“Don’t be silly. I’d never find anything like that.” Eva allowed Juliana’s glare to slide off without effect. “Of course, the method is to always know where your books are. It makes you look mysterious when you pull the exact right book off the shelf while everyone else fumbles around looking foolish.”
“Who is it you have to appear mysterious to?” she half-shouted. “And this one,” she said as she slapped down on one of the open books, “it isn’t even a real book. More like you took the pages of ten different books and shoved them into one binding.”
Eva swept around the room until she could see the book in question. “Oh,” she said, “I don’t know how that one got there. It’s one from Devon’s library. I must admit shame at the fact that his sorting system is just that much more mysterious than mine.”
It was hard–much harder than Eva had imagined it would be–to hold in her laughter while Juliana looked about ready to scream in frustration.
A look of horror replaced the frustration on Juliana’s face. “You mean to tell me that
That set Eva off. She started laughing.
It was good to have Juliana around again.
Really. Eva felt bad about what happened to Genoa. She didn’t want to keep Juliana tied up here. Not if her mother needed her.
At the same time, Eva wanted to keep Juliana all to herself. Things had just been so glum over the past while that Juliana was like a breath of fresh air.
“Don’t worry. After moving my stuff from Florida, I haven’t had a chance to sort through it all. It got a bit jumbled in transit. And that book,” she pointed at the mish-mash tome open on the table, “shouldn’t have too many like it. Devon likely found damaged tomes and slapped what was salvageable inside a spare book cover.”
Still chuckling, Eva took a seat in the chair opposite from Erich and pulled out her tome of blood rituals.
She had offered to go through her library with Juliana, but the mad woman wanted to do everything on her own. Or rather, she insisted on double checking every book Eva tried to go through. Instead of feeling useless by having her work overwritten, Eva had decided on going back to her own projects. Namely, the project involving Sawyer.
But, with that project on hold until she had a chance to acquire more bloodstones, Eva was left with idle time. There were the enigmas, but Eva was at a loss what to do with that. Carlos could have used some help, probably–he had taken samples of the enigma back to his hotel for testing with larger equipment that he had brought with him–but Eva found being in the company of Juliana far more preferable.
Luckily, in her search for both the ritual for Sawyer and the ritual she had
One in particular looked all too enticing. Sawyer, of all people, had hinted at it the very first time he had captured Eva. Back when he had first snipped off her toes.
She really hoped that he hadn’t kept any of those. Eva made a mental note to see if Nel couldn’t track her missing limbs down. They were human limbs and had been taken a good year and a half-worth of treatments ago. For all Eva knew, she was too different now for them to be used against her in any meaningful way.
But Sawyer had found it humorous that Eva couldn’t reattach her own toes with a mere thought.
One ritual contained within the tome sounded a lot like it would accomplish just that. It offered such a great control of her own blood that an arm coming off would be a literal flesh wound. A wound as easy to fix as minor cuts were at the moment. It didn’t actually state how it would repair bone, but Eva assumed that she would be able to hold her arm together using blood until it could heal on its own.
That was, of course, assuming she could be damaged at all. Eva could already harden blood under her control to the point where it could be used as weapons. If, during combat, she could harden her flesh into armor, or perhaps pull a thin layer of blood outside her body to coat her skin, her durability would be through the roof.
As far as she understood the ritual’s effects, that is.
Unfortunately, Eva doubted she would be able to perform the ritual for some time. It required five bloodstones to be consumed in the ritual itself, plus an extra one embedded within her heart. That last one had to be replaced with startling frequency.
All the more reason to save her good bloodstones. If she could get away with not replacing that one by using a good one, she would take it.
Though most of her research had been centered on rituals, as those would be the most likely candidates for ways of finding Sawyer, she had looked through her tomes for any hint of bloodstone creation. If she could find a way to create everlasting bloodstones, it could be one of the most important discoveries in her haemomancy career.
