Explosive chemistry, p.15
Explosive Chemistry, page 15
There was an added complication. She had already foreseen that Alexander Bennet would be in considerable danger today. While he had been unwilling to trade access to the base for her help, she felt she had to help anyway.
Ignoring visions that insisted the Sidhe prince who protected Pete and whose lips sent thrills from her fingers all the way to her toes would be badly injured or possibly killed when she could prevent it—that was not something Liliana could do.
She tried looking ahead in the day to see if there was a time when any one of the other people who would be involved in Doctor Nudd’s death went off base. Pete would be off base for a time, but he would arrive too late to save Doctor Nudd. Perhaps she could find someone else who could get her on base sooner, while still allowing her time to help Alexander Bennet.
She was in luck.
Doctor Periclum would travel to a nice restaurant in downtown Fayetteville for dinner. A violent spring storm had moved in. As it was pouring rain with a possibility of hail predicted, he would opt to park his large, sleek car in a parking garage.
She could speak to Andrew Periclum when he finished his dinner meeting. A pride member had arranged the meeting to provide the king of lions with a large amount of transferable pay cards. Liliana did not know why the jackal-kin did that, but pride business was not her concern. She hoped to convince the king of lions to smuggle her onto the base.
Liliana found a comfortable out-of-the-way spot in the concrete roof structure of the parking garage near where the lion-kin’s car was charging and waited. She had seen that Andrew Periclum would come out of the restaurant and return directly to base.
As a lion-kin’s daughter, she was technically a pride child, even though she was not a lion, jackal, or hyena herself. A good pride-king would nonetheless give her aid in return for the loyalty she had pledged to him.
She wasn’t sure if the lion-kin cyberneticist who built Siobhan’s eye and arm even remembered that Liliana was a pride-child, but she could remind him. If he did her this favor, it would obligate her to give the pride aid in some way at a later date, much like an exchange of favors among the Fae. She would accept that obligation if it helped her to save her favorite goblin and her favorite sprite.
If the king of lions was not willing to smuggle her onto the base, then she considered possibly hiding in his trunk. The large black vehicle was equipped with modern magnetic shielding designed to protect from many projectile and energy weapons. It would also keep the base’s entrance scanner from detecting her as long as it was on, and unlike most base visitors, Andrew Periclum routinely left his on.
The puzzle was, how could she either convince the king of lions to help her or get into his trunk without his knowing. If the first tactic failed, she would probably lose any possibility of trying the second tactic.
When she looked more closely at the car, she saw something unexpected. The car was occupied. Apparently, someone was waiting to drive Doctor Periclum back to the base: a muscular lion-kin with three slash scars on his face that looked like claw marks. She remembered him as the man who had been Andrew Periclum’s second during the pride succession challenge. He had filled out with even more muscle over the years, and the scars pulled his lip in a way that gave him a permanent sneer. It made him look very fierce.
Well, then. The trunk was not an option. She would have to convince the doctor to let her ride with him and his driver. She looked ahead in time, with the idea of asking for that favor firmly in mind. If she did not see a likelihood of success, then she would have to abandon her plan and find another way.
The spider-kin watched as Colonel Alexander Bennet’s urban camouflage-painted car with big, knobby, all-terrain tires parked directly under her perch in the roof structure. She had seen that this was the location of his danger and hoped to have time to save him, then ask the pride-king for a favor.
She looked forward in time to see why the prince had come.
Oh. Hmm.
Liliana sighed. She would have to change her plan. The king of lions would not be granting her any favors. The Colonel’s plans completely negated hers.
She should simply leave while there was time and find another way onto the base, but that would leave Alexander Bennet to an unpleasant fate. The probability of his death was low, but the probability of serious injury was high.
She sighed and shimmied down her safety line onto the broad flat hood of Colonel Bennet’s car. She had left a few lines dangling from convenient alcoves in the concrete ceiling structure here and there.
The prince had been getting out of his car when she dropped onto it.
He dropped his hand to his sidearm, unsnapped it, drew it, and pointed it at her, nearly as fast as an old west gunfighter. It was drawn and pointed before his face showed recognition. “Liliana!”
She nodded to him and sat cross-legged on the hood of his huge car with the big tires, putting herself close to eye level with him.
“Why are you here?” the prince asked, lowering his gun to his side.
“I also came to speak to Andrew Periclum. I was going to ask the same favor of him that I already asked of you, but because of what you will do, I will not get the chance.”
“I’m sorry?” he said, as if it were a question.
Maybe he was asking her if he should be sorry for forcing her to alter her plans? She shrugged. “You believe that Andrew Periclum has defied you, broken his word, and harmed your soldiers. You should not be sorry.” She felt her lips tighten in contempt. “A pride-king’s word is law. If Andrew Periclum has given his word to you and broken it, then he is an unworthy pride king. Your mission here is an honorable one.”
The prince raised both brows at her, one wrinkling smooth dark skin, the other mottled scar tissue. “Honor is a word I hear used a lot. You say it as if it means something to you.”
“My parents raised me to respect honorable people, even if they are enemies.”
“Are we enemies now?” he asked, hand tensing around the gun at his side. It wasn’t pointed at her, but the threat was clear.
Liliana looked at him directly with her human eyes for a second, then back down at her hands in her lap. “I still have not decided.”
His eyebrows went up again. They were the most expressive part of his otherwise stoic face. “I expected you to say no, whether it was true or not.”
“I always speak the truth. If we become enemies, I will tell you.” She shrugged. “Or I will simply kill you, but I will never tell you that I am an ally if I am not.”
His full lips twitched at the corner, the faintest shadow of a smile. “I’m not used to that much honesty.”
“Andrew Periclum will enter this building in six minutes. You should stand there before he comes, so he will not see you.” She pointed to a concrete roof support pillar that would hide the prince’s presence from the pride-king until he came close.
Liliana hopped down off the car and walked with him to the concealment. The top of her head barely came up to his broad chest. He towered more than a foot over her, something that struck her every time she faced him up close. “Today is the day I spoke of before, when you are highly likely to be injured or possibly killed. I will offer you the same bargain again. If you will get me onto your military base unnoticed, I will make certain that you leave this building unharmed.”
“My answer is the same.”
Liliana sighed and nodded. She would have been surprised if he changed his mind.
Andrew Periclum’s footsteps echoed in the concrete parking structure.
Liliana shook her head in disgust. The king of lions moved with the stealth of a hippopotamus. Her father would have been appalled.
The prince turned to watch him.
Liliana scrambled up a line and into a convenient alcove, not wanting Andrew Periclum to see her with the prince. Even if he was an unworthy king, still, Andrew Periclum was her king. And the Fae prince was not planning on being polite to him.
Alexander Bennet turned to look where she had been and seemed unsurprised that the space she previously occupied was now empty. He flashed a delighted grin at the empty concrete of the parking garage.
Andrew Periclum passed the concrete pillar.
Liliana turned her attention, and the focus of all eight of her eyes, to the two men below. While she watched, she prepared a line of silk with a large loop on the end.
With his wide-barreled pistol held casually down by his leg, the tall Fae prince stepped in front of the king of lions.
The lion-kin doctor stopped barely in time to avoid colliding with the prince’s chest. The pride-king stood above average height and was in excellent physical condition, yet Colonel Alexander Bennet still towered over him.
“Oh, hello, Colonel,” Andrew Periclum said. He put his hands casually behind him and stepped his feet apart into something like a military parade rest posture. With her fourth eyes, she saw one hand touch his wrist phone, activating it in some way.
“You gave me your word that your experiments wouldn’t do any harm to my people,” the prince said.
Andrew Periclum shrugged. “As far as I know, they haven’t.”
Liliana blinked her third eyes. They told her that his words were, without doubt, a lie. Yet nothing in the lion-kin’s face or posture revealed the lie. For a beast-kin leader whose trusted word was the source of his power, Andrew Periclum was far too skilled at lying.
“Then why have eight of the twelve soldiers on your list disappeared and later turned up dead? Two more went missing this week.”
Andrew Periclum shook his head and waved a hand dismissively “A tragedy, sure, but nothing to do with me.” Another blatant lie without a flinch, Liliana noted. “Your CID attack bitch and your pet Celtic wolf have already dealt with the monsters responsible for most of those deaths, I hear. And no one knows what happened to those two women found in a shallow grave in the forest.”
Muscles bunched in the prince’s dark jaw. “You covered your tracks well. There’s no evidence to trace this back to your doorstep, but I can see the pattern. They were all Others on my team, seasoned veterans who had cybernetics you designed. I don’t know what you’re doing, but these people were all under your care. I’m getting a new cyberneticist transferred in to look over your work.”
Andrew Periclum snorted. “Good luck with that. I’m probably the only Other cyberneticist in the world. And not everything is your decision, Colonel. My processes are revolutionary, designed to make Others an even more powerful force.” He leaned forward into the Fae prince’s personal space. “My process could give this country the military edge. And Princess Aurore loves the idea of boosting Other powers with modern science.”
The Fae prince’s hand shot out and clenched the fabric of the military doctor’s uniform faster than Liliana could blink. “You will inform the brass, and my sister, that the project was unsuccessful, and you will stop it. Now.” The dark prince’s deep voice sounded calm and controlled. He showed no sign of the seething rage bleeding orange around the prince’s mind shields just under the mirror surface.
From her perch, Liliana could feel the concrete of her alcove tremble. She thought at first it was an echo from the thunder outside, but they were deep underground beneath multiple layers of concrete. The fury of the storm outside didn’t penetrate here.
She placed a hand on the gritty artificial stone, head cocked to one side. The subtle tremor was no more than a heavy truck driving through might cause, but her third eyes could see the slight shading of fire orange in the concrete itself.
The Sidhe prince was angry. Although the prince did not appear to be deliberately exerting power to affect it, this man-made cave with its steel roots sunk into the bedrock beneath the little town shared his anger.
The king of lions barked a laugh in the prince’s face. “You forget that I am not in your chain of command. Neither of them, your highness.” He spoke the title with a twist of sarcasm, not respect. “I will not declare my work a failure when it isn’t. My reputation is on the line.”
Alexander Bennet lifted the gun in his hand, bringing it up to point at the doctor’s face. “I don’t give a damn about your reputation, your majesty.” He gave back the same sarcasm on the honorific title. “No more of my people are going to die.”
The squeal of tires made both men look up. Periclum’s sleek black car, the electric engine nearly silent, barreled toward them at high speed.
In his surprise, the colonel’s grip on the doctor’s uniform loosened.
Andrew Periclum shoved the Fae prince hard and stepped to the side.
As Colonel Bennet stumbled into the path of the speeding car, Liliana dropped her loop of silk.
Even as he tried to jump out of the way, the spider could see that he would not clear the car’s path.
She pulled with all her strength on the silk cord looped around his shoulders. It boosted the momentum of his own leap so he went farther.
Colonel Bennet lost his grip on his gun as he hit the concrete. He tucked his long legs in just as the tires of the car brushed past, leaving a black mark on his gray and faded green camouflage printed uniform pants.
The car screeched to a stop a few feet away, the king of lions got in it with a defiant wave, and the car accelerated again.
Behind the wheel, the huge lion-kin with the claw scar on his face that she had seen in her vision earlier smiled in a way that wasn’t the least bit pleasant.
Chapter 14
Not Favors
Liliana dropped from the alcove in the concrete ceiling.
The Fae prince eyed her warily, upper arms bound to his sides by her silk, but far from helpless.
She walked away from him to pick up his gun and walked back.
Colonel Bennet rolled up to one knee as soon as she turned her back but hadn’t made it to his feet yet when she turned to face him, gun in hand.
He froze.
Liliana’s feelings about this Fae prince were muddled and uncertain, but she knew that she absolutely did not want him to be afraid of her. That would severely limit her life expectancy. She closed all but her human eyes, reversed the pistol so she held it by the barrel, and extended it to him, down low, so he could take it with his currently limited reach.
As the pistol grip touched his palm, some of the tension in his shoulders eased.
Liliana popped out one of her arm blades, carefully, in a direction that was clearly not aimed at him. “I can cut the silk if you will allow me.”
Colonel Bennet nodded permission.
As she cut the cord around his upper arms, she felt the warmth of his skin through the uniform. On his knees, his face was only a few inches lower than hers.
She breathed the warm, masculine scent of his skin. Her eyes traced the burn scars from his neck, up to his cheek and over to his temple where a streak of white in his short black hair led to the mangled curve of his ear—the only flaw in this otherwise flawless man.
The Japanese had a concept of wabi, the small imperfection that highlighted the perfection of the whole. Her brother-in-law, Rizki, taught Liliana the concept. Colonel Alexander Bennet embodied it.
After she tossed the silk away, the spider-kin flicked her wrist to sheath her blade.
A small crease formed between his brows as if she puzzled him. “I told you I wouldn’t grant the favor you asked for.” His melodious voice all but whispered since she stood so close. “I still won’t bring you onto my base.”
Liliana nodded. “I will have to find another way to protect my friends.”
The spider seer thought of seelie Siobhan and the unseelie goblin the sprite called her best friend, and the dead unseelie sprite Siobhan mourned. She thought of Doctor Nudd’s paternal attitude toward a Celtic wolf, the enemy of all unseelie. Fayetteville seemed to be a place where old enmities could be safely set aside.
And the second time they’d come face-to-face, the prince had plainly sworn to her that he wouldn’t let those old lines define him.
Liliana wondered why, even as she held out her hand to a son of the race that had so many times ordered her kind put to death.
He looked at her slender hand for a long moment before taking it with his much larger, stronger hand.
An oddly pleasant tingle spread from his hand through her body, making her shiver. That was some very powerful chemistry.
Colonel Bennet kept hold of her hand as he got to his feet, but he didn’t pull on her at all. His thumb caressed the back of her hand. “Thank you, Liliana, for aiding me with no promise of reward. Again.”
The heat from his hand spread to her cheeks. She stared at his shiny black boots. “You would probably have survived.”
“Probably.” He chuckled softly.
“I have to go,” Liliana said.
“I understand.” He gave her a formal bow over the hand he held. He clearly out-ranked her socially, yet he had given her a bow appropriate for an equal—oddly out of place in America where almost no one bowed. His eyes took on a mischievous sparkle for just a moment, and he turned her hand over. He gave a lingering kiss to her palm, his lips warm and soft.
Heat fired every inch of Liliana’s skin, making her heart pound like she’d just been in combat.
He looked up at her, still bent over her hand, his dark eyes sparkling with mischief, his full lips quirked at the edges.
On impulse, she moved her hand to his cheek, stroking skin, a tickle of shaving stubble, and bumpy scars. She leaned forward and brushed his lips with hers for the barest moment. As she jumped back, the feel of his lips lingering on hers, he stared at her in open surprise.
Liliana swallowed, her heart racing, and her cheeks hot, wondering why she’d done that. “I have to go,” she repeated.
Alexander Bennet chuckled softly and repeated, “I understand.”
Liliana turned and walked quickly, she definitely wasn’t running, away.
Her friends’ lives were at stake. She didn’t have time to be flustered. She didn’t have time to think about the searing heat of his lips on hers or the tremble in her knees.
