“Please, come in,” he said with a gesture of his hand. “Have a seat.”
His eyes were locked solely on Eva, never once glancing over her shoulder to where she knew Arachne would be glowering at him. But she had no real reason to refuse, so she took the center of three chairs. Arachne stood behind her, not taking either of the empty seats. As she sat down, a thought occurred to her regarding just why Anderson might wish to speak with her.
“I’m not wearing gloves or a blindfold,” she said firmly, brokering no room for an argument.
Apparently, she had guessed wrong. Anderson frowned as his face changed from false pleasantry to confusion.
“I’m sorry?” he said after a moment of pondering.
“You told all the other demons to disguise themselves as humans,” Eva said, figuring she may as well continue with her line of thought. “I refuse.”
“Ah.” Anderson closed his eyes and gave a tiny shake of his head. “No, no, that isn’t why you’re here at all. The demons are as they are for one simple reason; I merely wished for our guests to not be
“One or…” he trailed off, finally glancing towards Arachne for the first time since they entered the room, “or two abnormalities is far more palatable than a dozen.”
Well, that was good news. For a moment, she thought he was going to ask her to skip class and stay hidden for a few days. Something that Eva would have been opposed to in principle, but would have gone along with anyway to work more on the ritual site.
As it turned out, having an open-sky field was more troublesome for rituals than she had expected. It had rained the day after they started tracing out ritual lines, ruining much of their efforts. Mostly Juliana’s efforts as she was the one who could dig out deep troughs in the ground. Luckily, rain soaked into the ground, vanishing after doing only a little damage.
She would probably be a whole lot more irritated if it had been cold enough to snow.
As such, they had decided not to waste their time trying to dig more until Eva had the time to set up some protections against the weather.
Blood wards were neat things. They didn’t require much effort to set up. Just a little globule of blood being told to keep an area safe would have a sort of invisible mist spread through an area, killing anything not keyed into the ward. It needed a bit of blood as fuel, but not much.
Unfortunately, a blood ward did nothing to protect against falling rain or falling anything for that matter. It certainly hadn’t protected against the falling boulder that Genoa had dropped on the women’s ward during her first meeting with the former mage-knight.
She could put up a blood shield. She had done so during the aforementioned incident with Genoa. Such a shield was not cheap. With the area it needed to cover, she would be going through as much blood as currently made up the ground of the new plaza every week.
Probably. Rough estimates were hard when she had never done such a large shield for any real length of time.
Not really a tenable option unless she was willing to sacrifice huge numbers of people. Which she was, so long as they were the wrong sort of people. But even with her contact in Florida—whatever his name had been—Eva doubted that she would have enough people for more than few days of powering a shield of that magnitude.
Luckily, she had a third option. Thaumaturgy. Setting up such a large ward would be complicated, but not impossible. To make matters better, weather wards were among the simpler types and didn’t take much magic unless it was raining or snowing. Even then, the magic required was mostly negligible. Stopping by once a day to ensure that it was topped off should be plenty.
Eva was planning on trying to conjure up a ward as soon as school ended for the day. She hadn’t ever done a weather ward as part of class, but how hard could it be?
Anderson clearing his throat snapped Eva out of her thoughts. He stared at her, clearly expecting a response to a question that Eva had not been paying attention to.
“Sorry,” Eva said, shaking her head. “What did you say?”
“I said that I called you here to ask about this,” he said with a frown as he tapped the sheet of paper on his desk.
Eva leaned forward to read it as he continued speaking.
“You didn’t sign up for the interscholastic–”
Cutting him off with a wave of her hand, Eva slid the sign-up sheet away from her. There were several names written down. More than she had honestly expected. A number of perfectly normal humans—mostly those in the top two years of school—along with all three of the former diablery students who had taken on demons.
Saija had put her name down for whatever reason, just above Irene’s name. Both names were in the same handwriting and Eva was betting that the handwriting hadn’t come from Irene’s hand. Shalise, Shelby, and Jordan were all missing from the list while Juliana’s name had been crossed out.
