by Lori Devoti
I exhaled through my nose. I was not used to being ordered, at least not by anyone below the high council. My arms hanging loosely at my sides, I addressed her. “I don’t expect to find the baby in Madison, just information.”
“And you can’t get that with a phone call?”
I couldn’t. I needed to see Mel face-to-face if I wanted any hope of convincing her to help the Amazons. She didn’t trust us. She might even believe the child would be better off with the sons.
“No,” I replied, then walked away.
My foot had barely hit the step when she called again. “It was my failure too. I’ll get the knife and meet you here.”
I paused. My first instinct was to turn on her, to tell her exactly who was queen and what my orders were, but when I processed her actual words, they stopped me. She had admitted fault. She suffered guilt for it. I could appreciate that, could see how she would want to be part of righting what had happened in the woods. I still didn’t want her in Madison, but I couldn’t deny her the right to fix what she had been part of screwing up. Not without hearing her out.
I continued on into the house, torn on what to do.
Thea was crouched on the ground next to Sare when I came out. I could see that the artisan was drawing rather than carving as I’d guessed earlier.
As I approached, Thea took a piece of paper from her and rolled it like a scroll.
Ignoring them both, I got into the safe camp’s car, a ten-year-old Jeep Cherokee. The Amazons who came and went had their own vehicles; this one was communal property, meaning for today it was mine.
Despite my complete lack of acknowledgement, Thea climbed into the passenger seat. I took my hand off the key. I’d told her she needed to stay at the camp. While inside the house, I’d realized no matter her guilt or desire to right her part in our mistake, she needed to comply.
She tapped the rolled-up paper she’d gotten from the artisan against her leg. “What is your plan?”
“I am going to Madison. You are staying here.”
My direct response didn’t seem to bother her.
“You haven’t explained why you think going to Madison is the answer. Seems more likely we would find out something around here.” Her thumbnail flipped the edge of the rolled paper.
I hadn’t explained because I didn’t need to explain. I still didn’t, but remembering her admittance and not wanting to put more pressure on our strained relationship, I replied, “We know the sons have the baby. We just need to find out where. There are two sons in Madison. Seems logical they might know something about the pair who has the child.”
“And you think they will tell us?” She twisted her lips to the side.
I tapped my fingers against the top of the steering wheel. “Probably not, but if I ask right, maybe someone else will. Worst case, I can watch the Madison sons. Madison isn’t that far from Beloit—the sons who stole the baby probably know the others. With their Beloit cover blown, they may be in contact for help.”
She nodded. “Makes sense, but it seems like there might be a more direct approach.” She unrolled the scroll.
And there was my fairy godfather staring up at me.
I cursed myself silently. She’d described the son to the artisan and the girl had sketched a portrait. It was a good idea, a much more direct plan than spending two hours in a car and hoping I’d be able to get information out of the sons in Madison.
“He might live near here or at least have gone into town to get supplies, eh?” she asked.
“He does,” I replied without expression, and then I started the car.
The depth of my potential failure was making it hard to speak. He was my fairy godfather, of course he lived near here. Probably within walking distance of the safe camp. Hell, he might live in our woods in his wolverine form, be the creature the hearth-keepers were constantly trying to keep away from our chickens, for all I knew.
She smoothed the drawing, ran the pads of two fingers over his face. “You’ve seen him before?”
I put the vehicle into reverse, then headed down our drive. “No, but I know he lives close by.” I couldn’t kick her out of the car now. Besides, it didn’t appear I’d be going to Madison, at least not right now.
She angled her head, obviously waiting for more of an explanation, but that was all I was giving.
Finally she looked away and started digging in a corded bag she’d brought with her—the kind that could be used as a backpack too. It was yellow, a bright sunny yellow.
She pulled out a cell phone and started punching buttons. “If he has the baby, he will need supplies.”
I watched her out of the corner of my eye. Amazons had a long-standing resistance against technology. We had a landline in each of our safe houses, and I knew a few Amazons who had those pay-as-you-go phones, but that was about it. “What are you doing?”
“Searching the Internet. Trying to see where he might go for baby supplies.”
“It’s a town of three thousand. There aren’t that many choices.” Her thinking to have the artisan re-create the son’s image had shaken me, but I was past that. “We don’t need the Internet.”
She placed the phone on her lap. “Have you ever used it?”
I hadn’t. I wasn’t even sure what it did. I stared at the narrow highway in front of me. We were out of the wooded area where we lived and traveling through the more typical terrain of fields and more fields.
“It won’t help us find the son.”
I flipped on my turn signal and turned the Jeep into the hub of life here in Deep River—Walmart’s parking lot. When I slammed the Jeep’s dented door closed, Thea’s cell phone had disappeared. I rewarded her with a jerk of my head toward the store.
We only had the one picture, so we headed first to the photo department and had a few more made. Then we split up. I let Thea take the baby section. I headed to the cashiers.
After an hour of complete failure, I was feeling much better about my initial plan to visit the sons I knew I could find.
I went to the in-store cafe where I’d arranged to meet Thea. She had her phone out again and was talking to someone. When I walked up, she punched end and stood. “I found him. He’s living in a cabin about ten miles by road from the safe camp, maybe two cross-country.”
Success, or at least a step closer.
Thea held up her phone and smiled.
My fairy godfather was about to get a visit he wouldn’t forget.
The son’s place wasn’t hard to find. It was, as I had guessed, close to the safe camp if you traveled through our woods anyway. By road it was a good distance, but it was off the main highway.
I turned onto a spindly dirt road. There were two ancient steel mailboxes stacked on top of each other right at the highway, meaning there was at least one other house on the road. If the other house was occupied by humans, this might complicate things. Humans got jumpy when weapons and magic were tossed around. I preferred to keep our encounter with the sons under the human radar.
As we were pulling in, a compact hybrid was pulling out. I moved to the side to let it pass.
It didn’t look like what I imagined my tattooed godfather would drive, but I stared down the driver anyway. A woman peered over the steering wheel as she approached. I relaxed against my seat. Unless the wolverine could also shift into seventy-year-old schoolteachers, I was pretty sure it wasn’t him.
I waited to move until she was completely past, then looked to Thea for further instructions.
“It’s at the end of the road,” she replied.
“How long is the drive?” I asked. After seeing the son had a neighbor, I wondered if we wouldn’t be better off returning to the camp and approaching the cabin on foot through our woods.
As soon as I asked, we passed another vehicle, a truck . . . the kind with dual tires on the back end. It was parked nose out. Trees crowded around it, but I could make out an oversized fifth wheel behind it and a log house beyond that.
“Not
there,” Thea commented. “It’s a bit further.”
A man in his fifties was standing beside the truck, seemed to be tinkering with some device on his dashboard. As we rolled past, I noticed a woman too, loading boxes into the trailer.
I made a point of not looking at them as we went by and I don’t think they paid much attention to me. They seemed too occupied with whatever they were doing. Right past their place there was a huge pothole; as I maneuvered around it, the truck started up and the pair pulled out, the trailer hitched up behind them.
With our potential witnesses gone, I relaxed a bit. We drove probably another quarter of a mile, then pulled off into the grass.
Thea got out first. I took my time. The son had picked a good spot. Even knowing he had a neighbor a quarter of a mile away, the place felt isolated. Of course, that didn’t mean we were alone—the son or sons could be there. I hoped they were.
With that in mind, I pulled a knife from under the backseat and signaled for Thea to creep toward the house.
The forest closed in on the short gravel drive as we approached, narrowing to nothing but two bare ruts in the grass with trees pressed in so close the branches overhead mingled into one thick canopy. The cabin, tucked in between some massive maples, was small. I guessed nothing more than one main room . . . maybe a small bedroom and bath. There was a carport thing instead of a garage; it, like the cabin, was made of unstripped logs. It looked like the son had built the place himself.
The wolverine had a little Grizzly Adams in him. A bit of old farmer too . . . the place was littered with old pieces of machinery. The kind you normally see rusting in fields as you drive down county highways.
“What now?” Thea stayed partially hidden in the trees.
The property seemed quiet. I was fairly confident our arrival would come as a surprise . . . if anyone was home. There was no vehicle parked under the carport.
Of course the bird son could have taken the car and my fairy godfather could be inside, or he could be sitting in the underbrush in his wolverine form watching us. Or another son in a different animal form could be watching us. I glanced around the clearing; a rabbit paused not far from the carport to nibble at some grass.
I froze . . . over a rabbit. My reaction was unsettling. But it was more unsettling to realize I could be staring right at my enemy and not be able to tell. If I ignored the rabbit, walked toward the cabin, he could shift and I could find an arm wrapped around my throat.
I looked at Thea. “Do you sense magic?” Sometimes priestesses could tell if magic was being worked. Of course, if the rabbit was a son, he might not be using magic right now. Maybe they used it only to shift, not to hold the shape. Not being an expert on Amazon sons or magic, I really didn’t know.
Thea closed her eyes and held out her hands.
Finally she opened her eyes. “Nothing.”
Which told me the same—nothing. Still, it wasn’t her fault I knew so little of our enemy. I hid my annoyance.
I pointed, letting her know I would circle to the back of the cabin; she was to stay where she was, to alert me if anyone approached and to stop anyone besides me from leaving.
Hoping I wasn’t just playing bird dog, that the son would be home and choose to face me, not rush for an escape route, I slipped through the trees lining the clearing.
When I was even with the cabin’s porch, the rabbit heard me and ran. I watched him escape into the trees and prayed I wasn’t making a mistake by assuming he was simply what he appeared to be.
With the horrible rabbit threat gone, I crept toward the cabin. There were two windows each about four feet off the ground. They were easy enough to peer into, but the inside of the cabin was dark. All I could make out past the grime was the rough shadow of some furniture, a couch, and an oversized chair. I moved to the second window. This one looked into the bedroom. The actual room was dark, but a light had been left on in a small attached bathroom making the contents of the space much more visible.
There were two rifles and maybe six rifle-shaped boxes lying on the bed.
Guns. Amazons don’t do guns.
We have never had a reason. We haven’t had a real enemy since before firearms were invented, and certainly haven’t since before they’d become the reliable killing machines they are today.
But now we had an enemy, and he was armed not only with the ability to shift, but also with rifles, maybe more weapons I couldn’t see through this window.
It pissed me off. Not because we couldn’t destroy the sons, we still could, but because the males were an even less worthy adversary than I had thought.
Were they so sure of their weaknesses they were afraid to face us using traditional weapons? I shook my head in disgust.
“What is it?” Thea had crept up behind me.
I stiffened. I had told her to wait.
She cupped her hands and stared through the glass. “Guns.”
I nodded.
“We should take them.”
I didn’t move; I couldn’t. “Take them?”
“They are superior weapons to what we have now.” She glanced at the knife I held.
“So we should take them and use them,” I repeated.
She opened her mouth to reply, but I was already past her, already headed for the back door. I didn’t bother to check the lock. I lifted my foot and kicked in the door.
There was a click. Instinct told me to move a step to the side, but heat smacked me in the face and a force flung me backward. After that all I was aware of was noise . . . an explosion and the sensation of my body flying through the air.
The cabin had blown up.
Chapter 4
I was thrown twenty feet, into the woods. My back hit a tree seconds before my butt hit the ground. I cursed and tried to stand. Pain grabbed me, like someone had slipped my spine into a vice and was twisting down the handle, trying to twist me too. I gritted my teeth and tried to convince my mind it didn’t feel the pain, didn’t feel anything at all.
Doubled over, I staggered forward.
The cabin was an inferno; smoke billowed from the hole that had been the roof. The leaves on the closest trees, curled from the heat.
“Thea?” I called. Amazons were hard to kill, harder than humans anyway, but a fire like this? Nothing could survive it. Still bent at the waist, I jerked off my shirt and wrapped it around my face, then I lurched toward the fire. She hadn’t been in the cabin, hadn’t even been as close as I had been. Surely she had survived.
Heat slammed into me. Fire roared forward like a live beast unleashed and set on destroyting its captors. There was a crash. One of the cabin walls had fallen in; ash and bits of red-hot coals sprinkled the ground and my bare skin.
I brushed them off and circled to the right. Entering the building without knowing the priestess was inside would be suicide—entering it at all would be suicide, but if I could hear her, knew she was there, I’d do it. It wouldn’t even be a choice.
I paced slowly over the area near the back door where I’d last seen her, listening and searching for some sign.
After five minutes I had to stop, had to bend lower to find air not clogged with soot. There was none. Even outside the actual fire, I felt as if I had been dropped down inside a potbelly stove.
I’d decided walking back and forth like a trapped bear was getting me nowhere when two old farmers in a pickup with a water tank in the back arrived. Based on the hoarse yells of the ragtag pair, I gathered they’d had a hard time making it down the drive. I also knew if one of them had called in the fire, I had fifteen, twenty minutes tops to get out before the real fire department arrived.
They started spraying the trees closest to the cabin. I’m sure the structure itself appeared to be a lost cause.
I marched forward, doing the best job I could to hide my still-throbbing back and held out my hand for the hose. The man stared at me as if I’d stepped out of the fire with the complete intention of pulling him back in with me. Frustrated, I grabbed the
hose and soaked myself down, shorts, hair, and the shirt tied over my face.
Then I dropped the still-flowing hose onto the ground and headed back to the fire.
The other man found his voice. “You can’t go in there.”
I ignored him, made it all of three steps before it began to rain, soft, almost a mist. It felt insulting, like a god was laughing at me, teasing me. I turned to stare at the cabin. It was already consumed by the fire.
I had to face that even an Amazon couldn’t have survived that.
And the fire truck couldn’t be far away.
I wasn’t too worried about the farmers being able to identify me with my face covered by my shirt and my body by soot or that they would have paid much attention to the Jeep, but the firefighters were a different matter. I would have to move the Jeep before they came down the narrow road and spotted it. I was a witness, chances were they’d at least want to hear my version of events.
Without looking at the self-appointed heroes again, I pointed my body toward the main road. Somewhere in the short trip back to the Jeep, my back pain changed from a steady throb to intermittent shrieks—shorter and more spaced out, but breathtakingly severe.
At least this new pain made me forget my leg completely. It didn’t, however, make me forget Thea or stop thinking about what I would do after hiding the Jeep.
Not that I needed to worry about hiding the Jeep.
When I returned to where I had left it, it was gone.
I’d disappeared into the woods just as the fire truck rumbled down the road. The pothole had slowed the massive vehicle some. I figured by the time they got to the son’s house, it would be nothing but ash.
Which suited me fine. I didn’t know what the story on the guns was, but I wanted the sons for myself. I didn’t want them being locked up in some human prison before I could get to them.
It took me an hour to get back to camp on foot. If I’d been whole, I could have made it in a quarter of the time. I guessed it took the son in his wolverine form even less than that.
I approached from behind the barn; the horses were out, but there was no sign of any Amazons. I was glad for the quiet, glad I didn’t have to face any of them just yet. The past twenty-four hours had taken a toll on me. I needed to at least look strong when I gathered them together and announced Thea was missing. I hadn’t worked out yet what had happened to the Jeep. My guess was the sons had seen us arrive and stolen it.
