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“You know that’s every homicide detective’s dream, right?”
Liliana wiped her first eyes again and glanced at Detective Jackson. “It is?” The detective’s face was almost exactly even with hers. The petite spider seer did not often encounter people her own size.
“Catching the murderer after some poor unlucky shmo is dead has always felt like a consolation prize to me. I couldn’t protect them, but at least their murderer won’t get away with it.” She made a rude noise. “Better than nothing, but I wish I had your visions instead.” Her face took on a glow of zeal. “That would be amazing, being able to save lives like that.”
“It is always better to save a life than to avenge it,” Liliana said softly. She remembered her first mother, her father, and her second mother all saying the same words to her at different points in her life. “And foreknowledge is often the weapon you need for that. It is good, except when you fail.” It started the tears flowing again to know that she had failed so completely. “I had the knowledge, but they are still dead.”
“Hey, hey.” Detective Jackson started to reach for her, then pulled back. “Is it okay if I put my arm around you?”
Liliana nodded and leaned toward the detective, who put a gentle arm around Liliana’s shoulders. She appreciated that the detective asked first. She didn’t like being touched by people without her permission or unexpectedly.
“So you saved our lives,” Detective Jackson said, squeezing Liliana’s shoulder “You couldn’t save the family or Greg because you didn’t see it coming. Sounds like you did the best you could, right?”
Liliana shook her head. “I had another vision a few weeks ago. Two women in military uniforms. I didn’t know them. They were shot in the back of the head. I didn’t see by who. I couldn’t even tell when because it was the oddest vision, shaded as if their deaths were happening in the future, but also like they had already died in the past.”
“Not much to go on.” Detective Jackson asked, “Did you see where it happened, or will happen?”
“It just looked like a clearing in the woods. It could have been anywhere, but…” Liliana pointed at the trees she recognized, “I saw that leaning pine and the oak with the bush over the ground patch covered in blooming wild hellebores.”
The detective looked where Liliana pointed. “Yeah, that’s pretty distinctive. So where are these two women now? Do you know?”
Liliana pointed at the ground. “Here.”
Detective Jackson stood.
Liliana stood as well.
They both looked back at the mound of disturbed earth with large flat rocks on top that they’d been sitting on.
It was a grave.
Chapter 4
The Spider And The Prince
Liliana sat far away from the graves in the thick branches of an old post oak growing by a glade where everyone parked their cars. She was cradled comfortably in some of the tree’s stately limbs while the forensic team exhumed and studied the bodies she’d found, looking for clues.
Her clothes were still dirty and torn since she’d battled a giant in them, but she’d used the forensics teams sanitary wipes to get the dirt out of her scrapes and clean her face. As she sat in the tree, she carefully worked the broken twigs and leaves out of her thick curls. The rough bark of the old tree held her safely far away from the staring eyes of strangers.
Detective Jackson had convinced her that the day was still a victory, saying that she, for one, was very glad that Liliana had come. “As one of the people still breathing because of your intervention, I think you should count the lives you saved, not the ones you couldn’t save.”
Liliana still wished she’d done more for the military women. She’d been wracking her brain trying to figure out what course of action she should have taken, even though it wouldn’t change anything now. Rationally, she knew that. But it didn’t stop her thoughts from going round and round in circles.
Her fourth eyes watched the exhumation of the bodies as they were photographed and carefully moved. Sergeant Giovanni identified the bodies by the names stitched on their uniforms as two women who had been reported AWOL the day before when they didn’t show up for duty. Their faces were half missing due to the exit wounds.
Pete told Detective Jackson, “They’ve only been dead a day or so based on the lack of decomposition, which matches Zoe’s information. And it looks like they were standing in the hole when they were shot. Or the person who shot them was as tall as U’tlun’ta.”
When Liliana first saw a vision of them, they’d been alive. It made no sense that the vision had been shaded both as if they were not yet dead and as if they were already dead. It could not be both. Clearly, they had not yet been dead two weeks ago.
What am I missing?
Her fourth eyes showed her a car pulling into the makeshift parking lot her big oak tree shaded. The spider-kin blinked several eyes as she saw someone she had not expected to see: Pete and Sergeant Giovanni’s colonel, the Fae prince.
She didn’t see him in the future. She saw him right then with her human eyes as well as her fourth eyes. He parked his urban camouflage-painted car with big knobby all-terrain tires between Pete’s green van and Detective Jackson’s unmarked sedan.
The military vehicle and the military man who drove it captured her full attention, as he always seemed to.
A part of her froze instinctively against the tree trunk. She was in the arms of an ancient oak and surrounded by miles of life in every direction. If the Sidhe prince blamed her for the deaths of his soldiers, he could kill her easily here. She would likely be no more effective at defending herself than the Wolfhound he killed by bringing a tree to life in Janice Willoughby’s yard a few weeks before.
