“Did you go dancing?” Peter Teague asked.
Liliana smiled wistfully at the toes of his big combat boots. “I used to love to go dancing. I never liked the crowds, but the music was so beautiful. I would dance outside on the porches and balconies, and in the grass.”
Their was so much music in her youth. People played instruments and swirled brightly colored skirts. Everyone danced in the evening after dinner for someone’s wedding or birthday or just for the sheer joy of being alive. It had been so long since Liliana danced, she’d almost forgotten to miss it.
Peter Teague’s brow wrinkled. “So, does that mean you went dancing or not?”
“There aren’t any places to dance in the grass away from the crowds in Fayetteville. There’s always too much noise and too many people, and the music is too loud. I don’t go dancing anymore.” It had been decades at least. She hadn’t gone dancing in decades.
“Did you go to the Wolverines basketball game Friday night?” Peter Teague’s voice had gained a more intense edge, but she didn’t know why this scientist was so interested in what she did for fun.
“Go Wolverines,” she muttered dutifully. It was socially required in Fayetteville to say those words whenever the local high school was mentioned. “I don’t like basketball games at all. So many people screaming and shouting for nothing important.” She shrugged. “And I always know who will win anyway. I never go to basketball games.”
“Do you mind telling us where you were Friday night?” Detective Jackson asked.
“I was here. I have been rereading Gulliver’s Travels.” Liliana waved the scarf at the closed door beside her that led into the rest of her house.
“Is there anyone who could verify that?” Peter Teague asked. “Was someone with you?”
She shook her head. “Clients stay in the business space unless they have to go to the bathroom.”
Liliana tilted her head to one side, puzzled by the seemingly random conversation. “Usually, when men ask about things like dancing and basketball games and my house, they want to have sex with me.”
Doctor Peter Teague was attractive on the outside. If he was a nice person on the inside, she might enjoy having sex with him. She hadn’t looked into him, though, so she didn’t know if he was a good person, or even if he was human like the two women, or some kind of Other.
“Do you want to have sex with me, Doctor Teague?”
Doctor Teague cleared his throat and took a step back. “Uh, that’s not um, I mean…uh, not that you’re not pretty, but…”
Detective Jackson snorted.
Sergeant Giovanni laughed outright. “Give it up, Pete. There’s no good answer to that one.”
Liliana’s ears flushed hot. When people laughed at her, it usually meant Liliana had missed something obvious to everyone else.
She replayed the conversation in her mind, trying to spot where her understanding had gone wrong.
Oh. Their questions weren’t about Liliana. They were about murders. “Did the murders happen last night and last Friday night?”
“Ma’am, we’re sorry we bothered you.” Detective Jackson stood up. “We’ll be going now.”
“Okay,” Liliana said, still confused. Why did the detective not answer my question?
“Not just yet,” Doctor Teague said.
Detective Jackson’s full lips tightened, and her eyes narrowed, making her look very fierce. “May I remind you this is my investigation?” She stood up and pointed at the sergeant and the scientist. “You two are only here in an advisory capacity, and so far your advice has led us on a big fat snipe hunt.”
“I just have one more question,” the red-haired man insisted, holding up a single finger.
Detective Jackson sighed and crossed her arms. “Fine.” That looked like more annoyance, but definitely not at Liliana this time. “Ask. Then we leave this nice lady in peace.”
Peter Teague turned back to the spider-kin. “Have you ever seen people killed by having their insides dissolved by acid and sucked out through two big holes in their throats?”
“Pete!” Sergeant Giovanni stood up and grabbed the man’s arm, pulling him back from Liliana. “The lady is clearly...” She circled a finger around her ear. “…busy.”
Liliana continued to look down at the scarf in her hand, so the soldier probably thought the spider-kin couldn’t see, but Liliana always saw. “I am not crazy, Sergeant Giovanni. The word people sometimes use to describe me is ‘autistic.’ It’s not really right either, but it’s a better word than ‘crazy.’ I’m not crazy.”
She forced herself to look at the soldier and the man directly for a second before her gaze dropped again. “Yes, I have heard of people killed in that way, Doctor Teague.”
The two women stopped glaring at the man, and Sergeant Giovanni stopped trying to drag him out.
All three stared at the spider-kin seer.
Liliana swallowed hard. She hated when people stared at her like that.
Sure, she had seen that kind of death, but she certainly didn’t want to see it again. It was a horrible way to die. Widow spider venom dissolved people while they were still alive.
Wait.
Widow spiders were spider-kin.
Every hair on her body stood on end.
Do they think I’m a widow spider?
Liliana rocked her weight onto the balls of her feet, her body ready in a moment to fight or run. She had seen enough of the detective and the sergeant’s minds and hearts, she didn’t want to hurt them. They were good people, but Liliana would not let anyone put her in a cage.
“Did you ask me those questions because you think I killed the soldiers?”
“You match the description of the woman we suspect, Madame Anna,” Detective Jackson said, with an apology in her tone. Her arms were uncrossed, and she studied Liliana. It was the first time since she arrived that the detective showed no sign of annoyance.
The man with the big shoes shrugged off Sergeant Giovanni’s grip.
His stare made her even more uncomfortable, like he was trying to tell her something, or ask her something, without words.
Was he some kind of Other?
Liliana put her hands over her face as if she were upset and peeked through her fingers at Peter Teague with the small, black third eyes by her tear ducts.
The man’s pale, freckled appearance hid another face, a sharp-fanged canine face, and an intense aura of feral energy, like the scent of musk mixed with the color of lightning.
Wolf-kin. Though he looked different from other werewolves she had known. His aura was filled with more feral power. Most wolves were dark-haired and of Eastern European or Native American descent. She had only seen red wolves in visions and nightmares.
Peter Teague must be a Celtic wolf, one of the mercenaries who hunted down dangerous Others and killed them for money. Like the pack who killed her parents.
Terror hit her in the gut like a kick.
He was on the hunt for a spider-kin killer. Liliana was the only spider-kin in Fayetteville. His cold blue eyes watched her intently.
Ice water crawled over her skin.
Not this time. This time, I am not a powerless child.
Liliana threw her scarf in the werewolf’s face and bolted through the door.
The wolf lunged for her.
She leapt over her couch.
His fingertips brushed her ankle, then his belly hit the wooden back of her couch. Air whoofed out as if he’d been punched.
Ha!
No one knew her house like she did, and no human or wolf was more agile than a spider-kin.
A pirouette on one toe spun her around the corner to her kitchen. She thumbed the switch on the room-bot. The waist-tall device with its long extendable arms trundled into the wolf’s path.
Peter Teague tripped over her bot and face-planted on her tile kitchen floor. It sounded painful.
Liliana couldn’t help but wince in sympathy as she slammed the back door shut behind her. It gave her a few precious seconds on her back porch, out of the wolf’s sight.
In a swift, smooth motion like an Olympic gymnast, she leaped onto the railing around her back porch, caught the edge of the roof, and flipped her legs up. Her feet landed on the slanted roof.
Wolves hunt by scent.
She threw one of her ballet slippers onto the sidewalk and the other clear out to the quiet, drizzly neighborhood street.
Her body flattened against the wet shingles just as the werewolf pelted into her backyard. Her heart pounded so loud in her ears, she worried the red wolf would hear. She opened her fourth eyes so she could watch him without raising her head.
He found her shoe, then saw the other.
Take the bait, wolf. Come on. Take the bait.
Sergeant Giovanni ran out the door next. The werewolf raced off into Liliana’s neighborhood, the human on his heels, rapidly leaving her little house behind.
Liliana smiled with fangs out.
You won’t be killing a spider today, Celtic wolf.
Detective Jackson followed the other two onto the porch a few seconds later and closed the back door politely. The police officer watched the soldier and the wolf-kin scientist run up the street for a moment, shook her head, and muttered, “I still say it’s a damn snipe hunt. If that lady knew anything about those dead soldiers before we arrived, then I’m the pope.” At a steady jog, she followed the other two into the shady neighborhood.
Whatever a snipe was, Liliana felt some kinship with the creature in that moment.
She didn’t twitch a single muscle until the detective jogged around a corner.
From perfect stillness to explosive motion, she skittered up her roof, leapt from the peak to the tall pine growing beside her house, then crept out onto the wiggly end of a high branch. With her wrist, she touched the rough bark. A dot of fluid from the tiny hole just below her palm stuck to the bark. As she pulled her hand back, a fine line of silk strong enough to hold several times her body weight formed where the fluid and air met.
The spider-kin looped the silk strand around the branch, drew an appropriate length out of the spinneret in her wrist, and scrambled down the line to the flat roof of the strip mall next door. She ran along the top of the long building, her feet clad only in knit tights, skimming lightly over the rough gravel roofs of the Troopers Army surplus store, the H&R Block, the barber shop, and the Virtual Fit net-based clothing store.
The roof was flat asphalt with gravel over it. Each rock jabbed her feet as she ran. A few spots of blood stayed behind as her wet tights ripped and shredded, leaving her feet bare on the rocks.
Thank goodness the red wolf was on the wrong scent, or he would have been able to follow her blood trail easily. She ignored the pain and built up enough speed to leap clear across the narrow alley to the roof of Emerald Arms. That should break up her trail a bit, even if the wolf picked it up. She landed neatly on the foot-wide concrete ledge of the custom weapons store’s roof and kept running. The concrete abraded the cuts on her feet, but at least it didn’t add to them.
When she reached the end of the block, the spider-kin shimmied down a silk strand to the asphalt parking lot. She leaned against the brick wall, catching her breath and assessing her situation.
The old gas station across the street had been converted to a Starbucks when gasoline became obsolete in the ’40s. With the entrance to Fort Liberty less than a block away, cameras hid everywhere. Camera drones circled overhead at periodic intervals. She had to move carefully to avoid them.
Liliana took her moment in a traffic lull to run across the street. She panted again, hidden under the cover of the Starbucks’ green-roofed entryway, watching with her fourth eyes until the sky cleared of camera drones.
She ran some more.
Down Fillyaw Road, the shade of neighborhood trees gained density and became a narrow strip of true forest. Persimmon Creek ran through there, winding its way behind and between the neighborhoods full of houses for off-base soldiers and civilian contractors. The cradle of tall trees beside the creek hid her from curious eyes and airborne drone cameras.
The little creek had a grassy walking trail beside it. Liliana hissed in relief when her raw feet touched the sandy soil and green grass. She slowed to a rapid walk, probably far enough away from the werewolf that he wouldn’t find her. She regretted sacrificing her shoes, but they had thrown the wolf off her scent admirably.
Liliana used her human eyes to see where she was going. Her fourth eyes opened to find out what the three people hunting her were doing. She kept her head down so her thick, black hair would hide the large lavender and teal eyes on her forehead if someone happened to look.
She focused on the red-haired wolf-kin with the blue eyes and the big boots. She needed to be careful with her attention split. It had taken Liliana decades to master her fourth eyes. Flashes of what might be and what had been could mix and wander through the visions of what was.
Her mastery of her most valuable and difficult gift was now to the point where she could perceive a double image, each sharp and distinct. It was as if she walked beside the creek far from the two humans and their hunting red wolf and beside them in her neighborhood at the same time. After decades of practice, her divided mind could now fully process those two sets of input and continue to do simple things like dusting or walking.
The three people quickly caught on that they had lost Liliana and stopped chasing randomly through her neighborhood. They returned to her house and took shelter from the chilly drizzle on her porch. Liliana hoped none of them would think to check the roof.
“Do you seriously think this Rain Man girl is our perp, Pete?” Sergeant Giovanni asked as they went up the wooden stairs onto Liliana’s back porch.
The wolf-kin nodded. “She fits the description, and she doesn’t have an alibi.” Liliana noticed Peter Teague did not mention she was spider-kin, and the killer was almost certainly a widow spider based on his description of the manner of their deaths. Possibly his Normal companions did not know about Others.
Detective Jackson shook her head. “Maybe a hundred women in Fayetteville fit that description. Another hundred more if you include Liberty and the surrounding small towns.” She rounded on the red-headed man, hands on her hips, and glared up at the taller wolf-kin. “Why are you so damn certain a mentally challenged fortune-teller, who doesn’t seem inclined to swat a fly, is a serial killer?”
Peter Teague shrank under the short policewoman’s glare. “She shares some other similarities to the killer…um…that I’m not at liberty to discuss, ma’am.”
“Not at liberty to discuss?” The detective pointed a finger at the middle of the taller man’s broad chest. “Well, I think you better get some liberty, Dr. Teague. This is a murder investigation, and if you don’t come up with a damn good reason for me not to, I might decide to arrest you for obstructing it.”
Sergeant Giovanni held up a hand in her friend’s defense. “It’s really nothing he can talk about, Detective. I’m sorry. You just don’t have the clearance.”
“Why is he even here? Just what kind of—” Detective Jackson made air quotes with her fingers. “—special consultant are you, Doctor Teague?”
“I’m an expert in um…biological anomalies?”
“Biological what?” Her eyebrows shot up. “Biological anomalies!” Detective Jackson took a deep breath and let it out in a relieved sigh. “Now I get why you two have been driving me nuts, speaking in half sentences since I met you. You are exactly the man I want to talk to. There are some things you just can’t ask the forensics folks here in Fayetteville.” She sat down in Liliana’s cedar wood porch swing with the bright blue and green cushions. “So tell me, in your expert opinion, Dr. Teague, what sort of Other kills with acid venom like this?”
“You know about…uh…uh…” the wolf-kin stuttered.
“Others. I transferred here from N’Orleans. If you think the Other activity level around here is a little high, the Crescent City during Mardis Gras would have you crying to your momma.”
Liliana nodded to herself. So, they were all three aware of the hidden peoples. Useful information.
Sergeant Giovanni held up a hand. “The United States government cannot officially confirm such creatures exist.”
Detective Jackson waved that away. “I don’t need official confirmation of diddly. What I need is a clue as to what I’m looking for.” She rocked the porch swing in a slow glide. The height was just right for her. “I’ve been thinking maybe a Fae with toxic thorns, or maybe some kind of poisonous snake-kin, because of the huge puncture wounds, like fangs.”
Peter Teague shook his head and sat down next to her. His knees poked up, but it didn’t seem to bother him. “I thought the same thing at first, but not plant, and not snake. I analyzed the protein structure in the venom. Spider.”
“Spider.” Detective Jackson rocked and considered.
“Definitely spider. It has all seven of the black widow venom toxic protein structures, but with a much higher proportion of vertebrate neurotoxin and a completely unique organic acid.”
“And why do you think Madame Anna is spider-kin?”
Peter Teague rocked with her, letting the detective’s shorter legs set the pace. “She did a good magician’s job of keeping us distracted when she was reading Zoe, but I spotted her opening two extra sets of eyes. My guess is she has another set I didn’t see. Eight eyes. Spider-kin.”
The spider-kin under discussion stubbed her bare toe on a tree root. The toe throbbed with far more pain than such a minor injury merited.
Why do stubbed toes sometimes hurt more than broken bones?
She added a bit more attention to her human eyes so she wouldn’t trip again and berated herself for not being careful enough about hiding her spider eyes from the three strangers.
Back on Liliana’s back porch, Detective Jackson nodded. “All right. I’ll buy that. Having more kinds of vision would explain why she was the most precise and accurate fortune-teller I’ve ever met—and I’ve met a few in my day. She didn’t use any of the usual vagueness, optimistic platitudes, or data fishing attempts, and she had no way to research our backgrounds before we arrived. But what brought us here in the first place? You two were awfully cagey about your reasons. I assume they’re Other related?”
Sergeant Giovanni, who was leaning against the porch railing, crossed her arms and gave Peter Teague a pointed look.
His smile turned sheepish, and he rubbed the back of his neck. “You know Siobhan, the little person who owns the custom weapons shop down the street, Emerald Arms?”
Detective Jackson nodded. “She modified my backup pistol. They don’t make the grips with hands my size in mind.”
“She’s Fae and knows nearly every Other in North Carolina. She said Madame Anna was the only spider-kin in Fayetteville. Plus, Anna matched the description from the security cameras at the dance club and the witnesses at the game.”
Liliana bared her fangs at the sandy path under her feet. Siobhan, the seelie Fae flower sprite, had put a mercenary on Liliana’s trail. The spider-kin would not forget that betrayal.
“Dammit, Pete. I told you we shouldn’t listen to Fayetteville’s resident cuckoo cyber-fairy.” Sergeant Giovanni sighed. “Your relationship with her is bad for your career and your mental health.”
“Siobhan isn’t crazy,” Peter Teague hastened to reassure Detective Jackson. “She’s just a little…obsessive.” He turned back to the Army sergeant. “And Zoe, you shouldn’t call her a fairy, at least not where she can hear you. The Fae consider that an insult.”
“What’s she going to do, take me out at the kneecaps?”
The red-headed man grimaced as if in pain. “Possibly with a machine pistol, yeah.”
Sergeant Giovanni wrinkled her nose in distaste. “Even the supposedly sunshine and rainbow Others will stab you in the back. You need to spend less time with them, Pete. They’ll warp your brain. They just don’t think like people.”
Detective Jackson raised an eyebrow at that, but she continued rocking without comment.
Liliana cocked her head to one side as she walked briskly, trying to ignore her tender feet. The sergeant did not seem to know Peter Teague was an Other himself, despite their friendship.
As Liliana followed the footpath into a larger patch of woods, she thought about leaving town, disappearing, and creating a new identity. She hadn’t moved in five decades, not since her second mother died at the turn of the millennium. She liked Fayetteville. The weather was pleasant, and business was good. A constant stream of soldiers and soldiers’ families, mostly Others, paid her to check on their loved ones as they fought far away. She even helped some Normal human civilians keep an eye out for whatever life might bring.
My clients.
Her steps faltered.
Moving would mean leaving her clients on their own. They would have no one to watch over them, no one to guide them away from danger and toward happiness.
She loved her job. It let her positively affect so many in Fayetteville, without forcing her into social interaction.
What would she do if she left? Join a circus again?
Her lip curled in an automatic sneer of distaste.
She had grown up in the circus, but she hated the chaos—always moving, always traveling. She liked the comfort of routine and stability. She liked her cozy little house in her cozy little neighborhood with her books and her pretty things.
A lot of circuses had gone virtual in the last few decades, traveling holographically rather than literally. That might not be quite as bad.
Liliana sighed and pulled the thin silk of her homemade blouse around her shoulders against the cold and drizzle. She was barefoot, her tights wet and torn, and she had no coat.
Before she could go someplace warm and dry and decide what to do with the rest of her life, she had to figure out what to do about the red wolf hunting her.
She tightened her fists.
Regardless of what her life would become, she would not die beneath red wolf fangs like so many of her kind.
The Fae colonel who paid the mercenary to hunt her needed to call him off.