Page 62 of Explosive Chemistry

Detective Jackson shrugged. “That’s fair.”

As her friends started down the long corridor with caution, a loud roar and crash made the direction of the danger obvious.

What caused the crash?

Liliana’s fourth vision re-focused. The sprite stood on a table by a window, grabbing things off high shelves and throwing them at the lion.

Andrew Periclum lifted a massive centrifuge and hurled it at the sprite.

Siobhan jumped aside in time, but the heavy piece of equipment caught her sword, knocking it out of her hand and through the window out onto the medical center lawn. The broken window let in the rain, the wind, and the sound of blaring sirens.

Now, the little sprite had no weapon but her wits.

She rolled under a table to avoid flying glass and debris and dodged through the two-sided cabinets to another bench.

The lion roared and ripped thousand-pound stone-topped tables loose from their bolts in the floor, shoving them aside. Glassware and chemicals atop them added to the chemical soup on the floor.

Liliana ran toward them from too far away. She hurdled a few chain-link fences as she passed the middle school where Pete’s beloved worked and Janice’s children learned. In the distance, from too far away, she heard the window break as the centrifuge flew through it.

Less than a minute after she saw it in her visions.

She had to run faster.

Would Pete, Detective Jackson, Colonel Bennet, and Sergeant Giovanni arrive soon enough to save Siobhan?

Her fourth vision shifted again.

In that moment, her vision passed from the overbright visions of the future into the sharper certainty of the present.

She had no more time. Everything she saw was happening as she saw it.

Her friends ran into the room where the sprite fought the lion.

The spilled chemicals in the big room had filled it with acrid fog. It made the newcomers cough and struggle to make sense of the trashed lab and the life-or-death battle inside.

Siobhan dodged between the legs of a table on the other side of the lab by the big window as the massive lion-kin tried to catch her with his claws, then tore the solid wood table itself apart to get to her.

They made it in time. Siobhan’s still alive!

Tumbled furniture, broken lab equipment, and a chaotic, intermittently smoking and bubbling mix of random chemicals filled the once-orderly lab. Driving rain from the spring storm diluted the chemicals into rapidly growing puddles by the large, broken window. The wind whipped and swirled through the chemical fog.

“Freeze!” Detective Jackson shouted, pointing her gun at the big lion-kin.

Periclum turned to face them with a snarl, sword up in a guard position.

Siobhan took advantage of his distraction to do a flying tackle with all her weight into the back of the lion’s knee. It would have been an effective attack if she had had a little more weight to throw.

As it was, the lion man merely staggered. His clawed hand grabbed the collar of her leather jacket and lifted her up, as if showing Siobhan to her friends.

“OY! Let go of me, you big ball of clatty fur!” The sprite twisted and struck out wildly but couldn’t get free. Blood ran down her face from a claw scratch on her forehead.

The point of the lion’s sword came to rest in the center of her back. Siobhan stopped struggling. Her lips flattened in an expression of irritation.

“Put your guns down or the little bitch dies.” The wind whipped the lion’s mane, and rain driven through the window soaked him and Siobhan both. Thunder rumbled after another flash lit the clouds behind him.

Pete, who had a knife in each hand, sheathed them and raised his empty hands. “Please, don’t hurt her.”

Detective Jackson said calmly, “You might as well put her down and give up. There’s no place to go.” Her gun stayed trained on Periclum’s head through the blowing chemical fog.

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