And they were some impressive shackles. Eva had pulled out one of Devon’s tomes dedicated to advanced shackles. Every possible bell and whistle had been covered. No magic at all within the circles. No items could be passed from the inside to the outside. Sound and sight was obscured from the inside to the outside. Touching the edge from the inside would cause more than a little pain.
About twenty other effects as well, all designed to keep a demon contained and unable to interact with anything.
Zoe had offered input and supervision. While not an expert in diablery, she had decided that it would be prudent to learn how to create shackles given all the demonic incidents that she had found herself involved in over the past two years. She had set up air barriers around the place on the off-chance that the demon had already released some toxic gas or anything similar.
Eva was fairly certain that one of the shackles did something along those lines, but she hadn’t said anything. As Eva often felt the need to mention, she did not consider herself a diabolist and neither did she know all that much about shackles. It was all from the book.
Still, the drawings were fine handiwork, if Eva said so herself. So much so that Eva was absolutely certain that no demon she had ever heard of would be able to extract themselves from the room without outside assistance.
She thought that before Zagan walked in, walked around the giant ice cube once, and walked back out without a pause in his steps.
Eva shook her head. He was a devil class demon and therefore he did not count.
“So,” Eva said as Zagan approached her, “what is it?”
Zagan’s twin golden eyes glanced down at her. A thoughtful expression crossed his features for a moment before twitching into one of annoyance.
“That, my little embryonic one, is a curiosity.”
Eva frowned. “To be clear, you aren’t talking about a creature with the name of ‘curiosity’ are you?”
“An enigma, a mystery. Do make an effort to not be so daft.”
“What you are saying,” Eva said, brushing off the insult, “is that you don’t know.”
“It came from Hell, that much is clear. The summoning circle connected properly–I can smell the lingering aura of a domain in the air.”
Eva had been working within the room to set up the shackles and hadn’t smelled a thing. Even taking a deep breath now left her with a fairly neutral scent. There was the slight tinge of her own blood in the air, but nothing more.
Maybe giant bulls had an enhanced sense of smell.
Zagan ignored her actions, bringing up a thumb to stroke the tip of his chin. “Perhaps the imp brought a creature to its domain whereby the creature was summoned in its place. It could have been invading the imp’s domain much as you and your little friends did to that poor demon I slaughtered.”
Zoe stepped forward, looking Zagan in the eyes. “Does it have anything to do with the situation regarding Hell itself?”
“I suppose we won’t know until we figure out exactly what that creature is. However, I would say that we should eliminate more mundane theories before jumping to something quite so fantastical.”
“Let’s try summoning up an imp,” Eva said. “If it works like normal, then we can probably write this off as some oddity. If we get more of those things,” she thumbed over her shoulder towards the large block of ice, “then we’ll at least know not to summon more imps for our class.”
Zoe turned to face Eva with a sharp glare. “Ah, yes. We still haven’t talked about your ‘class.'”
Eva winced and held up her hands. While she had thought to invite Zoe one of these days, she had intended to broach the subject with far more tact than Catherine showing up and blurting out that something went wrong.
“Martina Turner thought it was a
“You’re still teaching it.”
“I’m here to keep the stupid children out of trouble.”
The devil was pointedly ignoring the conversation, looking above-it-all as he so often did.
“And a great job you’ve been doing of that,” Zoe said, pointing at the room.
Hands on her hips, Eva frowned. “Well sorry. Being attacked by rogue nuns has a way of making one late to other appointments.”
“Nuns?” Zagan said, attention suddenly on Eva. “The Death nuns, yeah? After the hel’s little temper tantrum, I half expected them to vacate their presence on the North American continent.”
“Hence my usage of the word ‘rogue.'” Eva did not feel it wise to mention exactly who said nun was to Zagan. There was always the chance that he wanted to finish their fight.
