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She drew out a line of silk and picked up a pebble, encasing the stone in silk on one end. She stepped back behind a tree trunk, waiting for the right moment.
In the clearing, Sergeant Giovanni, Pete, Detective Jackson, and Lieutenant Runningwolf surrounded the giant, shooting her from multiple angles. The bullets made tiny chips in her flint hard skin, no bigger than a mosquito bite.
U’tlun’ta laughed, holding the body of their now dead teammate in one hand, with the other behind it.
Pete tried hurling a few knives at the stone giant. When that had no effect, he reached to the back of his neck and pulled the machete from the sheath on his back.
Liliana shook her head. That would not help. If he had his sword maybe, but the machete would do nothing. He needed to shoot her in the right hand like Liliana told him.
With a whooped war cry, Pete hacked futilely at a stone thigh, the steel blade clanging chang chang against unyielding stone.
The giant shifted her grip on the dead body, so she held him by one leg, then swung the body at Pete and the others in a sweeping arc, ending with the body flying toward Runningwolf, who had an automatic weapon. His bullets had made more mosquito bite pockmarks in her stone skin than any other.
He dodged the flying body in a motion almost too fast to see, but it put him farther away from the stone giant.
Only Sergeant Giovani was left standing within reach. The tall, athletic MP aimed carefully and shot the giant in the eye.
U’tlun’ta blinked, rubbed her matt black eye with her left hand, the one that didn’t have a long sharp spearhead attached. Then she reached for Sergeant Giovanni with that spear.
The military police sergeant ducked the giant’s reaching bladed hand, turned, and ran for all she was worth straight up the trail Liliana hid beside.
U’tlun’ta’s feet smashed everything in her path like massive boulders as she gave chase.
Sergeant Giovanni zoomed past, her long legs churning like an Olympic sprinter, but U’tlun’ta’s longer stride rapidly closed the distance between them. Giovanni looked behind her just as the giant’s hand reached forward…and the soldier tripped on one of Liliana’s silk lines.
As Sergeant Giovanni tucked with the fall in a skilled reflex roll that Liliana admired, the giant’s hand grabbed air where she had just been a moment before.
Liliana threw her pebble-weighted silk line around one massive flint ankle. It whirled around and around like a tether ball on a pole.
Sergeant Giovani rolled to her feet and kept right on running up the path.
The stone giant took one more running stride and encountered the line Liliana strung that was just over the petite spider-kin’s head. Sergeant Giovanni had rolled under it. For U’tlun’ta, it hit just below her knee. The giant, who had already been leaning forward to grab at her prey, overbalanced forward and tried to bring her other foot up to compensate.
Liliana ran back around the tree trunk and dug in her ballet slippered heels, dropped her butt to the ground, held tight, and let the giant’s foot drag her like a weighted ball on a chain. Her silk cord pulled around the tree, stripping bark as it went. Liliana’s shoulder slammed into the trunk.
Unable to get her other foot out fast enough, the giant fell, knocking over mature pines, their trunks snapping like rifle shots. Her body shook the earth when it hit like a landslide.
Pete ran up the trail, Detective Jackson and Lieutenant Runningwolf on his heels. “Lilly!” he shouted.
She looked up at him, exasperated from where she lay beside the tree in the dirt of the trail, her skirt, leotard, and slippers all probably ruined. Her skin beneath the cloth scraped raw and burning. “Shoot her right hand.”
“That makes no sense,” Pete said.
The stocky soldier beside him said, “I’d swear that was U’tlun’ta, Spearfinger. But she’s not supposed to be in this area. I heard she was killed in the mountains near Asheville a century ago.”
“She is immortal.” Liliana sat up and leaned backward just as the giant started to get up. The tree bent and cracked, but didn’t break, so the giant tripped and fell again. “Killing her just makes her sleep in stone for a century and awake somewhere else.”
“Lucky us.” The big soldier grunted and looked at Pete. “We’ll have to shoot her in the right hand. It’s Spearfinger’s only weakness.”
Pete looked at him sharply. “How do you know that?”
Lieutenant Runningwolf shrugged. “I dated an Eastern Cherokee girl in college. We traded stories.”
Lilly gave Pete a pointed look, too annoyed to be embarrassed to meet his eyes.
Pete’s pale, freckled face, already red from exertion, might have turned a shade of brighter pink. “Sorry, Lilly.” He sheathed the useless machete and pulled his pistol back out of the shoulder holster.
The giant yanked her foot hard. The tree snapped like a twig. The line Liliana held flung the little spider seer into the forest.
