AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His life depended on her. Two lives. She liked Sergeant Giovanni too, even though the sergeant still believed Liliana was a charlatan, and possibly still thought she was a murderer.
But even if her own life had depended on it, Liliana could no more walk into that building than she could stroll into a bonfire.
She considered speaking to Pete and Sergeant Giovanni before they entered.
Maybe she could warn them.
Would that save them?
An image of herself appeared before her fourth eyes of Liliana blocking their path on the sidewalk, trying to convince Pete and his friend not to confront Lady Daphne. “You will both die before morning,” she told them.
Sergeant Giovanni’s eyes narrowed. “Is that a threat?”
“It is not a threat. It is a warning.”
Pete put a hand gently on Liliana’s shoulder. “We have to find the murderer before they kill again. Even if you’re right, and investigating will get us killed, we can’t just stop looking. You told me yourself, more people will die.”
Liliana closed her fourth eyes.
A warning would change nothing. Duty drove them. They wouldn’t shirk that duty, even if it meant their deaths.
If she was going to change things, Liliana had to get in there and do something directly.
She studied the building thwarting her. Brick and windows, balconies and fancy, irregular, decorative architectural features made it look…climbable. The spider-kin could climb a building like that as easily as she could climb a flight of stairs.
A slight smile tugged at her lips, aimed at the building daring to oppose her. She would beat it in her own way.
The Mirror Club and hotel sat at the intersection of two busy streets. An empty, undeveloped lot hid behind it where people parked their cars, and a single-lane alley ran on the fourth side.
To avoid being seen by the woman at the club door, Liliana circled the block, cut through the parking lot, and came at the building from behind. The first two floors were flat brick on this side. Balconies and decorative features started two stories up. Liliana couldn’t jump high enough.
A dumpster in the alley solved that problem.
As the spider-kin vaulted to the sheet steel lid of the dumpster, the loud clanging of the steel made her freeze in fear of discovery.
She opened her fourth eyes.
Did anyone hear that?
After a moment of tense searching, she moved again. No one had noticed the noise.
Her new perch made the leap to the lowest balcony achievable, barely, but the angle was bad. The underside of the balcony with its hollow, steel support beams extended over her head, so she couldn’t reach the edge to grab onto it. She crouched, gathered her feet under her, and leaped high, right arm outstretched. She slapped the spinneret in her wrist to a balcony support beam. As she fell, a silk line was pulled out. She caught it.
She kicked her legs to swing out and touched the spinneret on her other wrist to the edge of the balcony. As she swung back, a new line pulled out. She grabbed it and let go of the previous line. She popped her arm blade out, swung forward hard to get past the edge of the balcony, twisted, and hooked her arm blade over the edge. The sharp tip dug into the wood decking, allowing her to haul herself up. When her hand closed around the decorative ironwork railing, she grinned to herself, showing her fangs. She would not be defeated by a mere building.
From there, it was a relatively simple matter to stand on top of each railing and leap up to catch the base of the next highest one. She attached a quick safety line at each level in the unlikely case she missed one of her jumps. Attaching a safety line was habit so ingrained that Liliana’s hands did it without her mind having to consciously decide. Every time she actively thought about it, she thought of her first mother.
I always remember, Mut. I won’t forget.
Her fourth eyes showed her an image from long past, her first mother smiling and nodding in approval while she dangled from a safety line she had set without being told. Solifu cared far less that she’d made a mistake and lost her footing while practicing a routine on the high wire than that her daughter had developed a habit that could save her life.
Liliana’s first mother rarely smiled like that in open approval, far more often stern and disapproving of her mistakes. But while Solifu always pushed her daughter to do better and become greater, the young spider seer’s third eyes saw the love and worry in her first mother’s aura. And in that moment, approval and relief and love lit Solifu’s smile from within with deep blues and rich rose.
As she climbed, a lovely sunset shaded the sky in glowing colors like her mother’s soul so many years ago. It made Liliana’s smile grow sad, remembering the colors of her first mother’s aura that her fourth eyes couldn’t look back in time and see.
Each little balcony was equipped with wrought iron chairs and a round, glass-topped table. The furniture looked uncomfortable, but she liked the aesthetics of the curvy strips of metal and thick glass. She scrambled up one railing, around the fifth floor or so, to find a man in a terry cloth robe sitting on one of the chairs, sipping from a mug and reading something on a pocket reader. The devices looked a bit like scrolls with flexible screens that retracted into the cylindrical ends when not in use, but they scrolled out sideways.
Liliana preferred old-fashioned books made of paper, but they were becoming less and less common, and more and more socially frowned upon since the Green Party gained power. The spider-kin liked that the forests grew wild and tall again, but she still guiltily preferred real paper books.
