by Lori Devoti
I snapped to attention then. He knew about the telios.
He turned around, lifted his shirt up to his shoulders. A fox peered at me from the center of his back. The animal’s paw was poised above the stream, like he was about to dip it into the current, search for a fish. It was a beautiful tattoo, alive and real enough it could have been a telios, but it was wrong-the wrong animal, in the wrong place, and on a male back.
“That isn’t a telios,” I replied.
He pulled his shirt the rest of the way off, high on his right shoulder was another tattoo, a lynx. Again the vibrancy of the colors, the way it seemed to glisten and move as if alive, gave it the appearance of a givnomai, but it was also wrong.
He pointed at it.
I shrugged. “Nice.” That’s all I was giving him. I didn’t know where he’d learned as much as he had, but I wasn’t giving him any more.
He stepped closer. “Touch it.”
His arm moved. The skin under the tattoo shifted, making the lynx seem to move too-but it was an illusion, that was all. There was no magic in that ink. There couldn’t be.
“It won’t bite.” He grinned-a challenge.
I placed my palm on his arm and immediately jerked back, stunned. The tattoo had pulsed under my hand, vibrated with power.
I stared at the lynx, half expecting the tiny animal to jump off Peter’s arm onto my desk. I’d seen…survived…stranger things in the last eight hours.
Peter held out his arm again, in an impossible to miss invitation. I swallowed my hesitancy and placed my palm to his skin. There was no missing the power in that ink. I pulled my hand back a second time, but slower.
Peter turned, presenting his back. Prepared this time, I stroked the line that formed the fox’s head, followed it down his back to the orangey-red, then white, then black stripes on his tail. Throughout, Peter stood still, but I could sense him reacting. His muscles tensed, as if the skin were sensitive, as if he were containing some response.
When he turned, his eyes were almost black, dilated. My body reacted in return. I licked my lips and tried to stop my mind from wondering how it would feel to have his fingers stroking my givnomai and telios. Did he feel my power when I touched his?
But what he was saying wasn’t possible. Mother would surely have noticed something as obvious as telios and givnomai tattoos on any man she was intimate with.
I tapped my fingertips against my palm. “Even Mother wouldn’t have missed those.”
He stared at me, as if reluctant to be pulled out of the moment. Finally, he yanked his shirt back over his head. “You missed them.”
At my startled look, he continued, “When you were fathered, not everyone had the tattoos. As I said, you were the first. We’ve grown a lot since then, learned a lot.”
I couldn’t let his earlier statement go. “But you said, I missed them? You and I, we never…”
He smiled, that sexy slow smile that had drawn me to him in the first place.
“Not me, Harmony’s father…and your son’s.”
“Michael?” There was a quaver in the word.
“Did you think it was strange they kept their shirts on, didn’t let you touch their bare backs or shoulders?”
I frowned, thinking back. It was true both men had worn shirts every time I’d seen them…been with them. And Michael…he’d preferred a position where my hands couldn’t reach his back, not easily. Harmony’s father…he’d held my hands, something I’d thought was sweet and sensitive at the time.
I looked up at Peter, knew he saw the realization in my eyes. “So, Harmony and…?” I paused. My son. It suddenly occurred to me he was alive somewhere. I’d been so focused on my grandmother’s betrayal, I hadn’t taken time to consider what it meant. But if what Peter said was true, if the sons were organized, kept track of each other…maybe somehow they could help me find him. Joy shot through me. My son. I might be able to meet him.
“Second lineage.” Pride shone from Peter’s eyes.
I frowned. There was something I was missing here, something important. “Was it planned? Did Michael and Harmony’s fathers seek me out?” An ugly, dark feeling crept over my skin, dimming the joy I’d felt just seconds earlier. “What are you doing? Selective breeding?” The queasiness was back.
“It isn’t like that.”
I curled my lip. “What is it like? These ‘sons’ sought my mother and me out, planned for us to get pregnant. Who does that? And why?”
“I think you have this backward. Your mother and you-all the Amazons-seek out men with the plan of getting pregnant. And you have criteria when you do. Don’t lie and say you don’t. Has any Amazon you know picked a man who didn’t fit some ‘ideal’?”
Dana. Dana hadn’t, but he was right. Most Amazons picked their men based on the obvious genes they’d bring to the match. Physical strength being number one in desirability. We were shallow because it didn’t matter. We didn’t plan on building a life with this person. I started to say as much, then realized there was no way to make that sound good.
“Maybe it’s in our DNA,” he continued, “but the Amazons’ sons want the same thing. We want our children to be as strong as they can be-we just had a different set of ideal traits.”
“And all of them had to come from Amazons.”
He raised a brow. “We weren’t interested in getting stronger-not physically. We were interested in regaining some of what the Amazons have lost over the thousands of years since being fathered by Ares.”
No mention of Otrera, mother of the Amazons, I noted.
“And what’s that?” I asked.
“Ares was a god-immortal, magical, all powerful.”
“You want to be immortal?” This was beginning to sound like a bad villain speech. He just needed a mustache to twirl.
“No.” He hesitated, averting his gaze for a second before looking back. “We want to rejoin the Amazons-to be seen as equal, not something to be tossed aside.”
It felt like all the oxygen had been sucked from the room. I couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. “All the sons. They want to join the tribe?”
“Not all.” He moved his gaze again-a move I’d seen my daughter use just last week when she had wanted to go to the mall with Rachel and “claimed” all her homework was done.
“What do the rest want?” I asked, tension coiling inside me.
“The sons who survived have been through a lot. Best case they were abandoned by their mothers, worst they were killed or maimed.” He touched his right shoulder, where the lynx was.
“Your givnomai…?”
“Is on the limb the Amazons seemed to prefer when they mutilated their sons.”
The right arm, made sense. It was the arm Amazons most often broke or removed to keep their sons weak. It was also completely sick and made me once again despise where I’d come from. And in an even sicker way, those Amazons of old had been right. They’d mutilated their male offspring to keep them from growing up strong, from becoming a threat.
But Bubbe and a few others of her generation had put a stop to that.
Bubbe. How would she react to this?
Unable to take any more, I sat. Confusion, twisted loyalties, ancient truths that weren’t-all of it swirled around me until I couldn’t sort one thought from another.
Then suddenly everything fell into place. “Finish. What do the rest want?” But I didn’t need to hear his answer. What would I have wanted? What had I wanted?
His lips thinned. “We’ve tried to track down every son, to tell them who they are if they are old enough to understand. The little ones…we position ourselves in their lives. Train them without their adopted parents finding out.”
At my questioning look, he continued. “Teachers, softball coaches, even babysitters. We take whatever job we can to get close to them and gain their trust.”
“And?” He hadn’t got to the ugly part yet, and there was an ugly part-uglier than what he’d told me
so far. There had to be.
“But there are sons who don’t agree with us. Some work openly against us, finding Amazon children before we do, accusing members of our group of all kinds of things to keep them from getting close. Then working with the boys themselves.
“And in a few cases, boys we’ve trained have turned-either joining the other group or just walking away.”
“That’s not bad, though.” That was what I had done.
“Maybe not.” But his face said it was.
“What brought you here, Peter?”
I didn’t believe he’d come here to seduce me. That had been my initial thought, but if that had been his purpose, revealing himself to me now would have made no sense. Then I thought about what he’d just said, about getting close to the children of Amazons. Until now it had all been boys, but until I had left the tribe, the only Amazon offspring out and about in the real world were boys.
I was back on my feet. “Harmony. How long have you been watching her?”
“She’s special, Mel. The first child to be second generation. We had to watch her.”
Something dark and elemental wove through me, made my hands open and close, made my mind begin to shift through the magic at my disposal.
“Keep away from her. Go back to your little nest and tell the others. No one trains my daughter but me.”
“But you haven’t been training her. She’s fourteen, almost an adult. You hadn’t even given her her givnomai yet.”
I shook my head, my body shaking too. It was none of his business, no one’s business but mine, what I shared with my daughter or didn’t, when or if I trained-“What did you say?”
He stared at me, confused. “You haven’t trained her. You don’t even know what skill sets she has.”
I stepped around my desk, moved to within an inch of him. “Her givnomai. What did you say about that?”
“You hadn’t-” Then he realized his slip. I could see it on his face. He stepped back, held up one hand. “She needed one. You know that. If she’d waited much longer, it might not have worked.”
The givnomai was given during puberty when powers were thought to be forming. The telios came later, when the girl…or boy…became an individual, symbolically left her family, but through the tattoo kept their strengths with her.
And there was a killer out there collecting them. A killer who knew who I was, who had some kind of perverse interest in me, and had already attacked one person I loved. My hand formed a fist. I pulled back my arm and slugged Peter, or tried to. With the reflexes of a lynx, he caught my fist in his hand. Stared at me, his eyes wide.
“She needed one, Mel.”
My body was shaking-anger and fear for my daughter crowding out all rational thought. “Not your decision.” He’d touched my daughter. I wanted to kill him.
“She’ll be safer now. Her powers will grow.”
She wasn’t safer. She was in danger. It was all I could think of. I couldn’t even concentrate on my rage, on the desire to blast Peter to tiny bits. All I could think of was Harmony, and the killer.
“I have to get to her.” I was mumbling to myself, but out loud. I turned, Peter all but forgotten, until he grabbed my arm.
“She’s fine. Why are you panicking? You’re a tattoo artisan. I know there’s some reason you hadn’t done this yourself, but now that it’s done, can’t you see that it’s a good thing? And Harmony wanted one. She came to me.”
She came to him. Like that justified anything. My anger began to bubble again, to break through the surface of worry. How could he even begin to think that made this okay? Or did he?
I took a step back, looked at him with new eyes. What did I know about Peter? Obviously not very much. But I’d seen his tattoo work, knew now that he had Amazon blood, bore tattoos with power. What else? Did he have priestess…priest…skills too? Could he be the killer?
Of course he could.
Chapter Twenty-five
I closed my eyes and tried to hide the emotion racing through me.
Peter’s hand grazed my arm. I took another step away, this time toward the window. Once there, I shoved it open, felt the cool, slightly damp air of a day that had turned gray flow into the room. The wind pushed my hair away from my face-I welcomed it.
I didn’t know if Peter had priestess skills, but I was about to find out.
I pulled in a deep breath, then turned. Peter was staring at me, his brows lowered, a line between his eyes. He held out his hands as if about to say something, ask something.
I didn’t wait to hear his words. I let go, let the wind blast from my lungs. The force of it almost sent me reeling backward out of the window. I dug my fingernails into the old wood of the window’s frame to keep from falling. My fingers ached and my back snapped against the top of the double-hung frame, but I stayed in the room, my gaze glued to Peter.
The wind should have hit him full strength. I’d done nothing to signal my move, but he still seemed to have known. As the air rushed across the room, less than a heartbeat from when it would have hit him, he dropped to a crouch-stayed there, balanced on the balls of his feet and splayed fingers.
My initial inhale spent. I grabbed the first thing my fingers reached, a terra-cotta saucer that had sat under a long-dead plant and now gathered dust and loose change. I whirled it across the room, aiming a foot or so higher than Peter’s head, instinctively guessing that he wouldn’t sit still and wait for my missile to hit. As it left my fingers, I spun them in the air, adding momentum.
I didn’t wait, didn’t watch to see if my impromptu Frisbee would hit its target, I started grabbing everything I could find-books, painted rocks, even a Xena Warrior Princess doll my employees had given me as a joke-never realizing how close to the mark they’d hit. All went flying.
I could hear them hit, could feel the floor shake as Peter leapt to escape. An old tattoo machine in my hand, I pulled in more air and glanced in his direction, ready to spin a shield if he threw magic my way.
He was crouched again, his gaze on me and his muscles tense. I could see the question on his face-like I was the one doing something wrong, who’d gone crazy.
I threw the machine, let go of a blast of air at the same time. For one second he was trapped-between where I’d aimed the blast and the machine.
Indecision shone in his eyes, and I knew I had him-that he was about to reveal his true talents. I expelled the air out of my lungs, moved my hands in a circle, and chanted, using the air to form a barrier between me and whatever magic was about to be propelled toward me. And as I did all of this, I kept my gaze on Peter. My chest tightened; I knew once he attacked I’d quit playing, attack him for real-kill him rather than let him kill another girl.
He leapt again, toward me, blurred as he moved. I squinted, unable to make out what was happening, what he was doing. Suddenly he was back in focus, but it wasn’t Peter flying toward me. It was a lynx-just like the one I’d seen tattooed on Peter’s shoulder.
Stupidly, I dropped my hands, dropping the shield as I did. The cat hit me square in the chest, knocking me back against the wall. My fingers wrapped in its gray-brown fur. I pulled on its head, tried to keep its teeth from sinking into my neck.
I slipped and we fell, tumbling to the ground and rolling. The lynx’s front paws wrapped around me and its feet wedged against my stomach. I could feel its breath on my neck and I tried not to panic, knowing the claws on those back feet could tear into my gut, easily do as much damage as its teeth. I groped around the floor as we moved, frantically trying to find something…anything I could use to fight the creature.
My fingers wrapped around a metal ruler and I pulled back my arm, determined to somehow thrust it through the animal’s throat. Then the creature began to blur again. I froze, fixated on what was happening, unable to process what I was seeing…or not. And suddenly, lying on top of me, staring down into my eyes, was Peter.
“What the fuck?” I said, dropping the ruler and shoving against him with every ounc
e of strength I could muster. I quickly realized my hands were pressing against bare skin-that Peter was completely naked.
He rolled off me and moved to a sitting position. His leg was bent, hiding anything too shocking, but with the amount of bare skin revealed, I couldn’t stop myself from dropping my gaze to the floor.
My heart was pounding as if it might explode from my chest. Peter had turned into a lynx; my mind skittered trying to understand that.
I exhaled, no magic this time, just a way to release some of the confusion swirling inside me. “What…” I looked up, stared at his face. “What did I see?”
He moved one shoulder. “Me.” He tilted his head, studied me. He wasn’t even winded-looked cool and calm, analytical, even. “So, it’s true. Amazons don’t shift? You haven’t seen that before?”
I dropped my face to my hand, let my fingers drag across my skin as I looked back up. With them closed and still lying against my lips I answered, “No. I’ve never seen that before.” I’d planned to force him to reveal his skill, and I had, but it hadn’t been what I’d expected, not at all. A lynx hadn’t killed those girls, not that Peter couldn’t have other skills as well, but…I shook my head. I didn’t believe he was the killer, not anymore.
The corners of his lower lip pulled down; his head nodded. “That’s what I’d heard, but…” He shrugged. “We didn’t know for sure. There’s a lot about the Amazons we don’t know.” He walked over to where his clothes lay in a haphazard pile.
I couldn’t find the strength to follow him, to stand, to do anything but sit on the floor and stare at him. Too much adrenaline had shot through me, too many certainties proven false in too short of a time. I felt deflated, lost like a balloon blown away by the wind…floating.
“The sons can all shift, but not until after we get our givnomai. That’s one reason I thought it was so important for Harmony to have hers.”
“You think Harmony will be able to shift into her givnomai?” I couldn’t imagine, or worse-I could. I wanted to ask what tattoo he had given her, what animal I could expect to face the next time I banished her to her room, but I didn’t. A givnomai was personal. She’d tell me when…if…she wanted to.
