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Instead, she grabbed a hanging silk cord with one hand and used it to flip up onto a broad limb. She pulled a loop of silk from her spinneret, then leapt for branches and dangling lines as unpredictably as she could.
As she swung over the little Fae, she dropped the loop over the gun barrel. She saw two images of bullets coming toward her at the same moment and didn’t know which one to dodge. One would hit her head, the other her shoulder. She took her best guess and dropped flat onto a tree branch, then rolled to one side just in case she guessed wrong. The bullet hissed past her shoulder, burning her with the heat of its passage.
She’d guessed wrong, but a bullet graze was an acceptable price. She still had her head.
She pulled on the loop.
The gun flew out of the cursing sprite’s hand.
Before the petite walking arsenal could pull out another gun, Liliana grabbed a line and swung directly toward her, planning on planting her feet in her small foe’s belly.
The Fae sprouted huge dragonfly-like wings through slits in the back of her black bolero-style jacket. Her body shrank as small as an infant human and fluttered upward and to one side.
Liliana’s feet missed their mark, but she still felt a thrill of triumph as her abused toes landed in thick, prickly pine needles. She had caused her enemy to make a mistake. Taking to the air was not a wise move in a patch of woods filled with hanging strands of spider-kin silk.
Siobhan’s wings flapped into Liliana’s dangling lines and tangled. Liliana threw more fresh, sticky silk to further entangle the little Fae in spider-kin web. In seconds, the sprite could barely move her wings, trapped.
Their fight brought Liliana to the edges of Pete’s island of light. The Fae had come that close to killing the helpless wolf-kin. Liliana opened her human eyes and looked to make certain he was still safe.
His eyes widened in fear, but he focused on something past her. “Doc, no!” Pete shouted.
With her second eyes, Liliana saw a giant shadow behind her, a massive club lifted to smash her skull.
In one motion, Liliana ducked, twirled to face the goblin, and raised her left arm, sharp blade out. The club struck her blade, not her head. The force of the blow nearly dislocated her shoulder as her blade caught the wooden club and stuck in it. She let the powerful blow spin her around again.
The force of the goblin’s strike gave her the momentum to yank the weapon from his sloppy grip. She ended the spin with the goblin’s club stuck on her left arm blade and her right arm blade snugged against the goblin’s genitals.
“Yield, Fae. I have no quarrel with you, but I will not let you kill this wolf.” With her second eyes, Liliana watched the sprite in tiny, demi-plant form. Her delicate wings beat frantically in the web, but she didn’t draw another weapon or make any hostile moves toward the helpless red wolf.
“Kill him?” the goblin said, looking confused.
“We didn’t come here to kill him, you brainless spider,” the flower Fae said in her high-pitched voice. She shifted back to her heavier human form. Her tangled wings vanished, which freed her to drop to the ground.
“Lilly, it’s okay,” Pete said, chuckling. “That’s Doctor Nudd. You called him.”
Without moving her arm blade from the goblin’s tender parts, she tilted her head so some of her eyes pointed toward the bound wolf. “Your closest friend, the one you trust with your life, is a goblin?”
“Yeah.”
Liliana’s world turned completely sideways. No version of reality existed where that made sense. “And the fairy?”
“Hey!” the seelie flower sprite in human form called indignantly.
“Yes, Siobhan is my friend too,” Pete said.
Liliana stood frozen in confusion, head cocking one way, then the other, arm blade still threatening the goblin’s reproductive future.
“Lilly, weren’t you going to leave before they got here?” Pete asked gently.
“The world is a dangerous place, especially for Celtic wolves,” Liliana said, not certain if he would understand why she stayed, or even if she understood why.
She looked at the goblin, opened all her eyes, and studied him. He had the usual core of stubbornness and anger of a goblin, but it was carefully damped and controlled. His soul sang with music and glowed warm with compassion like a hearth fire. He was…kind, if such a word could ever be applied to a goblin.
“You are friend to a Celtic wolf?” she asked him incredulously, watching for falsehood in his answer.
“Yes,” the goblin said carefully, her razor-sharp blade still touching him intimately. “I’m his friend. I’m here to help.”
Truth.
