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Liliana felt her cheeks heating. She clenched her hands together behind her to keep from messing with her sleeves again. “He might not have been in danger, Mr. Harper, if I had not told him to talk to the…” she hesitated. She had almost said “widow spider,” but caught herself barely in time. Ben Harper did not know about Others. Most of Liliana’s clients were Others or Normals who were somewhat in the know. She had not had a long conversation with an ordinary human who knew nothing of the hidden peoples in some time. “… the woman who owned the club in Raleigh.”
“You helped him find the killers and come home to me alive. I’ll always owe you for that. And call me Ben. My students are about the only ones who call me Mr. Harper. What brings you here?” He gestured at the vine-covered gazebo. “Pete’s not home right now if you came to talk to him.”
“No, Ben. Pete is hunting another serial killer with Detective Shonda Jackson, Sergeant Zoe Giovanni, and Lieutenant Runningwolf. I came to talk to you.”
Ben Harper’s smiling mouth did a funny sideways twist. “Most people come to the front door.”
“I knocked, but you didn’t answer. I knew you were in the gazebo. You like to grade homework here when the weather is nice. The weather is very nice today.” Liliana started to feel a little less nervous. Pete’s beloved was not hard to talk to.
“Um, yes, it’s a lovely day. So Pete told you that I grade schoolwork out here?”
“No. I just knew.” Liliana could not tell Ben Harper that she was spider-kin, but her big wooden sign was on a major street in Fayetteville. “I am also known as Madame Anna of Anna Sees All. I am a seer.”
The human’s smile changed again. Ben Harper’s face seemed to be made for smiling. He had a wide variety of different kinds of smile. “A seer, huh? What have you seen about me, besides where I like to sit to grade homework?”
“Pete is going to ask you to marry him. But you will say no. It will make him very sad. And you should give me his sword. If you don’t, someone will steal it and Pete will die.”
Ben’s smile did some very strange things, first widening into delight, then tilting wryly, then fading into confusion. Liliana had never met anyone who seemed to express nearly every emotion with a smile.
“Uh.” He set the stylus down on the table. “That’s um. Pete’s going to ask me to marry him?”
“He has a ring. He has just been waiting for a good time. There has not been a good time lately because so many people have been dying. Pete and Sergeant Giovanni have to help Detective Jackson, so Pete has been busy and distracted. He wants to take you somewhere nice and ask.”
“Pete told you all that?” Ben asked, his smile turning ironic.
“Pete did not tell me any of that. I am a seer. I have wondered why you will tell him no, though. Pete is beautiful and smart and fierce and loves you. Why will you not choose him for your mate when he has chosen you?”
Ben’s smile seemed a little teasing, and he looked around as if someone else might be hiding behind the big elm tree or in the decorative hydrangeas by the fence. “Why is Pete so sure I’ll tell him no that he sent you to talk to me? Maybe I’ll say yes.”
Liliana sighed. Once again, she was completely failing at communication. She sat down at the picnic table and reached across it to touch Ben’s hand. Sometimes people paid more attention if you touched them. “Pete thinks you will say yes. Pete doesn’t know I am here.” She looked up directly into Ben’s dark brown eyes for as long as she could stand it. “I came because I need you to give me Pete’s sword so it will not be stolen, and Pete will not die. I just wondered why you did not want him for your husband.”
The smile faded from the teacher’s face. “You’re serious. Pete didn’t send you?”
“Pete doesn’t know I am here, and you must not tell him. The paths of the future where he finds out and comes to me to ask about it are bad ones. You must not tell him.”
“The paths of the future, right.” Ben Harper smiled again, but the smile bothered Liliana. It reminded her of the people who spoke to her very slowly. “Look, Miss Lilly, I’m not one of your customers. You don’t have to put on an act for me.”
Liliana frowned and fought to remain calm against rising anger. “No. You are not a customer. You are my best friend’s beloved, who will reject him and break his heart. And if you refuse to give me his sword, you will get him killed too.”
“I’m not the one who sent him straight into a club full of armed serial killers,” Ben Harper pointed out sharply, his smile vanishing.
Liliana blinked her human eyes and pulled her hands back into her lap. She ran the bright silken sleeves of her blouse through her fingers. It didn’t help. He was right. She blinked again and a tear ran down her face. “I did not mean to nearly get Pete killed.”
The spider-kin got up abruptly. This was not working. Ben would not give her Pete’s sword. Ben did not like her.
“Whoa. Whoa. Wait a minute.”
Liliana ignored him and climbed back up the gazebo support pole, still blinking tears from her human eyes.
“Lilly, please, stop a minute. You said something about Pete dying?”
Liliana stopped when she reached the gazebo roof. Ben was right. The spider-kin could not just give up and leave. Pete’s life would be forfeit. “You believe I am a charlatan who puts on an act. You do not believe that I can see the future, so why would you care what I have seen?” Liliana sat down on the peak of the gazebo roof and wiped her human eyes.
She always wondered why only her human eyes wept. She had seen Stella’s spider eyes weep when she lost her beloved, so it was not the same with all spider-kin. Only her kind. Or at least, only her. There were so few spider seers left, she didn’t really know.
She couldn’t remember ever seeing either her older sister Isabella, or her first mother, Solifu, cry. Liliana didn’t remember crying much herself over the last few decades. Yet lately, Liliana seemed to be doing it a lot. Her life was no longer a bland nothing with every day the same as every other day. It had lovely high points, but it also had moments like this when she wondered why she’d ever left her house.
Ben stepped out onto his back lawn and backed up until he could see where Liliana sat. “I teach science, not fantasy.” He shrugged and smiled apologetically. “Fortune tellers are always charlatans. I don’t believe anyone can see the future. It’s nothing against you personally.”
