Amazon Queen (4 page)

“Has anyone ever gotten close to you, Zery? Have you ever loved anyone or anything? Or can’t you, because no one has loved you? Because your own mother doesn’t give a damn about you?”

It wasn’t his words that angered me, but his tone, the mockery in them—I’d had enough, waited enough. I lifted my knee to deliver the most basic, but fulfilling of attacks.

Behind me an owl called. The sound seemed to startle him; he froze.

I smiled . . . a mistake on his part.

His hold on me disappeared. My weight shifted, but my knee was already moving, guaranteed to hit its mark . . . but once again I struck nothing but air, because the man was gone and the animal I’d first encountered was back.

He looked at me, his eyes free of emotion now. Then he did what I’d imagined he would when I’d first seen him; he opened his jaws and chomped into my calf.

Then, just as quickly, he let go and was gone.

Blood streamed down my leg. I took a step forward or tried to, but my knee buckled. I cursed and used my staff to force myself to stay standing.

With each step, I forced my brain not to register pain, let the adrenaline flow unimpeded through me. It kept me going, but the son hadn’t taken the path as he escaped. He had dived into the thickest brambles, using his animal form and instincts to get him quickly through areas that, even unwounded, I’d have had a tough time negotiating, at least without a sword to clear my way.

Also, I had lost blood. The pain might have been muted, but my leg was rubbery and my knee wasn’t answering the demands of my brain as it should have. I placed my palm against a birch and mumbled my frustration. I would heal, much quicker than a human, but it would take a day or so, not seconds. Amazons were descended from a god; we weren’t gods.

“Zery!” Thea yelled from the clearing.

I pushed myself away from the tree and scowled after the son. He was long gone now, and hard as it was to face, in my injured state I had no hope of catching him.

I swallowed that truth, then returned the way I’d come. Though short, it was a hard trip. The adrenaline that had pushed me forward before, now ebbed. And with its waning, my leg began to throb. But I was used to pain, was trained to handle it. I blew air out of rounded lips and limped on.

Thea stood next to the obelisk, her hands empty and a scowl on her face. As my eyes met hers, as my foot hit the flattened grass and dirt, the pain, manageable seconds before, ripped through me. With no explanation or warning, I lived the attack again, in slow motion.
The animal’s teeth punctured my flesh a millimeter at a time, his jaws crushed against my bone. He pulled; my leg screamed; my mind screamed.

I staggered, and a shudder shook my body.

Then the pain was gone, not completely, but down to a gut-twisting ache.

I stared at the high priestess, wondering if she’d seen what had happened, had some explanation. But if she did, she didn’t offer to share.

She tromped to the obelisk and smashed her fist against the stone. “You lost him.” Her head lowered, she muttered something.

“
We
lost him,” I corrected. I assumed she meant the wolverine son and not the bird, but she had obviously been no more successful in stopping either than I had been.

Her gaze dropped to my leg, then back at my face. There were words behind her expression, angry words. I waited for her to throw them, or something else at me. Then we could face the wrath that boiled inside both of us, the frustration of our lost battle. I flexed my fingers, then curled them back around my staff . . . ready.

Her eyes stayed flat and her lips tight for a flicker of a second. Then she shook her head. “The pressure of losing her after we had just saved her, and before I could present her to the goddess . . . I didn’t mean to. . . . How could you have expected an attack from above?” She glanced again at my leg, letting her gaze linger there for a bit.

I adjusted my stance. “True, we couldn’t expect it, but it shouldn’t have happened. The child should have been safe inside the house, surrounded by the tribe.” She had endangered the baby by bringing her here. Apparently she needed to be reminded of that.

“I was so close . . . ” she murmured. “To presenting her to the goddess,” she finished as if in explanation. Her jaw tense, she picked up the bowl and walked to the edge of the trees with it. Her back to me, she mumbled a few words, then spilled the contents of the bowl onto the ground.

She seemed to miss that
she
was the reason the child had been stolen, that
she
had brought her here. So what if the baby had been “presented” before the sons grabbed her? She still would have been taken. I bit down on the inside of my cheek. “Did you see where the bird went?”

She shook her head; anger, loss, and disappointment warred in her eyes. “I had my . . . I followed him as long as I could, but he was too big, too fast. It was impossible to keep up.”

“What direction did he go?” I made no pretense of politeness. It was obvious we both thought the other had failed.

She pointed to the north. “Toward the town.”

Our camp was twenty miles from the nearest small town. “He could have been headed to Deep River, or the highway, or Canada.” I smashed the end of my staff into the ground. There was no telling.

Thea twisted her lips to the side and a shadow passed over her face. “What about the other one? What was it?” she asked. “It looked like a wolverine. Do you have wolverines here?”

I shook my head. “Not that I know of, but that doesn’t matter. The sons can shift into whatever animal their
givnomai
is.”

“So it’s true.” Despite the fact she’d just seen a bird the size of a small plane swoop down on us, she looked skeptical.

“You saw for yourself how true it is,” I replied, realizing she hadn’t believed the stories, not before today. “You saw the son I battled, saw him shift.”

She shook her head. “I saw the wolverine, then I saw the man. That doesn’t mean they were the same. But the bird . . . obviously what it did wasn’t normal.
It
wasn’t normal.” She looked at my leg again. This time she knelt down. When her hands touched me they were cool and covered in whatever oil she’d been stirring, then spilled on the ground. As she rubbed the oil over my wound, the smell intensified, but I didn’t work with oil either for magic or cooking. I couldn’t identify the scent.

“Trust me. He shifted,” I said.

“I’d heard the stories, but . . . ” She held up a hand. “Give me your shirt.”

I pulled it over my head. She folded it around her hand and wiped oil and blood from my skin.

I continued, “What did you think the bird was, if not a son?”

She refolded the cloth and wiped some more. “A bird. An agent of someone, his moves orchestrated.”

“Orchestrated? By who?”

“The sons obviously, eh.”

“But you believe it now? Believe they can shift?” I hadn’t seen a son shift before today either. I had to admit it was hard to believe they could. Amazons couldn’t shift. Why could their sons?

She tilted her head side to side in grudging agreement. “I believe I underestimated them. I believe next encounter I’ll be ready.”

On that we both agreed.

She returned to my wound, tying the cloth around my leg. When she stood, her expression was tame, almost soft. “The damage isn’t bad, puncture wounds only. I expected much worse.”

“Because it was a wolverine?”

Her eyes unreadable, she replied, “Because it stopped you from doing your job.” Then she strolled from the clearing.

With a growl, I followed.

Amazons had owned the safe camp since the area was settled. We—not me, being in my nineties, I wasn’t born yet—built the farmhouse not long after.

When Thea and I arrived at the house, the yard was empty. Thinking everything was under control, not knowing we had lost the child yet, the Amazons had gone about their normal tasks. It was approaching time for dinner. The hearth-keepers would be in the kitchen. The warriors were exercising the horses in one of the lower fields, and the one artisan staying with us was off doing whatever artisans did . . . drawing or carving or something.

“Do you have a plan for retrieving the baby?” Thea asked.

Her voice startled me. I wasn’t used to being questioned, not even by the high priestess. But Thea wasn’t Alcippe, our old priestess; she was younger, probably used to being bolder and sharing more responsibility in how a camp was run.

That, of course, didn’t mean I had to answer. Especially since the answer was no. I had no idea how to find the sons now. And even if I did, I was fairly certain getting the baby back this time was going to be a lot harder.

And I wasn’t sure how much time we had. But after talking to the son in the woods, I had an idea
why
they wanted the child . . . revenge, pure and simple.

Payback for every son an Amazon had killed or maimed in the past.

I stayed up most
of the night, pacing outside. I had gathered the tribe as soon as they had returned to camp from their various tasks. It had been awkward telling them we had lost the child, that the two sons had stolen her back, but they deserved to know.

There had been a few dark looks darted from face to face, but that was it. No one questioned us. It wasn’t their place. They knew if their assistance was needed, Thea or I would tell them. Until then they were to just go about their regular lives.

After the circle broke up, I’d stayed outside . . . thinking, wishing I could go back in time and stop what had happened.

I tilted my face up to the sky.

The moon was full. Artemis was strongest at the crescent, on the sixth day of the new moon. That was when I could count on being filled with her fierce energy, but any night the moon was in the sky, I felt her. And tonight I needed her.

The baby was back in the hands of the sons. I didn’t know how long they’d had her before we rescued her the first time or exactly what they had planned for her, but knowing they had her, could put in place whatever scheme they had at any moment, ate at me.

I wanted to rally the tribe and race out to defeat them. Problem was, I had no idea where the sons might have gone. The council had given Thea the address in Beloit. I had put in a call to my contact, Kale, when we got home, asking for more assistance, but calls to council members went to voice mail, and mine had yet to be returned.

I stared up at the moon for a moment longer, praying Artemis would look down on me and gift me with some skill to find the sons and save the child.

But I knew it didn’t work like that, knew Artemis had already gifted me with all the skills I could expect to have. New ones didn’t just drop down from the trees.

So if I wanted to find this baby, I would have to find the talent to do so inside myself.

I just hoped for the child’s sake that wouldn’t take too long.

After only a few hours of sleep I awoke later than normal, but still early. I checked my wounds before leaving bed.

I’d discovered a second injury on arriving home last night—a bloody slit in my thumb. It throbbed a bit this morning, but was obviously nothing to be disturbed by. I spared a glance at it before moving on to the bigger concern—the bite on my leg.

As I pulled off Thea’s makeshift bandage, I saw she had been right. There were four distinct puncture wounds, two seriously deeper than the others, but none dangerous to me or my leg.

And none nasty enough to explain the pain I had felt when I stepped into the clearing. The incident was already fading from memory, though . . . perhaps it hadn’t been as bad as I recalled. I was tense at the time. That amount of anger and frustration could easily have amplified my reaction. I was calm now, though, and ready to find the sons.

I left the wound open to the air. It would heal quickly. I could already put weight on my leg with no pain, and I didn’t need a bandage as a reminder of what had happened.

I left my room and stepped into the hall. There were sounds coming from the kitchen—the hearth-keepers fixing breakfast and preparing goods for the farmer’s market in Madison, Wisconsin, in three days. It was a weekly event during the summer for us. Technically everything sold at the farmer’s market was supposed to be a Wisconsin product, but we weren’t big on technicalities, and a small piece of land the tribe owned in northern Wisconsin provided a convenient address for the paperwork. Marketgoers knew us as Amazon Farms, and they loved us. Who wouldn’t?

I personally didn’t frequent the market; Lao handled it and handled it well. I seldom went to Madison at all.

But Thea had said the bird last night was heading north. Madison was north, as were the only two sons I knew how to find. I’d met both of them in the fall, or seen them at least. We hadn’t exactly sat around the fire and exchanged war stories.

One worked for my friend Mel in her tattoo shop as an artist. The other, his mentor, was an older man confined to a wheelchair. His handicap was the result of the old Amazon ways, when we still killed or maimed our sons to keep them from becoming threats.

If the council didn’t call this morning with a new direction, searching out whatever sons I could seemed a sensible step. So a trip to Madison would clearly be in order.