Page 30 of Explosive Chemistry

A knock on the door had William Eliot standing swiftly, and Alexander writing something on a piece of paper as if he’d been taking notes. “Come,” he said in his normal, deep voice. “Get me that report on the training exercise requirements by the end of the week.”

“Will do, Colonel.” William Eliot left with a smile at Sergeant Giovanni as she walked in.

Liliana let that vision go. What she needed to know was what sort of person William Eliot was.

Are his feelings real for Sergeant Giovanni?

For a moment, she saw the wizard give Sergeant Giovanni a locket some time in the future and got an overwhelmingly bad feeling related to it. She remembered a vision she’d seen before of that locket. The young military police sergeant would die if she wore it.

William Elliot wove dark magic into it. His hands closed the clasp on the chain, hanging it around her neck.

Is William Elliot the source of the tide of blood I saw coming?

Green eyes flashed in her fourth vision like they were made of fire, then vanished. She couldn’t see anything directly related to the wizard after that.

An odd afterimage of the fiery eyes persisted in front of her fourth eyes. She blinked repeatedly, trying to get rid of it.

Magic. The wizard must have some spell to protect his actions from seers that activated as soon as she focused on his actions, not someone or something adjacent to him.

But she’d seen enough. William Eliot was using Sergeant Giovanni, not wooing her. And it would end in her death if Liliana didn’t change something.

She wondered if the wizard was similarly using Alexander Bennet, or if his feelings were any more sincere toward the Fae prince than they were toward the sergeant.

But when she tried to look, all she saw was that flash of eyes of green fire, then nothing again but a painful afterimage.

Frustrated, she yanked out a particularly stubborn chickweed and got to her feet.

Chapter 8

Wings On The Windshield

Liliana went inside and took a quick shower to get the garden dirt off well before her first client appointment of the day. After that, she had some time with nothing to do.

Her favorite client, Janice Willoughby, would come at noon. If Liliana stayed in her converted dining room turned business, then she would not risk disappointing her best client. But it was only 10:52, according to her many old-fashioned clocks, and one digital satellite clock that she used to keep them all accurate and in sync.

Once she lit the jasmine incense to give the right atmosphere, Liliana had some time to let her eyes wander in the peaceful tick, tick, ticking.

She considered continuing to sit at the little round table in the center of her converted dining room and looking into the crystal ball as if there was a client across from her. It had become habit for her to look into it when she used her fourth eyes in her business space. Habit was comfortable.

But she felt physically restless.

She worried that Colonel Bennet might be in danger in the same way Sergeant Giovanni was from the wizard. Visions of Alexander Bennet’s face, both human and polished obsidian in his demi-stone form, appeared in front of her fourth eyes every time she opened them without focusing on something else.

It might not just be worry that made her see his handsome face all the time.

But she felt uncomfortable watching the Fae prince. She most wanted to see him in private moments, and her father taught her that kind of spying was dishonorable.

She should look at someone else.

The fancy jar that people put pay cards into hadn’t been emptied in some time. When she removed the lid, she was surprised by how many cards were in it, each with some unknown denomination assigned to it, the modern equivalent of cash. She dumped the cards out into her skirt.

She took the pay cards out of her business space through the door into her house, leaving it open so she could hear if her client knocked on the business door early.

The seelie daylight Fae, Siobhan, intrigued her in an entirely different way. The little sylvan Fae had nearly defeated Liliana on her own chosen ground after the fight with Pete. The spider-kin respected that level of combat prowess. Then, her help with the last widow spider had turned the tide from a battle that felt like it was already lost to one she and Pete rapidly won.

Everything Liliana knew about flower sprites—they tended to live in rural areas and be non-violent artistic, creative people with no interest in technology—none of that fit Siobhan. Even sprites from the unseelie night court powered by the Green of midnight and the dark moon were reputed to be merely mischievous, rather than dangerous.

Siobhan did not seem like a harmless flower. She reminded Liliana of tales her second mother, Ixchel, told about jaguarondi, tiny relatives of the jaguar. Siobhan’s fierceness matched the tiny predator’s.

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