Page 7 of Explosive Chemistry

“What’s your name?” Detective Jackson asked.

“U’tlun’ta.” She waited for a moment, as if expecting them to recognize the name. The old woman snorted. “More whites.”

The petite policewoman, with skin nearly as black as her hair, grinned. “Can’t say I’ve ever been called that before.”

“Where did the Ani’ Yun’wiya, the real people go?” the woman asked in careful, halting English.

“Maybe she was with the family that died,” Detective Jackson said softly to Pete.

“Maybe her mind isn’t all there,” he murmured back. Pete took a stride forward past Detective Jackson, standing a little hunched so he wasn’t as tall and his broad shoulders didn’t look as massive. “Were you with the family that camped back there?” He pointed back down the trail where he and Detective Jackson came from.

The old woman smiled, showing red-stained teeth. “I was.” She cackled briefly as if remembering something funny. “Little girl wandered off in the trees. I found her.” She walked toward Pete and Detective Jackson. “Are you friends?”

Liliana dropped from the trees into a defensive crouch, her arm blades high, with Pete and Detective Jackson both acting startled at her back. “They are here to catch the one who killed the little girl and her family. The one I am looking at.”

The old woman stopped coming closer. She threw back her head and cackled in amusement. “So someone knows me then.” She shrugged. “Agi yosi. Hawiya awaduli.” Then she switched to a song that sounded like a lullaby, with a broad shark’s smile on her red stained mouth. “Uwe la na tsiku Su sa sai,” she sang sweetly in that strange language as she came closer. “Su sa sai.” She struck as fast as a rattlesnake, her right hand shooting forward, a long wicked-looking pointed flint knife where the first two fingers should be.

Lilana deflected the strike with her arm blade. “We are not such easy prey as an innocent child and her unsuspecting family.”

The woman cackled. “You whites are all easy prey.” She ducked into the woods, vanishing in the underbrush faster than a leaping deer.

Liliana looked over her shoulder at Pete and Detective Jackson, both staring with mouths wide. She flicked her wrists to fold her arm blades back into the hidden pockets in the flesh of her forearms.

Pete asked, “Did that old lady just try to stab you with something, Lilly?”

“With her right hand,” Liliana answered. “She is the one who killed the families. Shoot her in the right hand.”

Detective Jackson shook her head. “Shoot first is generally not how I do things, not even if the suspect is an Other. But if she just tried to stab you, I’d call her armed and dangerous. So—” She drew a pistol from a shoulder holster under her jacket.

Liliana smiled at Detective Jackson’s Mary Jane shoes with thick soles, good support for running in any terrain despite their shiny surface. “She is always armed and very dangerous and now she is after your forensics team and Sergeant Giovanni.”

The popcorn sound of pistols firing sent Pete and the detective running back down the path toward the campsite of the dead family.

The spider kin ran off the path, through the woods, rather than following them.

This part of the park was crisscrossed with hiking trails. She found another trail and ran down it toward the campsite from a different angle. She leapt over her own ankle height trip line and ducked slightly under the one just over her head.

The ground shook with a steady beat and a sound like boulders crashing together.

Liliana raced to reach the clearing by the lake where the young couple and their ten-year-old daughter had chosen to set up their tent.

A woman, still wearing a buckskin dress that now hugged her tightly and fell barely to her thighs rather than to the ground, took up half the clearing with her wide stance. She stood taller than some of the pines now. Her skin and hair were both charcoal gray streaked with lighter gray, and pale brown, the distinctive pattern of flint rock. Every step she took crushed stone beneath her giant form and made the earth tremble more than her mass warranted. She was a native Sidhe mineral Fae, the first Liliana had seen.

With her left hand around his waist, she lifted a struggling man wearing paper covers over his shoes, rubber gloves, and a black jacket that read POLICE in big yellow letters on the back. He shot her in the face with a pistol, and she cackled like it tickled.

On the ground, Sergeant Giovanni, Detective Jackson, and Pete all fired their handguns at the giant. Lieutenant Runningwolf, standing on two solid legs, fired an automatic rifle in her direction.

U’tlun’ta held up the man in her hand toward them like a shield, so Runningwolf pulled his muzzle up and stopped firing to avoid hitting him. U’tlun’ta kept her right hand hidden behind him, even though the bullets didn’t seem to bother her.

From where Liliana stood, a few feet to the side and behind the giant’s left knee, Liliana could see the long flint spear head on the woman’s right hand where her index finger should be.

U’tlun’ta stabbed the man she held, slicing him open, and pulling out his liver, impaled on the point of the spearhead attached to her hand.

His eyes were wide in horror as he watched the giant woman pop his liver in her mouth.

She bit down on it. Blood filled her mouth and dripped off her chin, while the forensics man, gasping his last breaths, watched her eat his vital organ.

Liliana couldn’t help him. No one could.

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