“Too expensive. Not prices I’m willing to pay.” He gave a small shrug. “Besides, I can always chop it off if something better comes along.”
“Fair enough.”
As Devon tried to sheathe the knife, it slipped from his tentacle and clattered to the floor. “Still adapting to it,” he mumbled as he bent to pick it up with his other hand.
“Takes a while, doesn’t it?”
“Arachne’s limbs are analogous to human hands. This is completely different. I can’t even describe what goes through my mind when I try to use it.” He idly scratched at his goatee with his tentacle. “And trust me, I’ve tried.”
Eva glanced down and flexed her own hand. She couldn’t say that she ever thought much about it. There were extra joints, but none of it felt foreign. Then again, it had been a whole year. She had ample opportunity to get used to it.
“So? What are you ditching school for?”
Before Eva could get a word in, Devon held up his hand. With a frown on his face, he said, “wait. Wrong question. What did you screw up this time?”
“Nothing!” Eva mirrored his frown and crossed her arms. “Why would you even think such a thing? I haven’t screwed anything up.”
Devon gave her a cold-eyed glare.
“I’m pretty sure, anyway. I was skipping class, but that’s not a good reason for an army of demon-golems to attack me.”
“What.”
Eva leaned up against her master’s desk as she told an increasingly agitated Devon the events of the past hour.
“And you just gave this Irene girl to a demon?”
“I didn’t give anything. I ordered Lucy to take her to a nurse. Carefully. No contracts, no barters.”
“That’s not a whole lot better.”
“Well I wasn’t in much of a position to do it. I came here for reinforcements only to find the reinforcements had already been sent.”
“And now we’re defenseless against this nun strike force,” he mumbled to himself. “Alright. We’re leaving.”
“What? We can’t leave. All my books and supplies are here. Nel too, I guess. Surely you don’t want to leave all your research.”
Devon slid open the bottom drawer of his desk and wrapped his tentacle around a backpack. “You’ll learn to pack light after a couple of these kind of things. Besides,” he hefted the bag up, “I last copied these notebooks just a week ago after your treatment. I can recover if I lose them.”
“That doesn’t help me! Let’s at least move my books into Ylva’s domain. They should be safe there.”
“You said they’d be here soon. I don’t want to be caught in the middle. Actually,” he rolled his head to one side with a crack before continuing, “we could just give them the girl, right?”
Eva frowned. “The thought did cross my mind,” she admitted. “The biggest problem is that she belongs to Ylva. She would vehemently disagree with that decision. I’m not too interested in turning her into an enemy, are you?”
A light grunt was all that answered her.
“I didn’t think so. That’s another reason we shouldn’t leave. Fleeing and leaving Nel to deal with whatever is after her won’t… turn out well with Ylva I’d say.” Despite her initial hostility at the woman who had been her monitor for Sister Cross, Eva didn’t actually hate her. At least not anymore.
That said, Nel wasn’t a friend and Eva wasn’t about to die or even get seriously injured for her. She did, however, make a decent excuse not to leave Eva’s books.
“I’ve been thinking,” Devon said after a minute, “with Ylva being gone, this would be an excellent opportunity to disrupt its domain’s connection to reality. Without its domain for support, it shouldn’t be too troublesome to banish it.”
“What?” Eva ceased her leaning on the desk. “Why would we do that? Ylva’s been helping us–protecting our friends and the like. That’s just… betrayal.”
“It has been doing what it wants and nothing more. It isn’t beholden to us or to human morality. We can’t hope to understand the motivations of something like that.” He paused to scratch at his neck before looking back to Eva. “And I don’t like it hovering over us during your treatments. I’m telling you, girl, that thing is bad news.”
“You’re paranoid.” Eva sighed.
Her master had far more experience. A year or so ago, she would have deferred to his advice reflexively. Now, Eva wasn’t so sure. Watching him interact with all the demons around was unsettling. He never referred to demons as anything other than ‘it’ and that never sat right with Eva.
After her final treatment, would she become nothing more than an ‘it’ to be loathed and treated with distrust?
Eva shook her head. She couldn’t perform the treatment herself. There might be needed changes to the circle or timing of the treatment that she simply lacked the knowledge to alter. There wasn’t much to do about his problem aside from convincing him otherwise.
For that, Eva wanted Ylva to stay. Unlike the admittedly psychopathic Arachne, Ylva was calm and collected. She treated Nel with benevolence. Zoe and Juliana as well. If Devon could see that, maybe he’d change his tune.
“But this isn’t the time,” Eva said. “Instead of wasting time talking, we should be moving and preparing.”
Devon sighed and dropped his pack back into his desk. With a twitch of his fingers, the drawer slammed shut.
Eva took a few steps away. She could feel whatever wards he enacted around it.
“So what’s the plan? I can’t enter Ylva’s domain, so barricading ourselves in there isn’t an option.”
“If you open it, it leads to the cell house. What if I open it?”
“Might work.” His thumb slid down his beard as he thought. After a moment, he shook his head. “If we aren’t banishing it, I’d rather not try. Ylva forbade me from entering, violating that could be unpleasant.”
“We could toss you into solitary. If found, you could claim you were our prisoner.”
Her master pursed his lips and gave her a look.
“No?”
“We’re not fleeing or hiding. Despite having backups, I’ll not destroy my research and it will not fall into anyone else’s hands. We’re fighting.”
Devon wandered over to a filing cabinet. He pulled open the drawer for enticements with his tentacle.
Eva watched with interest, wondering what he might pull out. Her master so rarely summoned demons that it was like a special occasion.
He first snatched up a set of handcuffs. They were old and rusted, maybe something that he found around the prison and decided would be useful. Whatever the case, their presence caused one of Eva’s eyebrows to raise. She had no idea what demon associated itself with handcuffs.
A bag filled with what appeared to be oily black tar had Eva’s other eyebrow up. Devon rubbed his fingers over the bag, squeezing the tar. He apparently found whatever he was looking for; with a nod, Devon dropped the bag into a pocket and went back to looking through the enticement drawer.
Eva frowned as her master looked over the third item. “We are summoning demons, right?”
“What do you think we’re doing, girl?” Devon slipped whatever the black cone was into his pocket and turned to face Eva. “Having a tea party?”
“I have no idea,” Eva said honestly. “I don’t recognize any of those as enticements.”
Devon flicked her forehead with his tentacle. Eva rubbed the spot, glad his appendage wasn’t covered in some kind of slime.
“Just goes to show that you don’t know anything.”
Eva grumbled to herself as they made their way out of his penthouse.
He had his own summoning circle set up on the ground floor of his cell house. The shackles around it were some of the strongest Eva had ever seen. She kept well away from them. Every treatment left her feeling less inclined to test the boundaries.
Devon started with the cone–a candle, Eva discovered as he lit it with green fire. He set it down in the center of the circle. As soon as he stepped outside the shackles, the summoning circle activated. The rotation of the symbols picked up speed as the entirety of the candle went up in flames.