Explosive chemistry, p.13
Explosive Chemistry, page 13
“My fault then.” Siobhan dragged the bot over to the middle of Liliana’s bright, hand-woven living room rug. One of its wheels refused to turn, so the sprite tilted the bot onto its other two. She pressed a spot on her left arm and a panel opened in her pale, freckly skin.
Liliana blinked and opened her second eyes to look at the sprite’s arm while Siobhan’s attention was focused on the bot. The arm was colder than the rest of her from the shoulder down, and there were struts of some cold material extending into her body, as a replacement for her collarbone and shoulder blade. “Your arm is not flesh!” Her second eyes told her that the sprite’s left eye was also artificial.
So that was how she saw Liliana on the night they fought.
As Siobhan’s arm moved, the servos inside made the faint whirring sound that Liliana noticed earlier.
Siobhan grinned, held up a tiny Phillips-head screwdriver, and showed the hollow storage space built into her forearm. “Tools wherever I go without lugging a toolbox.”
That must be where the sprite kept that little two-shot pistol she always seemed to have, hidden somewhere in her artificial arm like the tools.
Siobhan used the tiny screwdriver to open an access panel on the bot. As she touched circuitry, the broken arm flopped. “Hmm.”
Liliana remembered her vision with Andrew Periclum talking about the challenges of cybernetics on a flower sprite. He must have figured out a way. “How is that possible? You change size when you shift form.”
The sprite shifted quickly to her smaller, demi-plant form. Her body lost two feet of height and most of its mass. Brilliant violet and fuchsia dragonfly style wings sprouted wide to nearly brush the walls of the small living room. Her arm telescoped down smaller, in a manner not unlike the bot’s arms.
“Doctor Periclum said that making the eye adjust size and color was a lot harder, even though my eyes don’t change size as much as my arm.”
Liliana noted with interest how large Siobhan’s demi-plant form’s bright violet eyes were in proportion to her petal pink, heart-shaped face. Her miniature form looked delicate and exceptionally cute. Adorable even. The spider-kin might not be skilled at social interaction, but even she knew better than to speak that thought aloud to the fierce sprite.
Siobhan switched back to her larger human form to wrestle the bot onto its side. Her wings withdrew into her body like a flower blooming in reverse. The cropped heavy metal band T-shirt she wore had slits cut into the back, just like her jacket, to allow the wings to come and go unimpeded. “I can’t take plant form without losing the arm and the eye, but I haven’t done that in over a century anyway. There’s too much of a chance I wouldn’t wake up.”
“Andrew Periclum made your cybernetics?”
“Yeah, Doc Periclum’s the cyber specialist at Fort Liberty. He’s the only one in the world who specializes in cybernetics that change size and shape for Others.” The sprite didn’t look up from where she had parts of the room-bot spread all over Liliana’s rug. “He did me up after I got hit by a van. He usually deals with soldiers after they get body parts blown off. He said his work on me was ‘a miracle of miniaturization.’” Her freckled nose wrinkled adorably as she used her tiny tools on the bot’s damaged telescoping joint.
“It does seem quite extraordinary. I did not know that technology was so advanced. I also did not know the king of the North Carolina lion-kin pride had such skill until recently.”
“He’s king of the pride? So people actually do bow and scrape around the doc on a regular basis,” Siobhan said. “That explains a lot.”
“It is considered polite to bow or curtsey to the king of lions, yes. He is the informal leader of all beast-kin in his pride’s territory, and all lions, hyenas, and jackals serve him directly.” Liliana tilted her head and considered the sour expression on her guest’s face. “Why do you dislike Andrew Periclum?”
The flower sprite glanced up with a wry expression. “That obvious, huh?”
“I would have expected you to speak of the man who gave back your limb and sight with admiration or gratitude.”
“You sound like him. His majesty, the almighty Doctor Periclum. I should bow at his feet for lowering himself to bestow his brilliance on a mere lesser Fae.” She snorted. “Arrogant git. Nudd saved my life, even though he was afraid it might cost him his, and he’s never even called in the favor I owe him.”
Liliana shivered suddenly as the part of her mind that handled her fourth eyes prodded her. With the sprite’s attention back on her work, the seer risked opening her fourth eyes for a moment. “Doctor Nudd will die very soon unless…” Possibilities flickered into being as she considered the favor the sprite owed the goblin.
Siobhan stared at her, mouth open, tools forgotten in her hands.
Quickly, Liliana closed her fourth eyes. People seemed to look at her with their mouths open a lot. “Apologies. I know my eyes disturb you.”
Siobhan scoffed. “Not nearly as much as hearing that my best friend is going to die disturbs me.” Her cupid’s bow lips tightened into a thin line, and her blue, human-form eyes narrowed dangerously.
“I am very sorry.” Liliana had made her guest upset. She thought she was doing so well at social interaction. Now, she’d committed a serious faux pas that might cost her a valuable ally. “I did not mean to offend.”
The sprite made a sour face and waved that away with her cybernetic arm. “Spill, spider girl. Nudd’s going to die unless what?”
“I am not certain. Death is difficult to see around. I have only seen a badger-kin with a needle in his arm near the doctor when he dies. I think it is Lieutenant Runningwolf since he is the only badger-kin I know, but I have not seen his demi form. I know that if Doctor Nudd removes the needle from the badger, he will gain time. He will live a few minutes longer, but he will still die. But when you mentioned that you owe Doctor Nudd a favor…”
“You got some kind of spooky spider eyes intuition that I might be able to save Nudd by paying back my favor?”
Liliana tilted her head to one side. “That is reasonably accurate, yes.”
“Huh.” The sprite went back to reassembling the bot, hands working while her mind appeared to be considering what Liliana said.
Taking the sprite’s comments as permission to use her fourth eyes, the spider-kin opened them again and searched. With Siobhan’s favor to focus on, she could see a few more of the events surrounding the goblin healer’s death. Some of her visions now included the fierce little sprite’s death as well, or instead of the goblin. “If you choose to try to save him, it may cost your life in his place, or you may die together.”
The sprite finished putting the access panel back on the room-bot. She didn’t look up while she turned the bot on and ran it through its test sequence. “I’d have been dead ten years ago without him.”
“Your life is your own. You do not owe it to anyone, especially not an unseelie Fae.” Siobhan had called Doctor Nudd her best friend, but most would consider a goblin and a sprite to be mortal enemies by their very nature.
Siobhan lifted her chin. “Right, my life’s mine, yeah. And I get to decide who I would trade it for.” Liliana did not need to open her third eyes to perceive the smoldering heat of old anger. “Nobody, especially no court, can tell me who my friends are.”
Liliana made a mental leap that for once wasn’t in a random direction. “The leaders of your people banished you.”
Siobhan looked at her, and her human blue eyes were filled with pain and old anger. “Yeah. And executed my friend. She was an unseelie mistletoe sprite. Never hurt a soul in her life. She told the best jokes.”
Liliana leaned forward and squeezed Siobhan’s shoulder. “I am sorry for your loss. It is very hard to lose a friend.”
The sprite smiled at her oddly, large eyes shiny. “You’re the only person who’s ever said that, you know? Most people assume we couldn’t have been very close.” She turned the bot on, put her empty tea glass in its bin, and stood up. “Time to go.”
Liliana pretended not to notice as Siobhan surreptitiously wiped her eyes with her back turned.
While the room-bot busied itself washing their tea glasses inside, Liliana walked Siobhan out the back door to the customized Harley Davidson Spirit in the driveway. The weather had been mild lately, hinting at the beginning of spring. The sky was clear and studded with bright stars.
“I have been wondering,” Liliana said. “How did you arrive in time to save Pete and I from the widow spiders? Doctor Nudd said he couldn’t get there from Fayetteville in time to help.”
“I was at a bar called Locked and Loaded in Raleigh with a couple of the Other soldiers from Liberty. It’s just a few blocks away from the Mirror Club. I was worried about them with all the deaths and disappearances. When I heard them talking about going to the city to go carousing, I decided to tag along. So I was already close by when Nudd called.”
“Do you often protect the soldiers?”
Siobhan shrugged, kicked a toe at a clump of grass, and her pale human cheeks shaded pink, nearly as bright as her demi-plant form’s wings. “Those kids need someone to make sure they make it back to base in one piece.”
“Where did you get such a powerful gun on such short notice?”
Siobhan grinned, reached into her motorcycle saddlebags, and pulled out the machine pistol Liliana remembered, stroking it like a beloved pet. “I carry this baby with me everywhere, except on base.” Her expression turned sour. “The gate guards make me leave it behind.”
“Do you go on base a lot?”
“I do some work making weapons and ammo that are effective against bullet-resistant Others. They’re pretty hush hush about what they want them for.”
One of Liliana’s preferred strategies for social interaction when she was younger had been to get people to talk about the things that interested them. She remembered that it worked well for her then and went with it now. “I did not know that weapons of such power came in such a small size. Did you modify it?”
“A little, but not for size. It started out as a fully automatic pistol with a long barrel.” She ran a small finger along the barrel to show its length. “This model is designed to be easy to add on to. See the picatinny rail. I attached the forward grip to help me deal with the kick and an extended magazine, so I don’t run out of ammo.” She pointed to the section on the front that had a thick, short second barrel and trigger. “The grenade launcher is my latest addition. The kick-back is brutal, and I can only get stun grenades, but there’s just something so class about having a grenade launcher my size. The base model is a Kel-Tec PLR sixty…you really don’t care, do you?” Siobhan looked up at her with narrowed eyes.
Liliana’s cheeks flushed. The perceptive sprite had caught on to her strategy. “I know very little about guns, but I can respect any weapon wielded with courage and precision.”
Siobhan punched Liliana on the upper arm with a grin. “Nice save.”
Liliana rubbed her arm, wondering why the little sprite considered bruising her shoulder to be a gesture of affection.
Siobhan put the machine gun back in the saddlebag of her custom bike, mounted, and started it up. The quiet hum of the electric motor was completely drowned out by the blast of thumping base and screaming guitars that were probably supposed to be music.
“Later, Lilly,” Siobhan shouted, waved, and popped a slight wheelie as she accelerated onto the street.
As the pounding music faded away, Liliana smiled to herself. Siobhan called her Lilly, like Pete did. She liked that her friends called her by a different name from her clients.
Her friends.
She’d been alone for so long, then Pete was her only real friend for a while with the rest just allies or acquaintances. But Siobhan called her Lilly, and Doctor Nudd said they were friends, and Janice had lunch in her house. She didn’t just have one friend anymore.
Liliana had friends.
Since she left the circus, she had lived without friends. The life had been chaotic, but the camaraderie of circus folk ran deep. She hadn’t realized that she missed it, just as she hadn’t realized how much she missed flying on the trapeze or sparring with a worthy opponent.
She spun in a circle on her little patch of grass, letting her skirt swirl around her legs. Ignoring the risk of being seen, she opened her second eyes just so she could see all the brilliant colors of the stars. Her life had changed a great deal since the day a Celtic wolf walked into her shop and accused her of murder. It was almost as if she had been asleep for years. Her new friends woke her up and dragged her out into the light of the stars. Her friends reminded her to live, not just exist.
Friends made her life so much better. She shuddered at the thought of how much more barren her life would be when, after she had friends for a short time, she lost them all.
What she said to Siobhan was very true. It was hard to lose a friend.
She stood still in her yard, six eyes on the sky, two looking into the past, and swore an oath to herself and to her dead parents. “I won’t lose them like I lost you, Pater, Mut, Mamãe. I won’t go back to being alone.”
Chapter 12
Time And Patience
Liliana swung and flew from bar to bar and rope to rope in the space originally designed for a two-car garage and attic storage. Some decades back, she had removed the ceiling drywall, revealing the large attic under her high roof. She’d hung inch-wide metal bars and strong ropes from various parts of the house superstructure. It was the same space that she and Siobhan practiced combat in, but Liliana practiced in it for a different reason when Siobhan was not there.
Trapeze and high wire had been two of her favorite performances back when she was in the circus. It took focus and full attention, like combat. So now, she danced along the ropes and swung from one to another, watching where her hands and feet would land with her two human eyes, and watching other times, places, and people with her fourth eyes.
At least, eventually, she hoped to be able to do that. If she practiced a lot.
She had nearly died the first time she tried fighting with her fourth eyes open against Siobhan. Her first mother had been able to see blows coming both in the present and in the future. It made her incredibly formidable in combat. But Solifu did not live long enough to teach her young daughter the trick of splitting her consciousness that completely.
Even her older sister, Isabella, could only open her fourth eyes for a few seconds at a time during combat without risking distraction and death, and she was two hundred years older than Liliana.
Whenever Liliana became too accustomed to the placement of the ropes and bars, so that she didn’t need her human vision to find them, she would move them to a new configuration. Sometimes, she practiced at night with the lights off and used her second and fourth eyes. Over the last few months, she had been getting a tiny bit better at splitting her consciousness, but her fourth eyes could still distract her at crucial moments.
An image of the handsome Fae colonel, a moment when he smiled at her while wearing his shimmering demi-stone form, appeared in her wandering fourth vision. The smile had not been cold. It was warm and amused when she told him out of nowhere that she liked Pete.
She jumped for a swinging bar. And missed.
Again.
The momentary distraction at the wrong moment was all it took to make her fall.
She landed reasonably well on the gym mats covering the concrete garage floor. The spider-kin rolled to absorb the force of the impact. Physically, she was not injured, but everything in her ordered, internal world felt like it was slipping out of her control.
Liliana pounded her fists into the rubber mats under her. “Aaaaaaagh!”
She had not found a way to save Doctor Nudd.
Even with his sword, Pete would not survive the coming attack from the Wolfhound assassins without his mentor fighting beside him. Siobhan might be able to save Doctor Nudd, but Liliana did not wish to trade the life of one friend for another.
Without Nudd and Pete, Fayetteville would rapidly become a deadly place to be, for many Others and Normal humans as well.
Plus, she had begun to feel like even the ticking of her clocks was oppressive, counting down the narrowing gap before her blood fire time. It was a few years ahead, so it shouldn’t have been weighing on her so much, but it seemed that every little thing reminded her that she had no mate and that was likely to continue to be the state of things until her biology drove her mad.
The day before, she’d snapped at one of her customers who asked her a particularly silly question. All the future, all the past, and all the world were within her range of vision, and people asked her if sweaters would go on sale after Memorial Day.
Sweaters always go on sale after Memorial Day.
Liliana cancelled her appointments for the rest of the week. She couldn’t afford to alienate the people who counted on her. She had to get her life back in proper order and make sure that her friends didn’t die.
Someone knocked on Liliana’s door. Not the public door to her business that people knocked on normally, but the door to her home.
The spider seer glanced through the door with her fourth eyes to see who it was. It was Pete. She had been expecting him sometime soon.
Pete had never come to visit at her house before, except the one time when he came to accuse her of murder. Usually, they met for combat practice in the forest near Doctor Nudd’s house, for music and alcoholic beverages at Doctor Nudd’s house, or for hot drinks and talking at the Starbucks down the street.
Today, Pete had called Dr. Nudd and said he was busy and would not come to the forest to train.
In truth, Pete had been no more busy today than any other day. That wasn’t why Pete cancelled combat practice.
