As soon as she finished up with Sawyer, Eva vowed to research and invent time magics that would allow her to go back and slaughter whoever it was that invented frankincense.
It was made worse in that it didn’t help. Nel couldn’t see Sawyer. All that pungent scent of pine and lemon did was tell them that Sawyer hadn’t moved much since the day before.
Serena never seemed to mind, but Eva wouldn’t be surprised to find out that all of her senses were dulled unless blood was involved.
For that specific reason, Eva was not using blood to quickly draw out her ritual circle. She made do with regular chalk. It was dusty and got everywhere–including inside the joints on her hands–but she didn’t want to torment the poor vampire with the scent of her blood.
“Alright,” Eva said as she brushed the dust off her hands. “I think I’m done.” She did a quick double-check of the circle. During the previous days at motels, there had been a lot of spare time. Enough for her to memorize the ritual circle in full. Still, double checking cost nothing but a few extra moments and had the potential to save her from fatal mistakes.
Satisfied that her memory had served her well, Eva placed one of the thugs’ bloodstones in a small circle at the far end of the larger circle. The vial of Sawyer’s blood, she emptied into a glass bowl in the center of the circle.
She stripped her clothes off and sat down at the edge of the circle, just inside the ring.
With the others gathered around outside the circle, Eva started channeling her magic.
The bloodstone disintegrated almost instantly. Powder flew through the air and landed in the bowl of blood. It stirred and mixed together on its own. Once dissolved, the blood lurched from the bowl in a small ball and flew directly towards Eva’s face.
She didn’t dodge. And she tried not to wince as the blood seeped into the corners of her eyes.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Eva said as her vision split in two. There was a cold chill on her skin that she didn’t actually feel along with a light drizzle of rain.
Obviously, it wasn’t raining inside of their motel room. It might have been a cheap place, but it wasn’t that run down. Even if it was, Eva wouldn’t have drawn out a ritual circle beneath a leaky pipe.
Serena stepped forwards. “Did something go wrong?”
“No,” Eva shook her head. That action just made her stomach churn. She shut her eyes and lay back against the floor. “I just see and feel everything that Sawyer sees and feels.”
“You can see Sawyer?” Nel just about shouted. “With a ritual that simple? Then what have I been–”
“It will only last forty-eight hours. I figured that it would be more useful now rather than back at Brakket where it would run out and the information would be too out of date by the time we got here.” Eva smiled as she watched Sawyer’s actions. He didn’t even know. Or, if he did, he made no indication of it. “I can’t tell where he is either, though I’ll be able to find landmarks and figure out just what he has defending him.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to fight though. It’s too disorienting. We’ll have to wait until it wears off.”
Serena hummed for a moment. “Forty-eight hours? I’ll have to ask for an extension on our stay.” Through her blood sight, Eva caught Serena licking her lips.
“That’s fine.”
Nel crossed her arms and huffed. Eva could almost understand her frustration. Scrying was supposed to be her specialty, after all.
“Well? What is he doing?”
“Digging up a graveyard.” Eva watched through his eyes for a moment longer before correcting her statement. “I guess that he isn’t digging it up. He’s watching an army of skeletons dig it up.”
“An-an army?” Nel squeaked out.
Eva shrugged. They would be annoying, but she wasn’t going to consider the skeletons that big of a threat.
“More importantly, he has two enigmas at his side. Both looking incredibly docile.”
Chapter 010
It only took six hours for Eva to regret ever performing the ritual.
By twelve hours, she was certain that she would be sick multiple times before the ritual wore off.
The doubled vision and senses, she could handle. Sitting in one spot with her eyes shut went leagues in preventing her from feeling ill. Anything that reduced her sensory inputs to only Sawyer helped exponentially.
No. Her regrets didn’t have anything to do with the ritual itself.
Rather, her regrets stemmed from ever thinking that peeking in on Sawyer’s deprived mind would be a good idea.
It wasn’t.
It definitely wasn’t.
Watching him dig up a graveyard wasn’t so bad. That had consisted of him standing around and watching a bunch of skeletons. The skeletons shoveled out dirt. Eventually, one would hit a casket and wave him over.
That was around where things started to go bad. Cracking open caskets was not something that Eva would recommend to anyone. With all of Sawyer’s senses, Eva could smell the body contained within.
The smell.
She didn’t know where to begin in describing it. Horrible. Vile. Disgusting. No word she could think of had the proper impact.
Eva had barely managed to keep her lunch down. She was no stranger to gruesome things. Blood, violence, killing people even. None of it really bothered her all that much. She had become used to it.
But everything that she was used to was fresh. No time for rot to set in. Bodies she killed didn’t often fester inside a tiny box with no clean airflow. At least not while she was around.
She had actually started to regret leaving the bodies of those thugs lying around their warehouse. She actually hoped that the police had either found them immediately or wouldn’t until a hundred years after their bones had been picked clean by scavengers. Finding them anywhere in between would not be pleasant.
Sawyer hadn’t even wrinkled his nose at the stench. He reached in without hesitation and gripped the body’s chin. The leathery skin had holes in it, especially around the cheeks and eyes. He turned the head one way, then the other. A bit of cracking sound had accompanied the motions, but Eva couldn’t tell what it was. He was the expert, not her.
He plunged a bare finger into the eye socket. After wiggling it around for a moment, he withdrew, wiping the gunk on his finger on the cloth inside the casket. Closing the lid, he had checked the date on the tombstone before writing ‘three months’ on the lid with a marker.
“To the warehouse,” he had ordered.
Four skeletons had picked up the casket, one at each corner, and marched away.
In Eva’s opinion, caskets looked heavy. She had never lifted one, so she couldn’t say for certain, but that was just what she guessed by the size. How four skeletons could pick up a casket without their arms falling out of their sockets could only be explained through the use of magic.
That had been Eva’s experience with only the first of the caskets. He had stuck around, digging up tens of the things. Every one got an inspection like the first. Some smelled worse, other smelled better–or Eva was just getting used to the smell. One in particular had been damaged at some point. The casket hadn’t been sealed properly or it had broken open. Maggots infested the inside.
Sawyer hadn’t so much as flinched when reaching into the casket. He hadn’t taken any notice of the things as they crawled over his hands. Only when he removed his hand did he glance down at the maggots. A pale light washed over his skin.
The maggots dropped to the ground, unmoving.
Some of the bodies followed the first to the warehouse. Some went to ‘the field.’ A number of them got thrown back into their graves. Ones fresher than a year tended to go towards the warehouse. Older ones went to the field. Damaged corpses, those with missing arms or bashed in skulls for example, made up the bulk of those that were returned to their grave.