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Liliana braced her feet on either side of her closet doorway, legs in a Y a few feet above the ground. From there, she could reach the ceiling. She slid a small section aside and placed the cards in between the ceiling joists to join a fairly large pile already there. She probably ought to get those down and count them at some point.
Once she put them through the reader that told her how much money each card held, she could calculate the total. The last pile she’d counted still had several cards left, though, plenty to buy groceries and such for a while, so she didn’t feel any urgency.
I wonder how Pete and Siobhan met?
Her fourth eyes immediately landed on a panicked flight through the shifting black shadows of a nighttime forest. The vision had the faded look of something happening years in the past, but Liliana wasn’t certain how many years.
The spider seer placed the ceiling tile back into place, making sure she kept enough attention on her first eyes to see what she was doing. Then, she dropped to the floor as she watched Siobhan fleeing with her fourth eyes.
The sprite’s dragonfly-like wings beat frantically, their bright colors leached by the wan moonlight. Her short green and brown dress showed slashes from branches, or maybe claws.
Sweat tangled the little sprite’s long, bright pink hair. Her bangs fell in her wide frightened eyes as she looked behind her. She pushed them away repeatedly.
A gnarled hand with cracked, dirty nails shot out of a clump of foliage as the sprite flew close. It snatched at her tiny bare foot.
It took a burst of wingbeats and a frantic kick to push the little Fae just out of reach. Mud and blood streaked Siobhan’s legs around multiple scratches.
This was not her first close call.
Gibbering laughter echoed around the sprite.
A malevolent hairy creature with long arms and hungry yellow fangs leapt down from a high branch.
Siobhan swooped to the side.
The cedar boggart fell past her, but sharp nails caught in her full skirt, dragging her sideways off course and ripping the cloth.
Fragile wings fought to stay aloft, stuttering and falling lower.
Four boggarts closed in on the struggling flower sprite. Two chased her from tree branch to tree branch, two ran along the ground under her.
Cruel laughter followed her from all sides.
The tiny sprite dipped and swerved between the trunks and branches of trees, narrowly avoiding again and again the grasping hands of the boggarts.
Liliana held her breath as the frantic beats of flower-petal wings staggered with weariness, dropping the sprite closer to her pursuers on the ground.
“No,” Liliana whispered, even knowing that what she watched in the moment had already happened some years ago. Time didn’t much affect what her fourth eyes saw, just a subtle difference in tint and brightness of color that she’d learned to identify as an indication of future or past, and an extra crisp sharpness that indicated present.
Boggarts squealed with excitement in her vision.
Siobhan burst out of the dense trees and into open air.
Hanging back, the boggarts stopped their chase at the edge of the forest.
The sprite used the respite to put as much space between her and the unseelie pursuers as she could. She gave up altitude and skimmed just a few feet above the tall grass to put on the only burst of speed her weary wings could manage.
A brilliant light sliced through the darkness and blinded Siobhan. Liliana saw her wings light up vivid translucent fuchsia and violet in the white light.
SMACK!
Liliana flinched as the under two-foot sprite with the ten-foot wingspan splatted into the windshield of a green van. The van swerved wildly.
Siobhan’s wings draped over the entire windshield, completely blinding the driver and covering the auto-drive sensors. One bright translucent wing snapped in the middle at an almost right angle over the roof of the van.
The accident recovery program kept the vehicle on four wheels as the van slid off the road into the dirt edge of the forest.
Shaking his head, the driver staggered out, a very young human man, perhaps less than twenty years with bright red hair.
