Chapter 52: Spirit Barrier

We took Ethan Meuskate to Sera’s shop.

The place always struck me as a strange kind of cluttered, the good kind. Shelves lined every wall from floor to ceiling, packed with charms strung on leather cord, lockets shaped like teardrops and crescents, bracelets stacked three deep in wooden trays. Nothing about the arrangement made sense to me, and yet nothing about it looked wrong either, like Sera had built the whole room around some logic only she understood.

Almost everything in the shop sat somewhere between orange and yellow, as if the whole room had been dipped in the last light of sunset and left to dry that way. Even the dust in the air looked warm.

Even now, past midnight, with Ethan slung between us, the charms on the nearest shelf caught what little light there was and glowed faintly, like a hundred small embers refusing to go out. I’d asked her once why she kept the place lit like that even when she wasn’t working. She’d told me embers were more honest than flames. I still didn’t know what she meant by that, and I suspected she liked it that way.

Sera dragged a chair to the center of the back room, the legs shrieking against the floorboards, and we dropped him into it without much ceremony. I bound his wrists to the armrests and his ankles to the legs while Sera pulled a thin blade from her belt, the metal catching the ember-light and throwing it back gold for a moment before it dulled again.

She took his hand, turned it palm up, and drew a shallow line across the pad of his thumb. Ethan didn’t stir. A bead of blood welled up dark against his skin, and Sera caught it on the flat of the blade before it could drip onto the floor, tilting her wrist with the kind of practiced care that told me she’d done this more times than she had ever admit to me outright.

We used it to draw the circle.

She knelt and traced it around the chair in one unbroken line, the blood thinning as it went but never quite running out, like it knew exactly how far it needed to stretch to close the loop. I’d watched her do this before and it still unsettled me a little, the way the blood seemed to understand its own purpose better than the man it came from ever would.

At the four points where the circle would have made a cross, we set down two daggers each, blades crossed over one another, and balanced a candle on the hilt of each pair. My hands were steadier at this part than hers, if only because I’d set up more of these than she had lately.

The candles caught with a simple word from Sera and burned in a low, steady yellow, the flames leaning slightly toward the circle’s center as if something inside it were breathing them in.

I knelt outside the circle and pressed my palm flat against the blood, feeling the tackiness of it drying against my skin, and let some of my spiritual power flow out through it.

The reaction wasn’t gradual. The yellow flames on all four candles surged upward at once, then bent, then deepened, folding from gold into a furious, bleeding red, as if I’d fed them something they’d been starving for. Heat rolled off them in a wave that had no business coming from candlelight.

The blood circle itself seemed to tighten, the air inside it going taut in a way I could feel against my skin even from where I knelt, like the whole space had been cinched a notch smaller.

"Finally the Spirit Barrier is made."

Sera stood, brushed off her knees, and walked over to slap Ethan hard enough to snap his head sideways. The sound of it cracked through the small room.

His eyes flew open. He drew in a breath like he meant to scream, and he did scream, his whole face twisting with it, throat working, veins standing out along his neck, but no sound came out of him. Not a whisper. Not a rasp. Nothing.

The circle swallowed it whole before it ever reached us. He could hear every word we said. We would never hear a single one of his.

"We will ask questions," Sera said, and her voice had changed, gone flatter and colder than the one she used with me, "and you will use your head to answer. Understood?"

Ethan stared at the two of us for a long moment, chest still heaving from the scream nobody heard, sweat already beading along his hairline despite the chill of the back room, before he gave a small nod.

Neither of us worried about him remembering our faces, because we were wearing masks. Mine plain and unmarked. Sera’s carved with a thin smiling mouth that never seemed to match the tone of anything she said through it.

"Are you trying to kill people in Shanshin?"

He shook his head.

Sera nodded, satisfied, and I believed it too. Whatever else this man was, the barrier wouldn’t let someone lie, not inside that circle, not with that blood.

"Are you planning on doing something in Shanshin?"

A nod, immediate, like he’d been waiting for the question.

"Can it kill people?"

His shoulders came up in a slow shrug, the kind that carried more weight than any answer could have.

"He means that he doesn’t know," Sera told me, not bothering to look away from him.

"Are you doing it for the fun of it?"

He shook his head.

"Will it benefit humanity?"

Another shrug, the shoulders barely lifting this time, like the question itself exhausted him more than the last one had.

"Are you doing this for a family member?"

He nodded, and something in his face cracked open just slightly when he did, some feeling he couldn’t voice any more than he could voice a scream. For a second he almost looked like someone worth pitying.

Sera let out a breath and turned to look at me. "What should we do with him?"

I studied Ethan’s face, the sweat cooling on it now, the desperate stillness of a man who knew exactly how much trouble he was in and couldn’t say a single word about it. Somewhere behind his eyes I could see him doing the math on what came next, and not liking any of the answers he was finding.

"If we let you go," I asked him, "will you still go through with it?" ℯ

He tried to shake his head. I watched him try, watched the muscles in his neck fight for it and lose. But the barrier had no patience for comforting lies, and his shoulders rose instead, dragged up against his own will, giving us the only honest answer he had.

"Crippling is better," Sera said, already moving.

A blade of light formed in her hand, and she let out a slow breath as it did, the kind of breath you take before doing something you have decided is necessary rather than something you want. There was no relish in it. If anything she looked tired.

I closed my eyes.

Slash!

The scream that tore out of him this time found no more voice than the last one had, but I felt it anyway, in the way his whole body convulsed against the ropes, in the raw shudder that ran through the circle itself, the blood line flaring bright for half a second before settling back into its dull red glow.

When I opened my eyes again, Sera was already wiping her blade clean, and Ethan had gone slack in the chair, breathing hard through his nose, staring at nothing.

[Quest Completed!]

[Quest: Cripple or Kill The Protagonist’s Father]

[+250 Plot Points]