#nightvalelibrary

18. A cut on wrist

Puck had been stalking the streets of Night Vale when his charm led Eidyia to him. He’d felt her change before he saw it, and circled round her, grinning with giddy delight. 

“A selkie in a desert. You must be miserable. Who’d you piss off?”

her next thought was that Evy might be at the old opera house, and usually she had no hesitation in going. but something about this conversation made Lucy nervous about having it in the home of Chaos Herself. the next best thing might be to hit up Evy's patch of flowers.

When Puck returned to the library next, it was alone. He strolled in with his hands in his pockets, casual as could be, until he could see Eve atop her hoard of books. 

“Good day, m’lady,” he said cheerfully. A thoughtful pause, and he amended, “Or, no, ‘lady’ isn’t quite the truth anymore, is it? Funny how the thinning of the Veil reveals the beastly truth of things.”

After the embarrassment of Eidyia showing up while she was in the middle of a fight with her dad, Millie maintained almost a week of radio silence. She threw herself into looking at apartments, sorting school things, and work, leaving herself little time to even think about the crawling dread that now accompanied the seething resentment she felt about the whole situation.

But soon enough she and her sisters had managed to find an apartment in Desert Pines. They moved in right away, buying only the bare necessities that they hadn’t been able to salvage, leaving the apartment sparse and lacking the warm, lived-in feeling their home in Old Town had possessed. Teres was quite pleased to be let out of the rain boot, though understandably still shaken by his experience. 

As things started to settle, and Millie gained some distance from her father, guilt crept in . So on her next night off, she sat on the edge of her bed, picked up her new phone, and gathered her courage to call the library. 

It had been a little while since there had been time for Millie to see Eidyia. First there were apartment tours, then there was moving, all on top of homework and finals and graveyard shift at Cat and Cowl, and the ongoing, awkward fighting with her father. Altogether, it was exhausting, and so it wasn’t a surprise that she slept through the events of the day and only learned about them secondhand that evening. 

Flower monsters, growing in the Botanical Garden, eating up the people They had killed. 

There was no proof that this had anything to do with Eve, and Millie wanted desperately to believe that Eve would have no part of something so heinous, but there was that unwavering, fearful vein of doubt in the back of her mind that she couldn’t quiet. 

So, in a desperate bid to distract herself, Millie went down to the library the next afternoon. There was still fear here, too, but it was the lesser fear, and her trust in Eidyia helped her overcome it. She stepped up to the door, knocked, and then quietly let herself in. “Hello?”