She was not walking across the city and back out every single day. Besides, it was probably more dangerous to do so. She would be open and vulnerable while walking.
It wasn’t a great house. One of the windows had been broken. The siding was in disarray even now. Ivy, vines, and all manner of foliage had taken over one side of the house, growing up the walls and even onto the roof. The lawn had been overgrown. Juliana had fixed that up herself with some carefully applied earth magic to churn the dirt, burying most of the weeds and grass.
Tiptoeing up to the front door, Juliana paused.
Her excursion out into the city was supposed to have been for only a few hours. Just enough to unpack in the dorm. Instead, she had spent the full day plus a good portion of the night out and around Brakket. And even a short amount of time out at Eva’s prison. A place where she was supposedly banned from going.
Well, it wasn’t much that she was ‘supposedly’ banned. She was banned.
Her father would definitely know how late she had been out. Hopefully he didn’t know about her little side trip.
Taking hold of the doorknob, Juliana twisted the handle as quietly as possible.
On the off-chance that everyone was asleep, she could claim to have returned an hour or two earlier.
That plan quickly fell by the wayside. Her father, her brother, and her mother were all sitting out in the living room.
She had expected at least one of them to be—the light was on, after all—but she had been hoping that they would have fallen asleep.
“Um, hello.”
Her father got to his feet. “Juliana Laura Rivas. Where have you been?” He took three steps forward before Juliana’s mother cleared her throat.
“Carlos, you promised to remain calm.”
Juliana watched as her father clenched his hands into fists, took a deep breath, let it out, and released his grip. He took a few steps back and sat back down.
“Now then,” Genoa said with a cold smile, “why don’t you tell us all about whatever happened tonight.”
Closing the door behind her, Juliana stepped into the room. She didn’t take a seat.
The faces of all three people were riddled with concern, worry, and maybe a hint of disappointment. Carlos had his lips pressed together as he often did while angry. Meanwhile, Erich sat in a small recliner. Unlike Juliana’s parents, his eyes were glued to the front window. He didn’t look at Juliana more than a brief glance as he fidgeted to one side.
“First,” Juliana said, “I’d just like to say that I was perfectly safe the entire time.”
“That–”
Genoa cleared her throat again before Carlos could speak. He turned to her with slightly narrowed eyes—though his coke bottle glasses magnified it enough that the glare was almost comical rather than menacing.
“That’s reassuring,” he eventually finished, voice flat.
“I was at Zoe’s apartment. With Zoe.” And Ylva, she didn’t bother adding. Mentioning that wouldn’t grant her any favors with her family. “Everything happened at Brakket Academy.”
“And just what was it that happened?”
“Well,” Juliana rubbed the back of her head, “a few demon hunters tried to murder just about everyone. They only halfway succeeded.”
Before anyone could ask what that meant, Juliana powered on. “Eva is fine. So is Catherine. The dean is… unconscious still. Last I heard anyway. They did get the entire security team.”
Lucy was still alive and in the mortal realm, but she wasn’t in a state to act as a security guard.
Juliana didn’t bother to mention Zagan. If her father found out that he was gone, he might send her off to another school. Zagan would be back. Of that, Juliana held no doubts. She did not particularly wish for him to return only to find her not at Brakket Academy.
“A few buildings got damaged, but no students or professors were harmed.”
“I suppose that is better than I had feared,” Genoa allowed with a tilt of her head. “And these demon hunters?”
“Got away?”
“You don’t sound very sure.”
“Well, Eva thinks that one of them is dead. The other got away for sure. But that isn’t the important thing.” Juliana held out an arm. All of the metal she had collected from the battlefield started to coalesce in the palm of her hand. It formed into a sphere.
A sphere of shiny silver metal.
With Eva’s help, she had confirmed that it retained its demon injuring property even after being melded and reshaped.
There hadn’t been enough lying around to completely cover her. And yet, she had shed most of the metal she had been wearing. The new metal was heavy.
Heavy enough that even the small sphere she was forming needed both hands to hold it steadily in front of her. Distributing it around her body—her shoulders, hips, and back especially—helped to lighten the apparent load while wandering around. However, after finding a safe place to store the metal, she would only carry a small amount with her. The rest would be the lighter copper, brass, and iron that made up her normal suit.
Until then, she would carry it with her everywhere.
That Eva trusted her enough to keep all of the metal even despite her track record of failure spoke wonders of the other girl’s opinion of Juliana. It was metal that could possibly kill Eva if she came into contact with it for too long. Juliana would not allow herself to let down Eva by mishandling it.
“I was wondering if you knew what this was. It hurts demons and looks silvery, but Ara–” Juliana let out a slight cough, clearing an imaginary blockage in her throat.
Unlike Zagan, she would have to bring up Arachne at some point in time. The spider wanted to meet with her mother after all. However, that could wait for a time. Maybe when Erich and her father weren’t around.
“Eva told me that normal silver doesn’t hurt her in the slightest.”
Tilting her head to one side, Genoa took her hands off her lap. Gripping the handles of her wheelchair, she rolled herself forward.
“It’s heavy,” Juliana said as her mother held out a hand.
“Please. I may have a hole in my chest and can barely walk, but I’ve been keeping up with my weights.”
So she said, and yet she held out her other hand to help hold the sphere.
With a sigh, Juliana leaned forward, keeping a careful grip on the metal until she was absolutely certain that her mother truly had control. Only then did she release it and step away.
“Incidentally, Juliana…” Genoa trailed off as she turned the orb over in her hands. Activating her own ferrokinesis, she molded it away into a sort of glove. “Incidentally, you shouldn’t be picking up strange bits of metal after a battle. Or strange bits of anything. You never know when something is cursed. This seems alright, so I will let it slide this one time.”
“As long as it isn’t toxic or anything,” Erich muttered from his seat across the room.
Genoa started to turn to him, opening her mouth as if to speak, but she paused.
The metal glove on her hand turned from a shiny silver to a dark black. So dark that the area around it almost felt darker in comparison.
“That’s odd. I was only trying to stretch it out a bit.” She turned the now black glove over, holding it up to the light.
Which did nothing to alleviate the darkness.
“This… seems familiar somehow, but I can’t quite place it.”
Juliana just stared with wide eyes. It looked familiar to her too. Eva’s dagger was made of a very similar material.
Some demon metal, Eva had called it.
But why did demon hunters have demon metal?
— — —