her thinking clearly, because a woman who thinks clearly is going to arrive at the same conclusions I have, and she's going to arrive there faster than she wants to.
Brennan is at my shoulder the moment I step outside.
"You let her walk," he says.
"I did."
"That's the marked vessel of a god-level entity walking unescorted through open territory toward a civilian population center."
"I'm aware of what she is, Brennan."
He falls into step beside me, which with Brennan means he isn't done.
He has a particular quality of silence that functions as a continuation of the argument, and I've known him long enough to read it accurately.
He thinks I made the wrong call. He's going to tell me why in precise, sequential order as soon as he determines I'm actually listening.
"She rejected everything you told her," he says.
"Yes."
"She's going to go back to her shop, tell herself she can manage it, and be completely unprepared when something comes through her front window tonight."
"Probably."
He stops walking. I don't, and after a moment he catches back up. "You're going to let that happen."
"I'm going to let her get home," I say. "I'm not going to let anything happen to her.
" I keep my eyes on the tree line where it borders the field between pack territory and the road into town.
"There's a difference. She needs to understand the threat is real before she'll accept help.
Telling her isn't enough. She's the kind of person who needs to see it. "
"That's a significant gamble with her safety."
"I know what it is." I do know. It sits in my chest with the particular discomfort of a necessary decision that I don't enjoy making. "Pull Torin from the northern boundary and put him on the town perimeter. I want eyes on her shop from two positions. Nobody moves in unless something does."
Brennan is quiet for a moment, which is different from his arguing silence. This is the silence of him recalibrating. "You're already running a protection detail."
"I'm running a monitoring detail. There's a difference there too."
He makes a sound that isn't quite agreement. "The northern boundary is already thin."
"Add Fenwick back once Torin is in position. Rotate every four hours." I finally look at him. "I need her to choose to accept help. Not because I forced her hand, but because she sees she needs it. That's the only way this works long-term."
What I don't say, because Brennan is sharp enough that saying it out loud would open a conversation I'm not ready to have, is that forcing her into anything sits wrong.
My bear has been loud about her since the moment I picked her up in that hollow, and the instincts running underneath my reasoning are not entirely tactical.
Brennan would have thoughts about that. Later.
We reach the road and I send him back for the vehicle while I take the longer route into town on foot.
The mark's energy is still faintly perceptible to me even at this distance, a low signal like a radio frequency just below comfortable hearing.
I track it toward the center of town and orient myself by it more than by the familiar streets, which tells me something about how the morning has changed my perception of things.
Her shop is called Briar and Root. I pass it from the far side of the street, not slowing, taking in what I need in a single scan.
Lights on inside, the open sign flipped, a young woman visible through the window straightening a display shelf, bright and quick in her movements.
Not Elowen. The shop assistant mentioned in what I know about the local businesses I've had reason to track over the years.
Elowen herself I catch a glimpse of through the back window. Moving. Functional. Jaw set in a way that tells me the walk home didn't settle her the way she wanted it to.
Good. Settled would mean she'd stopped thinking about it.
I find a position across the street in the narrow gap between the hardware store and the post office, and I wait.
This is not a thing most people would describe as comfortable, standing in a cold gap between buildings watching a shop front, but I've spent enough years doing versions of this that comfort stopped being the metric a long time ago.
The metric is whether the position gives me what I need, and it does.
Two hours pass. Town does its ordinary afternoon things around me.
Then, at the edge of my perception, something shifts.
It's faint enough that a less experienced tracker would miss it entirely.
A displacement in the energy around the shop, the way the mark's frequency changes slightly when something that can perceive it gets close enough to lock on.
Not a person. Not local wildlife. Something that is neither of those things moving through the alleys on the far side of the block, slow and directional.
Testing.
I reach for my phone and text Torin a single word: east side.
His response is immediate: Confirmed. Two minutes out.
I push off the wall and cross the street.
The sun is almost down.