AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Lady Daphne stood on the second floor of her nightclub near the DJ’s booth. A few people danced around them and many more gyrated to the music down on the huge dance floor they overlooked. Mirrors on every wall bounced and magnified the noise, laser lights, and holographs, dazzling and confusing Liliana’s inner vision. She blinked repeatedly, but she forced herself to keep watching.
The owner of the hotel and the Mirror Club looked like she was pushing forty, but spider-kin tended toward extremely long life spans, second only to the Sidhe who never aged. Liliana had met Lady Daphne more than eight decades ago, and she’d looked no different then. The widow spider’s true age could probably be measured in centuries.
Lady Daphne stood more than six feet tall and weighed well over two hundred fifty pounds. The black velvet corset she wore with her scarlet dress pulled in her ample waist and accentuated her hips and breasts, giving her an hourglass figure. Her shoe-polish-black hair hung to her waist, with bangs cut in a sharp slash across her forehead. Lipstick the color of fresh blood matched her long, perfectly manicured fingernails.
The petite woman in the bright blue dress who Liliana had glimpsed going down the stairs to the basement earlier stood beside Lady Daphne, looking worried. Next to Lady Daphne, the woman in the blue dress looked like a child. She looked barely old enough to drink alcohol legally, and she probably weighed no more than Liliana did. With a wig to change the color of her hair, Liliana could see how she and the girl would match the same descriptions. A small, curved bulge on the pretty young girl’s lower belly made Liliana suspect who the murderer Pete sought must be.
A muscular dark-skinned woman wearing the same black and silver Mirror T-shirt as the woman at the door leaned in close to Lady Daphne’s ear and shouted softly over the musical din. “An MP and some guy are asking for you by name. What should I do, ma’am?”
Liliana recognized her with a jolt. This was Stella, the woman who would kill Sergeant Giovanni.
Lady Daphne and the young woman looked down at Sergeant Giovanni and Pete as they waited by the bar on the first floor, showing pictures of the missing men to the bartenders and customers.
In a posh British accent, Lady Daphne whisper-shouted in Stella’s ear, “Are either of them Other?”
“The man smells canine. I think the woman’s a Normal.”
“We can’t use her in any case,” Lady Daphne said. “Get something to take her mind off things for a while and let the others know. Then bring them both to my office.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The muscular, dark-skinned woman gave the petite woman in the blue dress a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder, then melted back into the crowd.
The petite pregnant woman in the blue dress wrapped a lock of shiny blonde hair around her finger nervously. “The doctor didn’t send them,” she shouted just loud enough for the woman standing next to her to hear. “He’d have told us.”
Lady Daphne petted the young woman’s hair gently. “Don’t worry about it, love. I’ll take care of everything. We shall simply need to leave a bit sooner than we planned.”
“I’m sorry I’m causing you so much trouble.”
The big woman’s scarlet-painted lips thinned, and her eyes narrowed in obvious anger, but her hand on the girl’s head stayed gentle. “None of this is your fault, Kristen. The bloody bastard panther-kin who violated you is the only one who did anything wrong. His death was well-earned.”
The girl, Kristen, ducked her head, letting her long blonde hair fall forward to hide her face. “Maybe he deserved it, but the other men were innocent.”
Lady Daphne made a very unladylike snort. “There’s no such thing as an innocent man, my dear girl. And you heard the doctor. Those men would have died regardless. You simply made use of their bodies.” She lifted Kristen’s chin with her hand, wiped a tear from her cheek with her thumb, then gave her a quick one-armed hug. “Go on downstairs, love. We’ll meet you there in a few minutes.”
Kristen nodded and went, just another pretty young college girl in a crowd of hundreds.
So, the girl in the blue dress who had run down the stairs a few minutes earlier was Kristen, and she was a pregnant widow spider. Her nest sisters were feeding her and protecting her. That explained a great deal. Liliana’s fourth eyes must be looking at the very recent past.
Liliana wondered who the doctor they talked about was, but she had more important things to focus on right then. If Kristen had already gone downstairs, then time was running out.
When will Lady Daphne meet Sergeant Giovanni and Pete?
Her vision jumped in time. According to the clock on Lady Daphne’s desk, she now saw mere minutes into the past.
Stella stood behind Sergeant Giovanni and Pete as they sat in two chairs in a small office. The din of music was muted enough that they could converse normally.
Lady Daphne sat behind the desk. She looked at pictures of the murdered soldiers and shook her head. “I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know any of these men.”
“One of them was seen at your nightclub,” Pete told her.
That wasn’t true as far as Liliana knew.
Sergeant Giovanni glanced at him with one eyebrow raised but made no comment.
Perhaps Pete’s words were not a true statement but were simply provided as a plausible reason to question a nightclub owner in Raleigh about murder victims found in Fayetteville?
Liliana knew lying was a thing other people often did, but it still disturbed her sense of reality. What was was, and she could no more say it was otherwise than she could unsee a thing that had been seen.
Lady Daphne shrugged. “Hundreds of people come here every night. Surely I can’t be expected to remember all of them.” She chose a stylus from the cup full of various decorative styluses on her desk and signed a form on the pocket reader in front of her. Setting the reader to the side, she scrolled out and glanced down at the next one.
