To that end, Eva had finally decided to use the whistle. She had spent a good fifteen minutes scrubbing it clean. There really was no excuse not to try it at this point. Still, she wanted to use it as little as possible. She and Arachne were out searching for where the enigma-demon felt strongest for exactly that reason. Hopefully the whistle would work on it. Sawyer had only had what Eva deemed to be standard enigmas with him. His hadn’t consumed demons or vampires or anything else as far as she could tell. Not until after the attack on his ritual, anyway.
“What do you think? Is this the best we’re going to get?”
Arachne shrugged her shoulders. “We could try a few more streets. I don’t know that much will change. It’s too hard to tell.”
Eva glanced around. There was a small pizza place on their street, not one that she had ever been to. Peeking through their windows, they looked busy enough. It was probably the only pizza place in Brakket, so that shouldn’t be too unexpected. A few of the employees did stop and look out the windows when she got too close, but none looked particularly alarmed at her presence—possibly thanks to the event, which they had undoubtedly watched. She just waved and continued walking until she was out of sight.
Both buildings next to it had been boarded over. She couldn’t see anyone inside either while using her sense of blood. One looked to have been boarded up relatively recently. The boards were newer looking and the sign of a printing company stood out in faded letters above the door. Eva couldn’t tell what the other had been. The wooden barricades looked rotted and worn to the point where it was doubtful whether it kept much of the weather on the outside.
The opposite side of the street was much the same. Half the buildings had closed down while others had found something that the city’s low population still needed and couldn’t get elsewhere.
Walking up to one of the abandoned buildings, Eva coiled the muscles in her legs and jumped. Springing off the ground brought her to a nice and easy stop just at the edge of the single story building. She stood right on the ledge with the tips of her toes hanging off over the sidewalk.
Arachne didn’t leap up in a single bound. She jumped, dug her right hand and right leg into the brickwork of the building, and used that as a platform to launch herself the rest of the way to the roof. Her injuries were mostly healed now, so Eva wasn’t entirely certain
So Eva just shrugged and let it go. If she wasn’t feeling quite well enough to jump to the roof, Eva would keep an eye on her when trouble inevitably started.
Spinning the whistle between her fingers again, Eva stopped it with the mouth of the whistle pointing at her. The height of the building, while not an extreme height, should help carry the sound through the air. The surrounding buildings wouldn’t block it.
“If you see the creature run towards populated buildings, try to save the people as much as you can. Also try to corral it towards one of the uninhabited buildings.”
“Perhaps we should do this at night? After these people have gone home?”
With a shocked blink, Eva opened her mouth and held up a finger. But she ended up snapping her mouth shut. She didn’t really have a good response to that. Though she did stare at Arachne with narrowed eyes. She made a decent point about the safety of others? Humans at that? What had happened to
After a moment of thought, she shrugged.
“I was hoping to meet up with Catherine before too long. Zoe as well. Perhaps get their help to finalize as much of the ritual as possible. But…”
Eva knelt down. She carved a small wide-area sleep runic array into the ledge. A single drop of her blood went into the exclusion zone and, with a poke of her finger into Arachne’s leg, Arachne ended up excluded as well. If the sleeping had worked on the other enigma, it should work on this one. Sure, it would put all the humans in the area to sleep. Theoretically, one of the pizza guys could wind up falling into an oven or cracking a head on a counter, but she was close enough that she should be able to get to them before they could come to too much harm. A few stitches into their eyebrow would be much safer than potentially being eaten by an enigma.
She didn’t power it right away, however. The array was fine just sitting and waiting. If she ended up putting the enigma to sleep before blowing the whistle, it would just stay hidden, unable to hear the sound.
Everything ready, she stood and placed the whistle on the edge of her lips.
