“Like it had been abandoned recently?”
“Maybe.”
“Alright. Figure out where it is. I’m going to grab Zoe. If it is a false alarm, we can leave peacefully—maybe rekidnap Shalise if she wants—otherwise, better to be safe than sorry.”
Chapter 003
Just as Nel had described, the camp was deserted.
Halfway around the world, a small forest held a small camp. Two small-sized tents occupied a small clearing. A fire pit in the center still had some smoldering embers amidst plenty of ash.
A bench and a makeshift table looked as if they had been fashioned from the surrounding woods. That and magic. With Shalise being an air mage, she would be able to use blades of wind in place of an axe. Eva wasn’t sure if Shalise was adept enough at magic to do so, but whoever had sliced up the trees into planks had to be an amateur.
Just looking at the bench made Eva shudder. Sitting down would probably fill her whole behind with slivers.
The least Lynn Cross could have done was to stop at a hobby shop and pick up some sandpaper.
A good portion of the forest had been cleared away. And yet there weren’t enough wooden things around to make up for the trees. Eva found herself wrinkling her nose at the makeshift latrine. It was the only other wooden structure around. It was more of a hole in the ground with some wooden boards placed over top.
The rest must have all gone into the fire.
Not a hint of actual civilization was anywhere to be found. Lynn Cross might be crazy enough to live in a place like this, but how could Shalise?
It wouldn’t surprise Eva in the slightest if Shalise had run off.
“No sign of them?”
Eva glanced up to Zoe and shook her head. “Nope. No spilled blood anywhere either, so I doubt there was a fight. What about you? Hear them?”
“I don’t hear anything that one wouldn’t expect to find in a forest.”
Eva knelt down on the ground, poking at a spider-form Arachne. The poor spider demon had yet to recover from Zoe’s teleport. Eva had only just managed to push herself to her feet when she started looking around the place.
Having only made one trip, Zoe had yet to bring anyone else along with her. Juliana and the others were still back in Brakket City. Wayne had just about come along as well, but Zoe had insisted that he remain behind. Someone needed to bail them out if they were walking into a trap.
“So what do we do? Wait around until someone comes back?” Eva asked as she stepped over to one of the tents and unzipped the door.
Shalise’s tent. At least, her clothes were lying on the floor along with a healthy helping of dirt around a sleeping bag. A good portion of the dirt was stuck to the clothes as well. Just how much were they roughing it that they couldn’t stop by a laundromat in a nearby town? Lynn Cross could teleport just as well as Zoe could. There was no excuse.
Eva winced as she realized that the two of them must be smelling awfully foul. There were no showers set up around the camp.
And the latrine…
“This has to be child cruelty or something, right? We can’t leave Shalise here no matter what.”
“Though she is her mother, Cross is still kidnapping Shalise. She doesn’t have guardianship over her. That rests with the state.” Zoe rubbed her forehead. “Really, we should have done something about it a long time ago, but everything has just been piling up.”
“Well, it’s good that we’re getting her now then. This just isn’t proper living for anyone.”
“So long as we find her,” Zoe said as she moved to the other tent. She unzipped it while Eva stopped by Arachne.
The poor spider-demon was just now stretching out into her humanoid form. She still wobbled back and forth as she got to her feet.
“Don’t worry,” Eva said, patting her on the shoulder before helping to steady her. “We’ll go back using my teleport.”
Zoe could teleport with Shalise. She would teleport back to one of her gate rooms on her own. Going through Zoe’s ‘Between’ was the epitome of distressing. It didn’t leave any lasting effects, quite unlike Eva’s teleportation on mortals, but that didn’t mean that she wanted to be shivering on the floor for a few minutes.
“Eva,” Zoe called out, waving her over to the other tent. “What do you make of this?”
Moving over and pushing the tent flap aside, Eva found herself frowning.
At first glance, there wasn’t anything wrong inside the tent. Just as with Shalise’s tent, there was a sleeping bag, a suitcase with clothing spilling out, and plenty of dirt that had been tracked in. Lynn Cross’ tent had a little broom and dustpan to one side and the floor looked as if she had made a few attempts at using it to no real success.
The tent was four-sided. Two angled panels making up the roof and two flat sides for the other two walls. The door was on one side and an unzippable window on the other.
Eva was about to dismiss the tent until she noticed the light coming through the window. Even fully zipped up, light still made it through the thin material of the tent. And the window—still zipped up—was casting a shadow to the side of the sleeping bag.
A circular shadow full of lines and designs that couldn’t be an accident. Some of the sigils and runes were easily recognizable as such.
“Well, it isn’t a summoning circle.” Eva stretched out a finger and pointed at a few of the lines along the edges. “There are elements of demonic shackles, but I don’t think it would work like this.”
She made sure to keep her distance. If it was some odd set of shackles that Lynn had come up with, Eva didn’t want to get stuck inside. Zoe would be able to slash away the window, thereby breaking the shackles, but the idea wasn’t appealing to Eva. The last time she had encountered nuns, they had taken Arachne’s head half off with a well placed lightning bolt.
The eyes connected them somehow. A sort of shared learning mind, according to Nel. If one nun learned something that advanced their own magical theory, the rest would know soon enough. While Sister Cross wasn’t a sister or part of the Elysium Order anymore, she still had her implanted eye.
“Any ideas?” Eva asked Arachne. The spider-demon had moved up, staring at the pattern from outside the tent.
“Devon might know,” she said with a disinterested shrug and shake of her head. “You would be more knowledgeable than me.”
Glancing up to Zoe, Eva said, “Arachne’s right. Take a picture and take it to Devon. Or send it to Catherine, you’ll probably get a faster response and she knows things about ritual circles.”
Popping out of the tent, Eva left Zoe to her cellphone as she checked Shalise’s tent. Doing a full circle around the outside, she didn’t find any unusual markings. Whatever the circle was, it was for Lynn only. Perhaps protections for or against something.
“Alright,” Zoe said, emerging from the tent. “Don’t have any cell service up here, but I’ve got a few pictures. I’ll take them to Catherine if we finish up here and haven’t found anything. And if she doesn’t know, I’ll head over and ask Devon.” She said his name with palpable distaste.
“So what do we do? Sit around for a while or go looking?”
“They could be anywhere. We could pick a direction—three if we split up—leading out of this camp and still have an entire forest to check through. That’s assuming that Lynn didn’t teleport them somewhere.”
“You’re saying we should stay then,” Eva said slowly.
“We have a better chance at finding them that way.”
“Unless something bad happened.”
“You have a better idea?”
Eva frowned, not quite sure what to say. No, she didn’t have a better idea. But sitting around just felt too much like she was doing nothing at all. There had to be something left around. A trail of breadcrumbs that Shalise left behind. Maybe a trail out into the woods.