Precise oaths, p.11
Precise Oaths, page 11
Janice blushed at the compliment. “Will it really work? Will that be enough to make sure the Celtic wolf protects my Lou?”
Reluctantly, Liliana opened her fourth eyes again.
With Janice following a path to friendship with Pete’s beloved, will Pete be there to protect Lou?
The image of the lone red wolf standing against the vicious pack of killers while the rabbit-kin escaped still flickered, barely possible.
Liliana cocked her head to one side, wondering. That should have worked. Janice would follow her advice. Liliana had guided Janice for years.
Why is the future where the red wolf protects the rabbit-kin still so uncertain?
An ugly image assaulted Liliana. Powerful, brutal, and vivid. Close in time and almost certain.
Liliana jumped up onto her chair. She lifted her hands to defend herself. Her reflex was to extend her arm blades, but the danger wasn’t to her. She squeezed her fourth eyes shut, but she couldn’t shut out the image of Pete’s lovely blue eyes, wide and staring with death, his face twisted in a silent scream of agony and horror, his body wrapped in a spider-kin’s web. It was the one death that genuinely terrified the brave wolf: death by widow spider bite.
It would claim him soon, probably today.
“No,” Liliana whispered.
“What is it?” Janice asked, fear in her voice. “Is my Lou going to die?”
“No, no, no!” Liliana said more forcefully. She jumped off the chair and retreated to the corner of the room by the inner door. The spider-kin turned her back on her best client and twisted the fabric of her skirt until it nearly tore. “No more questions today. I am tired.”
It was what Liliana said to clients who stayed too long. Janice had not been there that long, but Liliana desperately wanted her to leave.
“But...um...okay.”
With her face in the corner and her back to her client, Liliana watched Janice pull a pay card out of her purse. Liliana hadn’t noticed until that moment that she’d opened her second eyes, the ones she used in combat to see all around. They sometimes opened instinctively when she was frightened or upset.
Janice punched a number into her wrist phone, authorized it with her thumb print, and dropped the pay card in the elaborate jar Liliana kept beside the round table. People used to put paper folding money in the jar. Now they put pay cards in it. Barely anyone used paper money anymore.
“I have to know though, Madame Anna.” The rabbit-kin hesitated at the door. “Is my Lou safe? Will the Celtic wolf protect him?”
“If the red wolf dies…” Liliana swallowed the lump in her throat and leaned her forehead on the corner walls. “If he dies, take your husband and your children and move away to another city. Without the Celtic wolf, Fayetteville will no longer be safe for your family.”
“What’s going to happen to him? The red wolf, I mean.”
With a bitterness the rabbit didn’t deserve, Liliana wondered why Janice cared what happened to the wolf-kin she had so callously rejected. “No more questions today. I am tired,” she repeated.
“Can you see me again next week?” Janice asked.
Visions of Pete’s gruesome death consumed every part of Liliana’s mind. Her hands shook as she ran the fabric of her skirt through her fingers again and again. She barely heard the question Janice asked. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Pete would die.
Horribly.
Today.
Face to the corner, the spider seer crouched down, trying to block out the sight of Pete’s staring eyes. Pete’s screaming mouth. Pete’s sunken pale cheeks. She squeezed down in the corner into as tiny a ball as she could and rocked, hands over her first, third, and fourth eyes.
Janice Willoughby left at some point.
The day her parents died, Liliana saw it, even before it happened. She watched her eldest brothers and their children, her father, and her first mother all torn apart. She had seen it like a record stuck in a bloody groove, a slice of time looping again and again uncontrollably through her mind. Blood and death and screams, over and over. The family she loved reduced to meat and blood. At that age, she had not yet divided her mind into compartments to separate each vision and shut out what she didn’t want to see. She couldn’t stop the visions. She was paralyzed by the overwhelming horror. Helpless, useless, trapped in her own mind. Only shutting her mind down completely, going into the blank place where there was no time, could make it stop.
Liliana had only just begun to know the compassionate red wolf. Already she had seen him die twice and seen an assassin murder his strongest protector, the handsome Fae colonel. She felt a surge of unreasoning anger toward Janice. Why had the stupid rabbit woman made her look?
She opened her fourth eyes a tiny slit to look at Janice’s future, half-hoping she would see something awful happen to her. Instead, she saw the rabbit-kin baking batch after batch of cookies, along with the cake she had already promised. With a look of stunned delight, the golden-haired teacher who owned the red wolf’s heart accepted the generous gifts for his bake sale fundraiser.
Janice’s attitude toward the red wolf and his beloved had radically changed. Liliana saw a potential future flicker into uncertain possibility where a deep friendship developed between the rabbit-kin homemaker and the Normal teacher. That possibility hadn’t existed until Liliana spoke to Janice. The rabbit-kin’s path altered, as had her husband Lou’s by extension and their children’s. Liliana now knew the fate of the Willoughby family was intertwined with the fate of the Celtic wolf and his boyfriend. With her advice to Janice, Liliana changed Pete’s future in a small way for the better.
It reminded Liliana that she wasn’t helpless this time, like she’d been when her family was slaughtered. She could change what she saw.
She risked a quick glimpse into the future, but saw the same three ugly deaths, one close in time and nearly certain, one in a few days if the Fae colonel died trying to protect him, and the other waiting to claim the red wolf in less than a year if he somehow escaped the first two.
She had helped a little, but Pete was still going to die.
Liliana stopped rocking and stood up.
Not if she had anything to say about it.
Chapter 11
Towering Enemy
To get from Fayetteville to Raleigh, Liliana had to take an auto-cab. It would cost far more than a simple one-hour ride in a car should, especially now when clean fuel was virtually free and cab drivers were computers that didn’t need salaries, but it was necessary. Liliana could not cram herself into the hollow tube of the bullet train to Raleigh with hundreds of strangers and hope to emerge on the other side still sane, and she had never learned to drive or bought a car—so, a cab.
She wrapped a bright red scarf decorated with sequins around her head where it would cover her fourth eyes. She could open and close them freely that way, and since they saw things that weren’t in front of her, the scarf would not interfere with her vision. She braided her hair with it in the back so it would be out of her way if she had to fight. Then she walked down the busy street in front of her business, looking for a cab going to Raleigh. She didn’t care who it intended to take to Raleigh. Her mission to save Pete was of paramount importance, and time was limited.
She searched for some time as she walked to the nearest busy intersection, then kept walking further toward the center of town. It took nearly half an hour to find a cab. It had just come from the airport in Raleigh, and therefore, it would accept a multicity fare to take her back.
The only problem was that it would be fifteen minutes before it finished dropping off its passenger. Unwilling to wait, Liliana stepped in front of the cab. Its tires squealed only a little. Computer vision, collision sensors, and other recent advances made standing in front of a moving car frequently safter than riding in one.
When the car stopped, Liliana stayed in front of it, following when it tried to back up or go around her.
Finally, the passenger door opened. An angry man in blue jeans with long, black, curly hair got out, shouting at her in what sounded like…Polish, maybe? Slovakian? It had been a long time since Liliana lived in Europe. She not only didn’t understand the words, she wasn’t sure of the language. However, the man’s intention and emotion were very clear as he shouted at Liliana and waved his hands at her to get out of the way.
Once the passenger door was open, the car would not move, so she went around to where the man stood, red in the face from his anger.
With a start, she recognized the man. A bit of black leather collar showed above his shirt despite the long hair mostly covering it. He was the Wolfhound assassin she’d seen in her vision.
She considered killing him right then to prevent the ugly future she’d seen, but they were in the middle of a street in broad daylight. She might have risked it anyway, but a quick peek with her fourth eyes showed her that if he didn’t report his arrival at the hotel, another assassin would be immediately sent.
She couldn’t remove the threat now, but it helped her to know he was a horrible person who killed without mercy on command. She didn’t like inconveniencing anyone by taking their cab, but in the case of this man, she felt zero guilt. He could walk the remaining eight miles to his hotel.
She walked up to him but stepped a few feet away from the car, like she intended to talk to him, and waved him over.
He let go of the car door and stepped toward her to growl and snap unknown obscenities directly into her face.
She sidestepped the man, jumped into the car, closed and locked the door. “Go to the Mirror Club in Raleigh,” she instructed the car.
“Override previous destination?” the polite feminine voice of the car asked.
“Yes, please.”
The man with the curly black hair pursued her and pounded on the cab roof in fury for a few seconds before the car merged with faster traffic, leaving him behind.
Liliana noticed a large backpack in the seat next to her and assumed it was his. She pressed the button to roll down the window and tossed the backpack out the window.
She found it weirdly satisfying to see it hit the street at speed, roll through a big puddle, and smash into a curb, bursting at the seams with clothing and personal items scattering.
On the other hand, she suspected that her actions would have consequences. As the car pulled into the all auto-drive lane on the highway and accelerated to far higher speeds, she checked the vision she’d seen where the Wolfhound faced Colonel Bennet. As she suspected, the future where the assassin showed subservience rather than rage was gone.
Liliana’s recent actions pushed the assassin’s anger level beyond control. She sighed. It had been satisfying, but now, even if she managed to save Pete today, he would die a few nights later.
And even if she helped then, he would die within a year protecting Lou Willoughby.
Keeping Peter Teague alive was practically her new hobby.
She sighed again as the beauty of the heavily forested, kudzu-overgrown North Carolina countryside sped past her window. Much of the damage done to the earth by modern technology had been mitigated by the invention of even better, more earth-friendly technology and a shift in attitude that valued the green world rather than disregarded it. But no one had figured out how to get the invasive kudzu under control. It was the sort of problem that a land-bonded Sidhe could fix, but there weren’t any in North America.
Pete faced death today because he was following her advice to talk to Lady Daphne Fairchilde. A few days from now, his death and the death of the Fae prince who protected him at the hands of the Wolfhound had both become certainty rather than possibility because of her cavalier treatment enraging the assassin.
These two possible deaths were both her fault. And while she didn’t know how the incident that involved Lou Willoughby might be her fault, she wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it turned out to be so.
Saving Pete would not be nearly as frequently needed if Liliana didn’t keep unintentionally making his already dangerous life even more dangerous. A Celtic wolf who hunted killers did not need her to make his life harder.
The drive took nearly an hour. She looked for various ways to help but hadn’t yet found one with the outcome she hoped for.
When the cab dropped her off in front of the Mirror Club, it did not request payment. It took Liliana a moment to realize that because she changed the destination while the assassin was still the logged passenger, the machine automatically charged him for the trip.
She chuckled to herself as she stepped out on the sidewalk, but her laughter died as a pedestrian jostled her. This part of Raleigh was far too busy.
Her heart pounded as more and more strangers walked past, too close.
She looked around frantically, then stepped into a sheltered alcove beside the nearest building to catch her breath. The Mirror Club, owned by a woman she hadn’t seen in nearly a century, occupied the building across the street that rose up to an impressive twelve stories.
Lady Daphne Fairchilde, the widow spider, was neither particularly fair nor a child, nor by many definitions was she a lady. Liliana always found it odd when names didn’t match the people who were named.
Now, she faced Lady Daphne’s tall building, noting that only the first two floors were the Mirror Club, one of the most popular nightclubs in Raleigh. The upper floors of the building seemed to be a different business, a hotel with balconies overlooking the street, but Lady Daphne had bragged all those years ago about buying a whole building, one of the tallest in Raleigh at the time, so she must own the hotel as well.
Loud music leaked out of the front door when a muscular woman in a black T-shirt opened it to let people in. The T-shirt said “Mirror” in reflective silver letters, then had the same word beneath it, upside down in gray.
Even this early in the evening, few people came out the doors. Most went in. A lot of people went in. The pounding music drew the Normals to dance and intoxicate themselves until they became easy prey. Liliana suspected the nightclub would draw the more predatory beast-kin and Fae, as well as the often equally predatory humans.
Noisy, crowded places like this were why Liliana no longer went dancing.
Another door led into the hotel lobby, but it had nearly as many people pouring in as the door directly into the nightclub. Inside the hotel lobby, her fourth vision showed her another entrance to the club was also guarded by an athletic woman in a black T-shirt.
In a few minutes, Liliana knew Pete and his friend, Sergeant Giovanni, would enter the building. Neither of them would leave it again unless Liliana changed their paths.
It was her fault. She told Pete he should speak to Lady Daphne.
Liliana huddled in the shadowed doorway of the closed offices glaring at the building filled with noise and people and mad flashing lights as if it were a vicious enemy. She absolutely could not walk through that door. She shuddered with revulsion and something like terror thinking about it.
The spider seer had always hated being stared at. And crowds always stared at her. Worse, in a crowd the short spider-kin was often bumped, touched, jostled, and shoved around. If she tried to force herself to go inside, she would instinctively shut down, go to that blank place in her mind where time passed without her awareness.
That would not help Pete.
His life depended on her. Two lives. She liked Sergeant Giovanni too, even though the sergeant still believed Liliana was a charlatan, and possibly still thought she was a murderer.
But even if her own life had depended on it, Liliana could no more walk into that building than she could stroll into a bonfire.
She considered speaking to Pete and Sergeant Giovanni before they entered.
Maybe she could warn them.
Would that save them?
An image of herself appeared before her fourth eyes of Liliana blocking their path on the sidewalk, trying to convince Pete and his friend not to confront Lady Daphne. “You will both die before morning,” she told them.
Sergeant Giovanni’s eyes narrowed. “Is that a threat?”
“It is not a threat. It is a warning.”
Pete put a hand gently on Liliana’s shoulder. “We have to find the murderer before they kill again. Even if you’re right, and investigating will get us killed, we can’t just stop looking. You told me yourself, more people will die.”
Liliana closed her fourth eyes.
A warning would change nothing. Duty drove them. They wouldn’t shirk that duty, even if it meant their deaths.
If she was going to change things, Liliana had to get in there and do something directly.
She studied the building thwarting her. Brick and windows, balconies and fancy, irregular, decorative architectural features made it look…climbable. The spider-kin could climb a building like that as easily as she could climb a flight of stairs.
A slight smile tugged at her lips, aimed at the building daring to oppose her. She would beat it in her own way.
The Mirror Club and hotel sat at the intersection of two busy streets. An empty, undeveloped lot hid behind it where people parked their cars, and a single-lane alley ran on the fourth side.
To avoid being seen by the woman at the club door, Liliana circled the block, cut through the parking lot, and came at the building from behind. The first two floors were flat brick on this side. Balconies and decorative features started two stories up. Liliana couldn’t jump high enough.
A dumpster in the alley solved that problem.
As the spider-kin vaulted to the sheet steel lid of the dumpster, the loud clanging of the steel made her freeze in fear of discovery.
She opened her fourth eyes.
Did anyone hear that?
After a moment of tense searching, she moved again. No one had noticed the noise.
Her new perch made the leap to the lowest balcony achievable, barely, but the angle was bad. The underside of the balcony with its hollow, steel support beams extended over her head, so she couldn’t reach the edge to grab onto it. She crouched, gathered her feet under her, and leaped high, right arm outstretched. She slapped the spinneret in her wrist to a balcony support beam. As she fell, a silk line was pulled out. She caught it.
