No sound actually passed through the thin tube of bone. Nothing more than the rush of air, anyway. No high-pitched whine that people normally associate with whistles. Which wasn’t much of a surprise. Eva had heard, or rather
So she just crouched own and waited, keeping an eye out for anything suspicious. She kept an extra watch on the humans in the few occupied buildings around her. Just in case the enigma had sneaked down into their storage cellars or broom cupboards. While she hoped it would come straight to her, there was always the possibility that it would attack people on the way.
To Eva’s side, Arachne twitched. Just a small thing. Her fingers curled unnaturally. It had been a few seconds since she had blown the whistle, so it probably wasn’t that.
“Something wrong?” Eva asked, glancing up to see her friend’s face.
“You don’t feel it? It’s moving.”
Eva blinked and concentrated. She had been too focused on her sense of blood and the humans around. As soon as she focused on the faint sensation of the demonic enigma, she realized just what Arachne was talking about. The sensation was moving. Like a pressure wave after a particularly large firework. Nothing world changing, but enough to notice.
“So the whistle did work then. Good.”
“Perhaps. Be on your guard. The necromancer may have done something to the enigma in his company to keep them loyal and merely used the whistle as a call.”
“I know,” Eva said, holding her hands over the rune array, preparing to activate it the moment she saw the enigma. “What do you think this is for?”
Arachne let out a low growl. “Just be ready. It worked on one. That doesn’t mean it will work on others. These things… unnerve me.”
“Me too.” Though, as with the other demonic enigma, Eva wasn’t getting an unsettling feeling in her stomach. Perhaps things would change once it got closer. She was hoping it didn’t.
Another oddity, one she only realized as she was thinking about how the enigmas normally felt, was that not once had her captured enigma done the high-pitched whine into cannon boom attack. It hadn’t even tried as far as she could tell. She would have to ask Catherine to confirm. If it had eaten something that ended up changing whatever mechanism of its body produced that sound, it might become an imperative to feed that something to any other enigmas they ran across. Working around them with a constant headache would be nearly impossible.
Eva’s head snapped to the side, staring up the street she and Arachne had been walking up. She had thought that she saw something. Just a shadow in the corner of her eye. Yet staring down the street, Eva couldn’t see anything except the pizza place’s returning delivery truck. Which, at its languid pace, wasn’t nearly concerning enough to get her to look. Not on its own anyway.
The driver exited the beat-up car, grabbed some bag with the pizza company’s logo, and headed inside the building while being entirely unaware of Eva and Arachne’s presence. The shadows beneath the car remained still. No creatures crawled out from underneath.
A bristle against the hairs on Eva’s neck had her standing and whirling around.
Again, nothing was there. Just plain white snow, even on the flat roof, unbroken by footsteps.
“Arachne?”
The spider-demon had spun around as well, though more in reaction to Eva’s turn than anything else.
“I don’t see anything.”
Eva took a step forward, farther away from the edge. She brushed her foot over the snow, melting it away while keeping an eye out for any inconsistency in the melting. “Could it be illusions of some sort?”
“Would it be able to use any abilities it gained from eating demons? The other one flopped about, barely able to utilize its wings.”
“But it did manage. Even if it was bad at it.” Eva shook her head. Turning back to the rune array, she brought the whistle up to her lips. “Just keep an eye out. I’m going to try calling it again.”
The second she blew on the bone whistle, she heard it. A high-pitched whir coming from the street below. She didn’t get a chance to clasp her hands over her ears before the inevitable explosion crashed through her skull. Glass exploded up and down the street. The car’s side windows instantly turned to little diamonds of glass while the larger windows of the shops spider-webbed before they fell out of their frames.
