Precise oaths, p.12
Precise Oaths, page 12
She kicked her legs to swing out and touched the spinneret on her other wrist to the edge of the balcony. As she swung back, a new line pulled out. She grabbed it and let go of the previous line. She popped her arm blade out, swung forward hard to get past the edge of the balcony, twisted, and hooked her arm blade over the edge. The sharp tip dug into the wood decking, allowing her to haul herself up. When her hand closed around the decorative ironwork railing, she grinned to herself, showing her fangs. She would not be defeated by a mere building.
From there, it was a relatively simple matter to stand on top of each railing and leap up to catch the base of the next highest one. She attached a quick safety line at each level in the unlikely case she missed one of her jumps. Attaching a safety line was habit so ingrained that Liliana’s hands did it without her mind having to consciously decide. Every time she actively thought about it, she thought of her first mother.
I always remember, Mut. I won’t forget.
Her fourth eyes showed her an image from long past, her first mother smiling and nodding in approval while she dangled from a safety line she had set without being told. Solifu cared far less that she’d made a mistake and lost her footing while practicing a routine on the high wire than that her daughter had developed a habit that could save her life.
Liliana’s first mother rarely smiled like that in open approval, far more often stern and disapproving of her mistakes. But while Solifu always pushed her daughter to do better and become greater, the young spider seer’s third eyes saw the love and worry in her first mother’s aura. And in that moment, approval and relief and love lit Solifu’s smile from within with deep blues and rich rose.
As she climbed, a lovely sunset shaded the sky in glowing colors like her mother’s soul so many years ago. It made Liliana’s smile grow sad, remembering the colors of her first mother’s aura that her fourth eyes couldn’t look back in time and see.
Each little balcony was equipped with wrought iron chairs and a round, glass-topped table. The furniture looked uncomfortable, but she liked the aesthetics of the curvy strips of metal and thick glass. She scrambled up one railing, around the fifth floor or so, to find a man in a terry cloth robe sitting on one of the chairs, sipping from a mug and reading something on a pocket reader. The devices looked a bit like scrolls with flexible screens that retracted into the cylindrical ends when not in use, but they scrolled out sideways.
Liliana preferred old-fashioned books made of paper, but they were becoming less and less common, and more and more socially frowned upon since the Green Party gained power. The spider-kin liked that the forests grew wild and tall again, but she still guiltily preferred real paper books.
The man on the balcony looked up at her, and his eyes got very large.
Uncertain what was appropriate in this social situation, she waved at the man and gave him her best attempt at a friendly smile.
He waved back, so that was probably the right thing to do.
The spider-kin resumed climbing. At the top floor of the hotel waited a restaurant. She hadn’t known that until she pulled herself up and swung a leg over the railing.
A single, very large balcony covered half the area of the building’s roof. About a dozen of the pretty glass-topped tables with their accompanying wrought iron chairs sat on the rooftop. The weather was much more pleasant than yesterday, warm and dry with a soft breeze. It looked like a very nice place to have dinner. But she was not hungry, and she needed to figure out how to save Pete and Sergeant Giovanni.
In between a young couple at one table and a man in a business suit sitting by himself at another, Liliana swung her other leg over the railing. Discreetly, she detached her safety line from her wrist behind her back as her ballet slippers settled on the terra-cotta tile.
She waved and smiled. Apparently, it was the polite thing to do. The young couple looked at each other, then waved back. The man in the business suit never looked up from his wrist phone. Liliana shrugged and went on. She wasn’t the only one who didn’t know how to behave in certain social situations.
Wide, wooden-framed glass French doors, propped open to take advantage of the evening breeze, led her into a large room with more of the same type of tables and chairs and terra-cotta tile floor. The room was filled with people chatting and eating, and servers bringing food and clearing away dishes.
Noise and the pleasant spicy scents of garlic, oregano, and rich coffee washed over her as she entered. A lot of people glanced up at her, making her acutely uncomfortable. She looked down at her feet and smoothed her scarlet skirt with the black waistband and ruffle at the bottom. It matched the scarlet scarf wrapped around her forehead and braided into her hair and her black, short-sleeved top with the red roses embroidered on it.
A server looked at her oddly as he set a drink down on one of the tables.
His forehead wrinkled, then he went back toward a door at the rear of the restaurant. He passed a woman who came through the other side of the swinging door from the other direction carrying a huge tray laden with steaming plates of food. That must be the kitchen.
Liliana only had a few seconds to decide what to do before the server fetched whoever was in authority and sent them over to question her. There were three other doors on the back wall, labeled “Men,” “Women,” and “Ungendered.” The only door on the right wall had a small podium with a stack of menus in front of it. A big sign saying “Please wait to be seated” was tilted so it would be visible to people coming in from that door, and a small sign saying “EXIT” in red letters hung above it.
Since she did not need to use the bathroom or go into the kitchen, she chose the door marked EXIT, even though she did not wish to leave the building she’d just gone to so much trouble to enter.
The spider-kin stepped out into a little foyer. Two elevator doors faced her. Getting into a tiny, enclosed room with strangers and no place to run or hide was not a good option. Liliana’s nose wrinkled at the thought. She looked around for an alternative.
Another door had a picture of stairs on it and another red EXIT sign. She ducked through quickly.
As she closed the stairwell door behind her, she heard someone open the restaurant door. Liliana opened her fourth eyes for a quick peek behind to see who followed her. She saw the waiter who had wrinkled his forehead at her and an imposing chubby tower of a woman. She had shiny black hair in a bob just under her chin. She wore an apron dusty with white flour and a pinched look of annoyance. They looked around the empty foyer Liliana had just left, a puzzled frown on the server’s face. He started toward the door to the stairwell.
Liliana climbed over the railing, attached a quick safety line to the concrete stairs, and grabbed the edge with her fingertips. She swung her feet up to hook her toes under a stair edge.
The waiter opened the stairwell door just as she snugged her body up flush with the underside of the staircase. The big woman in the apron peered into the stairwell, saw empty stairs, and cocked her head to listen for footsteps.
The spider-kin held her breath.
The elevator dinged. Six people stepped out, laughing and chatting loudly, obviously a bit intoxicated. Instead of pursuing Liliana further, the waiter welcomed the new guests to the restaurant, and the large woman went back to the kitchen.
Liliana sighed in relief.
Okay. She was in the building. Now what?
For want of any better ideas, Liliana followed the stairs down. Several floors were hotel rooms. Those floors required a card key to enter. As she reached ground level, she passed two floors with loud music vibrating through the walls. No card key was needed on these floors but she still could not bring herself to enter that pandemonium.
The sound insulation between floors was impressive. The pounding music would be unlikely to disturb the hotel guests in their rooms.
She kept going clear to the basement where the stairs stopped, then hesitated, unsure where to go from there.
A door led out of the stairwell and into the basement proper, which was completely quiet compared to the noise of the two floors above.
While she wondered what to do next, a door opened two floors above her. Thumping, cacophonous music flooded the stairwell for a moment. Light footsteps started down, the quick tap, tap, tap of high heels.
Liliana looked around for a place to hide. The stairwell was bare concrete, and she didn’t know what waited in the basement.
As the footsteps came closer, the spider-kin ducked into the tiny, unused nook under the bottom of the concrete and steel stairs. She crouched in the dark corner and hoped she wouldn’t be seen.
A petite young woman with long blonde hair tapped her high heels down the concrete stairs over Liliana’s head. The short skirt of her cerulean-blue dress with the open back swirled around her thighs as she hurried down the stairs.
Liliana admired the pretty dress through the concrete with her fourth eyes.
The young woman opened the door to the basement and went through without showing any sign of noticing the spider-kin crouched under the stairs.
This seemed to be an excellent hiding place.
She was deep inside the building that had seemed impossible to enter, and concealed well enough that even if her visions distracted her, it was unlikely she’d be attacked while vulnerable.
Now came the really hard part.
She took a deep breath to brace herself against the ugly visions. She could do it. She had to.
Where are Sergeant Giovanni and Pete, and when and how will they die?
Chapter 12
Wolf’s Bane
Liliana was immediately assaulted by the same image of Pete’s dead face she had seen so many times in the last few hours. Pete’s death was so close in time, so close to certain and so horrific, it was nearly impossible for her to see past it to anything else.
Dammit.
She pulled at fistfuls of hair on either side of her head. The spider seer desperately needed her fourth vision to obey her, but it showed her only death, again and again. Not what she needed to see to stop the death from happening.
She hissed with frustration and closed her fourth eyes.
With deep calming breaths, she fought for control of her vision.
It did little good. Every time she looked for Pete, she saw him die. Again.
If she was going to save Pete, she needed to see more than the horror show image of his staring dead face frozen in a silent scream.
Perhaps she should shift her goal.
Just Sergeant Giovanni. What will happen to her?
Warily, she cracked her fourth eyes open, focusing on the human military police sergeant.
Liliana saw a meat cleaver come down and sever the pretty soldier’s head while she lay unconscious on a butcher-block table.
The spider seer closed her eyes quickly.
No, she had to look. She couldn’t help if she didn’t look.
The moment she reopened her fourth eyes, she again saw Zoe Giovanni’s death.
Liliana flinched as the cleaver came down but fought her instinct to close her fourth eyes. Sergeant Giovanni’s death would at least be less agonizing than Pete’s. It would be painless and comparatively peaceful. The spider-kin forced herself to keep watching.
A muscular, dark-skinned woman in a black T-shirt and a chef’s apron continued chopping up Sergeant Giovanni’s body as if butchering an animal for food. A large plastic can sat nearby labeled “Edible Garbage.”
The room was clearly a large, professional kitchen. A door swung open and Lady Daphne Fairchilde herself walked through it. Through the door, Liliana glimpsed a darkened room filled with glass-topped tables. The wrought iron chairs were neatly stacked against one wall. “Well done, Stella. Margaret and I have the car nearly packed, and Kristen should be finished by now. Meet us in the basement once you’ve disposed of that.”
So, Sergeant Giovanni would be killed by a woman named Stella in the restaurant on the top floor, but it would be much later, after the restaurant had closed for the night and all the people were gone.
Lady Daphne was somehow involved in the killings, but Liliana did not understand how or why. Lady Daphne did not sleep with men, so she was highly unlikely to be pregnant. Why would a widow spider kill Other men with her fangs and eat them if she didn’t have to? Why would she have one of her employees kill Sergeant Giovanni? The sergeant was neither male nor Other, so she could not nourish unborn widow spider babies. Her death could not help a pregnant widow spider if there was one. What was the point of all this killing?
Liliana followed Lady Daphne backward in time. Having a different thread to unravel let her go around the vicious image of Pete’s death.
What does Lady Daphne have to do with Pete and Sergeant Giovanni’s death?
Lady Daphne stood on the second floor of her nightclub near the DJ’s booth. A few people danced around them and many more gyrated to the music down on the huge dance floor they overlooked. Mirrors on every wall bounced and magnified the noise, laser lights, and holographs, dazzling and confusing Liliana’s inner vision. She blinked repeatedly, but she forced herself to keep watching.
The owner of the hotel and the Mirror Club looked like she was pushing forty, but spider-kin tended toward extremely long life spans, second only to the Sidhe who never aged. Liliana had met Lady Daphne more than eight decades ago, and she’d looked no different then. The widow spider’s true age could probably be measured in centuries.
Lady Daphne stood more than six feet tall and weighed well over two hundred fifty pounds. The black velvet corset she wore with her scarlet dress pulled in her ample waist and accentuated her hips and breasts, giving her an hourglass figure. Her shoe-polish-black hair hung to her waist, with bangs cut in a sharp slash across her forehead. Lipstick the color of fresh blood matched her long, perfectly manicured fingernails.
The petite woman in the bright blue dress who Liliana had glimpsed going down the stairs to the basement earlier stood beside Lady Daphne, looking worried. Next to Lady Daphne, the woman in the blue dress looked like a child. She looked barely old enough to drink alcohol legally, and she probably weighed no more than Liliana did. With a wig to change the color of her hair, Liliana could see how she and the girl would match the same descriptions. A small, curved bulge on the pretty young girl’s lower belly made Liliana suspect who the murderer Pete sought must be.
A muscular dark-skinned woman wearing the same black and silver Mirror T-shirt as the woman at the door leaned in close to Lady Daphne’s ear and shouted softly over the musical din. “An MP and some guy are asking for you by name. What should I do, ma’am?”
Liliana recognized her with a jolt. This was Stella, the woman who would kill Sergeant Giovanni.
Lady Daphne and the young woman looked down at Sergeant Giovanni and Pete as they waited by the bar on the first floor, showing pictures of the missing men to the bartenders and customers.
In a posh British accent, Lady Daphne whisper-shouted in Stella’s ear, “Are either of them Other?”
“The man smells canine. I think the woman’s a Normal.”
“We can’t use her in any case,” Lady Daphne said. “Get something to take her mind off things for a while and let the others know. Then bring them both to my office.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The muscular, dark-skinned woman gave the petite woman in the blue dress a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder, then melted back into the crowd.
The petite pregnant woman in the blue dress wrapped a lock of shiny blonde hair around her finger nervously. “The doctor didn’t send them,” she shouted just loud enough for the woman standing next to her to hear. “He’d have told us.”
Lady Daphne petted the young woman’s hair gently. “Don’t worry about it, love. I’ll take care of everything. We shall simply need to leave a bit sooner than we planned.”
“I’m sorry I’m causing you so much trouble.”
The big woman’s scarlet-painted lips thinned, and her eyes narrowed in obvious anger, but her hand on the girl’s head stayed gentle. “None of this is your fault, Kristen. The bloody bastard panther-kin who violated you is the only one who did anything wrong. His death was well-earned.”
The girl, Kristen, ducked her head, letting her long blonde hair fall forward to hide her face. “Maybe he deserved it, but the other men were innocent.”
Lady Daphne made a very unladylike snort. “There’s no such thing as an innocent man, my dear girl. And you heard the doctor. Those men would have died regardless. You simply made use of their bodies.” She lifted Kristen’s chin with her hand, wiped a tear from her cheek with her thumb, then gave her a quick one-armed hug. “Go on downstairs, love. We’ll meet you there in a few minutes.”
Kristen nodded and went, just another pretty young college girl in a crowd of hundreds.
So, the girl in the blue dress who had run down the stairs a few minutes earlier was Kristen, and she was a pregnant widow spider. Her nest sisters were feeding her and protecting her. That explained a great deal. Liliana’s fourth eyes must be looking at the very recent past.
Liliana wondered who the doctor they talked about was, but she had more important things to focus on right then. If Kristen had already gone downstairs, then time was running out.
When will Lady Daphne meet Sergeant Giovanni and Pete?
Her vision jumped in time. According to the clock on Lady Daphne’s desk, she now saw mere minutes into the past.
Stella stood behind Sergeant Giovanni and Pete as they sat in two chairs in a small office. The din of music was muted enough that they could converse normally.
Lady Daphne sat behind the desk. She looked at pictures of the murdered soldiers and shook her head. “I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know any of these men.”
“One of them was seen at your nightclub,” Pete told her.
