Eva complied. Opening her mouth turned to a yawn part way through. The yawn wanted to end with her jaw closing, but Eva suppressed the instinct so as to avoid biting off Devon’s fingers.
Though, it almost looked like someone had tried already. Devon’s hand was dotted in cuts and scrapes. Thin lines of blood had leaked out and scabbed over already.
Seeing her looking at his hand, Devon grunted. “You were less cooperative while unconscious.”
Eva meant to ask how long she was unconscious, but the words came out as nothing more than unintelligible mumbles. Devon still hadn’t removed his fingers from her mouth.
Said fingers ran over her teeth, prodded the insides of her cheeks, and even yanked on her tongue.
She smacked his hand away at that last action. “What did you do that for?”
“Your tongue is elongated,” he said almost absentmindedly as he wrote in his notebook. “I’ll get a measurement later.”
Eva rolled her eyes. He said that after just about every treatment. She had never noticed much of a difference and his measurements were usually fractions of a centimeter. That could have just been from natural growth or how relaxed her tongue was at the moment of measurement. Still, Eva stuck out her tongue just to test, feeling it pass over surprisingly sharp teeth on its way out of her mouth.
She blinked at what she saw.
Her tongue was darker in color. No longer the healthy pinkish red, but almost black. Maybe more of a gray color. Previously, she might have been able to touch the underside of her nose with her tongue. Now, it took no effort to get it up and around the peak of her nose.
“We should talk about your use of the word ‘elongated’ and how much it never applied until today,” Eva said.
Devon just harrumphed. He folded his notebook under his arm while he used both his tentacle and hand to run down Eva’s side, counting her ribs under his breath. Once satisfied, he opened his notebook again and jotted something down.
“How do you feel?”
“Like I had a bucket of ice water poured all over me and haven’t been given a towel to wipe it up.”
“Interesting,” he said, making another note. “The water was just normal water from your rune system. No ice added. It had actually been sitting out for about fifteen minutes. Should have been closer to the ambient temperature.”
Eva glared at him. “Are you going to give me a towel or not?”
He tapped the tip of his pen against his notebook three times.
Eventually, he decided. With a resigned sigh, he headed back into the women’s ward shower room. A moment later, he reappeared with a fluffy purple towel.
Which he threw at her.
It smacked her right in the face.
Eva let out a small growl as she started drying herself off. “Apart from that, pins and needles.” She paused her efforts with the towel and held a hand in front of her face. “I can’t seem to stop shaking.”
“Likely left over from the pain rather than any side effect of the treatment itself,” Devon mumbled, noting something in his notebook anyway.
That made sense well enough. “There was a lot more pain than I had expected. It was intense. Drastically different from the treatments with Arachne.”
“I anticipated that.”
“You could have warned me.”
“That would have just caused unnecessary apprehension. Anything else?”
“I can feel the other demons. Before, I might have been able to sense Zagan if I was concentrating. Never could tell about the others though. Now it is like they’re broadcasting themselves to me. Each one is distinct and clear, though Zagan still towers over the rest.”
“Really?” Devon’s eyebrows climbed up his forehead a good inch. “With the somewhat drastic changes to your body–”
Eva glanced down at herself, double-checking that she still looked like a human on the outside. She did. And, through her sense of blood, she decided that she was mostly human internally as well. Although, most humanoid demons tended to look indistinguishable from humans even on the inside. Had she not already memorized their circulatory systems, Eva wouldn’t be able to tell Zagan and Catherine apart from anyone else while they were in their human form.
Lucy was a bit different, being a mass of tentacles compressed into a humanoid form.
Blinking, Eva realized that Devon was still talking.
“–jump started or skipped over part of the process. I doubt you’re fully demon yet, but this may have accelerated things. I’ll need a more in-depth examination to be certain.” Devon hummed for a moment, tapping a finger on the edge of his notebook. “What about farther away? Can you sense the hel? Or any other demons at your school?”
Eva closed her eyes in concentration. Leaning in and listening, metaphorically, she found nothing more than the four demons around her prison.
“Nope,” Eva said. “Maybe Zagan is overpowering anyone who is too far away. Or I just can’t feel them from this far away. Once I get back to the city, I’ll feel around a bit and let you know.”
