Anna Sees All
Liliana, or Anna as everyone called her these days, kept six of her eight eyes firmly closed as she meticulously dusted and organized the props of her profession. The crystal balls, Indian artifacts, arcane goddess symbols and mysterious-looking knickknacks that covered the shelves in her public work space were just that, props. She didn't need any of it to see that which others couldn't see. Instead, the props led others to see in her what they expected.
Most of the junk simply collected dust, although she liked the pretty scarves that draped the walls, the shelves and the round table in the center of the room. She collected the scarves from vintage clothing stores. She wore a plain leotard and loose skirts and blouses that she made from those same scarves. It was the same thing she always wore. Silk and velvet, bright colors and patterns, sparkles and beads. They were a lovely distraction from the dark images that sometimes invaded the tangled labyrinths of her mind. The silken feeling of them on her skin helped to anchor her in the here and now when otherwise she might wander. She found normal clothes intolerable for the most part anyway. The labels always scratched her or the seams pinched, distracting her until she could think of nothing else.
A knock came at her door, the public outside door on one end of the rectangular room that had been her formal dining room before she converted it to her business. Above that door on the outside where it faced a road was a big sign with crescent moons and stars. The sign said, "Anna Sees All." The inner door on the other end of the room led into her home. No one ever went in there but her.
Liliana cocked her head to one side in confusion. She was not expecting any customers this morning. She was very certain that her first appointment wasn't until 1:00. She looked at some of her many antique clocks. They all said 9:34 exactly, as they should. Their tick tock ticking was soothing to her nerves, jangled by the unexpected break in routine. She loved her clocks.
Perhaps it was a customer who came on impulse, or one who wished to schedule an appointment in person, rather than over the phone.
Liliana carefully put on her human face that could see with only two eyes, and opened her door. She dragged her two human eyes up for just a moment to meet the eyes of the people there. It was hard, looking people in the eyes, but both of her mothers had taught her that she must do it anyway. It was an important social rule. She knew that customers in particular wanted eye contact.
Two men stood at her door, both very fit. One was dark-skinned and more heavily muscular with a wisp of beard on his chin. The other was pale-skinned with night dark hair, sharp cheek bones, and lovely thick-lashed blue eyes.
Her gaze dropped sideways and her head tilted as she considered. These men did not seem like customers. She considered woging to her spider form, and opening another pair of eyes to look at them properly, but hesitated, not wanting to see the ugly twists of dark hearts if they were not good men. If they were bad men come to rob her or worse, then they would soon be very, very surprised, and then, most likely, they would be dead.
Perhaps, if she waited, the men would tell her who they were and why they knocked on her door.
The smaller, light-skinned man pulled a badge out and held it up. She saw the golden flash of it out of the corner of her sight, too nervous around the strangers to properly look at it, or at him. He was a policeman, but not in a uniform. "I'm Detective Nick Burkhardt and this is my partner, Detective Hank Griffon. We'd like to ask you a few questions."
"Questions," she repeated. Liliana struggled to parse the information. Communication was always a challenge. This didn't seem too bad, though. They had given her the information she wanted. They were police and they wanted to ask her questions. She waited for them to ask. Everyone came to her to ask questions. That was a situation she understood.
"Yes," the detective confirmed. There was a pause while Liliana waited for them to say more. The two policemen seemed to be waiting for something as well. Was there a social rule she was forgetting? Social rules were so complex and subtle. They confused Liliana all the time.
The dark detective looked up at the sky.
Liliana looked up as well. It was a normal drizzly, chili Portland day. There didn't seem to be anything unusual about the sky.
"Um, ma'am, could we come in?" the dark detective asked. Hank. His name was Hank Griffon. Should she call him Hank? Was that acceptable? She thought there was a rule that you called policemen officer, or in this case, detective.
"Oh. Yes, Detective Hank, Detective Nick. You can come in." People liked to sit at the table when they asked questions, not stand on the doorstep, but they didn't come in until invited. She had forgotten to invite them.
Liliana opened her door. She bowed gracefully and gestured the men into her public space. The dramatic motions were expected from seers. It was the one aspect of the part she played that came naturally to her.
She hadn't finished cleaning and organizing. The largest crystal ball was two inches to the left of the center of the table where it belonged. Liliana hastily fixed that. It made her uncomfortable that people were in her space unexpectedly when it wasn't properly prepared for them.
The two men really filled a lot of space. They stood among her scarves and arcane knickknacks and looked around curiously. The light one, Nick Burkhardt, picked up a tiny, very detailed statue of a tarantula that her mother had made. It was, of all the things in this room, the one thing that actually mattered to her. No one else had ever touched it.
Liliana made a small whimper of distress in the back of her throat. People weren't supposed to just pick up her things. She was sure there was a social rule against that. She never picked up other people's things without asking.
Nick hastily set the little statue down. "Sorry."
She picked up the delicate statue and held it to her heart, cradling it.
The men needed to stop standing in her space touching her things. If they would sit, they would take up less space. "Sit down," she said and knew it had come out more as an order than an invitation. Her voice tended to be flat instead of nuanced with emotions like other people's. She recognized the flaw, but couldn't consistently imitate the way other people spoke.
She added a graceful gesture of invitation with one arm, accented by the flowing scarves that made up her blouse. The customers seemed to like the addition of dramatic gestures. It made them feel more as if they were getting their money's worth. Liliana might not be good with voices, but physically, she could be as graceful as any ballet dancer. She had learned to dance on the high lines of a circus when she was young.
Liliana placed the little spider carefully on a high shelf, away from where the men might touch it again, and lightly sat down opposite them at the little round table with the crystal ball in the center. Now, she was a little more comfortable, in her element. She could stare at the crystal ball and watch the men from the corner of her two human eyes. They wouldn't feel insulted. It was expected for her to stare at the ball with its bright reflections of the many colors in the room.
Liliana launched into her usual intro speech. Police didn't normally come to her, but they had questions, so treating them like customers seemed like the simplest thing to do. In a dramatic singsong that she had memorized, she said, "Anna sees all. Pay me what you feel is fair for truth that cannot be seen by other eyes. I see only what is, what has been, and what might be. Ask and the truth shall be yours."
Liliana waited. This was usually when the customers told her what their questions were.
The two men looked at each other. Amused smiles played around their lips. Hank rolled his eyes.
Ah, these were men who did not believe. They came here expecting a charlatan's show.
Liliana looked at Hank, woged, and opened her third set of eyes, the ones that see into the mind and heart. They sat just below her human eyes. She was correct. Hank believed Liliana was a charlatan.
She peered more closely into his memories, to find something that she could tell him about himself that she should not know about a man who simply showed up on her doorstep out of the blue. "You have loved unwisely, Detective Hank. Four times, you chose forever, but forever didn't last." Liliana opened her fourth eyes, the ones that saw what was not in front of them, to see his current and near future loves. Did he intend to marry a fifth time? "A beautiful beast seeks your heart." Liliana wondered what would be the result of the hexenbiest that sought after the dark detective. She saw him lying in a bed, eyes red with a witch's poison, dying. The vision was close in time and very likely to come to pass by its clarity.
Liliana gasped in unintentional reaction. The policeman had a good heart, brave and honest. She did not want him to die. "Detective Hank," she warned him, forgetting to use her dramatic customer voice. "Don't eat the cookies."
Hank looked amused and confused at the same time. "Aren't you supposed to tell me that I'm going to meet the girl of my dreams?"
Liliana controlled her voice back into the singsong that was expected of seers. "I see only what is, not what you might wish to be. Someday, perhaps, you will meet such a girl." Liliana looked into his future with her fourth eyes, the ones just above the center of her brows, angled like a cat's, but there were flashes of many women, all flickering with unlikely possibility. "You may one day find love, but not soon."
She saw another cruelly laughing image of the beautiful hexenbeist that stalked Hank, stronger than any other female image. "The golden beast seeks your death, not your love." She didn't want Hank to die because he thought Liliana was the usual charlatan. She dropped the customer voice, and did something she rarely did. She reached across the table and touched the back of Hank's hand lightly with her fingertips. "Heed the warning. What I see is truth. Her beauty is poisonous."
Liliana closed all her eyes quickly, as flashes of Hank and the beast entwined invaded her mind. She didn't want to see that. She couldn't tell if her warning would have any effect, or if she had communicated it correctly and strongly enough so that the nice policeman would know how to avoid his ugly death. She hoped so, but she didn't want to look in case she had failed.
She woged back to her human face.
Liliana stared down at the tablecloth and stroked the fabric, using the texture to soothe her mind. The images of the man in front of her dying would not leave her mind. Visions like that were why she kept her eyes closed a lot of the time.
The other detective, Nick, cleared his throat. "Ma'am, we didn't actually come here to ask about Hank's bad taste in women."
"Of course, detectives. You have questions." Lilianna waited again, staring into the crystal with her human eyes, simply so she would have a safe place to look.
"Right." The two men exchanged another glance.
They were friends, these two. Liliana saw the close bonding of two who faced danger side by side, and protected each other. Liliana didn't need any more than her human eyes to see that.
"We're investigating two murders. We thought you might be able to help us," Detective Nick said.
Liliana stood up suddenly and walked to a shelf, turning her back to the policemen. She had several new scarves on the shelf next to the door. She had meant to fold them or hang them before her customer came at 1:00. They were in an untidy disorganized pile. She picked one up and ran it through her fingers. Burnout velvet was her favorite. The sensation of silky then velvety cloth trailing between her fingers calmed her. "The police don't usually come here. No one asks me to look at murders. I don't want to look at murders."
Nick got up and followed Liliana to the corner of the room, crowding her space uncomfortably. "It's all right," he said softly. "You don't have to look at the murders. We just wanted to ask you where you were last night and two nights ago. Did you go to an art show two nights ago?"
"I like to look at art when no one else is around."
Detective Nick's voice sounded confused. "So, does that mean you went there, or not?"
"Art shows are always filled with people. Too many people. I don't go to art shows."
"Then I suppose you also didn't go to a night club last night?"
Liliana snorted, still facing the door that led into the rest of her house, back still turned to the policeman with the pretty eyes. She wasn't supposed to talk to people with her back to them. She knew that rule. "I don't like night clubs even more. I never go to night clubs."
She took a deep breath to steady herself and turned around, still holding the burnout velvet scarf. It was a pretty deep green, one of her favorite colors. She could look at the scarf while she ran it through her fingers and it would be all right. They weren't going to make her look at murdered people.
"Where were you last night, and two nights ago?" the detective asked.
"I was here." Liliana gestured to the door that led into her home.
"Is there anyone who could verify that?"
"I was alone. No one comes in my house. I don't like people touching my things." Liliana tilted her head to one side, confused. "Usually, when men ask about things like art shows and night clubs and my house, they want to have sex with me. Do you want to have sex with me, Detective Nick?" The detective was handsome on the outside. If he looked as nice as Hank inside, she might enjoy having sex with him. She hadn't had a lover in some time.
Nick cleared his throat and took a step back from her. "No! I mean, that's not um, I mean, I don't .. uh , not that you're not pretty or anything, but …"
She had made him uncomfortable. She probably said something inappropriate. There were so many rules about talking about sex. She had given up a long time ago on trying to figure them all out.
Hank laughed. "Give it up, dude. There's no good answer to that one."
The two men looked at each other again. She had made a mistake, missed something obvious to them. She replayed the conversation in her mind for a moment trying to spot where her understanding had gone wrong. Their questions weren't about her. They were about murders. "Did the murders happen last night and two nights ago?"
Hank stood. "Ma'am, we're sorry we bothered you. We'll be going now."
"Okay." Liliana was relieved, but still very confused.
"Not just yet," Nick said. They seemed to be having an unspoken disagreement. "Have you ever heard of people being killed by having their dissolved insides sucked out?"
"Nick!" Hank said and grabbed Nick's arm. "The lady is clearly a little …" Hank circled a finger around his ear and mouthed "crazy." Liliana continued to look down at the scarf so he probably thought she didn't see, but Liliana always saw. "… busy," he said out loud.
"I am not crazy, Detective Hank," Liliana said. "The word people use is Aspberger's. It's not really right about me, but it's a better word than crazy. I'm not crazy." Her older sister had been unable to adapt when her fourth eyes opened. She had gone irrecoverably insane. Liliana's mother had had to slay her own child. Liliana had seen it with her own fourth eyes, even though it happened decades before she was born. An insane spinnesehen was deadly dangerous and could not be allowed to live. She had to show these detectives that she wasn't crazy.
Liliana turned to Nick, and forced herself to look at him directly for a second before her gaze dropped again. "Yes, I have heard of people being killed in that way, Detective Nick. Did you ask me because you thought I killed them?" Liliana wondered if these policemen posed a threat to her. That would be sad for them. She had seen enough of Hank's mind and heart that she would not want to hurt him. He was a good man. But she would not let anyone put her in a cage.
"You look a lot like the woman we suspect, ma'am." Nick, the policeman with the pretty eyes, stepped closer to her and looked at her intensely. She dropped her eyes back to the scarf. His stare made her uncomfortable, like he was trying to tell her something without words.
Was he wesen? Had he seen her spider eyes when she woged and opened them to look at Hank? Hank was human. She had seen him with all her eyes, so she was certain.
She woged, and opened her eyes, all of them, and looked at Nick.
Terror hit her in the gut like a kick. A Grimm.
And he suspected her of murder. It didn't matter that she hadn't done it. He would kill her.
Her mother told her stories of the Grimms when she was young. When her fourth eyes first opened, she had looked into the past and seen the truth of the stories. Throughout history, in all lands, Grimms killed wesen brutally and without mercy. Many of her childhood nightmares had been of Grimms coming to get her. She still had those nightmares sometimes. A lot lately, in fact. It might have been traces of visions from the part of her mind that processed images from her fourth eyes trying to warn her that a Grimm really was coming to get her.
A few months before, when one of her wesen customers told her that there was now a Grimm in Portland, she had almost uprooted her cozy life and moved, right then. Grimms terrified her.
Faced with a real life Grimm who thought she was a killer, Liliana threw the scarf in the Grimm's face and bolted through the door behind her into her home.
The Grimm chased her, but Liliana was faster and more agile than any human, even a Grimm, and she knew the layout of her home intimately. The Grimm did not. She leapt lightly over furniture and danced around corners.
While Nick, the Grimm, stumbled over her couch, Liliana slipped out the front door. She slammed it shut behind her. It gave her a few seconds out of the Grimm's sight.
Liliana threw her slippers out into the quiet neighborhood street that she lived on. She knew everyone else was at their normal 9 to 5 jobs about now. No one would see her.
Liliana leapt straight up, caught the edge of the roof, flipped her legs up and back, and landed lightly on her bare feet on the wet shingle roof of her little house. She flattened herself against the roof so she was invisible from the ground, and opened her fourth eyes so she could watch the Grimm without being seen.
Nick ran out her door a moment later, saw her slippers in the street and ran in that direction, as she had intended. Hank ran out the door right after. He raced on the Grimm's heels.
While they ran around her neighborhood, she ran in the other direction, along rooftops at first, then down to ground level so she wouldn't draw too much attention. Liliana opened her human eyes so she could see where she was going. Simultaneously, she kept her fourth eyes open to watch what the policemen did.
It was difficult to focus on both at once. Different parts of her mind dealt with the two different images. It was part of what made her strange to others. The ability to see in multiple ways at once meant that her mind resembled four minds that worked together. Her mind was different because it had to be.
Her fourth eyes saw in a completely different way from all other eyes. Flashes of what might be and what had been could mix and wander through the visions of what was. It had taken her decades to learn to focus on a single thing or person. Now, it was almost as if she simultaneously walked down the street far from the Grimm and his partner, and walked beside the men.
The detectives realized quickly that they had lost her.
They walked back to her house, discussing her. "Do you seriously think this rain man girl is our perp, Nick?"
The Grimm nodded. "She fits the description and she has no alibi." He did not mention that she was spider wesen and the victims were killed by a death spider, but Liliana knew that was the real reason the Grimm believed she was the killer. His partner was an ordinary human. Hank might not even know about wesen.
"Yeah, but half the women in Portland fit that description. What made you even think she might be the one?"
Liliana cocked her head to one side as she walked briskly, putting more distance between her and the Grimm that hunted her. It was a good question Hank asked.
"Anonymous tip," Nick said, but it had the ring of falsehood. She couldn't follow his thoughts with her third eyes unless he was in front of her, so she couldn't find out who had put a Grimm on her tail. It was a good question, though.
Liliana's first thought was to leave town, disappear, create a new identity. She hadn't moved in three decades, not since her second mother died. She liked Portland. She liked her pleasant routine and her cozy little house. Her business had a steady enough clientele that she lived comfortably. Most of her customers were from the local wesen community, but many were normal humans who believed in her.
She liked her customers. She watched over them. She guided them away from danger and toward happiness. It was a good job.
What would she do if she left? Join a circus again?
Her lips curled into a grimace of distaste involuntarily. She had grown up in the circus, but she hated the chaos of the circus life, always moving, always travelling. She liked routine and stability. It was comforting. She liked her cozy little house on her cozy little street.
Liliana sighed and pulled the thin scarves around her shoulders. It was cold and wet. She was barefoot and had no coat.
First, she would find a safe dry place, then she would figure out what to do about the Grimm.
