But the street wasn’t back to normal. The portal was gone, but it left a dark splotch of land left behind.
“That was an enigma, right?”
“As far as I could tell.”
Eva knelt down, touching just the tip of her finger to the darkness. The moment she did, she felt a certain familiarity. Like being back within her domain in Hell. As a quick experiment, she tried forming a single metal bar from her prison, just like how she built the alternate women’s ward.
Her fingers wrapped around cold metal almost as soon as the thought crossed her mind. She withdrew her hand, pulling a narrow bar of rusted iron from the darkness. Exactly like what she might find in one of the cell blocks at her prison.
A scowl crossed her features. “This must be what Nel meant.” She had never followed up on the augur’s message about enigmas leaving things behind. If it had been important, she figured that Nel would follow up on her own. Obviously she couldn’t trust the nun to do that much.
“Do you suppose this is Life’s plan?” Arachne said. She leaned down next to Eva, but kept her hands well clear of the dark splotch. “We kill enigmas, they leave some of Hell behind. It seems like it would take forever to bring all of Hell through.”
“Seems like it would take forever to get meaningful results.” The entire spot of distorted terrain covered less than a five foot circle. It wasn’t a perfect circle at that, somewhat elongated. Perhaps using the outside edge of the enigma’s body to determine its radius.
“Powers are different beings. They don’t think like we do. I doubt they experience time like we do either. Still, if other things can come through this at will…”
“Then we kill more, which makes more, which means more and more things will come through.”
“It might not take as long as we think.”
Eva stood, backing away from the dark area. “Let’s see if Anderson will set up a few guards—guards impressed with orders to not kill the enigmas—around this and ones Nel and Ylva made. Then… we need to finish the ritual circle. Immediately.”
Finishing Touches
Hands clasped behind her back, Eva walked around the completed ritual circle. Arachne followed along at her side, as usual, and Zoe had joined in as well. Catherine flew overhead, snapping pictures of the entire thing. They had a few changes to make that Catherine pointed out as errors. After her final check, the circle would be ready.
Ready. An odd thought. They would summon Void. Void would fix the sky. Maybe send Life back into its natural dormancy. And then who knew what? It was an odd feeling. She had been working on the ritual circle since Vektul had arrived at Brakket. Given that it was now the end of December, that had been several months ago. And she had known about the problem since long before that.
With it all over, maybe she could just go back to attending school like a normal person. She doubted it. Things entirely unrelated to Powers had been interfering with her school life from the start. She had no reason to believe that they would stop anytime soon.
Then there was the hunter. Eva hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her since she had kidnapped Juliana. Of course, they had been careful. Nobody went anywhere alone. Not even Zoe or Wayne, as far as Eva knew. When leaving the school, they almost always left with each other. Though, since both were capable of long-distance teleportation, Zoe was able to safely get to the prison without Wayne on occasion. According to Juliana, Genoa had asked a few of her old colleagues to patrol around the city on the lookout for the hunter as well as any enigmas that managed to slip by Brakket security.
Which, as it turned out, happened at least once already. Another stealthy enigma escaped from one of the remnants of Hell from a deceased enigma. Thankfully, Genoa’s friends had gotten the memo to not kill more of them. Instead, they focused on capture and containment using Catherine and Devon’s containment scheme from the prison.
If the mage-knights had found anything about the hunter, nobody had said a word to Eva. She had a feeling that they hadn’t been looking all that hard, given the enigma problem. But Genoa wouldn’t have kept quiet about something like that given her daughter’s kidnapping, so they had to be looking out for something.
Unfortunately, they had their work cut out for them. Even discounting the darkened blotches of Hell-land, enigmas kept popping up. Ever since Juliana had summoned Zagan, there had been periodic ‘enigma-falls’ every few days.
“Lynn thinks that the more enigmas on Earth, the faster Hell will be pulled into the mortal realm. Exponentially, with the darkened spots, but even on their own, they’re acting as some sort of anchor. The demonic ones even more so.”
“So I heard.”
Eva blinked. She hadn’t realized that Zoe had spoken with Lynn. Not that it really mattered to her. It just meant that Zoe had gone out to the prison without Eva. She was perfectly welcome to do so, as Eva had mentioned in the past.
