Fear.
Eva pressed backwards against the lip of the roof.
Uncertainty mixed with her fear, locking her in inaction.
Arachne advanced. Her powerful legs slammed into the ground. The distance between them dropped to nothing in the blink of an eye.
There was a sickening squelch as chitin pierced flesh.
Hot red blood splattered over Eva’s body.
Chapter 025
“Mom!”
Juliana jumped to her feet. Fear beat in her chest.
That was… a lot of blood.
Eva pulled out her black dagger and jammed it into her mother’s chest.
Juliana almost started spouting a stream of profanity before she remembered what that dagger was for.
A moment later, the constant stream of blood stopped flowing from the arm-sized hole in her mother’s chest.
While the blood stopped, the wound did not heal.
“Eva, she is old.” Arachne moved closer as she shrunk down to her human form. “I am sure she would be happy to give up the short remainder of her life if it meant letting us get her daughter out of this place.”
“She isn’t that old,” Eva shouted back.
An ember of rage burned inside Juliana at the callous disregard for her mother. Arachne liked her mother. They enjoyed sparring together. This… This…
“She isn’t quite dead,” Willie said from her side. He too had stood up. He leaned over the top of the row of seats in front of them with wide eyes.
That ember of rage flared into a full-on bonfire.
He was at fault. This entire battle, setting them against one another. All of it was his doing.
If he wasn’t around…
Juliana’s grip on her dagger tightened to the point of her fingernails digging into her palm. She tried to ignore the warm liquid lubricating her hold on the dagger. Worried it would slip out, Juliana molded the metal around the back of her hand.
The only thing stopping her from lashing out with all of her anguish was the knowledge that her mother had failed not long before doing just that. Even with his back mostly turned towards her, giving her the element of surprise, Juliana didn’t know where to hit.
She would only be getting one chance, after all.
Head, neck, or even most of the chest area would take down most humans, but Willie was a demon. A demon with strings.
Juliana slipped the dagger out from underneath the hem of the green dress Willie had given her.
None of those ideas will suffice. A puppet master won’t be defeated through the demise of his puppets.
Juliana flinched. It had been a long while since she last heard that voice. Not since the prison. Still, the voice was probably correct.
She slipped her dagger back underneath her dress while eying the thin strings coming off the demon.
They didn’t go anywhere. A few feet above his body, the strings just faded out of existence.
There had to be a real body somewhere.
“Going somewhere, milady?”
Halfway out to the aisle, Juliana flinched again. “Just need to go to the bathroom,” she said.
“Do hurry back. I am not so certain that the show is over.”
Juliana gave a brief nod. She started walking out. That walk turned into a jog. Her jog turned into a full on sprint.
Soon enough, she burst out of the theater’s entrance and onto the small island.
As the doors swung shut behind her, Juliana collapsed to her knees.
Mom is okay, she told herself. Eva was patching her up. And Arachne… It must be a ploy. Something to put Willie off guard.
And if it wasn’t… well, her mother would be more than capable of paying Arachne back when she got better. It certainly wasn’t a fight that Juliana could hope to affect.
Her mother would get better. She had survived far worse. The scars covering her body stood testament to that. Arachne’s wound would be just another scar when she healed.
For any of that to happen, they needed to get out of here. And that meant dealing with Willie.
Juliana got back to her feet. Using the front of her dress, she wiped off her face. Ignoring the damp spots, Juliana took a step out of the theater’s entryway and onto the sand-covered beach leading towards the boat dock.
And promptly stopped.
Where was she to go?
Anytime Willie wanted her to be someplace else, he teleported her there. There was nothing to the island except for the theater as far as Juliana could tell with her strictly mortal senses. No bridges to the other places. She didn’t have a clue how to get to the old west town that currently held her mother.
And Juliana highly doubted that Willie would have taken her to see his real body.
To find the puppet master, one must simply follow the strings.
“I tried that,” Juliana hissed. “They just disappeared overhead.”
As she ranted at the voice inside her head, Juliana glanced towards the sky, pointing as if in demonstration.
An involuntary tremble shook through her arms.
The moon, shaped like an eye, stared down at her.
That couldn’t be it. It was a moon. Nothing more.
With a heavy weight in her chest, Juliana sank to her knees in despair. For some reason, she doubted the small dagger she had fashioned would be up to the task of killing whatever being existed behind that eye. The sheer size of it would mean her dagger would inflict nothing more deadly than a paper cut.
“Now what,” she said. It wasn’t a question so much as it was a statement of defeat. Even if she had a magical knife of instantly kill demons, there was no way to actually reach the eye.
“Well?” she asked, clenching her teeth as her anger grew. “What do I do now?”
It was probably foolish to shout at the voice in her head. Especially underneath the watchful eye of the moon. But Juliana couldn’t help it.
“You dragged me out here and showed me what must be done. And now what? Was it just to show how hopeless my situation–my mother’s situation actually is?
“What do you expect me to do‽”
Juliana stared up at the sky. Not at the moon. At a blank spot off in the vastness of the darkness. Whatever entity had taken an interest in her clearly had some level of omniscience to it, so it probably didn’t matter where she looked. If she hadn’t already heard the voice in the prison, she would probably have dismissed it as Willie further messing with her mind.
What’s more, she could feel its intent. She wasn’t entirely certain how. If asked to put the feelings she received into words, Juliana would find herself at a loss.
Juliana wasn’t deluded enough to believe that the voice was benevolent–this was Hell after all. Nothing about the voice screamed that it was warm and fuzzy.
But the feeling wasn’t malicious. There was no cruelty in it. Just cold truth.
Perhaps it was an enemy of Willie. Or some other demon that wanted to make her into its pet.
At the moment, Juliana cared little. So long as it helped her, helped her mother, Juliana was willing to repay the favor with interest.
Nothing but silence answered her.
Juliana’s head slumped to her chest as her palms pressed into the sandy beach. She gripped the sand in her hands, lifting it up and watching it fall.
“Fine,” she said, again moving to stand. “Fine. I’ll save my mother myself. And I’ll owe you nothing.”
Turning back to the theater, Juliana started forwards. Even if it wasn’t his real body, perhaps killing the puppet would buy enough time to get her mother out of this hellhole.
Reentering the theater, Juliana found it mostly unchanged. Willie still stood facing the screen. The intensity in his eyes had died down somewhat compared to the first few moments after her mother had been injured.