And immediately pulled away, clutching her head.
“Zoe?” Wayne set a firm hand on her shoulder.
She shook him off. “Nothing. Same effect as when trying to look around her runes at the dorms. Which means it is probably a safe area.”
“Safe for her. Or the necromancers use the same thing.”
Zoe attempted scrying again. This time, she picked an area half a mile off. “No protection over here. There’s an unmaintained road leading up to a large black area.” Zoe winced. “The black area is the protected area. It triggers the same effect, though not as bad as when I tried to look in directly.”
“Any people or zombies around?”
“None that I can see from the hill.” Zoe frowned. She tried to avoid looking directly at the black area, but it was huge. “Each one of her rune packets is just enough to cover one room. This place is probably the size of the entire school plus one of the dorm buildings, maybe the other as well.”
“Are we going to go?”
“I’d rather not leave a student in trouble. We can be gone in an instant if it looks dangerous.”
“Unless they’ve got wards set up against that.”
“If we can get in, we can get out.”
Wayne just grumbled. He moved over and peeked into her scrying window.
Zoe readied her dagger and went between. The street fell into a white void and was replaced by a sagebrush filled hillside. Wayne appeared at her side an instant later. Zoe turned, looking out over the area that was covered in darkness.
“A prison.”
“An old one,” Wayne grunted.
“Do we go knock?”
Wayne shrugged and headed down the hill. Zoe followed after him, careful to mind her step down the rough hillside.
As they approached the main gate, Zoe made out the young girl leaning against the bars.
“Eva, are you alright?”
The girl before her looked like she could barely stand on her feet.
“Just tired for the most part. Took you long enough to get here.”
“I couldn’t see into the prison. Your runes, I assume. We were forced to arrive on the hill.”
“When you didn’t show up, I figured it was something like that. I had to come out here to keep you from wandering the prison.”
Wayne took a step forward, peering down at the girl. “Something we shouldn’t see inside?”
“Tons of things,” Eva rolled her eyes, “mostly didn’t want you running into one of my mentor’s wards. You would find that very unpleasant.”
“Unpleasant?”
“Explosively so.”
Wayne growled.
“In any case,” Eva said, “I’m fine. I need the book. Recent events have convinced me that it needs to be destroyed sooner rather than later.”
Zoe did not like the sound of that. “What events?”
“Oh nothing much. Ran into two necromancers. They killed Stephen Toomey right in front of me and had about a hundred flesh golems. They found us with some ghost dogs that were tracking us from when we found out the name of the book.” The black-haired girl smacked her face. She half shouted, “Which is something I didn’t think about until just now.”
The edge in her voice set Zoe on edge as well. Eva rarely was perturbed by anything.
“There is one more person I didn’t tell you who went with us. Well, two, but my mentor’s associate can take care of herself. Juliana on the other hand…”
“You took Juliana with you?” Eva putting herself in danger was one thing. One thing Zoe didn’t like. She couldn’t do much to help it aside from confining Eva to her room. She doubted that would even hold her. Not if she’d set up a home out here with enough facilities to make it livable.
Bringing other students into it was crossing the line.
Not to mention that it was Juliana. Her mother would raze Hell itself if anything happened to her daughter.
“You said there were hordes of skeletons.”
“Not that many.”
“Mr. Carter was injured so bad you haven’t even seen him since.”
“It was just a flesh wound.”
“You said you were lucky to have escaped with your lives.”
“Nothing wrong with a bit of embellishment. You’re making a much bigger deal out of this than you did when it was just me and my mentor.”
“You are wrong about that, Evaleen Spencer.” The girl winced at her full name. Zoe hadn’t forgotten how her father went on about the ‘ungrateful brat who won’t even call herself by her birth name.’ “I remember very distinctly scolding you for a good half hour.”
“Well, we don’t have time for another scolding. If they tracked me down, they might go to the dorms. They might already be there, I escaped from them over an hour ago.”
The young girl looked calm, but she started sweating. In the cold air, that was something of a feat.
Zoe knelt down and placed a hand on Eva’s shoulder. She felt a tremble beneath the shirt. “Eva, calm down. The dorms and school have very thorough alarm wards set up. If anyone were hurt or even taken somewhere against their will, all teachers would know instantly. Nothing has happened yet.
“Professor Twillie along with a full complement of local police are watching over it. Wayne,” she glanced at her companion, “will head over and check on Juliana.”
Eva nodded and looked at Wayne. “Shalise was injured at the party earlier. Bitten by a zombie.”
Zoe couldn’t help but gasp. Wayne shifted.
“She’s fine, not contagious nor infected.” Eva held up her hands. “Though you may not believe that when you see her injuries. We thought about taking her to the hospital, but Juliana believed that would be a bad place to go on a night like tonight. She’s hopped up on potions and being watched over by Juliana.”
“More of your zombie immunity potion?” He made his disbelief clear in his tone.
Eva nodded.
Wayne grunted and vanished.
“Now, Eva, we are going to talk about everything that happened tonight.”
“I’d rather get to destroying dangerous books and then bed. I am feeling a very bad headache coming on.”
“Eva.” Zoe gave the girl a hard glare. “We are going to talk about everything. People died tonight. I had to rekill two students. This is not okay.”
The girl tried to shake her hand off, but Zoe kept a firm grip on her shoulder.
“None of that is my fault. I am not a necromancer. I didn’t bring them here. I warned you that Halloween was a dangerous day.”
“I know. I’m not blaming you. You are more involved in this than anyone else save for the missing Mr. Carter, that is why we will talk.” Zoe gave her a smile and a squeeze on her shoulder before releasing her. “Are you going to invite me in?”
Eva shuffled her feet and shifted her eyes away from Zoe. “There are no good areas to host guests outside of very heavily protected wards. Well, there are, but you probably won’t like solitary.”
“And you can’t key me into the wards?”
“I… could. We talked about incriminating things already once. A similar idea applies here.”
Zoe didn’t respond to that. She already had an idea of what the elusive Mr. Carter was into. The ‘associate’ of his that had been with Eva earlier was another piece to the puzzle. There were few humanoid creatures that could move and jump the way it did.
“My office then,” Zoe said.
“That’s…” Eva put her hand to her forehead. “I’d much rather stay here. I’m quite confident in my wards and their ability to repel even very powerful creatures. Not to mention A–my mentor’s associate will get antsy if she finds me missing. She may become… unpredictable.”
“Eva. I am willing to look over Mr. Carter’s demonic associations.” Eva snapped her head up, eyes wide. So easy to read, Eva. “So long as Mr. Carter truly means no harm to anyone and keeps his…” Zoe ground her teeth, “things under control. And is against the necromancers currently assailing our town.”