She walked straight across the pit without even a glance down the vast chasm.
Outside Ylva’s domain was… normal. The sun was out, though not incredibly bright. Cold wind tossed Eva’s long hair up and around her. Clouds hung over the land in the direction of Brakket. Ylva’s doing no doubt.
Although there were pockmarks everywhere from whatever battle Arachne and Genoa had had, nothing in her prison was on fire. Yet.
That was always a positive.
Eva stepped. While it had yet to snow, the late November air was not the warmest thing Eva had felt and she did not want to spend longer than necessary outside. There was a wind that constantly blew through some of the buildings around her prison.
She still hadn’t gotten around to heating the entire prison with a rune system. So much to do, so many distractions.
It took four short steps to reach the front of Devon’s cell house.
A few more steps had her at the top of the stairs, right in front of Devon’s revamped penthouse. She opened the door and walked right in.
Devon was leaning back on the hind legs of his chair with a notebook and pen in his hands. His feet were resting atop a desk he had procured for himself.
The moment Eva opened the door, he started to tip backwards. Eva grinned in anticipation of the crash.
An empty chair clattered to the floor.
A cold blade pressed itself against her throat.
“Eva?”
“I might actually have to start knocking,” Eva said. She closed her chitinous fingers around the blade and gently pushed it away.
“As if,” Devon said with a scoff. “Shouldn’t you be in school.”
“Something came…” Eva trailed off as she noticed what was holding Devon’s knife. It curled around the handle three times, denting the handle at one part. “Is that–”
“One of the carnivean’s tentacles. One of the larger, more powerful ones. Yes.”
“You replaced your arm with a tentacle?”
Devon raised an eyebrow. “You replaced both hands and both legs with Arachne’s crap and you took the carnivean’s eyes. I don’t want to hear any judgment from you.”
“Yeah, but you’re kind of weird about the whole demon thing. I expected you to find the most human-like arm possible.”
“Too expensive. Not prices I’m willing to pay.” He gave a small shrug. “Besides, I can always chop it off if something better comes along.”
“Fair enough.”
As Devon tried to sheathe the knife, it slipped from his tentacle and clattered to the floor. “Still adapting to it,” he mumbled as he bent to pick it up with his other hand.
“Takes a while, doesn’t it?”
“Arachne’s limbs are analogous to human hands. This is completely different. I can’t even describe what goes through my mind when I try to use it.” He idly scratched at his goatee with his tentacle. “And trust me, I’ve tried.”
Eva glanced down and flexed her own hand. She couldn’t say that she ever thought much about it. There were extra joints, but none of it felt foreign. Then again, it had been a whole year. She had ample opportunity to get used to it.
“So? What are you ditching school for?”
Before Eva could get a word in, Devon held up his hand. With a frown on his face, he said, “wait. Wrong question. What did you screw up this time?”
“Nothing!” Eva mirrored his frown and crossed her arms. “Why would you even think such a thing? I haven’t screwed anything up.”
Devon gave her a cold-eyed glare.
“I’m pretty sure, anyway. I was skipping class, but that’s not a good reason for an army of demon-golems to attack me.”
“What.”
Eva leaned up against her master’s desk as she told an increasingly agitated Devon the events of the past hour.
“And you just gave this Irene girl to a demon?”
“I didn’t
“That’s not a whole lot better.”
“Well
“And now we’re defenseless against this nun strike force,” he mumbled to himself. “Alright. We’re leaving.”
“What? We can’t leave. All my books and supplies are here. Nel too, I guess. Surely you don’t want to leave all your research.”
Devon slid open the bottom drawer of his desk and wrapped his tentacle around a backpack. “You’ll learn to pack light after a couple of these kind of things. Besides,” he hefted the bag up, “I last copied these notebooks just a week ago after your treatment. I can recover if I lose them.”
“That doesn’t help me! Let’s at least move my books into Ylva’s domain. They should be safe there.”
“You said they’d be here soon. I don’t want to be caught in the middle. Actually,” he rolled his head to one side with a crack before continuing, “we could just give them the girl, right?”
Eva frowned. “The thought did cross my mind,” she admitted. “The biggest problem is that she belongs to Ylva. She would vehemently disagree with that decision. I’m not too interested in turning her into an enemy, are you?”
A light grunt was all that answered her.
