Eva let the topic drop. Even if Alicia tried to kill Ylva, it was doubtful that she would succeed in doing any harm. In fact, it really wasn’t any of her business. Alicia was Ylva’s servant and therefore, Ylva’s problem. She could handle it herself.
“Anyway,” Eva said, “I was planning on dropping her into my domain with Shalise after she had healed a bit. Unless you had a better idea?”
Ylva shook her head side to side. Slightly. The movement was subtle enough that Eva almost missed it. Taking her eyes off of the cell, she turned to fully face Eva. “No. We find no issue with that plan.”
“Good,” Eva said, half-surprised that Ylva hadn’t objected on the grounds of adding another servant to her collection. “I’ll keep an eye on her as much as possible until then. You don’t think there will be any issues keeping her here, do you?”
“So long as she isn’t removed from the cell, she will not be able to affect anything outside of the cell. We suggest you keep her contained.”
Eva frowned slightly, but nodded. That might put a damper on her plan to heal Sister Cross with a blood ritual. Oh well, Eva thought, not feeling vindictive in the slightest, she’ll just be in pain for a little longer.
Zoe walked into the prison before Eva could verbally respond to Ylva’s suggestion. Her normally impeccable hair had been tossed up in disarray, like it had been an extraordinarily windy day.
She walked up to them, footsteps about as heavy as her breathing. She leaned up against the wall with a small sigh. “Great,” she said to her captive audience, “I need another shower.”
“You smell pleasant.”
Zoe’s eyes flicked over to Ylva with a questioning glance. “I… um…”
“Like a campfire,” Eva offered after taking a deep breath for herself. “A very pine-woody campfire.”
“Ah,” Zoe said, confusion disappearing with a nod. “We got your little accident under control.”
“Mine? I didn’t even use fire magic.” Eva thumbed at the cell. “And I didn’t ask to be attacked either.”
“Be that as it may, you could have at least sent off a message to us earlier.” With an exasperation-filled sigh, Zoe glanced over into the cell. Immediately, she winced. “She looks… Is she going to be alright?”
“Fine enough,” Eva said. “She’s actually mending her skin on her own. Maybe I’ll toss in a few potions if she is on her best behavior.”
“Really?” Zoe said, pressing closer to the cell for a better look. After a moment of inspection and apparently not finding what she was looking for, Zoe frowned. “Are you sure?”
“It is excruciatingly slow, but yes.”
Zoe hummed for a moment before pulling away. “Alright,” she said slowly as she turned to face Eva. “Now, what exactly happened and what are we going to do about her?”
Sighing, Eva wondered if she shouldn’t just call in everyone for a quick meeting. It would save a lot on the repetition.
Unfortunately for Eva, Ylva turned her attention towards Eva as well. Resigned, she started explaining everything from the start.
It was all Eva could do to keep in her irritation when Wayne wandered in fifteen minutes later asking what had happened.
— — —
Irene’s arm trembled as she sketched out a wide circle on the floor. The chalk in her hands left a trail of excess dust from the unsteady pressure, much of which smeared under her sweaty palms. Droplets of sweat fell from her brow, landing on her chalk and further marring her circle.
“You call that a circle? Looks more like an egg.”
Pausing for a moment, Irene looked at her drawing. It looked great. She had used string attached to her chalk and the center point. Unless the school had some computerized circle drawing laser machine, it was as perfect of a circle as anyone would be getting.
In fact, glancing over some of the other groups’ summoning circles, Irene was sure that hers was by far the best even taking into account the sweat droplets and other minor errors.
Gritting her teeth, Irene shot a glare at her partner, Randal Hemwick.
He sat on top of one of the tables that had been shoved aside, lightly swinging his dangling feet as he frowned at her drawing. Apart from constant criticisms, he hadn’t offered the slightest bit of help. And his criticisms were more complaints than anything useful.
Though him not helping was mostly her fault.
“I don’t want to summon a demon with something that shoddy,” he said, brushing a hand through his light gray hair. “Couldn’t you add some flourish to some of the designs? If your circle works at all, any demons we summon would be offended at your poor craftsmanship. And you’re so slow. Look,” he pointed, “those two groups are already done.”
Following his finger, Irene frowned. Had they looked at the book more than once? Despite her not having the actual summoning part of the circle memorized, she could see plentiful errors in the shackles. And those, as she firmly believed, were by far the most important part if people wanted to stay alive.
“Go draw your own if you hate it so much,” Irene said, grumbling more to herself than for her ‘partner’ to hear.
He heard anyway. “Aww, Irene. I would, but then who would summon your demon for you?”
Irene winced before falling silent. That had been their agreement. She would draw the entire summoning array and he would do the summoning.
But when he put it like that, it made it sound like she was frightened.
She was. Still, he didn’t need to say it so loud.
Choosing to ignore him, Irene returned to drawing out the lines, curves, circles, and so on. Almost every mark she made on the floor got double-checked in the book.
“No!”
The sudden shout caused Irene to jump. Her chalk went sliding across a small portion of her circle, ruining the last five minutes of work.
Sighing, she looked over to what caused the disturbance.
“If I can walk through your shackles without even trying, an imp will overpower them without breaking a sweat.” Catherine swiped her high-heeled foot through the circle on the ground, ruining perhaps the entire hour’s worth of work. “Do it again or watch another group.”
With that said, the succubus wandered off to evaluate another circle.
That was a relief at least. When Catherine had announced that today they would change the fact that this diablery class contained no diabolists, Irene had worried a lot that she was going to take up her usual routine of not supervising the students. She would feel much better had Eva shown up–Eva seemed to be far more responsible of the two, a scary thought on its own–but an active Catherine was good enough so far.
Picking up a fresh corner of her cleaning cloth, Irene set to work removing all traces of her mistake. It didn’t take long, and redrawing the affected lines as she erased sped up the process by skipping over the need to double-check in the book.
She still did, of course. But not until everything had been redrawn.
Setting down her book, Irene jumped.
Randal had slid off of the desk and was leaning uncomfortably close.
“So,” he hissed in her ear, “what would happen if we drew out a set of shackles and hid it under a mat in front of the door?”
Irene blinked. Shooting him an incredulous look, she said, “how could you not have read the book?”
It was Randal’s turn to blink. He opened his mouth to respond.
Irene talked over him. “Shackles can’t have anything but air between them and the demon. Even covering the circle with a thin sheet of tissue paper will break the shackles.”
“It was–”
“Are you an idiot?”
“What?”
“This isn’t some normal class where the worst you’ll do is burn down a desk before the professor intervenes. These are demons. Deadly dangerous creatures that don’t care about humans except in how much they can exploit us. They’ll kill us without blinking an eye. And you haven’t even read the book?