Jack–as he was called in the little notebook–jumped a few feet in the air. With almost practiced motions, his hand snapped under his pillow and pulled out a pistol. He swung it around until it was pointing right between Eva’s eyes.
There was a moment of hesitation as he took in Eva’s appearance before he fired.
Three bullets slid harmlessly off Eva’s shield.
“Tsk tsk. That’s not very nice.”
He fired again.
Eva didn’t bother to suppress a roll of her eyes. “If it didn’t work the first three times, what makes you think it will work the next–”
Another series of ear-splitting cracks echoed through the tiny room. It was somewhat irritating that she actually had to feed some additional blood into her shield to keep it from failing under the continued fire. Arachne’s blood would have been able to hold up to attacks of that caliber with barely any blood lost, but Eva wasn’t willing to waste the precious few vials that she still had.
Not on some random drug dealer.
Sawyer might be worthy of them.
Thankfully, the cracks shifted to a series of impotent clicks before she totally lost her sense of hearing.
He immediately started reaching down the side of his bed. As soon as he pulled out a spare magazine for his pistol, Eva canceled her shield and moved up next to him.
“That is more than enough of that.” She gripped his gun—hand and all—and squeezed.
The gun was fairly solid even under the pressure of her claws. There were creaks. The barrel bent inwards. Yet it still looked like a gun. Not too surprising given that it was designed to handle miniature explosions going off inside.
His hand was not designed to stand up to even a fraction of that kind of pressure.
“You’ve made several people very angry by pushing your drugs in the wrong sections of town, Jack. And you are not doing yourself any favors with me,” Eva said over his cry of pain. “I want information and you’re going to give it to me.”
He grit his teeth as he looked up with hate-filled eyes. “What do you want, bitch?”
Eva ignored the slight.
For now.
“First, do you know anything about an armored man and a woman passing through town a few months back?”
He shifted away, eyes glancing down to her hands before returning to her eyes.
Eva gave his hand another light squeeze. “Don’t move. The air is foul enough without your movements stirring up the stench on your bed.”
“Fuc–”
Eva’s other hand darted up to his face. Her claws dug into his cheeks. “You will answer my questions and say nothing else. I’ve other people I can ask. It would be a mistake to think that I need you alive.”
There wasn’t much of a visible response to that. Perhaps some more sweat, but that might not have been all that unusual given his current, soaked state. But the heart was much harder to disguise.
“I know them,” he said. “Demon hunters, they called themselves.”
Eva felt a slight chill go down her spine.
Maybe she would be skipping out on acquiring more bloodstones. As busy as he might be, there was no way that Devon wouldn’t want to hear about demon hunters around their old city.
“Didn’t see them myself.”
Eva blinked away her thoughts. “But you know them?”
“Some of the others talked about them. One moment they’d ask Barney in the middle of his route. The next they’d be talking to a school teacher. Eventually, they asked Channel Seven.”
“And they got on the local news,” Eva said.
Jack nodded a confirmation.
Her first reaction was that they should have done that in the first place. Get the word out there. Unless they were afraid that the demon would flee. It wasn’t something that Eva could imagine Arachne doing, but other demons might be more cowardly. Or smarter.
They had probably realized that their targets weren’t in the area any longer and ended up deciding to put the word out in an attempt to gather more information.
Some demon or diabolist might have passed through town since Eva had started school, but she doubted it. As Zagan had mentioned a long time ago, diabolists were rare. Maybe not so rare that one could walk the entire continent without encountering one, but rare enough that one wouldn’t be likely to find two unaffiliated diabolists in the same area.
Brakket was something of an oddity in that regard. However, Brakket was a school. Eva was willing to give it a pass on the assumption that schools attracted all kinds of strange sorts. Sawyer and the Elysium Order backed up that assumption.
But if the demon hunters had reason to believe there were demons in the area, then they had been after Eva and Devon.
No, she would definitely be skipping out on the rest of bloodstones. Devon needed to know soon and she didn’t want to stick around on her own. If Arachne were around, perhaps things would be different. As it was, fleeing immediately was the best choice.
“You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”
Narrowing her eyes, Eva looked back at Jack. He sounded resigned. Not a glimmer of hope in his voice. That lack of hope was apparent in his posture as well. He was still in bed, slumped over and staring at the floor.
