9 9

The town was ablaze.

At the road outside the town, a thick crowd of panicked people forced Shari to come to a halt. Shari looked at Lira, then the town, then back to Lira once more, telling her exactly what she needed to know: they needed to get in there.

Lira swung her leg over Shari's back and jumped off, approaching the back of the crowd.

"Move!" called Lira, trying to get through the crowd. A few people turned to look at her, one woman started babbling about their livelihood and grabbed Lira's arm, but none of them got out of the way. Lira shook the woman off and began shoving her way through the crowd. "Get out of the way or the spirit beast eats you!"

Shari growled, and suddenly, people seemed a whole lot more willing to make room.

They reached the front of the crowd, and almost immediately, the heat hit Lira in the face.

The fire was more than just a few buildings. Almost half the town was burning, and it was spreading. Flames licked the wooden walls and devoured the thatched rooftops. Embers drifted across the streets to set the next thing alight. People were screaming, the sky thick with smoke that flickered with the orange glow of firelight

Lira muttered a curse, pulling off her right glove and shoving it through one of her belts. She drew her smaller dagger and used the tip to draw a seal to protect against fire and heat directly onto the back of her hand. The seal's ruby light felt like nothing against the inferno before her, but it was the best that she had.

"Spirit hunter!" said a man behind her. He reached for her until Shari growled. "What are you--"

"Has anyone checked the inn?" said Lira.

"N--no," he said. "We think the fire started at the inn, but it spread too fast, we all just had to run, water didn't do anything--"

Lira swore again and turned her back to him as he kept babbling, pulling her cowl up over her head. "I'm following you, Shari."

Shari didn't need more of an invitation and ran forward, straight into the heart of the burning town with Lira on her tail.

Embers and ash covered the cobblestone streets, forcing them to move slower or risk slipping as they ran. Lira was forced to pull one side of her cowl over her mouth and breathe through that, desperately trying to both stay in sight of Shari and watch for falling debris as the smoke stung her eyes.

The fire's intensity only grew the further in they went. Even with her seal warding off some of the heat, it still scorched the uncovered parts of her face. The crackle and snap of the flames filled her ears, drowned out for brief moments when a wall collapsed beside her or a rooftop finally gave in with a deafening crash. More than once, they had to turn back, to try another street because a building had collapsed across it that even Shari couldn't shove her way through.

Two streets from the inn, with its rooftop almost visible through the smoke and flames around it, they met another blockage. The wall of a large townhouse had collapsed across the street.

In sight of the inn, Shari refused to leave. She put her paws against a large, wooden beam and attempted to push it aside, snarling as the flames licked her paws.

Lira cursed, pulling an arrow out of her quiver and using its head to make a small cut across her cheek and wiped the flat of the arrow head against it.

"Shari, get back!" said Lira, taking several steps back and aiming at the beam.

As soon as Shari was clear, Lira let loose. On contact, the arrow exploded, shattering the beam into several smaller, far more passable pieces. Granted, it also collapsed both walls either side of it, but at this point, property damage was the last thing Lira cared about.

Shari leapt through the flames and bolted towards the inn. Lira glanced around for her arrow, swore yet again when she realised she'd never find it among the debris, and jumped through the fire after her bond mate.

The door to the inn was blocked, and Shari looked to Lira for a solution. Lira didn't waste time trying to open it--even if she did, it might be the only thing stopping the whole building from collapsing. She stood to the side of the window and smashed it with the end of her bow. The flames inside flared, forcing Lira to turn her head away.

Despite the seal on the back of her hand still glowing and active, Lira was beginning to feel the effects of the flames. The heat was noticeably worse than it'd been a few minutes ago. Her head was pounding and her skin felt like it was burning. Shari had multiple things that looked like burns, particularly across her paws. Spirits were durable against anything that wasn't spiritsteel, but they still had physical forms. They could still be hurt. Burned. Killed.

Unable to protect Shari directly, Lira took a step back from the wall and undid her cloak, throwing it over Shari and strapping it across the spirit cat's chest. That done, Lira made another, far rougher cut across her bicep that was maybe a little too deep, but she didn't have time to be neat or wait for her blood to pool. She drew the seal onto a leather piece she'd specifically sewn to her cloak for seals, making it as big as she could fit.

It took barely a minute, but when a minute might be the difference on whether the roof collapsed on their heads or not, Lira felt every second like a stab to the gut.

She paused long enough only to glance inside and check the ceiling before she climbed in through the window.

The main floor of the tavern was scorched. There wasn't much left other than charred wood and ash-covered stone, but by some miracle, the building itself hadn't collapsed yet. The flames were still chewing through the support beams and some of the thicker pieces of wood, but even if there were someone in here, there was no way they were--

A ruby glow in the centre of the floor caught her attention.

A blood seal--a large one composed of at least six different functions, right beside the charred remains of who she assumed to be the innkeeper himself.

Lira took a few steps closer, not quite able to believe what she was seeing. The seal was complicated, but she understood enough of it to realise this seal had started the fire and caused it to spread at such a rapid pace, as well as several other things she couldn't identify.

For the seal to be this complex, this strong despite the fire around it, it would have needed a dangerous amount of blood. Seals could only be drawn in your own blood, which meant that somehow, for some reason, the innkeeper had drawn a seal that was not only guaranteed to kill him from the blood loss, but burn him alive.

A darker thought crossed her mind. That, or--

Shari roared, dragging Lira's attention away from the seal.

A little more shaken than she wanted to admit, Lira pulled herself together and followed Shari to the stairs. There wasn't much left of them--a treacherous looking framework at best. Lira took one look at the state of the floor above them and knew Shari had no chance of getting up there.

"Help me up," said Lira, climbing onto Shari's back.

Shari put her front paws as high up the wall as she could get them, allowing Lira to use her as an improvised ladder. Lira pulled herself up onto what remained of the second floor--a few thicker, narrow beams and the smouldering boards that spanned between them--and looked back down at her partner.

"Where am I going?"

Shari rumbled and turned her head, looking down the hallway.

Lira sucked in a breath, coughed from the smoke, and started moving, staying as close to the floor as she could.

She tested each beam she stepped on, a practice that saved her twice when a floorboard couldn't hold her weight. She kept her sealed hand in front of her face when she had to get close to the burning walls and used her left arm to shove aside the burning debris as bit by bit, the roof caved in. As her glove burned away to reveal the glowing blue limb beneath, Lira was yet again grateful that her spirit arm didn't feel anything.

Towards the end of the hallway, there was a second charred corpse slumped against the wall. Lira's heart jumped to her throat when she saw it, hoping, praying that somehow, this wasn't Shari's dark-haired girl. There'd been two serving girls. Two--and the door at the end of the hallway was still closed.

Lira reached the end of the hallway, her vision an ever-blurring mess of smoke and fire.

She grabbed the handle of the door with her left hand and tried to shove it open with her shoulder. Locked. She took out her hunting knife, jammed it between the door and its frame and slashed down through the locking device. Trying the door again, it still refused to budge.

Her thoughts went to the blood seal downstairs.

Almost hoping she was wrong, Lira used the blood from her still-bleeding bicep and drew a seal on its charred surface: Unlock.

She tried the door a third time, and this time, it opened.

Lira opened the door slowly, watching for any signs of collapse. A few inches in, she heard something--muffled, desperate screaming from someone inside. Confident the wall wouldn't immediately give way, Lira shoved the door the rest of the way open.

The room was filled with smoke and smaller flames that licked at a floor it found difficult to burn but was otherwise relatively unburnt. At the centre, the dark haired serving girl lay, gagged and bound to a fallen chair. She had a few burns and was bleeding from a large gash on her leg, but she was alive.

The rest of the room though--Lira didn't know where to look first as she shut the door behind her and crossed the room towards the girl.

The woman who'd written the letter last night and harassed her on the way out of town lay dead at the end of the bed to the left, her neck looking like it'd been broken. There were two messily drawn blood seals on the floorboards that were far more elegant than Lira's attempts at warding off fire--one drawn from the woman's blood, the other from the girl's, whose boot was smeared with mostly-dried blood.

"Listen to me," said Lira, cutting through the girl's ropes before the gag in the hopes she could get a few words in. "We're going to get out. Shari's downstairs. Don't panic, don't think about anything, just shut up, follow me, and do what I say." The last rope came loose, and when the girl didn't start flailing around, Lira took that as a good sign. "Got it?"

Lira pulled off the gag. The girl coughed a few times and swallowed on repeat, but she didn't start screaming.

"Can you walk?" asked Lira.

"I don't know." The girl's voice was hoarse. She coughed again. "You need to get Ryn out."

"If Ryn's the other serving girl, she's--"

The girl was already shaking her head, weakly lifting one hand towards the corner to the left of the door.

Despite the heat and the flames, Lira's blood froze when she saw the faint, pale-blue glow coming from a small spiritsteel cage. She rushed over, dragging the cage closer to the unburnt centre of the room and broke it open with her knife.

The spirit inside was a tiny, birdlike creature, barely bigger than Lira's fist. She removed the spiritsteel spikes that pinned down its wings and cradled it in her hand, biting down on the anger that threatened to make her stupid. The spirit was alive, but it was so, so weak. She could barely distinguish its form against her spirit palm.

Lira took one look at the girl's face and knew the truth.

"You're spirit bonded," said Lira, realising for the first time why Shari might've taken a stronger interest than usual, why she'd been so desperate to get back here. "What happened to Ryn?"

The girl blinked back tears. "The woman--I didn't realise what she was doing to him at first, but once I did, I tried to stop her, she fell, I--"

"What did she do?"

The girl looked up at the wall behind Lira, at the pale blue markings on the wall that looked all too much like the beginnings of a blood seal, only it wasn't human blood she'd been using to do it.

It was spirit blood.

"She cut him, and then she started drawing that, said we were going somewhere--"

Somewhere outside the room, something large and heavy caved in. Lira cracked open the door to check. The roof had gone, the hallway no longer an option for escape.

Shari's warning roar told Lira that she didn't have much time left before the rest of it followed.

"We need to get out of here," said Lira, gently passing Ryn to the girl. She pressed the back of her right hand to the girl's forehead, effectively stamping a second heat-protection seal onto her skin. "That seal will protect you. Your job is to protect Ryn. Don't let him get burned, even if it means you take the hit yourself. He's not strong enough right now."

"How are we--"

Lira glanced around the room, looking for options and only found one: the window. Knife drawn, she smashed through the window with its hilt, clearing out the shards of glass around the frame to look outside. The drop itself wouldn't kill them, but the burning debris at the bottom didn't look like fun to land in. If they didn't get skewered, they'd collect a few burns as their reward for surviving the fall.

"Shari!" Lira called out the window, hoping her bond mate had some kind of alternative.

She could try to make a rope out of what remained of the bedsheets, but the wall was on fire. They'd burn far too quickly. The furniture was too large, too heavy to shove out the window. Her arrows were useless, and there weren't many blood seals she could draw from up here that'd help, at least not ones that she wouldn't pass out after making in her current state.

Nothing. Shari was nowhere to be seen, and from the sound of the roof, they couldn't wait much longer. She could barely think through the headache and nausea at the back of her throat. The seal on the floor was the only reason this building had held out as long as it had.

Lira flexed the fingers of her spirit hand to reassure herself, then looked to the girl.

"Unless you can think of something else, we're gonna have to jump," said Lira. "Remember what I said about Ryn?"

"I won't let anything hurt him," said the girl, mouth set in a determined line as she stared Lira dead in the eyes.

"Good. I'll go first and do what I can to catch you, but if it sounds like the roof is going, get out before it--"

The roof groaned, and some instinct in Lira knew they had seconds.

Lira grabbed the girl and dragged her towards the window. To her credit, the girl didn't hesitate, copying Lira as she swung a leg out the window and dropped.

"Sovereign, save them!"

Half a metre from the ground and its burning pile of rubble, a swirl of golden spirit magic enveloped both Lira and the dark-haired girl and swept them to safety, right as the inn behind them finally collapsed into a smouldering heap.

The spirit magic carried both Lira and the dark-haired girl a few metres down the street, where it placed them on their feet, right in front of the young spirit mage from Arden's group, still holding her staff aloft from the spell.

Shari ran up to Lira, shoving her nose into her hand as Lira automatically ran her fingers through her fur.

Maybe it was the shock of it all finally catching up to her, but there was only one question that Lira could think of. "How did you even find us?"

The spirit mage lowered her staff, breathing hard despite her relieved look. Her golden hair was windswept, ponytail loose like she'd been running. Her blue eyes were wide, her spiritsteel eyepatch hanging around her neck, and--no.

Only one of her eyes was blue.

The other one--the one that had been covered by the eyepatch before--was made of spirit energy.

The girl--Thea--glanced down at Lira's arm and tapped her own cheek with a small smile.

"I'm like you."

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