Page 28 of A Blade of Lies and Spirits

When Walker opened the door,I was sitting at the desk with a plate of fresh apple slices at one of my elbows and a glass of tea in my hand. The food and drink had refreshed me. Tired humor narrowed his eyes.

He inclined his head. “Do you want to see the piece of your Wendigo?”

I nodded, no longer interested in my meal.

“Come with me then.”

I rose and followed Walker.

The building’s interior spaces had no windows. The hall he led me down extended well past where the house should have ended. A neat trick, that.

He opened the door at the end of the hall, murmuring a word before he turned the knob. Only a yard or so inside, a circle bound by multiple intertwining and separating strands of silver, hammered flush into the wooden floor covering the middle of the room. The air rippled within the circle, creating a haze that made seeing what might be within impossible. Nor could the room be crossed without stepping into the circle.

I’d seen circles like that when Uncle trained Chance. I’d tried to step within when I wasn’t keyed to it and had gone flying, paying with severe burns for my curiosity.

A foot out from the circle, the curves of an inscribed ward shone with lesser power than the circle, still visible to the naked eye, sparking blue and green. It tricked the eye, vanishing into the wall, even though, as far as I knew, that was not possible..

In terms of magic, this area was a separate and isolated entity from the rest of the house. It must have cost a tremendous amount of money and power to put together. Whoever built it, presumably Walker, valued security and privacy.

“That’s… impressive,” I said.

He stepped into the circle and held out his hand.

I didn’t have anything to lose, but I still winced as I stepped in. The crackle of oddly delicate power barely lifted the hair on my arms.

“This cleans off residue before I go into the lab,” Walker said. “Workings that might have been slipped on me when I wasn’t paying attention.”

Our steps echoed off the wooden floor of the inner room. If the building we’d entered was the same size on the inside as the exterior indicated, the workroom would consume most of the space. Ethan had talked about dimensional bubbles once, but I’d gotten distracted by a hawk swooping. Hawks were glorious in flight. Ethan hadn’t pushed me like he did Chance because most of my power was locked away and neither of us wanted to risk it getting free.

I’d almost gone elf as a child and didn’t want to risk it now.

The walls of a freestanding room took up half the area to the left. To the right, two more circles, one large and one small, gleamed with subdued power. The larger was set in the center of the space, the smaller perhaps five yards to its left. Both had wards set around them similar to the one we’d stepped through to enter the workroom. Tables ran along the walls of the right side that the circles didn’t occupy, scattered with an array of knives, dried and living plants, books and other ritual objects.

Between the circles stood a simple wooden desk covered with paper and pens.

Within the smaller circle, the scrap of darkness that I had impaled on my knife during the fight with the Wendigo skittered. The amorphous black shadow, curled and moved within its confinement. It changed shape, lengthening and thinning as it pressed along the inner edge. As I approached, it retreated to the furthest area it could, putting as much distance between us as it could.

My empathic abilities awakened, stretching out to the scrap, feeding me hunger mixed with anger and a faint echo of fear. Even when I relaxed, I received none of the texture of human emotions, no sense of the person it possessed.

Spirits, unlike humans, rarely experienced mixed emotions. The mélange it radiated was unusual and intriguing.

“No answers from it yet,” Walker said.

He gestured. Dazzling white light flared in the center of the circle, an almost physical presence. My eyes watered and dots danced in my eyes before I looked down and to the side. The shadow writhed, scuttling along the edges of the circle, rolling itself into a dot.

Weird. I couldn’t feel a single thing off it. Was the circle blocking emotions?

“I know you can hear me, wherever you are,” he said. His voice, cold and precise, cut the air like a blade as he sent his words through the piece of shadow to the Wendigo. “When I return, I’ll give this fragment of you a voice. What I do now to this scrap of your shadow I can do to you whenever I choose. Consider your options. If you surrender yourself, I promise that it will be considered as a mitigating factor.”

Without pausing, he strode to the freestanding room, opening the door and gesturing me in. Stepping out of the room with all its magic and circle was a relief.

Outside the room and the strange space it occupied was a relief, even though I didn’t feel any different leaving it. The room past the door was cozy and full of printed books, more than I’d ever seen. Ethan had a collection, but this dwarfed his.

A covered tray waited on the table, controls set to moderate heat, along with two place settings. He cracked the seal, and the waft of herbed chicken and buttered peas and carrots brought me to the seat immediately.

Floating in a happy food haze, I missed the knock.

“Come in,” Walker called.

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