“Right. Going to visit Zoe then. Come find me when you two are feeling better.” She started to walk away, only to stop as a thought occurred to her. A small table built itself up between the two of them with a few glasses of water sitting on top. Sand had formed the water which Eva found somewhat strange, but shrugged her shoulders. It probably wouldn’t hurt either of them. Shalise and Lynn had drunk and ate things provided by her domain for months in the former’s case. Neither had turned out wrong in the end.
With them having a bit of water in case they needed it, Eva took off in a light sprint towards Brakket Academy. She considered blinking, but didn’t want to accidentally leave her legs behind in front of Devon and Catherine. Old-fashioned walking would have to do.
The moment she crossed over the threshold where sand met asphalt, something felt wrong. Just a queasiness in her stomach. Another step and she felt her foot starting to erode away as water splashed against it, dissolving the blood. A quick thought hardened the liquid all the way up to her knees as Eva scowled at the sight before her.
Gone was the asphalt of the street. Before her lay a black void, stretching on for eternity, filled with the familiar waters that surrounded her island.
She turned back to find Devon, Catherine, and the other demons still right where she had left them, along with the half-destroyed buildings in the immediate vicinity of the obelisk. Grinding her teeth together, Eva took a few steps back from the waters of Hell. The sky went back to a sky familiar to Earth. The rest of the street reformed behind her.
Stepping onto the asphalt, her foot plunged straight through as the street wavered like a mirage, splashing into the waters of Hell once again.
“Great. Just great.”
Chapter 036
“You really can’t leave?”
Eva shook her head. Taking one step forward, she fell through the asphalt as if it were nothing more than an illusion and splashed into the waters of Hell. Zoe blinked, glancing left and right to try to find out where she went. Eva took a step back before her professor could panic, she moved back onto the island proper.
Which only caused Zoe to jump back with a slight gasp. Closing her eyes momentarily as she let out a short sigh, she said, “You aren’t just blinking away and back, right?”
“I don’t know why I would do that.”
Zoe just shrugged. “That’s what it looked like from my perspective. I haven’t forgotten how you disappeared when we very first met each other.”
The shrug made Zoe’s shoulders rise and fall. Shrugs tended to do that. However, the motion made Eva’s eyes follow her profile down to her missing arm. Eva had seen it before. Obviously. She had formed a cap of her own blood around the end to keep Zoe from bleeding out. Doctors or Zoe herself had managed to remove the blood, but they hadn’t replaced it with a proper arm.
Eva couldn’t say why. She wasn’t a medical professional. Though it had looked like a clean cut, maybe it had been damaged too much. Maybe the wound was cursed. Maybe reattaching an arm wasn’t as easy as slapping the two ends together with some thread and super glue.
Since Zoe hadn’t brought it up, neither had Eva. If she had a more normal set of arms, Eva might have considered chopping off one of her own the way Arachne had done for her. Unfortunately, Eva didn’t really have any arms. Unless Zoe had a bloodstone hidden in her chest somewhere, Eva really doubted that her arms would work properly for anyone but her. They would just make a mess.
Which brought up another problem. She had turned her heart into a bloodstone. While nothing had gone poorly so far, that wouldn’t be the case indefinitely. She needed to find a way out of her entrapment within approximately three months. If she couldn’t make another bloodstone, she would probably die. Her absent heart was regenerating, she could tell that much, but not as quickly as she would have liked. Void had apparently accepted her as a demon, so death wouldn’t be permanent, but it would be annoying. Her choice was to either get to Florida and find some thugs, or to start asking for human sacrifices.
For some reason, she doubted that the latter would go over well with many people she knew.
Actually, that wasn’t quite true. Catherine would likely have no qualms about finding her someone to turn into a bloodstone. However, she would likely be far less discerning of individuals to be sacrificed. Eva would probably end up with someone a bit too innocent for her liking.
Another possibility was to simply locate her dagger. Which didn’t sound like it would be too hard so long as it wasn’t lost to the void of Hell. Unfortunately, she wasn’t exactly in a position to wander around and search for it. Everyone else was busy with their own things in the aftermath of everything that went down.
Alternatively, she could figure out how to create the everlasting bloodstones herself. Which probably wasn’t something she could get done in a mere three months. It was true that she had never sat down and just dedicated three months to researching bloodstones, but she still doubted her ability to do so. That was assuming that she were left alone for three months.
Despite everyone being busy with their own things, Eva had a strange feeling that she would be kept busy. If not with Zoe, Devon, and Catherine, then with the demon hunters that would undoubtedly be arriving now that all the demons and people were gone. Their arrival was almost assured, the question was whether they would search around for any demonic books and beacons or if they would simply try to torch the entire town.
However, Eva doubted that any of them would be quite as tenacious as the hunters she had already killed. And if they stepped onto her domain to attack her, they would find the very world set against them.
Maybe she wouldn’t need to visit Florida for bloodstones after all.
“None of the other remnants have…” She trailed off, glancing around Eva’s domain. “Have done anything like this yet. We need to figure out a method to counteract and dissolve them.”
“I thought Devon said that he would work on that?”
“So he said,” Zoe nearly spat. Apparently, she still didn’t like Devon even though he had closed off the portal to Life, cutting off the flow of enigmas. “It is merely something to keep in mind.”
“I hope he doesn’t come up with a solution that would cancel out my domain,” Eva said, more as musing to herself than to Zoe.
“You are one thing, but imagine if one of those remnants connects to Willie’s domain.”
“Then he would be trapped in his own as I am, unable to properly interact with the outside world?”
“You’re willing to take the chance that a far more experienced demon than yourself will not be able to escape?” Zoe shook her head. “I’m sorry, but that isn’t a chance that I can take. If we can’t be discerning, cutting off all of Hell would be for the best.”
Eva harrumphed, feeling a tinge of mild annoyance even though she fully understood Zoe’s fears. Clasping her hands behind her back, she started heading away from the edge of her domain and towards the center. Towards the buildings that had all been partially destroyed by whatever—the obelisk, apparently; it had been out in the real world as well as her domain before the two connected. Which made Eva wonder if anyone would have been able to see her had she stood right up against it for long enough. Of course, the buildings weren’t still destroyed. Or maybe they were, but they didn’t look it.
Since everything around was within Eva’s domain, she had control over it all. A simple thought restored the destroyed portions of the buildings back to their working state. Shattered glass was whisked away, turned into the sand of her beach. Which then formed back into smooth panes of glass to fill the vacant holes where windows had once been. Brickwork mended itself much the same way. Even the mildly damaged ovens inside the pizza place had all been fixed up.