Not that he would bother anyway.
“So,” Eva started, slipping off the table she had been sitting on.
She didn’t continue speaking, pausing to watch both girls take a step backwards. Curly-hair actually got an arc of lightning crossing between her fingertips. The sight of which had Arachne rumbling out a low growl from the back of her throat.
Eva raised her hands to her chest, palms out. A move she hoped was a universal placating gesture. She had not been lying; fighting them was possibly the highest item on her list of things she didn’t want to do at the moment. Especially because of the limited hive-mind thing. If she fought them, a million other nuns would probably start crawling out of the woodwork.
Luckily, they both seemed to recognize the gesture for what it was. Neither one of them fully dropped their guard. Eva would have called them absolute idiots if they had. However, the lightning crackling between Curly’s fingers faded away, dispersed harmlessly into the air.
“So I’m going to go. Follow me around if you feel you must, but you won’t find whatever you’re looking for. If you’re here to protect the students or
The two glanced towards each other, frowns crossing their faces.
Eva used the distraction to slip around them. Where she edged around them, trying to avoid looking like she was going to attack them, Arachne followed with far less subtlety. Her footsteps were heavier than normal and she leered over the two much smaller girls as she moved. Eva couldn’t really blame her. The nuns had been the ones to blow her head off, after all.
Neither girl tried to stop them as they left the room. They didn’t try to follow either. By the time Eva and Arachne reached the end of the hallway, both girls were talking back and forth at a speed that would make an auctioneer envious.
“Pointless waste of time.”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Eva said. “Hopefully they don’t follow me around anymore. With saying all but the name about the vampire, I’m counting on each to distract the other enough for both to leave me alone.”
“What about your vampire friend? Assuming they believe you, you just set them on a vampire hunt.”
“Well, Serena should be fine. She isn’t wandering around the halls and isn’t from one of the other schools, something I explicitly said. They should focus on the students before Serena. But I’ll warn her later just in case.”
Arachne shrugged with a noncommittal grunt. Her interest in Serena amounted solely to any harm she could do towards Eva, she had confessed earlier. So long as Serena kept her fangs in other people, Arachne wouldn’t blink an eye.
Eva had wisely—in her opinion—neglected to mention the teleportation incident.
Momentarily free of both the vampire and the Elysium Order trainees, Eva stopped her aimless wandering through the halls. She headed straight towards the warding room.
Professor Lepus was still inside, much to Eva’s relief. It had been getting close to the end of her office hours. From outside the room, Eva only had her blood sight to tell what she was doing.
Namely, sitting at her desk in the office attached to the classroom. Her hands whisked across what Eva assumed were sheets of paper. They moved fast enough to be a blur. The way her eyes twitched across the paper was almost dizzying.
And her heart. Someone in the middle of a marathon wouldn’t have a beat rate so fast. There was a student at the feast of the schools whose heart was beating faster than any human heart. Even that looked like it wasn’t moving compared to how fast the professor’s heart was currently beating.
Eva burst into the classroom and the attached office without so much as a single knock.
The second she opened the office door, everything seemed to warp. Professor Lepus’ heart dropped its speed to what Eva would consider normal for someone who had just been startled by a demon bursting into their room. She stared at Eva over the bridge of a pair of reading glasses. Her eyes started wide before narrowing to angry slits.
“Was there a reason for entering my office unannounced?”
“I just…” Eva stared, trying to figure out how her heart could possibly have been beating so fast without killing her. Unfortunately, she couldn’t exactly say that she had seen her blood. Anderson knowing about her blood magic was one thing. Wayne and Zoe another.
