For that specific reason, Eva was not using blood to quickly draw out her ritual circle. She made do with regular chalk. It was dusty and got everywhere–including inside the joints on her hands–but she didn’t want to torment the poor vampire with the scent of her blood.
“Alright,” Eva said as she brushed the dust off her hands. “I think I’m done.” She did a quick double-check of the circle. During the previous days at motels, there had been a lot of spare time. Enough for her to memorize the ritual circle in full. Still, double checking cost nothing but a few extra moments and had the potential to save her from fatal mistakes.
Satisfied that her memory had served her well, Eva placed one of the thugs’ bloodstones in a small circle at the far end of the larger circle. The vial of Sawyer’s blood, she emptied into a glass bowl in the center of the circle.
She stripped her clothes off and sat down at the edge of the circle, just inside the ring.
With the others gathered around outside the circle, Eva started channeling her magic.
The bloodstone disintegrated almost instantly. Powder flew through the air and landed in the bowl of blood. It stirred and mixed together on its own. Once dissolved, the blood lurched from the bowl in a small ball and flew directly towards Eva’s face.
She didn’t dodge. And she tried not to wince as the blood seeped into the corners of her eyes.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Eva said as her vision split in two. There was a cold chill on her skin that she didn’t actually feel along with a light drizzle of rain.
Obviously, it wasn’t raining inside of their motel room. It might have been a cheap place, but it wasn’t
Serena stepped forwards. “Did something go wrong?”
“No,” Eva shook her head. That action just made her stomach churn. She shut her eyes and lay back against the floor. “I just see and feel everything that Sawyer sees and feels.”
“You can see Sawyer?” Nel just about shouted. “With a ritual that simple? Then what have I been–”
“It will only last forty-eight hours. I figured that it would be more useful now rather than back at Brakket where it would run out and the information would be too out of date by the time we got here.” Eva smiled as she watched Sawyer’s actions. He didn’t even know. Or, if he did, he made no indication of it. “I can’t tell where he is either, though I’ll be able to find landmarks and figure out just what he has defending him.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to fight though. It’s too disorienting. We’ll have to wait until it wears off.”
Serena hummed for a moment. “Forty-eight hours? I’ll have to
“That’s fine.”
Nel crossed her arms and huffed. Eva could almost understand her frustration. Scrying was supposed to be her specialty, after all.
“Well? What is he doing?”
“Digging up a graveyard.” Eva watched through his eyes for a moment longer before correcting her statement. “I guess that
“An-an army?” Nel squeaked out.
Eva shrugged. They would be annoying, but she wasn’t going to consider the skeletons that big of a threat.
“More importantly, he has two enigmas at his side. Both looking incredibly docile.”
A Day In A Necomancer’s Life
It only took six hours for Eva to regret ever performing the ritual.
By twelve hours, she was certain that she would be sick multiple times before the ritual wore off.
The doubled vision and senses, she could handle. Sitting in one spot with her eyes shut went leagues in preventing her from feeling ill. Anything that reduced her sensory inputs to only Sawyer helped exponentially.
No. Her regrets didn’t have anything to do with the ritual itself.
Rather, her regrets stemmed from ever thinking that peeking in on Sawyer’s deprived mind would be a good idea.
It wasn’t.
It definitely wasn’t.
Watching him dig up a graveyard wasn’t so bad. That had consisted of him standing around and watching a bunch of skeletons. The skeletons shoveled out dirt. Eventually, one would hit a casket and wave him over.
That was around where things started to go bad. Cracking open caskets was not something that Eva would recommend to anyone. With all of Sawyer’s senses, Eva could smell the body contained within.
The smell.
She didn’t know where to begin in describing it. Horrible. Vile. Disgusting. No word she could think of had the proper impact.
Eva had barely managed to keep her lunch down. She was no stranger to gruesome things. Blood, violence, killing people even. None of it really bothered her all that much. She had become used to it.
But everything that she was used to was
