AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Nosy Rabbit
When the knock on the door came, Liliana knew it would be her best customer. Not because she foresaw it, but because it was time for their makeup appointment.
Out of habit, Liliana quickly checked to make sure all but her human eyes were closed and pulled her hair forward before opening the door.
She welcomed Janice Willoughby in with a sweeping gesture and her usual singsong speech.
“Oh, Madame Anna, I’m so glad you could see me,” the rabbit-kin blurted before the door was closed.
Janice already knew Liliana was spider-kin, so Liliana opened all her eyes to look at the woman carefully. Janice was an ordinary woman in her late thirties in her human form. She looked exactly like what she was, the harried mother of five active children. In her demi-rabbit form, she was cuter, less careworn, and sleekly furred with large, mobile ears and a twitchy button nose. In her full rabbit form, she looked like an unusually large brown rabbit. “I can see you just fine.”
Janice laughed and waved her hands in the air. “Well, of course you can. I just meant I’m glad I could get a makeup appointment so soon.”
“What has you concerned?” The spider-kin gestured for Janice to sit with her at the round table with the crystal ball in the center.
“A werewolf came to my house!” Janice shuddered as she sat on the edge of one of the three client chairs and dropped her purse in another. “And not just any werewolf, that would be bad enough, but a red werewolf! Right there on my front porch!”
Liliana looked with her fourth eyes into Janice’s recent past and was not surprised to see Pete knock on Janice’s door. The spider-kin nodded while Janice rambled on about being terrified and wondering if the beast would eat her children.
The ball in Pete’s hands brought him to the Willoughbys’ door. One of the new soccer balls with built-in metrics for measuring kick strength, distance, and accuracy. It flashed a light to indicate ideal impact point for various kick angles and sent telemetry data to indicate when it was off sides.
A little more looking around the familiar neighborhood, and a bit further into the past, showed her Pete’s golden-haired beloved living next door to the Willoughbys. She watched as one of Janice’s children playing in the backyard kicked the soccer ball over the fence into the teacher’s yard.
When Pete brought the ball to the Willoughby house, Janice opened the door, smelled the wolf, squeaked in terror, and slammed the door in Pete’s face.
Pete’s shoulders slumped. He lifted his hand to knock again, then let it drop with a resigned sigh. He left the electronic soccer ball on the porch and went back to his boyfriend.
“The red wolf means you no harm,” Liliana told her client.
“How can you be so certain?” Janice chewed on a fingernail and tapped her foot under the table. “Lou saw him at the shop on base too. He’s been there to get his van fixed, so he must work at Liberty. And you know how sharp Lou’s nose is? Well, Lou swears he smelled blood in an old stain in his van!”
Liliana considered blood stains in Pete’s van with her fourth eyes open and saw an image of a much younger Pete gently placing a badly injured Siobhan in his van. “Your husband’s nose is correct. The blood belongs to a fuchsia sprite.”
Janice covered her mouth in horror. “What kind of monster would kill a harmless little fairy?”
“Harmless” was not a word Liliana would use to describe Siobhan. She snorted. The diminutive warrior had very nearly killed her the day before. “The sprite is his friend. The red wolf was taking care of her after an injury.” Her curiosity was piqued, but she would search for more details on Siobhan’s injury another time. For now, she owed Janice her attention.
“Is he a danger to my children?”
For the sake of her best client, she looked and broadened her focus question beyond the red wolf who she already knew would never hurt a child.
Is there any danger to Janice’s children?
She saw some deadly Other predators prowl their neighborhood streets, but the scent of Celtic wolf-kin, the guardians of humanity and servants of the seelie daylight Fae, made most leave as stealthily as they came. A few predators braved the wolf’s scent and met the red wolf himself. That tended to be a violent, occasionally fatal encounter for the predator. “The Celtic wolf loves the Normal man who lives next door to you and teaches at your children’s school on base. The red wolf guards his beloved’s territory from other predators...”
A rare few deadly Others through the past few years deliberately hunted Pete and also met ugly ends, as they should. But while Celtic wolves were strong, there were many stronger Others.
Do any pose a danger to Pete?
Janice hadn’t asked that question, but Liliana worried about the brave red wolf, now that she had begun to know him and saw the dangerous life he led.
It was difficult to pinpoint the moment in time without reference, but the vision was vivid. It had the feel of something in the very near future, within a week or less.
On some overcast night soon, an ordinary-looking man would creep across the Willoughbys’ lawn toward their neighbor’s house, avoiding the light from the windows. He wore jeans and a dark blue jacket and had curly black hair worn long, as was the modern style. Only the black band with an embossed silver crown on his muscular neck marked him as unusual.
The Order of the Wolfhound!
Most of the Wolfhounds were wolf-kin, dog-kin, or some other canine beast-kin, and they were all particularly trained and magically enhanced to kill Celtic wolves. They’d also kill anyone else who dared to stand between the unseelie and their “rightful” prey. Wolfhounds served only one royal Sidhe family. Liliana only knew of two living members of that family. One was Titania, the Queen of Air and Darkness, the most powerful unseelie Fae in the Western world, land bonded to most of Europe. The other was her daughter, Aurore Principessa, who had lived more than three centuries but had not yet been chosen by any land.
