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Liliana flexed her wrist to fold her blade back into the nearly invisible sheath in her forearm. The wolf still believed she would kill him, and the kiss was not enough to make her feel safe either. “I do like you, beautiful wolf. I just don’t trust you not to kill me in my sleep.”
“I wouldn’t do that. I’d only kill you when you were awake,” he said, with the unfiltered honesty of the venom in his veins.
Liliana chuckled. “I am not reassured, but thank you for trying.”
There was nothing for it. Liliana would still have to leave town and disappear. As much as it pained her, she would rather leave her clients unguided than murder this brave wolf-kin. She would have to be somewhere else when he was freed.
Peter Teague did not have one of the wrist phones everyone seemed to have this decade. She felt in his pants pockets.
He grinned and squirmed. “Hey, I thought you knew I was taken.”
She found a phone in his jacket pocket along with the spare clips. The phone was possibly older than the wolf. She wondered why he carried such outdated communication technology. Behind his back, where his hands were bound, she pressed his thumb against the screen. Zoe Giovanni was on his contact list. Liliana touched the number and waited. She got voice mail. For a moment, she considered what message to leave.
No. Not safe.
Liliana couldn’t leave Peter Teague tied to a tree in the woods for an unknown amount of time, helpless in the cold, until Sergeant Giovanni remembered to check her voice mail.
Celtic wolves had many enemies. Being defenseless at the wrong moment or trusting the wrong person could mean death.
She hung up.
“Besides Sergeant Giovanni,” she asked the wolf, “who would you trust with your life?”
“Doctor Nudd,” he said without hesitation.
Liliana touched the number for Nudd Home.
“What do you want this time, Pete?” the gravelly voice on the other end of the phone asked. The wolf’s phone was not quite as old-fashioned as her push-button corded phone at home, but it was definitely a few decades behind. There didn’t appear to be any holographic display, or even a flat video display that she could access, just voices in the dark.
“You are Doctor Nudd?”
“Yeah, who is this? How did you get Pete’s phone?” The voice had gone from annoyed to tense.
“He needs your help.” Liliana told the voice how to find them. “How soon can you get here?”
“What kind of trouble is Pete in? Is he hurt?”
“He is not seriously hurt.” There were two tiny trickles of blood on the wolf’s shoulder. Aside from that, he wasn’t even visibly bruised from their fight. If he were hurt in some way she couldn’t see, her venom would take care of it. “But he cannot defend himself.”
“I can be there in fifteen minutes.”
Liliana put the wolf’s old-fashioned phone back in his jacket pocket with the spare clips for his gun.
She opened her second eyes, closed her third and fourth eyes, and left the tiny island of human visible light to collect his weapons from the forest floor. She remembered to yank the two throwing knives out of the tree and to locate the long knife among the pine needles. The wolf-kin seemed fond of his knives.
“Anna?” he called to her as she walked away into darkness. “You’re not going to leave me like this, are you? You said you would let me go if I kissed you.”
Liliana placed his throwing knives next to the gun with its tiny bright light. She picked up his sword. It was well-crafted and very old. Liliana held it by the hilt. A fine, balanced weapon. Her hand felt warm on the hilt, and it fit as if it had been made for someone with hands her size. That seemed unlikely since the larger wolf-kin had also seemed comfortable wielding it. In the dark-seeing vision of her second eyes, it glowed softly. It must be enchanted in some way. She had a strong desire to keep the sword, but she had no right to it. Reluctantly, she laid the fine weapon at its owner’s feet. “I keep my promises. Your friend, Doctor Nudd, is coming. He will free you.”
“Why won’t you?”
“I need to go.”
“Where are you going?”
“Somewhere far away where you won’t find me and kill me.”
“You don’t have to go. It’s obvious you’re not the right kind of spider. I’ll go to Raleigh tomorrow, talk to Daphne, the widow spider you told me about. If your story checks out, I’ll know you didn’t have anything to do with the murders, and I’ll leave you alone.”
