Adam struggled not to wince as Antonio glared from one to the other of them. He reminded himself that, as far as he knew, Antonio only killed Spider People and those who threatened to reveal the existence of veneno. Well, at least it was all he had admitted to. The Chieftain hadn’t mentioned men who carted his niece off to gunfights at horror movies before hopping in the sack with her.
“Sir,” Olivia sat calmly beside him on the bed. “All factors indicated Hallisboro was completely safe. I had no way of knowing the depth of enmity the Weston woman had for Adam, or the extremes to which it would push her. Such behavior has never been recorded on the part of our adversaries before, so my failure to anticipate her attack came as the result of unique circumstances. Still, I accept I have erred. I should have acted with more caution.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about!”
“If you’re referring to the burning down of the theater, I will remind you it was a decision of the Spider People. But I’m sure you will be relieved to know this morning’s news said the manager was found unconscious in the alley behind the theater. He has no memory of what happened or how he got there. So at least there isn’t a death to motivate the police into exploring things deeper.”
“Oh!” Antonio exploded. “Well! It’s a relief to know at least one of the parties involved in this fiasco was using their heads. I’m just trying to understand why it wasn’t the one answering to me!”
“I think that’s highly unfair, sir. It was their ‘party’ which supplied the disturbed woman who arrived and started shooting up the place.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, Olivia!”
“Well, I hardly think we were responsible for the big spider either.”
Antonio held a trembling finger up between them, his face livid, obviously struggling for words. Failing to put even the slightest dent in her composure, he turned his glare to Adam.
“And you!” he growled. “Didn’t I specifically tell you before I left to watch out for her?!”
“Ummm…yes?” Adam offered.
“Sir, I can report with confidence he hardly ever took his eyes off of me.”
“I bet he didn’t!” Antonio howled. “Or his hands either from the sound of it! What did you two think you were doing!? What DO you two think you are doing!? And no, don’t try and change the subject again, Olivia! We can discuss shootouts, burning theaters, and high explosives later!”
“I confess, the high explosives were my idea, sir.”
Antonio blinked for a second, then shook his head.
“On no you don’t! Answer the question! What do you and Adam think you are doing?!”
“We were dating, sir.”
“I know that!” He glared again at Adam, who definitely felt shutting up was the better part of valor. “What the hell happened to chess? And what do you mean ‘were.’”
“Well, things have evolved since then.”
“Evolved? What do you mean ‘evolved?”
“We’re in love, sir.”
Olivia gave Adam a look of such fondness he thought he was going to melt. All he could do was nod in agreement.
“You’ve known each other for two weeks!” Antonio bawled. “That must have been one hell of a movie!”
Neither Adam nor Olivia chose to respond.
The Chieftain closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He took three deep breaths, then let the last one out slowly before turning to face his niece again.
“Olivia,” he sighed, “I would think you of all people would appreciate the damage last night’s antics will do to Adam’s already delicate position with the council.”
Olivia visibly tensed.
“I fail to see how an executive decision on the part of your sub-chieftain can be held against Adam. Having judged the risk acceptable, the decision was mine to make. And as a matter of fact, I stand by the decision.”
“Oh? This should be interesting.”
“It in no way increased our danger last night. Had we not gone to the theater, Miss Weston would have merely attacked us here instead. And since she would have probably taken the simple precaution of approaching from the opposite side of the hotel that Billy Clayton watched, her chances of successfully killing us would have been far greater. If anything, Adam’s asking me out on a date saved my life.”
“I’ll be sure and try that one on Cesar and Marcos,” Antonio groaned. “I can already hear the phrase, ‘rationalization after the fact,’ ringing in my ears.”
“It also happens to be true. And if we are done discussing my personal life for the moment, I would like to turn to more important matters.”
“More important matters…” the big man echoed, while giving Adam another look promising ten different forms of painful homicide.
Adam was pretty sure Antonio had his own ideas about the hierarchy of importance regarding current matters.
Olivia must have seen that too because her patience was clearly wearing thin.
“Yes, sir,” she snapped. “More…Important…Matters! Beginning with the fact our adversaries have had a highly intelligent, telepathic spider the size of a small bus go rogue on them and start eating outsiders. Complicating that, their most powerful asset…and believe me sir, she is even more potent than we thought… appears to be barely within their ability to manage as well. They have a crisis on their hands that threatens both of our people, and to further complicate things they are being governed by an entity who sees the world through the prism of the pre-Columbian era. Whatever methods they have employed to contain the situation have failed. Now it’s spiraling out of their control and they are going to need our help to stop it.”
“Our help?” Antonio replied, obviously taken aback by the woman’s uncharacteristic vehemence.
“Yes, sir…our help. I’m afraid you need to return to Houston and deliver another report to the Elder’s Council.”
“Again?”
“Yes, sir. Only this time I’m going to append a conclusion to the report. The report will also contain a lot of other material but I need you to see to it that conclusion remains the single primary focus of the meeting.”
“And this conclusion is?” Antonio narrowed his eyes.
Olivia gave him a steady stare before replying.
“The conclusion,” she pronounced, “is that time is up. Unless we find a way to make peace with our enemies tomorrow night, both of our peoples are doomed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
INTERLUDE
“Adam, stop fidgeting. You are making this difficult. Antonio will be returning this afternoon with a member of the Elder Council for tonight’s meeting with the Spider People, and it’s very important you make the best impression possible.”
“Sorry,” he sighed, and concentrated on sitting still while Olivia used a pair of scissors to trim the hair over his right ear. “I’m just not used to being fussed over like this.”
“Already complaining, are we?”
“Not at all!” he hastily replied. “But I get the definite feeling your uncle would be laughing his ass off and giving me some kind of ‘I told you so’ if he could see this. Well, he would… if he were still speaking to me.”
“Ah,” she studied his hairline and took another careful snip, “so now we’re worried about what my uncle might think. If he asks, I’ll be sure and report you cut your own hair with a hunting knife. I imagine he’ll let you keep your man card then.”
Adam gave her a dour look in the hotel mirror. In truth, he loved the attention from her but the current subject only reminded him of his latest problem.
“Thanks. But I’ll be happy if he just stops looking at me like he’s trying to decide where to put the first bullet.”
“He’ll get over it. Besides, he likes you. He’s simply a little overprotective when it comes to me and we surprised him.”
“Overprotective? Antonio? Nah!”
“Oh yes,” she muttered as she tilted his head and took
another snip. “I remember when Julio Garcia swatted me on the behind in the hallway two years ago, and Uncle Antonio cut his ear off. Now that was embarrassing.”
“Wha….!”
“Well, Julio was obviously out of line. But I was mortified. I didn’t speak to my uncle for three days afterwards.”
Adam looked for any sign in her reflection she might be pulling his leg. Nothing. Not even the hint of a smile. She seemed to be totally focused on trimming his hair.
“Olivia,” he groaned, “I hope you realize my new baby ulcer just grew another diaper size right then.”
“My point is, Julio’s stunt was unwelcome and Uncle Antonio never really liked him anyway. On the other hand, I notice that despite his shock at our new status, you sit here with both ears attached and no more holes than you left the theater with.”
“Well, I suppose I can take some comfort in that.” He fingered the Band-Aid over the notch in his ear. “At the rate I’m collecting holes, I sure don’t need Antonio adding to them.”
“Indeed.”
Besides, I guess in the long run it worked out to my advantage.”
“Your advantage?”
She pushed his head down and snipped his hairline along his collar.
“Yep. It solves a mystery I’ve been puzzling over for the past couple of days.”
“Oh? And what mystery is that?”
“I have been wracking my brain,” he grinned up at her in the mirror, “trying to figure out how in the world a gorgeous, brilliant, and classy woman like you hadn’t been snatched off the market years ago. Now I realize it’s because all the men who know you are terrified of your uncle.”
“Ah.”
She continued to snip his hair, apparently absorbed in the task.
Adam studied her as she worked—the precise way she used the scissors, the look of concentration on her smooth features, the distracted way she brushed a stray hair of her own out of her face. She was the very picture of a focused barber, and yet…
And yet….
“Olivia?
“Hmm?”
“Why do I have the feeling my latest attempt to pay you a compliment, resulted in me punching you right in the middle of a sore spot instead?”
Olivia didn’t answer right away. She took another couple of snips, studied the results, then placed the scissors neatly in line with the other grooming instruments she had arrayed on the counter. Having done that, she walked over and sat on the corner of the bed.
She faced Adam with her hands in her lap, and her green eyes large and somber.
“Oh boy,” he breathed. “I really stepped in something,”
“It’s alright, Adam,” she said softly. “This is something I needed to explain to you soon anyway…at least the second part. But since you brought it up, I may as well cover the whole subject.”
Adam rose in concern and walked over to her. She didn’t show much, but it didn’t take a mind reader to see the “whole subject” was not a happy one.
“It all comes back to our history,” she began.
“Wait. Your people’s history?”
“Yes. You have to remember,” she continued, “we were almost exterminated as a people.
And we lost so much. Not even our killers bothered to record much about us. So we hung on to what we had with grim tenacity. And all we had left was our identity, as marred and full of holes as it was.
There were barely enough of us left to make a viable population, so we were forced to bring in outsiders to bolster our gene pool. We are a clannish bunch ourselves, and we hated it, but it had to be done. They were always Mexican Indian, usually of Mixtec or Zapotec stock, but even so there are still families within our tribe who pride themselves on being pure Karankawa. Those families usually provide our chieftains and elders. And family is everything, even outside those bloodlines.”
“But your eyes…”
“Yes,” she closed them. “My eyes…”
Adam suddenly had an ugly idea where this was going.
“My father, Antonio’s brother, brought a Zapotec woman up from Oaxaca and took her as his wife. They were happy, and everything seemed fine. It was only after I was born they went back and discovered my mother had been adopted. She hadn’t even known herself. Her mother had been Zapotec, but her real father, my grandfather, had been a Castilian Spaniard. Blond hair, green eyes, the works.”
Adam didn’t know what to say, so he merely sat down beside her, took her by the hands, and listened.
“I suppose they took it well. My mother and father stayed together, and the green-eyed little girl didn’t have a childhood accident that I’m sure everybody would have understood and consoled them over. At least I had the decency to wear my unsuitable lineage on my face in plain sight, so there was no danger of further mistakes. On the other hand, I never had a brother or sister. I imagine my parents didn’t see the point.”
“Olivia…” Adam began but stopped again. What the hell could he say about something like this? That it was okay? It wasn’t. That it was over? It would never be that either.
It’s no damn wonder she’s so poised, he mused. When your whole existence is an embarrassing mistake, you find some form of dignity or you die.
“And then,” she whispered, “they were gone. I was twelve years old when Tropical Storm Alicia came and their car was swept into a drainage ditch…leaving a strange little girl with the wrong color of eyes for everybody to deal with. I was passed from family to family for about a year, before an uncle I had never met returned from a long stay in Mexico and took me in.”
“Antonio?”
“Yes. And then my life changed in all sorts of ways. I suddenly found myself having to live with a man who was actually present when he was in the room with me. For instance, it took him precisely three weeks to figure out how I was deliberately hiding my intellect in order not to appear even more freakish to others. He immediately fired all of my tutors for not figuring it out for themselves, then gave me the second most severe tongue lashing of my life. He told me life put enough obstacles in our path without me limiting myself on top of it. I was promised that if he ever caught me holding myself back again, the consequences would be dire. I believed him.”
“I bet you did,” Adam agreed. “I remember Antonio mentioning obstacles and limitations on our drive up here. Your uncle has a unique philosophy on things. But just out of curiosity, if that only earned you the second worst tongue lashing, what got you the worst?”
Olivia colored slightly and looked down at her hands.
“When I was fourteen, I bought myself a pair of brown contact lenses.”
Ouch!
“But the thing is, Adam,” she raised her eyes to meet his and continued, “this is all old history which needn’t concern you. It is behind me and I have dealt with it. My potential is now recognized to the point even the elders object to my being here on this mission, due to the risk. I simply recounted it to give you some context. It’s the next part I felt you have a right to know before things with you and I go much further.”
He gave her hands a gentle squeeze and waited.
“As I’m sure you’ve noticed,” she said with a wry little smile, “I have another distinctive trait, other than my eyes.”
“Well, there’s a rumor going around you’re sorta smart, too.”
“’Sorta.’ I am an expert in electronics, computer science, genetics, biochemistry, industrial chemistry, mathematics, and many different forms of security. In any one of those subjects I would be considered top of the field in the outside world. I am proficient in a great deal more. I speak seven languages fluently, and that is only because languages are not one of my stronger subjects. My recall extends back to an age of less than two. As my uncle will no doubt complain, I almost never forget anything.”
“Okay,” Adam shrugged, “I can see how some guys might find that intimidating, but I had already accepted you were smarter than me so it’s really not a big deal. Still…wow!”
>
“Adam, I think you are missing the point.”
“And the point is?”
“The point is,” she sighed, “I am far outside normal parameters. As a matter of fact, I’m outside of exceptional parameters as well. When I realized this, I turned my attention to understanding why. It took a while, but I figured it out. And when I found the answer, it was not a day to celebrate.”
Once again, Adam held his peace and opted to listen.
“I discovered that although we had far less contact with veneno over the centuries, the exposure had still affected the genes of my people as well. Nothing like it has the Spider People, but in milder, more subtle ways. Most of the time in ways making no difference…most of the time.”
“Yet…” Adam gently prodded.
“Yet, in my case, it seems my people drew their own form of a royal flush. The mutations were more significant than normal, but fortunately they were beneficial…for the most part.”
“But it’s the other part that has you sitting here like this right now.”
“The ‘other part,’” she continued, “is, for one thing, I’m deathly allergic to the substance that created my genetic variance. But more importantly, due to my variance, my ability to have children is severely constrained. A match with any talent in our tribe would almost certainly fail. Even with a non-talent, the odds are less than one in four of producing a viable result. Not exactly an attractive trait in a group where family is the context in which all other decisions are made. Add this to my already questionable lineage, and I guess you can see why I’m ‘still on the market,’ so to speak. I’m not exactly the bargain you thought I was.”
He actually had to prevent himself from staring at her with astonishment.
Holy shit, he marveled. She actually believes that last part! This is insane! Tread carefully here, Adam. You’re going to have to stick up for her without disrespecting everything she stands for. She may be a genius, but she’s seeing this from the inside because it’s who she is.
Adam thought about it for a few seconds, then made a point of crossing his legs and rapping a brace.
“I’ll make you a deal,” he replied. “If you are willing to walk a little slower for me, I’m willing to walk alongside wherever this path with you leads. Fair enough?”
Spiderstalk Page 39
