“Besides, I still haven’t got what I originally came here for.”
Chapter 002
Irene stood outside, enjoying the bright sun beating down on her skin. Brakket Academy just didn’t get enough sun. Doubly so given that the last two months had purple streaks in the sky. They were disturbing and unnatural.
Most of her time had been spent inside as much as possible.
As if that would save her from anything.
Shaking her head, Irene put thoughts of Brakket Academy out of her mind. She was back home in New York and a safe distance away from everything troubling.
Probably. Demons were involved. It was hard to tell if any distance was safe.
Irene slapped her cheeks. “Stop worrying,” she mumbled to herself.
It wasn’t like she was going back anytime soon. Normally, her parents wanted her and her sister out of the house and back at Brakket in time for the summer seminars. This summer would be different. The summer seminars were optional after all.
She would be keeping far away until the very day that school started.
“So, you going to tell me now?”
Pushing her sunglasses up to the top of her head, Irene glanced over at her sister. She had a feeling that she knew where this conversation was about to head. Even still, she decided to play dumb.
“Tell you what?”
“Oh come off it. There are no teachers around, no Jordan, no Eva, no Arachne, not even any parents.” At Irene’s questioning look, Shelby shrugged. “They went out to dinner together. It’s just us. No one else is home. So spill. What was all that?”
Irene let out a long, exhausted sigh. Her dear sister could make herself quite the annoyance when she wanted to. It was bad enough that waving her away to Eva, someone who could answer questions, hadn’t worked. Eva barely spoke to anyone since that night.
“I told you,” Irene said, “I can’t tell you. Literally cannot. Ask me again when we’re eighteen.”
The contract wouldn’t hold her tongue after that.
“That’s two and a half years away. Two whole years!”
“I know.”
“You have to give me something.”
“Look, if Eva won’t tell you, ask Catherine.”
“The substitute?”
“If she asks you to agree to anything, I would recommend against it.”
“What would she ask me?”
Irene just fell silent with a shake of her head. Saying anything more might be treading dangerous waters.
Shelby let out a sigh of her own. She walked around the porch to stand right in front of Irene. Without a word of warning, she pushed herself into the chair.
Irene had to scoot herself to the side to make room. Once Shelby finally stopped her squirming, Irene gave her sister a glare.
“You’re not going to disappear, are you?”
“What?” Irene said, blinking away her glare. “Of course not. What do you mean by that?”
“Well, Juliana disappeared. So did Shalise. Max as well.”
“Max has been hanging out with Drew,” Irene said, not even trying to hide her disgust. “Juliana’s mother got hurt. She went back home.”
“And Shalise?”
Irene didn’t have a good answer for that one. Eva had said that she was fine. Where and with who had been left out of the explanation. “She disappeared after Halloween, but she came back. I’m sure she’ll be around again.”
“As long as you don’t go anywhere,” Shelby said with a sigh. “I don’t know what I’d do. Or what I’d tell mom and dad.”
Irene flicked her sunglasses back over her eyes. “Me neither.”
— — —
Eva closed the door of the warehouse, again solidifying blood inside the locking mechanism and keyholes.
Not her blood. Eva had dutifully reclaimed every stray droplet of her own blood. She had used some of the thugs’ blood to reseal the doors and windows.
It wasn’t impervious. Anyone dedicated enough would break it with little effort. The solid blood was more to keep any passers-by from stumbling across something that would scar them for life.
Part of her was hoping that there were more members of that little gang and that they would be the ones to take a hammer to the door. Maybe it would scare them straight.
Eva frowned outside the building. Unless they thought it was the actions of a rival gang. That could very well start some kind of gang war.
She glanced back to the door. There needed to be… something.
An idea popped into her head. A terrible, horrible, no good idea. But Eva decided to go with it anyway.
Six crooks thought they had smarts
And kidnapped a girl for her parts
The girl fought back
Six crooks she did sack
And claimed every one of their hearts
Looking over what she had just scrawled in blood on the door, Eva’s already deep frown deepened further.
“That’s terrible.”
It identified the assailant as a girl. Hopefully that would keep any gang wars from springing up. That was where the good points ended. The fourth line could be misinterpreted to make it seem lewd. Worst of all, the rhythm was off.
She had half a mind just to erase the entire thing.
But it wasn’t that bad. At least the rhymes worked. It got the message across for any other thugs that might see it. She wasn’t afraid of being identified to any gang members. She planned to be back at Brakket before long anyway, far out of either the police or the gang’s jurisdictions. Eva knew the truth about the fourth line and didn’t much care if anyone actually misinterpreted it.
Not to mention the time it took to come up with. If she got rid of it now, she’d have wasted a good half hour of retooling the words and figuring out just what to say.
It probably said something about her that the rhythm bothered her most.
That and the last line wasn’t entirely accurate.
They’d find a seventh body in there, but she hadn’t touched the mage after he broke his neck. Bloodstones couldn’t be made from the deceased after all. Whoever found him could come up with their own conclusions about the reasons for that.
She had, however, stolen his wand and burned a handful of books that were up in the room he had been sleeping inside of. The books weren’t anything special. Eva was relatively certain that Brakket’s library held copies of them all.
As far as she could tell, he was entirely self-trained.
Eva built up magic and teleported across the city to her abandoned hospital. After stumbling out of the hospital’s gate room and taking a long drink from a water bottle, Eva sat down at her desk.
There she lined up four fresh bloodstones.
The first three had been done by the book. With the proper sigil inscribed in blood on the back of her hand, Eva pressed her hand against the still beating hearts of the thugs before channeling her magic.
After those three, Eva had decided to experiment.
She had altered the sigil slightly in an attempt to puzzle out just what each little line did.
The first alteration had produced a bloodstone slightly smaller than the average. Despite that, it felt just as heavy as the others, if not heavier. Eva lacked any sort of precision scales at the moment.
She would just have to wait and see how it held up in the long run. It lacked the pure sheen and crystal clear transparency that those she had recovered from the museum possessed. Because of that, Eva doubted that it would last forever.
In fact, she assumed that it would be the first to show signs of decay.
The bloodstone she had made out of the necromancer had been larger than normal and had lasted longer than an average bloodstone as well. Unfortunately, she didn’t know what she had done to get that result–Eva hadn’t been thinking all that clearly at the time. Having recently undergone torture at Sawyer’s hands would do that to anyone.