Precise oaths, p.4
Precise Oaths, page 4
A good tactic.
Liliana nodded and sighed again. “You are not going to call off the red wolf, are you?”
“Not likely,” he said, and there was something faintly apologetic in his tone.
She looked into his eyes, meeting them for just a moment. “I did not kill your men, and I intend you no harm either, if you let me be.”
“I’d like to believe you,” he said, and his voice softened. His face up close was compelling beyond anyone she’d ever met. Dark, smooth skin where it wasn’t marred by a burn scar like a ripple in Damascus steel. High cheekbones, a broad nose over full lips, and a jaw so square, construction workers could use it to measure corners. His whole body stood solid, a pillar of determination and strength.
“I’d like for you to believe me too,” she said. That moment seemed oddly suspended in time, as she met his eyes and a drop of water dripped from his hat.
She hurled herself toward him.
He brought his arms up to block an attack, but she wasn’t attacking.
She landed in a crouch, her bare toes touching the asphalt for just a moment inside his reach if he hadn’t been defending against her feint, and she bounced up as high as she could, using the rubberband-like pull of the line under extreme tension to add power to her leap. A high back flip in midair, and she landed perfectly on her toes, one hand on the concrete border wall of the flat roof of the building. “People who threaten me or mine die. Call him off.”
The Fae colonel’s jaw muscles jumped as his face hardened. He didn’t have to say anything more.
She shook her head in frustration, turned, and ran. As she reached the end of the roof, she leaped over the next alley, popped out her arm blade, and cut the line. She took care to stay on concrete and asphalt until she was a good distance from the Sidhe.
Chapter 4
Wolf Trap
Setting a trap for the red wolf wasn’t difficult. Once the trap was ready, though, she needed to find a way to draw the wolf into it.
Liliana looked with her fourth eyes into the high-end houses off Morganton Road on the edge of the little patch of woods across from the high school. One of them was empty, and the family forgot to set their electronic security system. Liliana entered through an unlocked second-floor window and borrowed their living room communication center. The five-foot, square holo-projector was able to pull in entertainment or social interactions from several hundred different satellite, internet, cable, or broadcast systems. It would more than suffice. She watched Sergeant Giovanni backward in time for a while until the sergeant called Peter Teague from her wrist phone. Once Liliana knew the red wolf’s phone number, she touched the little picture that looked a lot like her old-fashioned house phone’s receiver and pressed the numbers in the correct order on the screen. It took her a moment more to figure out nothing would happen until she pushed the green button labelled CALL.
“Hi, it’s Pete. Who is this?”
A bigger than life holographic projection of the wolf-kin’s head and broad shoulders appeared in the cube of empty space in front of Liliana’s human eyes. “You are the Celtic wolf who seeks a spider-kin who murders soldiers.” She watched the wolf in his van with her fourth eyes, a double image, matching the hologram in a way Liliana found fascinating.
Peter Teague sat in a vehicle cruising slowly down neighborhood streets on auto-drive. “Who is this?” he asked again, his brow furrowed in confusion. He frowned down at the dash where his holoscreen was blank.
Liliana had not kept up with the rapid progress of communication technology. She was not certain which of the many little images on the communication center’s control screen would turn on the camera so a hologram of herself would appear in the wolf’s van. “I am the woman you spoke to today. You asked me if I liked dancing or basketball games, and I thought you wanted to have sex with me. Face me as a wolf, and we will settle this. Do not bring either of the humans. I do not wish to harm them.” A red wolf mercenary might not care if his human companions were endangered, but she did. “Come alone or I will disappear again.”
She told him where to find her trap and hung up. She’d woven it in the forest near the shore of the little pond behind Westover High School.
Go Wolverines, she thought automatically.
By the time she returned to her trap, the sun had set, plunging the little patch of pine and oak forest into darkness. No moon shone that time of month, no streetlights were nearby, the clouds still blocked the stars, and the dense forest canopy cast the entire area into even deeper shadow. It plunged the little patch of forest into the near-total darkness rarely seen inside a city, an absence of light so complete, it rendered human eyesight useless. A Normal would not be able to see their own hand waving in front of their face. Even a wolf’s sharp eyes would not help here.
Liliana climbed a tall pine tree in the exact center of the web and waited for her prey to arrive. She shivered. Her feet were like throbbing icicles against the rough bark, but at least the rain had stopped.
She tied back her thick hair with a strip of silk from the pocket of her skirt so she could keep watch better with her second set of eyes, the large, iridescent green eyes on her temples. With them, the details of the woods stood out as clear as daylight in all directions at once, but in strange colors. The nameless colors still made familiar things seem alien to her, even after using them for more than a hundred years.
While she waited and watched, a rabbit, in phantom shades that weren’t actually red, crept out of its burrow under her tree. One long ear twitched and flicked as its tip encountered a trip line she had set. Each trip line was as visible to Liliana as if painted with glowing light, but invisible to anyone who didn’t see in the same spectrums. Even the rabbit’s sharp little button eyes couldn’t see them. The dangling silk lines the spider-kin left hanging from dozens of branches glowed softly to show her the safe paths.
Her stomach rumbled, reminding her of all the silk she used. Enough time had passed since she laid the trap to replenish her web reserves, but she would need to eat the entire contents of her refrigerator when this was over.
As a matter of habit, the spider-kin attached a safety line to herself and the branch she sat on. Her first mother had drilled that into her. Solifu’s voice, speaking precise French or English with her faint Egyptian accent, rang in her daughter’s memory even decades after her death. “It never hurts to have a safety line, and it can often hurt a great deal not to have one.” Liliana still thought of her first mother every time she set one.
I remember, Mut. I promise I will always remember.
She missed all three of her parents with a burning ache. They had been dead a long time, but when things went wrong, their absence hurt as deeply as a fresh wound. They had been a happy, loving triad. She’d never felt alone when they were alive, even at the lowest points of her childhood.
When she first opened her fourth set of eyes on her thirtieth birthday, Liliana had been flooded with so many maddening, unrelenting images of everything at once, she’d gotten lost. She’d withdrawn so far into herself, her parents had to feed her and dress her for a few years, as if she were a helpless baby.
Eventually, Liliana’s mind found ways to cope with her fourth vision, dividing her consciousness and improving her ability to focus, shutting out what she didn’t need to see. Unlike some other spider seers, she had never completely lost her hold on sanity. Some people thought she was insane, but Liliana wasn’t. She knew this for certain. Before she died, Ixchel, her second mother, reassured her again and again. Liliana’s problems were normal for an adolescent spider seer adjusting to her fourth sight. She trusted her second mother’s judgment completely. If Ixchel said she was not insane, then Liliana was not insane.
Liliana wasn’t a murderer either. She hadn’t killed anyone in decades. The Fae colonel had no reason to send a Celtic wolf to hunt her.
She would have to convince the wolf-kin of that. Or more likely, she would have to kill him. A red wolf hired to kill was as unlikely to listen to reason as his employer had been.
With her fourth eyes, Liliana watched the red wolf, making certain he did, in fact, come alone. If he had a pack accompanying him, then she would run. One red wolf she could probably defeat, but Liliana did not like her chances against a pack. Even her father and first mother fighting side by side had fallen to a Celtic wolf pack.
The red wolf was no longer with Zoe Giovanni and Shonda Jackson. He had been auto-driving around the spider-kin’s neighborhood in a big green van while he sniffed the air through the open window to pick up her scent. After her call, he drove to the apartment complex on Grande Oaks. He parked in front of the closed information center, under some trees where his van would be all but invisible from the street and passing camera drones. The spot would be unpopular since, in the daytime, it would not allow the solar panels on the car’s roof to recharge.
His choice of parking place made it clear he did not intend for anyone to know he’d been there. That made sense if his intention was to kill Liliana. It would not do for a U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division consultant to be seen parked at the scene of her murder.
He opened the back of his van, which was furnished like a tiny camper. He lifted a small couch with one hand until it clicked against the ceiling and stayed. He touched a spot on the van wall, and the hologram of carpet underneath disappeared. It revealed a hidden compartment big enough to hide a body containing things that made her shudder: an amazing array of knives, strange vials of colored liquids, and grenades. She even saw a rocket launcher.
The red wolf pulled out a battered old sword in a worn leather scabbard and strapped the belt around his waist. He stripped off his synth-leather jacket and put on a shoulder holster with a pistol. Extra clips went into the pockets of the jacket before he put it back on. He lifted his pant legs and strapped more knife sheathes to his calves, adding them to the knives already strapped to his wrists. A machete slid into a sheath behind his neck where the hilt barely poked above his collar. He tucked something that looked like a modified Taser under his belt in the back.
Liliana shivered harder, not just from the cold. She almost reconsidered her plan to fight the werewolf for her right to remain in her chosen home.
But she was trained for this.
Liliana’s father and both her mothers had been fierce warriors. They taught the young spider-kin to fight from the time her arm blades first extended when she was five.
All three of her parents used combat practice to help ground Liliana back in reality when her mind got lost in various new kinds of sight. She remembered the feel of a weapon in her hand or her own natural weapons extended from her arms. She remembered the warmth of the loving hands of her mothers and her father, each guiding her in the practiced motions of different fighting styles, grounding her when her mind threatened to break. Liliana never had any desire to hurt others, but combat was natural to her.
Combat was home.
Liliana extended razor-sharp, slightly curved bone blades over a foot long from nearly invisible natural pockets in her forearms. She carefully measured a silken cord out, exactly enough to let her swing just above her trip lines, and crouched on her cold, sore toes, waiting for her enemy to enter the trap. Her hands trembled as she cut her safety line with her arm blade and measured out that final strand.
She tilted her head. The feeling was similar to what she felt before shows as a young performer in the circus. She could focus on the performance when she was dancing in the air on high wires or trapeze swings or silk streamers, but this feeling was a lot like looking out at hundreds of people waiting to stare at her.
Fear was not a feeling she experienced often. Not this kind of fear anyway—fear for her life.
Fear of being stared at or laughed at. Fear of crowds. Fear of stumbling through awkward social situations like a blind child in a forest filled with bear traps. That kind of fear she was used to. But fear she might soon die? She hadn’t felt that in a long time.
She wished she could fight with her fourth eyes open as her first mother could, to see and anticipate enemy movements. Liliana’s fourth eyes were more likely to distract her in combat than to aid her.
Below, the rabbit stopped nibbling greenery and popped up on its hind legs, long ears in the air swiveling for better reception. A moment later, the little animal vanished back into its safe burrow under the tree.
Liliana wished she had that option. She wished the handsome Fae colonel had believed her.
Her mothers would be so proud of her, though, for facing her fear and standing up to the red wolf. She blinked tears from her human eyes.
Her father would have been disappointed in her if she did anything else.
Liliana lifted her chin.
The quiver in her belly was just the echo of childhood nightmares. She was an adult now, or close enough. She would face the terror of her childhood and win.
Her hand tightened on the fine silk line to still the tremble.
Still in human form, the red-haired werewolf crept through the woods, making barely enough noise in the wet pine needles and sandy soil to alert the rabbit’s keen ears. His gun was out; a bright compact LED light shone from the tip of the barrel. He held a knife poised, ready to throw in his other hand. The sword hung in the scabbard at his hip.
Peter Teague wasn’t a big man in human form. He didn’t look like one of the world’s deadliest beast-kin, but his movements showed the grace of a natural predator. The bright beam of white light searched the forest, joined with the barrel of his gun. If the Celtic wolf caught so much as a glimpse of her, Liliana would die.
She could do this. The spider seer took a deep, quiet, steadying breath.
The red wolf muttered softly to himself as he stalked further into the inky shadows under the tall pines and oaks. “Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.”
Liliana smothered a surprised urge to laugh. She always liked that quote. Her head tilted to one side.
Was Peter Teague afraid too?
For the first time, she considered the situation from his side. Alone. He had no pack backing him. He clearly knew this was a trap, and he believed she’d killed several soldiers in a horrible way.
Yet he still came.
He sought to stop a murderer, and knowingly risked becoming the next victim to do it. No one paid him,. His own need to protect innocent lives drove him. Her father would have admired such a man.
The light on the wolf’s gun barely scratched a tiny hole in the clinging blackness of the forest. He was all alone in the dark.
“Anna? Are you here?” Peter Teague called to her. “Anna, come on out and let’s talk about this.” He stepped deeper and deeper into the trap. She’d left some clear paths into the web, and he’d found one.
Her enemy was walking right into her trap all but blind. And she was a spider seer.
She could do this.
But maybe she could do it without killing the brave red wolf.
Chapter 5
Aerial Battle
Liliana swung down on her silk line, swooping at him out of the darkness with her right forearm blade extended. First, she had to blind the wolf-kin completely and make sure he didn’t shoot her.
She caught both his hands with the blunt side of her arm blade. She could have taken his hands off at the wrists with the sharp edge and ended their fight very quickly, but she chose a riskier path that might not end in anyone’s death.
The werewolf’s gun and knife flew out of his hands. The light didn’t go out. The gun tumbled across the pine needle–strewn ground and came to rest behind a root, making an island of white light in her second eyes’ ocean of nameless colors.
Peter Teague shook his hand where she’d probably bruised it. “Anna, we don’t have to do it this way.” The wolf-kin drew his sword. He pulled out another of his many knives with the other hand. “Just come with me, quietly. No one has to die tonight.” His footsteps were grounded and careful.
She could tell by the way he kept his feet low that he was unaware of the trip lines. He was also nowhere near them. She sprang the trap too soon. He still had several steps to go before he hit the web.
Nerves.
It was too late to correct her mistake.
Liliana jumped off a limb and caught another dangling silk cord, kicking her feet to swing faster in a long, graceful arc.
She had missed this feeling of freedom as the cold night air whooshed through her hair. It felt like flying. Just as it had back in the circus when she performed, exhilaration overwhelmed fear.
She extended her bare feet in front of her as she swung toward him, intending to knock the wolf down and hopefully cause him to lose another weapon.
The wolf must have smelled her, or heard her skirt flapping in the wind. He sidestepped and struck out with his sword.
Desperately, Liliana arched back as the sword blade swished over her body close enough for her to feel the air move in its wake. The heavy steel blade twanged against her silk line, parting it barely above her fingers.
As her line jerked, then went slack, Liliana twisted and managed to land on her sore feet. Her heart pounded in her throat. Even virtually blind in the dense forest on an overcast night, the werewolf came within inches of killing her.
The wolf-kin spun to face her general direction, sword and long knife held at the ready.
Liliana swallowed. She breathed deep and slow to steady her racing heart and keep from giving her position away.
He clearly couldn’t see her, but his head tilted slightly as he listened, waiting for her to move or breathe too loudly. He sniffed the air.
She had been all over this area setting her trap. Hopefully, that would confuse his sharp nose.
As silently as she could on her icy, sore feet, Liliana moved. The pine needles, cones, tree roots, and rocks made her steps tentative and painful. It was probably a good thing her kind weren’t prone to tetanus. She hopped up delicately onto one of her low lines to get above the forest floor, wishing she hadn’t left quite so much clear space between the trip lines. The familiar feel of her silk under the soles of her feet soothed them. Her steps steadied on the fine thread.
Liliana nodded and sighed again. “You are not going to call off the red wolf, are you?”
“Not likely,” he said, and there was something faintly apologetic in his tone.
She looked into his eyes, meeting them for just a moment. “I did not kill your men, and I intend you no harm either, if you let me be.”
“I’d like to believe you,” he said, and his voice softened. His face up close was compelling beyond anyone she’d ever met. Dark, smooth skin where it wasn’t marred by a burn scar like a ripple in Damascus steel. High cheekbones, a broad nose over full lips, and a jaw so square, construction workers could use it to measure corners. His whole body stood solid, a pillar of determination and strength.
“I’d like for you to believe me too,” she said. That moment seemed oddly suspended in time, as she met his eyes and a drop of water dripped from his hat.
She hurled herself toward him.
He brought his arms up to block an attack, but she wasn’t attacking.
She landed in a crouch, her bare toes touching the asphalt for just a moment inside his reach if he hadn’t been defending against her feint, and she bounced up as high as she could, using the rubberband-like pull of the line under extreme tension to add power to her leap. A high back flip in midair, and she landed perfectly on her toes, one hand on the concrete border wall of the flat roof of the building. “People who threaten me or mine die. Call him off.”
The Fae colonel’s jaw muscles jumped as his face hardened. He didn’t have to say anything more.
She shook her head in frustration, turned, and ran. As she reached the end of the roof, she leaped over the next alley, popped out her arm blade, and cut the line. She took care to stay on concrete and asphalt until she was a good distance from the Sidhe.
Chapter 4
Wolf Trap
Setting a trap for the red wolf wasn’t difficult. Once the trap was ready, though, she needed to find a way to draw the wolf into it.
Liliana looked with her fourth eyes into the high-end houses off Morganton Road on the edge of the little patch of woods across from the high school. One of them was empty, and the family forgot to set their electronic security system. Liliana entered through an unlocked second-floor window and borrowed their living room communication center. The five-foot, square holo-projector was able to pull in entertainment or social interactions from several hundred different satellite, internet, cable, or broadcast systems. It would more than suffice. She watched Sergeant Giovanni backward in time for a while until the sergeant called Peter Teague from her wrist phone. Once Liliana knew the red wolf’s phone number, she touched the little picture that looked a lot like her old-fashioned house phone’s receiver and pressed the numbers in the correct order on the screen. It took her a moment more to figure out nothing would happen until she pushed the green button labelled CALL.
“Hi, it’s Pete. Who is this?”
A bigger than life holographic projection of the wolf-kin’s head and broad shoulders appeared in the cube of empty space in front of Liliana’s human eyes. “You are the Celtic wolf who seeks a spider-kin who murders soldiers.” She watched the wolf in his van with her fourth eyes, a double image, matching the hologram in a way Liliana found fascinating.
Peter Teague sat in a vehicle cruising slowly down neighborhood streets on auto-drive. “Who is this?” he asked again, his brow furrowed in confusion. He frowned down at the dash where his holoscreen was blank.
Liliana had not kept up with the rapid progress of communication technology. She was not certain which of the many little images on the communication center’s control screen would turn on the camera so a hologram of herself would appear in the wolf’s van. “I am the woman you spoke to today. You asked me if I liked dancing or basketball games, and I thought you wanted to have sex with me. Face me as a wolf, and we will settle this. Do not bring either of the humans. I do not wish to harm them.” A red wolf mercenary might not care if his human companions were endangered, but she did. “Come alone or I will disappear again.”
She told him where to find her trap and hung up. She’d woven it in the forest near the shore of the little pond behind Westover High School.
Go Wolverines, she thought automatically.
By the time she returned to her trap, the sun had set, plunging the little patch of pine and oak forest into darkness. No moon shone that time of month, no streetlights were nearby, the clouds still blocked the stars, and the dense forest canopy cast the entire area into even deeper shadow. It plunged the little patch of forest into the near-total darkness rarely seen inside a city, an absence of light so complete, it rendered human eyesight useless. A Normal would not be able to see their own hand waving in front of their face. Even a wolf’s sharp eyes would not help here.
Liliana climbed a tall pine tree in the exact center of the web and waited for her prey to arrive. She shivered. Her feet were like throbbing icicles against the rough bark, but at least the rain had stopped.
She tied back her thick hair with a strip of silk from the pocket of her skirt so she could keep watch better with her second set of eyes, the large, iridescent green eyes on her temples. With them, the details of the woods stood out as clear as daylight in all directions at once, but in strange colors. The nameless colors still made familiar things seem alien to her, even after using them for more than a hundred years.
While she waited and watched, a rabbit, in phantom shades that weren’t actually red, crept out of its burrow under her tree. One long ear twitched and flicked as its tip encountered a trip line she had set. Each trip line was as visible to Liliana as if painted with glowing light, but invisible to anyone who didn’t see in the same spectrums. Even the rabbit’s sharp little button eyes couldn’t see them. The dangling silk lines the spider-kin left hanging from dozens of branches glowed softly to show her the safe paths.
Her stomach rumbled, reminding her of all the silk she used. Enough time had passed since she laid the trap to replenish her web reserves, but she would need to eat the entire contents of her refrigerator when this was over.
As a matter of habit, the spider-kin attached a safety line to herself and the branch she sat on. Her first mother had drilled that into her. Solifu’s voice, speaking precise French or English with her faint Egyptian accent, rang in her daughter’s memory even decades after her death. “It never hurts to have a safety line, and it can often hurt a great deal not to have one.” Liliana still thought of her first mother every time she set one.
I remember, Mut. I promise I will always remember.
She missed all three of her parents with a burning ache. They had been dead a long time, but when things went wrong, their absence hurt as deeply as a fresh wound. They had been a happy, loving triad. She’d never felt alone when they were alive, even at the lowest points of her childhood.
When she first opened her fourth set of eyes on her thirtieth birthday, Liliana had been flooded with so many maddening, unrelenting images of everything at once, she’d gotten lost. She’d withdrawn so far into herself, her parents had to feed her and dress her for a few years, as if she were a helpless baby.
Eventually, Liliana’s mind found ways to cope with her fourth vision, dividing her consciousness and improving her ability to focus, shutting out what she didn’t need to see. Unlike some other spider seers, she had never completely lost her hold on sanity. Some people thought she was insane, but Liliana wasn’t. She knew this for certain. Before she died, Ixchel, her second mother, reassured her again and again. Liliana’s problems were normal for an adolescent spider seer adjusting to her fourth sight. She trusted her second mother’s judgment completely. If Ixchel said she was not insane, then Liliana was not insane.
Liliana wasn’t a murderer either. She hadn’t killed anyone in decades. The Fae colonel had no reason to send a Celtic wolf to hunt her.
She would have to convince the wolf-kin of that. Or more likely, she would have to kill him. A red wolf hired to kill was as unlikely to listen to reason as his employer had been.
With her fourth eyes, Liliana watched the red wolf, making certain he did, in fact, come alone. If he had a pack accompanying him, then she would run. One red wolf she could probably defeat, but Liliana did not like her chances against a pack. Even her father and first mother fighting side by side had fallen to a Celtic wolf pack.
The red wolf was no longer with Zoe Giovanni and Shonda Jackson. He had been auto-driving around the spider-kin’s neighborhood in a big green van while he sniffed the air through the open window to pick up her scent. After her call, he drove to the apartment complex on Grande Oaks. He parked in front of the closed information center, under some trees where his van would be all but invisible from the street and passing camera drones. The spot would be unpopular since, in the daytime, it would not allow the solar panels on the car’s roof to recharge.
His choice of parking place made it clear he did not intend for anyone to know he’d been there. That made sense if his intention was to kill Liliana. It would not do for a U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division consultant to be seen parked at the scene of her murder.
He opened the back of his van, which was furnished like a tiny camper. He lifted a small couch with one hand until it clicked against the ceiling and stayed. He touched a spot on the van wall, and the hologram of carpet underneath disappeared. It revealed a hidden compartment big enough to hide a body containing things that made her shudder: an amazing array of knives, strange vials of colored liquids, and grenades. She even saw a rocket launcher.
The red wolf pulled out a battered old sword in a worn leather scabbard and strapped the belt around his waist. He stripped off his synth-leather jacket and put on a shoulder holster with a pistol. Extra clips went into the pockets of the jacket before he put it back on. He lifted his pant legs and strapped more knife sheathes to his calves, adding them to the knives already strapped to his wrists. A machete slid into a sheath behind his neck where the hilt barely poked above his collar. He tucked something that looked like a modified Taser under his belt in the back.
Liliana shivered harder, not just from the cold. She almost reconsidered her plan to fight the werewolf for her right to remain in her chosen home.
But she was trained for this.
Liliana’s father and both her mothers had been fierce warriors. They taught the young spider-kin to fight from the time her arm blades first extended when she was five.
All three of her parents used combat practice to help ground Liliana back in reality when her mind got lost in various new kinds of sight. She remembered the feel of a weapon in her hand or her own natural weapons extended from her arms. She remembered the warmth of the loving hands of her mothers and her father, each guiding her in the practiced motions of different fighting styles, grounding her when her mind threatened to break. Liliana never had any desire to hurt others, but combat was natural to her.
Combat was home.
Liliana extended razor-sharp, slightly curved bone blades over a foot long from nearly invisible natural pockets in her forearms. She carefully measured a silken cord out, exactly enough to let her swing just above her trip lines, and crouched on her cold, sore toes, waiting for her enemy to enter the trap. Her hands trembled as she cut her safety line with her arm blade and measured out that final strand.
She tilted her head. The feeling was similar to what she felt before shows as a young performer in the circus. She could focus on the performance when she was dancing in the air on high wires or trapeze swings or silk streamers, but this feeling was a lot like looking out at hundreds of people waiting to stare at her.
Fear was not a feeling she experienced often. Not this kind of fear anyway—fear for her life.
Fear of being stared at or laughed at. Fear of crowds. Fear of stumbling through awkward social situations like a blind child in a forest filled with bear traps. That kind of fear she was used to. But fear she might soon die? She hadn’t felt that in a long time.
She wished she could fight with her fourth eyes open as her first mother could, to see and anticipate enemy movements. Liliana’s fourth eyes were more likely to distract her in combat than to aid her.
Below, the rabbit stopped nibbling greenery and popped up on its hind legs, long ears in the air swiveling for better reception. A moment later, the little animal vanished back into its safe burrow under the tree.
Liliana wished she had that option. She wished the handsome Fae colonel had believed her.
Her mothers would be so proud of her, though, for facing her fear and standing up to the red wolf. She blinked tears from her human eyes.
Her father would have been disappointed in her if she did anything else.
Liliana lifted her chin.
The quiver in her belly was just the echo of childhood nightmares. She was an adult now, or close enough. She would face the terror of her childhood and win.
Her hand tightened on the fine silk line to still the tremble.
Still in human form, the red-haired werewolf crept through the woods, making barely enough noise in the wet pine needles and sandy soil to alert the rabbit’s keen ears. His gun was out; a bright compact LED light shone from the tip of the barrel. He held a knife poised, ready to throw in his other hand. The sword hung in the scabbard at his hip.
Peter Teague wasn’t a big man in human form. He didn’t look like one of the world’s deadliest beast-kin, but his movements showed the grace of a natural predator. The bright beam of white light searched the forest, joined with the barrel of his gun. If the Celtic wolf caught so much as a glimpse of her, Liliana would die.
She could do this. The spider seer took a deep, quiet, steadying breath.
The red wolf muttered softly to himself as he stalked further into the inky shadows under the tall pines and oaks. “Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.”
Liliana smothered a surprised urge to laugh. She always liked that quote. Her head tilted to one side.
Was Peter Teague afraid too?
For the first time, she considered the situation from his side. Alone. He had no pack backing him. He clearly knew this was a trap, and he believed she’d killed several soldiers in a horrible way.
Yet he still came.
He sought to stop a murderer, and knowingly risked becoming the next victim to do it. No one paid him,. His own need to protect innocent lives drove him. Her father would have admired such a man.
The light on the wolf’s gun barely scratched a tiny hole in the clinging blackness of the forest. He was all alone in the dark.
“Anna? Are you here?” Peter Teague called to her. “Anna, come on out and let’s talk about this.” He stepped deeper and deeper into the trap. She’d left some clear paths into the web, and he’d found one.
Her enemy was walking right into her trap all but blind. And she was a spider seer.
She could do this.
But maybe she could do it without killing the brave red wolf.
Chapter 5
Aerial Battle
Liliana swung down on her silk line, swooping at him out of the darkness with her right forearm blade extended. First, she had to blind the wolf-kin completely and make sure he didn’t shoot her.
She caught both his hands with the blunt side of her arm blade. She could have taken his hands off at the wrists with the sharp edge and ended their fight very quickly, but she chose a riskier path that might not end in anyone’s death.
The werewolf’s gun and knife flew out of his hands. The light didn’t go out. The gun tumbled across the pine needle–strewn ground and came to rest behind a root, making an island of white light in her second eyes’ ocean of nameless colors.
Peter Teague shook his hand where she’d probably bruised it. “Anna, we don’t have to do it this way.” The wolf-kin drew his sword. He pulled out another of his many knives with the other hand. “Just come with me, quietly. No one has to die tonight.” His footsteps were grounded and careful.
She could tell by the way he kept his feet low that he was unaware of the trip lines. He was also nowhere near them. She sprang the trap too soon. He still had several steps to go before he hit the web.
Nerves.
It was too late to correct her mistake.
Liliana jumped off a limb and caught another dangling silk cord, kicking her feet to swing faster in a long, graceful arc.
She had missed this feeling of freedom as the cold night air whooshed through her hair. It felt like flying. Just as it had back in the circus when she performed, exhilaration overwhelmed fear.
She extended her bare feet in front of her as she swung toward him, intending to knock the wolf down and hopefully cause him to lose another weapon.
The wolf must have smelled her, or heard her skirt flapping in the wind. He sidestepped and struck out with his sword.
Desperately, Liliana arched back as the sword blade swished over her body close enough for her to feel the air move in its wake. The heavy steel blade twanged against her silk line, parting it barely above her fingers.
As her line jerked, then went slack, Liliana twisted and managed to land on her sore feet. Her heart pounded in her throat. Even virtually blind in the dense forest on an overcast night, the werewolf came within inches of killing her.
The wolf-kin spun to face her general direction, sword and long knife held at the ready.
Liliana swallowed. She breathed deep and slow to steady her racing heart and keep from giving her position away.
He clearly couldn’t see her, but his head tilted slightly as he listened, waiting for her to move or breathe too loudly. He sniffed the air.
She had been all over this area setting her trap. Hopefully, that would confuse his sharp nose.
As silently as she could on her icy, sore feet, Liliana moved. The pine needles, cones, tree roots, and rocks made her steps tentative and painful. It was probably a good thing her kind weren’t prone to tetanus. She hopped up delicately onto one of her low lines to get above the forest floor, wishing she hadn’t left quite so much clear space between the trip lines. The familiar feel of her silk under the soles of her feet soothed them. Her steps steadied on the fine thread.
