Now that she was running, she realized Genoa was right. Leaving Juliana alone was stupid. How could she have done such a thing? Even if the crippled hunter didn’t come back, she knew that other hunters were in the area. Someone might come along to check out what had happened with that second sky cracking.
Juliana was human, but would a hunter stop to ask? Probably not.
Eva reached the roof and immediately started blinking through the air. Having just done this, it wasn’t difficult to follow her path back. Thanks to Juliana having already destroyed all the shackles, navigating through the remaining wards wasn’t an issue.
She stopped on the first roof. Saija was still lying on her stomach with a slowly melting shard of ice sticking out of her back.
Eva paused in her rush to find Juliana. On one hand, Juliana could be in trouble.
On the other… Saija was looking pitiful. Very pitiful. And she had saved Eva from the first set of shackles, if only because she had delivered Juliana.
So Eva nudged the fallen succubus with the tip of her foot. “How are you doing?”
“Oh, just fine,” the succubus drawled without turning her head to face Eva. “This roof was so comfortable I thought I would just lie here a little longer.”
“In that case,” Eva said, starting to walk away.
“Wait! You can’t just leave me here! What if those hunters come back?”
“One is dead. The other hasn’t come back?”
Eva sighed. That was good news. If nobody had been around, Juliana should still be safe.
No longer in quite the rush, Eva knelt. Pressing one hand on Saija’s back, she gripped the icicle and yanked it out of her in a single twist of her hand.
Saija shouted out, clawing at the roof. “That hurts!”
“Oh quit being such a baby.”
Eva stood, inspecting the wound. She could block off the blood vessels and keep her from bleeding out, but it didn’t actually seem to be bleeding that much. Maybe the ice had helped close off the punctured veins or maybe that was just natural demonic healing at work.
Either way, Eva shrugged her shoulders.
“It missed your spine. You shouldn’t be paralyzed or anything.”
“I hurt when I try to move.”
“Well, just sit tight here then. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve found Juliana.”
The succubus started to protest, but Eva ignored it as she walked away. Following her path across the rooftops, Eva reached the partially destroyed, partially glassed building.
The roof was empty. No Juliana. No metal-encased idol.
But that wasn’t surprising. Nothing to worry about. Juliana wouldn’t have wanted to stick around on an unstable roof. She would have gone down inside, maybe even down to street level.
“Juliana!” Eva called out as she leaned over the edge of the roof.
No Juliana down on the street. No answer either. She must be inside.
Eva dropped down into the main building, landing roughly where she and Juliana had landed after the crack in the sky. Landing elsewhere could be dangerous. In fact, moving through the building could be dangerous. The kind of dangerous that wound up with her stuck in shackles.
And if Juliana was in trouble, it might be some time before someone came along to free her. A potentially deadly situation should the shackles drain her as the other shackles tried to do to her.
“Juliana,” Eva called out again.
This time, she actually heard something in response. Nothing clear. A mumbled noise coming from somewhere below.
The staircase leading up to the roof had fallen with the blast. The way down from whatever floor Eva was on looked more or less intact.
Unfortunately, she spotted several demon shackles just waiting for some poor demon to try to walk up it without glancing above them. They were much easier to notice while facing the stairwell from the wrong direction. However, they spoke of just how on guard she would have to be while walking through the building. Or any of the buildings around.
If she had her cellphone on her, she might have called up Irene to see if she could get a human walking her through the area. At the very least, Irene should be able to scuff up the shackles enough to break them.
Not a choice at the moment, sadly.
Eva overpowered a fireball, throwing it right at the shackle before it exploded. When it did go off, it took most of the ceiling with it.
Surprising, given the difficulty in destroying the shackles within the apartment building. Perhaps they hadn’t had time to make them difficult to remove. Though they had managed to set up all the other wards that littered the rooftops.
“Oh well,” Eva mumbled to herself. “No complaints here.”
She carefully descended the staircase, checking every nook and cranny for more shackles. Even underneath the handrail and the vertical slat on each stair. Rubble from the ceiling of the stairs or the roof itself littered the landing, nearly causing her to miss another set of shackles.
This time, she tried a far less explosive fireball. Just enough to chip into the concrete platform and disrupt the shackles.
She made it all the way down to the first floor.
And promptly froze.
“Am I glad to see you,” Juliana said.
Eva wasn’t sure what to say in response.
A half-sphere of water sat in front of her. Somewhat like an above-ground swimming pool. Except there were no walls. The water was entirely held in by magic.
Wards.
Juliana stood inside it, feet about an arm’s length away from the ground, standing on a pillar of metal. Her pillar let her stick out from her chest up, but she had clearly fallen in at least once. She was soaked from head to toe.
Obviously, given her toes were underwater.
The pillar was probably made of her armor; she was only wearing her regular clothes at the moment. The only metal on her was her ring foci and Ylva’s black band.
The metal-encased idol was lying on the floor right next to the metal pillar.
Eva reached out, about to touch the bubble of water.
“Don’t!”
Juliana’s shout had her pull her hand back, clutching it to her chest.
“What if you got stuck in here? How would we get out then?”
“I’m just confused as to how you managed to fall into this trap?”
In slow motion because of the water, Juliana placed a hand on her hip. “It wasn’t full of water when I walked in. I didn’t see a thing until I ran into an invisible wall. Then it started to fill with water.” She paused, lifting a hand out of the water. Her hand hit something about a foot over her head, roughly twice as high as the water level. “I’m glad somebody showed up before it finished filling. I was about to try summoning a demon.”
She pointed down at her feet. As she lifted one foot out of the way, Eva found a mostly formed summoning circle had been etched into the top of the pillar.
“Of course,” Juliana continued in a quieter mumble, “probably would have gotten an enigma which would have just killed me. Better than drowning though. Even if I got a demon, no room for shackles here.”
“Don’t worry about either. I’m going to get you out of there.”
An easy statement to make. Much harder to follow through with. Now she was wishing she had a phone to call up Professor Lepus. The warding professor should be able to tear it down in the time it took to snap her fingers.
“How fast has it been filling?”
“Fast enough that I’d rather get out now than later.”
“You didn’t think to call someone once you got trapped?”
Juliana pulled a cellphone out of her pocket. One long dead from the water.
“Was the first thing I thought of once I realized I was trapped. Unfortunately, the water was rushing in much faster then. Enough to knock me down.” She dropped the phone with a shrug. It sank down alongside the idol and her pillar. “I honestly thought I would drown before I even had a chance to form the summoning circle,” she said.