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“No!” little Liliana exclaimed.
Isabella chuckled. “It’s all right.” She got a few drops of the nice-smelling oil on her fingers and rubbed it over the webbing, then finger combed her hair. The webbing let loose and came away easily. “There, spiderling. See? For you.”
Reverently, Liliana accepted the bottle of oil from her sister.
Liliana blinked her fourth eyes and looked around the forest just outside the border of Fort Liberty. She stood still, frozen in the moment after she ducked under the line of webbing. She had no idea how long she’d stood there half bent over.
She had jumped time unintentionally. That hadn’t happened in a few years. Instead of her wayward vision controlling her mind, Liliana had tamed her vision over many painstaking years of exercising her gift every day with clients to where her mind controlled it.
Most of the time.
She’d long since used all the oil her sister gave her, but the pretty little glass bottle sat in a place of honor on one of her bookshelves. She’d refilled it many times.
The fact that Liliana unwillingly saw visions of a treasured childhood moment with Isabella made her wonder if she might see her older sister again soon. It had been a long time, and when visions overtook her that strongly, they often indicated the hand of fate in action.
Or maybe that was wishful thinking. She hadn’t heard from her sister in more than a decade.
Her two brothers who escaped Europe with her, Petros and Jason, had grown old and moved away to the North Carolina coast. She didn’t know their surviving families.
Before Pete, Sergeant Giovanni, and Detective Jackson accused her of murder, she hadn’t been lonely simply from a lack of friends. The remaining members of her once numerous and boisterous family had died, or faded and then scattered, leaving her behind.
Voices brought her fully back to the present. She ran through the bushes to a different path, then leapt and scrambled up into the branches of a tall hickory, barely in time to avoid being seen. She did not want to accidentally change something that would send the path of fate in an unpredictable direction.
Homicide Detective Shonda Jackson looked completely out of place hiking through the forest in a stylish modern synth silk suit with shiny silver electromagnetic buttons. She stepped carefully along the path leading to the small parking lot on the edge of the Bones Creek campground, Peter Teague following a half step behind her on the narrow hiking trail. “That’s why I called you,” she said, continuing a conversation with Pete. “Whatever did that, it wasn’t human.”
Pete shrugged. “The wounds seem clean and precise, nothing like the attack of an enraged beast-kin or Fae. I did some preliminary tests and couldn’t find any sign of Other venom or contaminants. Couldn’t it have been a Normal with a big, sharp carving knife?”
The policewoman twisted her lips in a way that looked like she tasted something unpleasant. “A human who managed to kill an entire family with a single clean horizontal slice along the middle back, without alerting the other family members, even though they were all within feet of each other?”
“It does seem unlikely.” Pete rubbed the back of his neck where red hair grew short like fur. “But I’ve never heard of any Other that kills like this.
“Ever heard of an Other that removes the livers from its victims? They’re all missing their livers. I had the forensics team check first thing.”
“That’s weirdly specific. Why would you—never mind, did you find their livers?”
“No, the killer must have taken them.”
Pete’s freckled nose wrinkled. “Or eaten them.”
“Now, there’s a cheery thought.” Detective Jackson led Pete along the path that would soon run under Liliana’s tree. “This is the second family we’ve found dead out here in the Carver Creek campgrounds in the last two weeks. The other family’s deaths were called in as natural causes. We thought they’d eaten the wrong mushrooms or something. There weren’t any slash marks on their backs like this.”
“How were they like this family then, other than dying nearby?”
“At first, we thought they were entirely different too. They camped remotely enough that animals got to the bodies before the forensic team. We thought coyotes and vultures had eaten some of their internal organs, but one kid didn’t have a mark on him. Only when the medical examiner autopsied the family did they discover his liver was missing. All of them were.”
Pete stopped Detective Jackson on the path directly under the hickory tree with a hand on her elbow, so she looked back at him where he followed her on the path. “Wait, his liver was missing, but there wasn’t a mark on his torso?”
“Exactly. Once we eliminated scavenger animal bites, we found slash marks on two of the victims, but none on the other two. Slash marks or not, they were all missing their livers. That’s why I needed someone who specializes in ‘biological anomalies.’” She made air quotes with her grim expression lightening. “You didn’t think I’d call you and Giovanni in for a Normal killer who was knifing campers, did you?”
A woman with a long gray braid, wearing a buckskin dress that hung loosely on her old bones, stood in the path as they rounded the grove of trees. Dark eyes were all but buried in the wrinkles of her face, and her lips were smeared with red as if she’d been eating berries. She held her right hand in her left, clasped in front of her.
The spider-kin tensed. The path ahead of her friends had been clear when she looked a few seconds ago. Silently, she popped her arm blades out, the slightly curved blades that hid in almost invisible pockets in her forearms. They locked at right angles to her wrists, like a scythe, but with the razor-sharp edge outward.
The old woman spoke. “Osiyo. Ani yunwiya hiwonihi?”
“Hey there, where y’at?” Detective Jackson’s tone was gentle, to avoid scaring the woman away.
The woman stood and stared at them for a moment, confused.
