Awaking in a familiar place, staring at a familiar cracked sandstone ceiling, Eva let out a soft sigh. The women’s ward. Her own bed. Definitely a far cry from the endless abyss that had been her earlier death. The blankets felt soft and fluffy against her skin, as if they had just recently been laundered.
She didn’t want to get out of bed. For so long, she had felt this stress building up. And now, everything was over. Or it should have been over. Unfortunately, she couldn’t say that with absolute certainty. As much as she wanted to just lie down and relax for a week straight, Eva needed to find out what had happened. To find out whether or not everything worked out properly.
Mustering up her willpower, Eva threw off the blankets and swung her legs out of bed.
Only to fall straight to the floor, unable to even catch herself on the edge of the bed.
She had no legs. Her arms ended as stubs just beneath her elbows. Unlike how she had woken after using her beacon, no coalesced blood served to replace her missing limbs. Neither had Arachne’s carapace returned. Just raw skin that terminated around her bones.
However hard she tried, she couldn’t force her blood to pierce her skin. Or move it much at all, for that matter; trying to manipulate her blood within her veins worked, but the blood couldn’t escape her body.
Which wouldn’t stand.
Maybe it was her skin being too demonic, too strong for such a weak manipulation to work. Maybe it was something else entirely. Even if she had a cut, she doubted that her control over her blood was to the level where she could form limbs from it.
If her demonic power involved blood, that was great. She knew blood. Practically her entire life had been spent as a blood mage. But if it only activated when she was under extreme stress, what good was it? Especially now that she lacked Arachne’s limbs, she really needed it.
Propping herself up into an upright position, Eva glanced around with a scowl on her face. Nothing around the room would help her. Her dresser held clothes and books. The end table had a few runes to control the lighting of the room—which she hadn’t activated, and yet she could see perfectly fine despite the dark sky outside the window. Perhaps another demonic aspect? Night vision? Neat, but useless as far as mobility was concerned.
She didn’t have a wheelchair. Even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to wheel it. Her thaumaturgy wasn’t good enough to help. Fire wouldn’t do much except make a mess and her skills in air magic levitation were lacking. Earth magic might be able to push her around, but she was barely experienced enough to work with dirt, not the hard cement of the women’s ward floor.
Dragging herself around was a possibility, if an unpleasant one. She hadn’t had clothes since before her transformation at the ritual circle, so she would be dragging her bare skin across the ground. Bearable until she reached someone, she supposed, but that was another problem in and of itself. Did she really want to appear before anyone else while crawling across the ground? Juliana and Shalise might help her out without question, but they weren’t likely to be at the prison. Catherine, Devon, or Devon’s demons were the ones who should be around.
Eva had a sinking feeling that the demons would lose all respect for her while Devon would see it as an opportunity to lock her up and keep her from getting into more trouble. All for his experiments, of course.
Arachne was the only one she would trust and she was obviously not around. If Arachne were anywhere nearby, Eva had no doubts that the spider-demon would have sensed her presence and sought her out above all other happenings. Even were the world back in peril of ending.
In attempting to clamber back onto the bed—because so long as she was stuck thinking, she might as well be stuck in comfort—Eva knocked over the end table. A crystalline dagger, one she hadn’t touched in years, slid across the floor away from her. The hilt lacked a bloodstone. It hadn’t had one in years as well, the same years in which she hadn’t touched it. Neither did she have the means of creating a new bloodstone.
Her void metal dagger, and the gems it held, were likely lost. She had the dagger on her person before the ritual began. After transforming into the bloody winged version of herself, she hadn’t checked for its presence. After returning to Earth from Hell, she had wound up naked. Maybe it was lying out on the surface of the ritual circle. Maybe it was gone forever. She would make a few attempts to look for it, but obviously not at the moment.
There should be a few spare stones lying about from her trip to Florida however.
