“I had a lot of time to think,” she started, speaking slowly. Her words lingered in the air for a few moments before she continued. “I apologize. For any harm I caused your mother.”
Eva smiled, a new sort of respect for Arachne welled up in her. When she had first proposed to Arachne that the spider-demon should apologize to Genoa, she had thought that she would be dragging Arachne in by the legs. That she apologized to Juliana on her own filled Eva with pride.
Juliana stared. Her scowl disappeared, but she didn’t smile.
An awkward silence between the group stretched on. Eva found herself shifting slightly, wondering if Arachne’s apology wasn’t being quite as well received by Juliana as Eva had found it. It had sounded sincere to her ears.
Eventually, Juliana sighed. “I don’t know why you’re apologizing to me.” A bitter tone carried her voice at a volume a fair bit lower than she normally spoke at. “None of it would have happened if it wasn’t for me.”
“That isn’t true,” Eva said. She kept her voice firm as she stared at Juliana. “Zagan was the one who dumped you into Hell. Maybe it would have happened had you done nothing, maybe not. But you did nothing wrong.”
“I could have turned and walked away from Willie before you even arrived! Willie sweet talked me into sticking around after he knew that people were coming after me! I shouldn’t have bought into it. There were a million things I could have–”
With a hand on her shoulder, Zoe cut Juliana off.
“We have a crowd,” Zoe said, voice quiet and with a soft smile for Juliana’s sake. “Perhaps this is a conversation best left for later.”
Epilogue
Juliana stopped outside the front door of a smaller home on the outskirts of the city.
The very outskirts. It was difficult to get farther away without technically being outside the city limits.
Houses out here were few and far between. Brakket City wasn’t much of a city to begin with, but out here, it was basically farmland. Abandoned farmland. Real rural area.
With the abysmally low price of houses and her family’s own wealth, it hadn’t been much of an issue to purchase one. Juliana’s father had
She was
It wasn’t a great house. One of the windows had been broken. The siding was in disarray even now. Ivy, vines, and all manner of foliage had taken over one side of the house, growing up the walls and even onto the roof. The lawn had been overgrown. Juliana had fixed that up herself with some carefully applied earth magic to churn the dirt, burying most of the weeds and grass.
Tiptoeing up to the front door, Juliana paused.
Her excursion out into the city was supposed to have been for only a few hours. Just enough to unpack in the dorm. Instead, she had spent the full day plus a good portion of the night out and around Brakket. And even a short amount of time out at Eva’s prison. A place where she was supposedly banned from going.
Well, it wasn’t much that she was ‘supposedly’ banned. She
Her father would definitely know how late she had been out. Hopefully he didn’t know about her little side trip.
Taking hold of the doorknob, Juliana twisted the handle as quietly as possible.
On the off-chance that everyone was asleep, she could claim to have returned an hour or two earlier.
That plan quickly fell by the wayside. Her father, her brother,
She had expected at least one of them to be—the light was on, after all—but she had been hoping that they would have fallen asleep.
“Um, hello.”
Her father got to his feet. “Juliana Laura Rivas. Where have you been?” He took three steps forward before Juliana’s mother cleared her throat.
“Carlos, you promised to remain calm.”
Juliana watched as her father clenched his hands into fists, took a deep breath, let it out, and released his grip. He took a few steps back and sat back down.
“Now then,” Genoa said with a cold smile, “why don’t you tell us all about whatever happened tonight.”
Closing the door behind her, Juliana stepped into the room. She didn’t take a seat.
The faces of all three people were riddled with concern, worry, and maybe a hint of disappointment. Carlos had his lips pressed together as he often did while angry. Meanwhile, Erich sat in a small recliner. Unlike Juliana’s parents, his eyes were glued to the front window. He didn’t look at Juliana more than a brief glance as he fidgeted to one side.
“First,” Juliana said, “I’d just like to say that I was perfectly safe the entire time.”
“That–”
