The blade bit into the membrane, piercing a portion of it, but stopping before it could cleave through Eva.
Both rings she had sent out passed the knight during his charge. She recalled them, but by the time they reached the knight’s back, he had already dashed away.
“Arachne!” Eva shouted, seeing his target a moment before he reached the demon.
She jumped backwards just a hair too late. One of her back legs fell to the ground even as her body flew backwards.
Eva’s shield, or what remained of it, collapsed into solidified daggers of blood as she blinked straight to the hunter. If they were hovering orbs, they wouldn’t blink with her. Daggers would.
And with much of his armor missing, he had plenty of soft spots for Eva to jam the daggers into.
Eva aimed for a particularly soft spot right around his armpit.
His body wasn’t there by the time her dagger reached her target. Somehow, he had managed to get behind her with his blade already swinging towards her neck.
Eva blinked again, not really aiming anywhere in particular. Just so long as she wound up far enough away from that sword.
Srey moved in to Eva’s vacancy, letting the sword pass harmlessly through his ethereal vapor form. The moment it was safe, he solidified.
When he did so, he wasn’t in the form that Eva had become accustomed to.
He looked humanoid, but his body looked like molten vapor. Dark plumes of smoke erupted from a white-hot mist that made up the solid portions of his body. He reached forwards, hands passing through the helmet of the hunter. He retracted his hands almost immediately in apparent pain.
But not before Eva heard a cough.
The hunter stumbled slightly as he coughed a second time.
Eva wasted no time. She didn’t know how long they might have even a slight advantage.
She blinked forward again, arm already posed to bring a dagger down into his shoulder.
He moved a gauntlet up, catching the solidified blood with the back of his hand. Shards split off. Some larger chunks dug into the metal. Other smaller bits sprayed around the area.
Eva clapped her hands together anyway, blinking away as she did so to avoid his raised sword.
His gauntlet protected him from the explosion. Partially. Most of the metal scattered around the area in tiny shards—shards that burned her skin anywhere they touched. She obviously hadn’t blinked far enough away.
But he was still in a worse state. Save for a few fingers, he no longer had a gauntlet on his off-hand. Unfortunately, save for a slight blemish, his actual arm was otherwise untouched.
He was still coughing. More frequently than before.
Before Eva could blink back in and offer him the other dagger, he disappeared.
Eva’s head whipped around as she searched for where he dashed off to this time.
Except, neither her eyes nor her sense of blood could find him anywhere nearby.
Eva pulled out her cellphone, speed dialing Nel before it even hit her ear.
The augur picked up the second the ring sounded.
“Talk to–”
“The eye patch woman is going to crack the sky again!”
“Vektul,” Eva shouted. “Portal to anywhere that isn’t here! Everyone else, get through it.”
It took only seconds for the demon to comply. Eva dashed into the portal alongside the others, chased by the white beam of light crashing down on their position.
Chapter 015
“Wow.”
Eva rested her head on the table with a soft sigh. She had tried to keep her discussion quiet. That had failed within seconds.
Vektul, as Eva had asked of him, had gone around and warned the other demons of the sky cracking idol and the demon hunters. Unfortunately, he had gone around and told everyone during lunch. Everyone, in this case, included more than just the demons. Eva would be surprised if anyone in the whole school didn’t know what had happened the night before.
Having only gotten back to Brakket early in the morning, Eva had promised to tell her friends what she had been up to the night before as soon as school was out and they could have some privacy. After Vektul created an uproar, Eva figured that she might as well explain now.
“There were some flashes on the horizon. Shalise actually woke me up after the first one. I had been asleep.”
“I was just studying,” Shalise said. “I thought it was lightning, but there weren’t any clouds.”
“I can’t believe you ran off to all the excitement without us again,” Juliana said with a half-hearted glare.
Shalise shifted, glancing between Eva and Juliana. “I could do without all the excitement, personally,” she whispered.
“Says the girl who tried to convince Arachne to fight her without even talking to me,” Eva said, pretending she hadn’t heard Shalise’s hushed comment.
“I said I was sorry.”
Eva waved a hand. She really didn’t care if the two sparred or not. It was heartening to see Arachne consider Eva’s feelings. However, as long as she kept herself under control, they could spar all they wanted. There were more important things for everyone to worry about.
“But there wasn’t supposed to be anything exciting last night for you to miss. Just a simple terrain survey and cleanup.”
“You still haven’t explained what for.”
Eva glanced around the cafeteria.
The people who weren’t paying attention to Vektul’s robotic repetition of last night’s events were all leaning in on Eva’s conversation. Originally, he had only spoken with the demons. Loudly. Once a regular human asked for clarification on a point and he had responded without murdering them, that had opened the doors for all kinds of questions.
While the exact details of last night were no longer secret, the ritual still was. He had the sense for that at least.
Eva intended to keep it that way.
Knowing about demon hunters and the ways they could attack might be valuable for someone. Maybe it would even save someone’s life.
But not her ritual.
For Zoe, Eva had simply said that she had noticed something odd outside her prison and had gone to investigate. Eva doubted that Zoe actually bought it, but she hadn’t pressed too hard.
At least not about her reason for being out there. She asked a great deal of questions about the hunters.
Eva could understand her concern. If the hunters decided to use their sky-cracking idol around Brakket, they might kill a few demons. However, they would probably catch a great many humans in the collateral.
Looking away from Juliana, Eva just shook her head slightly. “How did they find us? They weren’t watching us before we went to my prison. Nobody was watching us when I told Srey and Vektul to meet me out there. While they might have wondered why we weren’t at Brakket and assumed that we were at the prison, they weren’t watching us before we left. We didn’t leave much of a trail for them to follow. We could have been anywhere.”
“Some kind of demonic tracking device that doesn’t trigger Srey’s sixth sense?”
“Yeah. Maybe. The good news is that they can’t block Nel’s vision. Or, if they can, they haven’t yet. She’s keeping an eye on them.”
A task she had taken to with a great deal of enthusiasm. When the inquisition had originally attacked Eva’s prison, she had put up a small protest against destroying their idol. Nothing had ever came of her momentary anger. She had either realized the necessity or had forgotten about it with her capture at Sawyer’s hands.
But seeing this mockery of the idol had set her off. Eva had a stack of maps and notes to go through as soon as school ended. Everywhere the hunters had been since their departure last night, everything they had been up to, anyone they had met with, and any possible traps around the farmhouse outside of town that they had co-opted as their base of operations.
“So we’re going to counterattack them, right?”
Eva glanced over with a frown on her face. Juliana had used the word ‘we.’