— — —
Shelby was furious with her twin. Jordan and Max too, but they weren’t around to be vented to.
“We can’t just pretend she doesn’t exist.”
Irene looked at her like she was crazy. “I didn’t see you striking up a conversation.”
“You and Jordan are closer to her than I was–I am–but if you aren’t going to talk to her, I will.”
“And what am I supposed to say. ‘Oh, hello Eva, sorry about your eyes. By the way, it is really freaky how you get around without them.'”
“Yes. That would be perfect. Maybe she’d just say how she gets around and we could all get along again.”
“I don’t want to know. What if it is something horrible.” Her twin was shouting now. Not a thing she often did. Irene was supposed to be the calmer and more level-headed of the two.
Shelby sighed. She stood up from her desk and crossed to Irene’s bed. She took a seat beside her sister and wrapped an arm around her. “You’re lucky she doesn’t live next door right now.”
She had a feeling she knew what the problem was. Irene’s problem, at least. Shelby didn’t know why Jordan hadn’t tried to talk to Eva. Maybe, like Shelby herself, he thought she would talk about it on her own. Maybe Eva still would.
Max hadn’t said anything because the boy was awkward; he’d admitted as much after alchemy. A good thing in her book. He would have said the wrong thing.
Maybe that was Eva’s own problem.
“I know Halloween scared you. I know Eva’s mysterious dance partner scared you. Max’s story of her scared me too. But she saved Shalise, she’s not a bad person.”
“We haven’t seen Shalise since then.”
“You haven’t. You were hiding in your room for a week, remember? I spoke with her before she left. She seemed a bit… well, traumatized–”
Irene scoffed. “After hearing Max’s story about the phantom, I can’t imagine why.”
Shelby swatted her upside the head.
“You hid in the room for a week and you didn’t even see anything. How would you feel if you were attacked by zombies. I doubt that she even registered Eva’s dance partner saving her.”
“And how did Eva save her? Shalise had a chunk taken out of her arm by a zombie! There’s no cure for that.”
Shelby shook her head. Her twin could be so dense sometimes. “Doesn’t matter. Eva saved her. How isn’t for us to know, at least not right now. Maybe we could ask that too.
“Now tomorrow, we are going to apologize. All of us.”
“Apologize? For what?”
Shelby flicked her twin’s nose. “For all but ignoring her. Then we are going to ask her if she wants to talk about anything. After that, we’re going to treat her like normal.”
She kept her finger tapping on Irene’s nose. “For you, that means treating her like before Halloween. I will be very cross with you if you don’t. You’re not a cruel person, I know you better than anyone. Being afraid or hating someone because they saved someone else is not your style.”
Shelby bounced off the bed and rounded on her sister, pointing a finger at her face. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes mother,” Irene pouted.
“Good.” Shelby turned back and sat down on her own bed. “I am your older sister and it is my job to set you straight. Call me mother again and I’ll turn you over my knee until your rear turns red.”
Irene stuck her tongue out before flopping over on her bed, shutting off her light as she did so.
With a sigh, Shelby did the same.
Another day like today couldn’t happen again. It felt too gross. Everyone sat around stewing in their own thoughts.
It was a good thing Juliana went after Eva during alchemy. If they managed to talk a little, perhaps that would help in the morning. She’d been surprised that Juliana didn’t say anything during classes or lunch. Juliana, at times, seemed just as awkward as Max.
Shelby doubted that either of the girls had any friends before coming to Brakket.
All the more reason to be friends now.
Author’s Note 001
All of the following is completely optional to read. This is no narrative. It in no way affects the story. I’m mostly going to ramble for a few words.
And that’s that.
Book one closes.
Thanks for reading. I do hope you enjoyed, I certainly did.
Book two will continue as scheduled. No intermissions, no interludes. Tune in next time for 002.001.
My main goal with book one was simply to finish. And I’d say I did so. It is a coherent story, at least from my position. I do hope it was coherent for you as well.
For book two, I am going to try to give some limelight to other characters and develop some of them a little more. Eva might take a short backseat. We’ll see more non-Eva characters as POVs. Probably. Still hammering out some details though I have a few chapters written already. It is a little something of an experiment so I suppose we’ll see how that goes.
Book two will finish out the remainder of the school year and then on to book three where Eva will be the unquestionably main character once again. But that’s a ways off yet, so I won’t promise any details I might change later.
As for book one, it took a little while to get off the ground, I’d say. I can already see things that I would change were this not a web serial. The early chapters especially.
Chapter six, I do believe is the weakest chapter. Few things actually happen that progress much of anything. Devon is made to look like a buffoon a bit too much, though I may blame that on Eva handing him potions that don’t mix well. At least in my headcanon.
It wasn’t until after I finished the entire thing and started on book two that I realized Eva fell victim to the ‘main character runs off alone despite nefarious people being around and after her’ cliche. It seriously didn’t even register with me until just now. I’m going to claim that Weilks had her stalked by ghosts and they were purposely waiting for her to be alone. Maybe that will alleviate some of my worry.
I do like the end of the book, that is to say the last few chapters. In my original plan, Eva was simply to be captured by Sawyer. A capture she promptly escapes from in a manner similar to how she actually escaped. At some point, I realized that these big bad necromancers were treating her with kid gloves despite killing several people during the Halloween chapters.
Halfway through writing that chapter, I decided that had to go. This isn’t some story with ineffectual villains. Sawyer and Weilks are unrepentant murderers who kill for their own gain. They’re not going to just leave Eva in some cell somewhere.
So the Sawyer torture scene came about.
I had a table set out full of injuries. Some were very minor, such as Eva’s hair. Others were more severe than her eyes. The eyes was probably the worst along side a full limb being removed. In the end, I decided on her fingers and eyes. After I decided on torture being a thing, she was always going to lose her toes.
The removal of her eyes caused quite a few changes, though nothing too specific. I had already alluded to her being able to sense blood, so I didn’t think it was too big a jump for her to sense blood within people. I’m always nervous about ‘eleventh hour superpowers’ as I don’t think they’re done well too often, but I thought that might be a reasonable.
No more talk about her eyes, though. There will be more on that in book two.
Her hands being replaced with Arachne hands ended up being another thing I had slight reservations about. I don’t want to make light of those with actual injuries in real life, but it is hard to write a protagonist with no eyes, no hands, and no toes. Perhaps in the future as my writing improves, I’ll take a stab at a legitimately crippled character. For now, I needed to at least somewhat rectify her injuries. I do think the hands will come into–well, I’ll leave that talk for future books. Wouldn’t want to spoil much of anything.
Speaking about injuries and their causes, I almost had a villain chapter. Sawyer and Weilks were mostly going to talk about their plans and how they were going to accomplish them. I ended up scrapping it only a few hundred words in. Rest assured, there were plans there and they would have succeeded had they not been disrupted.