We’ll be waiting!
P.S. Don’t keep us waiting for too long. We mere mortals don’t have forever.
Juliana blinked with a glance over towards Eva. “I don’t suppose there’s another prison around Brakket?”
In response, Eva clenched her hand into a fist. Rather than crushing the paper, her claws pierced straight through it, tearing one side to shreds.
“Devon is still there. He needs to be warned. All my stuff…”
“Eva–”
Whatever Zoe was going to say, she didn’t quite make it. Eva disappeared, leaving a foul stench behind.
Zoe hissed out a small curse before she disappeared as well. Her vanishing was accompanied by a cold air that cleared out the stench of brimstone left behind by Eva.
Juliana stood in the hallway, feeling somewhat upset at having been left behind. Just because she hadn’t been around in forever didn’t mean that she couldn’t help out. In fact, it was probably best to have more humans while demon hunters were around. Humans wouldn’t get stuck inside shackles or other traps.
Though, maybe with how she had acted upon finding Lucy, Eva was right to have left her behind.
She had forgotten just how… intense things could be around Brakket. It wasn’t something that she had prepared for.
With a sigh, Juliana glanced away from the spot where Zoe had disappeared from.
And found that Ylva was staring straight at her.
Rubbing her thumb across the cold band on her finger, Juliana said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t get much of a chance to greet you properly earlier.”
“The circumstances were understandable,” Ylva said. “After securing Nel, We will be moving to join Eva and Zoe.”
“I don’t suppose that you might take me with you?”
There was a slight pause as Ylva looked over Juliana. A slight nod sent her platinum hair flowing around her shoulders. “That can be arranged.”
“Thank you,” Juliana said with a smile and a bow. Her father would have a fit.
Chapter 023
At least nothing is on fire, Eva thought with a welling of relief deep inside.
In fact, better than nothing being on fire, nothing looked damaged at all. Everything in the women’s ward was just where she had left it. Outside, well, the prison was a fairly large place. Eva was mostly certain that everything was normal. Her blood wards gave her a view of the place in a manner reminiscent of her using clouds of blood to see and through that, she couldn’t see anything amiss.
Neither could she sense the presence of Daru anywhere. Nor any sign of him physically being here through her sense of blood. If this were a trap, she would have expected some trail of breadcrumbs to point her in the right direction.
Then again, it was barely past dawn. Dew coated the grass and the sun was too weak to give off much heat. The note had said to come at nightfall.
Which meant that she might have a few hours to set up traps before they showed up.
First thing was to prepare her secondary blood wards around the prison. They were wards that Eva had set up after the Elysium Order had attacked. The nuns had sat outside of her wards, taking them down while being a safe distance away. Eva’s secondary wards would lie dormant in a ring around the edges of her main ward, surrounding the prison. If someone walked up and tried to take down the main wards, the secondary wards would activate and hopefully ruin someone’s day.
It probably wouldn’t work against anyone who knew what they were doing. Someone would probably notice.
Hiding her wards better was one of the things that Eva was hoping to learn in next year’s schooling.
But, delaying attackers for a few extra minutes might make all the difference in the world.
Turning back into the women’s ward, Eva ran straight into Zoe. The professor immediately clasped her hands on Eva’s shoulders, freezing her movement.
“What were you thinking?”
“Devon needs to be warned,” Eva said. That was the second thing she needed to do. It would have been the first, but she didn’t want to run from the women’s ward all the way out to Devon’s building only to have to run back to the women’s ward.
“There could have been traps. Shackles in your gate room or even something as simple as a bomb.”
Eva opened her mouth to retort, but found she had no real response. The women’s ward, and the prison by extension, had always been safe. Well, almost always. Barring that one incident with the Elysium Order inquisitors. An incident that her secondary blood wards should mitigate in the future.
But she hadn’t even considered that someone could have taken down her wards in the two or so hours since she was last here, set up traps, and waited.
And if those traps had been intended for Zagan…
Eva shuddered. There likely wouldn’t have been anything left of her.
“Alright. I concede the point. But it is safe right now. My wards are still up and Devon is still around. Or, the carnivean is at least. I assume that he is with her.
“Actually, if you run and warn Devon, I’ll get a few traps of my own set up. We’ve got until, at the latest, nightfall. Best to use our time wisely.”
“What kind of traps?”
“Well, first, don’t walk outside the prison walls for any reason. Obviously, you can teleport back to Brakket if you need to, but the immediate area around the prison might cause bodily explosions.”
“That’s…” Zoe trailed off, rubbing her forehead. She pulled out her cellphone and started typing away. “I’m warning Wayne,” she said.
“What’s your number anyway?” Eva asked as she pulled out her own cellphone. “And Wayne’s. Do you have Catherine’s number as well?”
Catherine was supposed to have met her at the dormitories along with Prax. That was obviously not going to happen now. She needed to get word to them.
But she also needed to do the wards and other traps.
“You got a cellphone?”
“Sort of. I barely know how to work it.” Eva shoved the phone into Zoe’s hands. “Put in everyone’s phone numbers while you walk over to Devon’s building. Tell him that we might be hosting some demon hunter guests.”
Eva didn’t wait for any further protests, questions, or comments from Zoe. She all but ran back into her room.
The hovering orb of blood that both powered her wards and held the blood from everyone keyed in had grown quite large since she had first created it. Just about everyone that Eva knew had wound up keyed in at some point. Though they needed to donate only a small vial’s worth of blood, it all added up. A mixture of black and red, demon and human blood all swirled together.
Seeing the ward only reassured Eva that nothing untoward had happened either while she was hunting down Sawyer or during the few hours that she was gone rescuing Lucy. When people not keyed into the ward tried to walk around inside the area of effect, the orb would shrink. Not nearly so much as one of her shields, but enough to be noticeable.
And when she had finally gotten around to repairing the ward after the attack from the Elysium Order, there had been nothing left of the orb save for the blood used for keying people in.
Unfortunately, her secondary set of wards couldn’t be activated from her room. They were essentially small yet overlapping bubbles set up around the walls of the prison.
Turning to her window, one inside her room that hadn’t been obstructed by Serena, Eva blinked straight out to the nearest wall. It didn’t take long for her to open up the small box that held the blood ward.
While the main ward had started out around the size of a basketball and had grown to match a small beach ball, the secondary wards were much smaller. About the size of a tennis ball. They had much less area to cover, but there were a lot more of them.