Amazon Ink

Chapter Twenty-four

I made it to my office and was in the process of shutting the door when a hand thrust against the other side, stopping its closure. My thoughts shot to Reynolds.

“I didn’t give you permis-” I jerked the door open, and stared into the chocolate brown eyes of Peter.

“You didn’t give me…?” he asked. His tone was teasing, but his eyes were dead serious. I knew instantly another shock was coming my way.

I left his question unanswered, moved to my desk, and collapsed into my chair. He followed me, reached down, grabbed me by the forearms, and pulled me back up. My chest was pressed against his and, in any other state of mind, I’d like to think I would have shoved him away, but I didn’t, I just let him hold me there, and when his lips lowered to mine, I didn’t object.

His kiss was firm, reassuring-like he knew the turmoil I was going through and wanted to make it right. I wanted someone to make it right, maybe that’s why I let him kiss me, why I leaned against him just a little, opened my lips beneath his.

His tongue found mine and my hands found their way around his neck. His hair tickled my fingers. I wanted to stand there, and forget everything for a while. Pretend I had no bigger issues to deal with than the risk of another employee or a client walking in and finding me hanging on him like an adolescent lost in her first make-out session.

He pulled back just a smidge, enough that our lips separated but our bodies were still pressed together. My breath was ragged and my heart was pounding, but this time it felt good. I felt alive, was happy I’d come back.

“I need to tell you something.”

And like that, my happiness fled.

I loosened my fingers, took a step back, ignored the sudden feeling of loss. “Why’d you do that?”

He ran a hand down my arm, caught my fingers in his. “Because I knew I might not be able to again, not after we talk.”

A ball of dread grew in my stomach. I sat down, more to get away from him, to keep myself from touching him, than to relax. There was no hope of the latter.

He exhaled and walked to the other side of my desk, to the window that overlooked the cafeteria and gym. “I know about the Amazons.”

I stiffened, but then forced myself to relax-or appear to relax. “You mean the women renting the gym? Is that what they’re calling themselves now?”

“I know about you…that you left the tribe, that you were pregnant, but never appeared with the baby.”

My fingers curled around the arms of my chair. He’d been eavesdropping.

His gaze turned on me then, and I knew it was more than that-he knew more about me than I’d ever dreamed possible; he was involved somehow in my life. “Where is he, Mel? What happened?”

I stood, didn’t think about it, just did. “Leave.”

He shook his head. “Bad start. Sorry. It’s just…we’ve wondered for so long. We’ve been able to track almost all of the others, but your child-the one we had the most interest in, he…” He looked at me. “It was a he, wasn’t it?”

I couldn’t answer, but I didn’t want him to leave. I wanted to hear what he had to say. The hand I’d raised when I’d ordered him to leave drifted back down to rest on my desk. “Who the hell are you?”

He stepped away from the window. “I’m an Amazon.”

I laughed without humor. He was crazy. “You are not an Amazon.” I’d felt the evidence of just how male he as when we’d kissed.

“A son.” He watched me then, waited.

I blinked, confused. “A son?” What he was saying sank in then. “You are the son of an Amazon?” I asked.

He nodded, his eyes still alert.

I looked at my computer screen, black and covered in a coating of dust that didn’t show when it was on. I wasn’t sure how to play this-if I should play this.

“There aren’t a lot of us-not as many as there are Amazons, but we’re growing, finding those who don’t know their heritage, bringing in those who we can.”

I leaned back and let my chair rest keep me vertical, hoped my upright posture hid the shock that threatened to send me sliding to the floor. “But why? Why would the sons gather together? What do you want?”

He frowned, an angry line forming between his brows. “Heritage. Support. Understanding.”

“But Amazon sons…” Took after their fathers. Weren’t Amazons.

“I’m as much an Amazon as you are…or”-a strange look flitted over his face-“most Amazons anyway.”

There was something about his tone, the way his eyes didn’t quite meet mine. “What do you mean most Amazons? Why single me out from the grouping?”

“You were the first.”

“The first what?” I was feeling queasy, didn’t want to hear more, but also couldn’t help myself from asking.

“The first child of a son and an Amazon.”

“What?” I couldn’t keep the confusion out of my voice, and outrage, what he was saying…It was possible, of course, the Amazons didn’t keep records of the male lines, but to say my mother…I shook my head. The odds were too great. Part of the benefit of moving around like we did was to avoid the type of inbreeding he seemed to be insinuating.

“This is ridiculous.” I shoved my chair back from my desk.

He moved forward, leaned over my inbox. “Not that. I’m not saying your father was your grandfather or whatever you’re thinking. I’m saying your father was a son of an Amazon-a different Amazon, not your grandmother or your mother, a whole different line. Telios, right?”

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.