Genoa had taken her appearance in stride, for the most part. Eva guessed that she had seen far stranger as part of her mage-knight guild. Carlos had been more interested in examining her than anything else.
As such, it was something of a daunting experience, watching as this presumably normal mortal took in her appearance. His eyes, though they started wide, had narrowed into thin slits full of suspicion and wariness.
Eva kept eye contact, her face remaining as impassive as she could make it, daring him to say something. She fully intended to make him blink first.
A third person walking in the door threw that plan to the winds.
Eva jumped to her feet, knocking over her teacup. Ignoring Catherine’s yelp as the hot tea ran down the table towards her, Eva strode across the room.
Only for the unfamiliar man to move in front of her path. He held a green baseball-sized gemstone focus in his hand, outstretched towards Eva.
She didn’t waste any time in readying for combat. Her dagger came out of her sheath at her back while her off-hand ignited in thaumaturgical flames.
“Erich! Stand down.” There was a slight pause. “She’s my friend.”
Those last three words made Eva forget everything that had been worrying her. It didn’t matter if Carlos hated her. It didn’t matter if the man–this Erich–attacked her. She could take him. Probably.
The flames coating her hand expired and her dagger disappeared into its sheath.
“Erich.”
After giving her a wary look, Erich’s focus disappeared into a pocket. He took an excruciatingly long time with moving out of the way, but he eventually did.
“Hello, Eva.”
There was a smile there. Maybe not a careless, gleeful smile, but a smile nonetheless.
Putting on a smile of her own, Eva stepped forward and wrapped her arms around her friend.
“Hello Juliana.”
Chapter 017
“Excuse my brother. He isn’t so high-strung normally.”
Eva pulled back from Juliana and turned her eyes to the man she had called Erich. That explained the vague likeness to Genoa that she had noticed. Yet he lacked all of the relative frailty that embodied Carlos.
Which didn’t actually mean anything. Juliana wasn’t frail in the slightest. She had inherited her father’s height impairment while taking after her mother in every way that mattered.
Probably a good thing. She might not have survived her ordeals had she her father’s constitution.
Looking closer at him, and looking past the resemblance to Genoa, Eva found that he had rather sharp features. High eyebrows, a pointed nose, a chin that stretched down to a single point–at least, that’s how it appeared through his goatee. Unlike Devon’s unkempt scraggly beard, Erich had styled his to a point.
His short hair even came to a well-defined widow’s peak.
Especially with that beard, he looked more like he could have been a younger version of Devon than any descendant of Carlos.
Eva suppressed a shudder at the thought of Devon having children.
“Ah,” Eva said, hoping that the lengthy pause had gone unnoticed, “so this is the mysterious Erich that Juliana has so sparsely mentioned.”
She had already decided not to hold his almost-assault against him. He was just protecting Juliana from a possible threat. That was an admirable trait.
Erich crossed his arms, not lessening his glare in the slightest.
Glancing slightly towards Carlos, Eva said, “I didn’t think you would be bringing along your–”
She cut herself off. ‘Bringing along your whole family,’ was what she nearly said, but without Genoa, the whole family wasn’t here. And she didn’t exactly want to call attention to that fact.
“–children,” Eva finished, feeling awkward. She was the same age as Juliana and wouldn’t appreciate being called ‘children’ in any sense of the word. Erich was worse. Eva wasn’t sure how old he was, but he had already graduated from Brakket Academy before she had started. That put him at twenty at the very least, though Eva was willing to bet closer to twenty-five.
Carlos didn’t respond. He used one hand to grip either side of his glasses, hiding his eyes as he readjusted them.
To Eva’s side, Juliana just let out a small cough.
Erich didn’t react in the slightest.
“Perhaps,” Catherine said, her chair grinding back against the tiles as she stood, “you should move on to the ‘enigma.’ Your greetings can be exchanged later; at some point in time when I am not required to be here observing this disgusting display of social diarrhea.”
Eva could have done without that last line, but apart from that, all she was thinking was thank you Catherine.
“Right.” Eva clapped her hands together. “Um, just follow us?”
Heading out of the office lobby and into Brakket Academy proper, Eva kept just a few steps ahead of Juliana and Erich while Carlos trailed behind them. Catherine took up the rear, absolutely failing at her job of keeping an eye on the guests if all the noises coming from her cellphone were any indication.
The short walk passed in silence. And not the good, comfortable type of silence. Eva had a number of questions that she wanted to ask of Juliana, but with Erich sticking at her side and Juliana not at Eva’s side, it felt like an insurmountable task.
So instead, Eva used the walk to reflect. Partially on Juliana and the distance she was keeping, but mostly on herself.
Why was it so hard to talk to her? Eva had never had a problem like this. Mostly because she cared very little for what other people thought of her. Awkward situations were a snap to avoid when your only friends were a potentially insane old man and a spider demon.
But even after coming to Brakket and meeting Juliana, Shalise, Jordan, Irene, Shelby, and even Max, Eva had not had trouble interacting with them. And that included immediately after her gloves came off–so to speak–about demons and Arachne.
Really, all of them, save for Max and Irene to an extent, cared far less about the whole diablery thing than Eva had been expecting.
This, here and now, was a completely different feeling. Arachne had almost killed her friend’s mother. Under the influence of another demon or not, that was more than enough to cause a rift. Especially since they knew that Eva still associated with Arachne.
But still, she should be able to talk without tripping over herself, shouldn’t she?
Maybe it was something else then. Carlos and Erich? That was a whole lot more likely. Eva did care what Carlos thought to an extent. Not quite the levels of what she cared about Juliana’s thoughts. And Erich, Eva had only just met him. With no real opinions set in stone, she only cared about what he thought as an extension of what Juliana might think if he ended up hating her.
“Alright,” Eva said as she pushed open the door. “Inside that large ice block is the creature. I do have some information about it from other sources, but I think that I would rather hear your uninfluenced opinion to start with.”
“Is there a reason,” Carlos said as he readjusted his glasses again, “that you two are here instead of the dean or the school’s magizoology professor?”
Eva blinked. She had been expecting him to rush up to the enigma and start examining it, or whatever a magizoologist did when they came across a potentially undiscovered species.
“I’m not sure about the dean,” Eva said with a glance towards Catherine.
The succubus just shrugged and went back to her cellphone.
“Professor Twillie is on the outside of the loop because of the nature of the creature and how it arrived. Zoe should be here before long, she was just taking care of overseeing a makeup test that will be ending soonish.”
“That’s a summoning circle,” Juliana said, quirking an eyebrow at Eva. “It is a demon then? You think my dad has a better chance of identifying it than Devon?”