However, while it helped, Eva had to begrudgingly give a nod to Serena and her unique abilities.
Two guards stood alert outside of the doorway leading to the basement of the cathedral.
There was another way inside, but they would have had to backtrack through a good portion of the building, negating much of their work so far. And, if this one was guarded, that door was likely guarded as well.
Turning to the others, Eva said, “Arachne can handle this.”
At hearing her name, the spider demon poked her head out from under Eva’s shirt.
They didn’t actually need to be silent. Something that Eva was beyond grateful for. Part of her reason for wanting to go in alone was that it was far easier to be stealthy with fewer people. Arachne had shrunk and latched onto Eva’s chest just to help reduce their total footprint. More people meant more noise, no exceptions.
Except when Zoe was part of the group. She just twisted her dagger and the air itself didn’t allow sound to pass beyond a small radius around their group. The vibrations froze in mid-air.
That hadn’t made Arachne unshrink. A group of people was already a larger visual target than a single person, and Arachne was larger than any one person in their group. Zoe’s air magic couldn’t hide them from sight.
“How?” Serena asked with a wide smile.
The tone of her voice wasn’t hostile and it was a fair question. It still sent Eva’s eye twitching. Not only was it a question that Eva had been about to answer on her own, but it was Serena asking.
She wasn’t certain that she liked the vampire. Every time she glanced in Serena’s direction, she found the vampire staring at her. Every single time.
To Eva, it didn’t feel much like a friendly stare or even one of the curious stares that her classmates often gave her hands and eyes. It was of the hungry variety of stares. Like the vampire was just waiting for her to let her guard down so she could have a quick snack.
“Arachne climbs on the ceiling–no one ever looks up,” Eva said, glancing up herself.
If asked, she would say that she had glanced up as emphasis on her words. It was definitely not because she too never bothered to look up. While her blood sight worked in a sphere around her, there could be nonliving concerns on the ceiling.
Looking up only to find a trapped ceiling slowly descending to crush them would be terrible. She did not want to become an Eva sandwich.
Bringing her eyes back down to Serena after finding nothing, Eva said, “Arachne then drops on their heads, bites them, injects venom, and then we walk past two recently deceased nuns.”
Zoe shifted, probably about to say something about killing people.
Serena beat her to the punch. “Buut, that will leave two dead nuns.”
“You care?”
She shrugged. “I’ve no love for the Elysium Order. However,” she held up a finger, “what if the changing of the guards happens or someone walks by? Even if we hide the bodies, the lack of guards will alert the others. If there is an augur here, and there probably is, the entirety of the cathedral will be on alert near instantly. That makes our job far more difficult.”
“Fair points,” Eva said with a frown. “But you can’t just complain without putting forward a suggestion of your own. What’s your plan?”
“Hmm,” she tilted her head back and forth a few times. “Something like this.”
Before Eva could so much as react, Serena had jumped around the corner, extending her arm out like she was holding a pistol.
Through her blood sight, Eva could see the guards’ eyes widen a fraction of an inch.
Neither of their hearts had the chance to spike in pace before Serena’s invisible pistol sent a recoil up her arm.
As her wrist flicked back, a dark beam erupted from her eyes.
Both guards slackened slightly, but not enough to topple over.
“Hurry,” Serena said, already taking off running towards the door. “Not much time.”
Wayne and Zoe were already in motion, apparently having experienced such antics from the vampire in the past. Eva scrambled after them a moment later.
Both guards had a dazed look on their faces. Neither was quite focusing on any one thing in particular.
“Locked,” Wayne grumbled from ahead of the pack.
Serena whipped her head to one of the guards, staring at the nun for a moment.
For a bare instant, the nun’s eyes refocused. Eva tensed, ready for a fight.
But the nun just turned without actually seeing any of them. She pulled a key from her pocket and unlocked the door, tapping the lock with a wand before returning to her position at the side of the door. As she retook her position, her eyes lost their focus once again.
Wayne and Zoe charged through the door. Serena gave a little pat on the shoulder of the nun. “Thanks,” she said before following the other two.
With one last look at the glossy-eyed nuns, Eva ran through the door.
“A little warning next time,” Zoe said as she shut the door and flicked the deadbolt back into place.
“Ohh, but there’d be no fun in that.”
Zoe ignored her, clicking the locks on the door shut. “The nun touched the door with her wand. There was probably a magical lock in place. I hope it wasn’t tied to any alarms.”
As they spoke, Eva watched the other side of the door through her blood sight. Both nuns shook their heads slightly as they lost the sag in their pose.
Eva waited at the door, preparing to charge through and stop the nuns from running to get help. Serena was right in that killing them would be troublesome. They could at least restrain them. That would give them plenty more time than having them run off right away.
Neither made a move for or away from the door. Each simply resumed her guard without so much as a word to the other.
“Eva,” Zoe called up from the bottom of the staircase, “we’re not there yet. Best to keep moving before they notice the spells on the door are gone.”
“What was that?” Eva asked anyone as she reached the others. She paused for just a moment, looking around. “People inside the large room on our right. Only three. A meeting of some sort?”
Eva wished that her blood sight could provide more details. Or maybe she needed to get good at reading lips through blood veins. As it was, all she could tell was that three people were seated around a table, discussing something. Two of them were augurs, judging by the copious amount of eye-shaped organs dotted around their bodies.
They were fairly far away. Just at the edge of her range.
The end of the stairs opened up into a long hallway that, after a curve, followed back along the hallway they had just been in one floor up. The main chapel room sat directly adjacent above, though if there were a replica down here, they hadn’t gone down enough steps for it to copy the vaulted ceiling.
Unless the room had been partitioned off, the nuns would be sitting in the far corner from where Eva was.
Perhaps much of it had been made into a storage area? There were doors on either side all along the hallway. Offices? What did the Elysium Order need with such a large space?
And they still had to go down one more floor before reaching the room that contained the obelisk.
“That,” Serena said from the head of the group, “was just a figment of their imaginations. Staring at a wall for hours on end has a habit of playing tricks on the mind. Whatever they thought they saw was probably nothing.”
“‘Probably nothing’ unlocked the doors?”
Serena shrugged. “Not my fault that she had a sudden pressing need to open the door and forget about it afterwards.”
Frowning, Eva glared at the vampire’s back. “If you can do that, why are we bothering with all this sneaking around? We could just walk up to a nun and have her go get the obelisk.”