Amazon Ink

Chapter Four

Candidate number four dressed like she was trying out for some rock-chick reality show. Unfortunately, she was over forty and the black eyeliner didn’t do her crow’s feet any favors. However, she was also prompt and female. What more could I ask for?

“I don’t do feet,” she announced, plopping down into a chair. “And I don’t do cover-ups. Not my job to be fixing someone else’s mistake.”

Okay. Feet didn’t tend to be anyone’s favorite part of the body to tattoo, and I could understand her stance on trying to cover up someone else’s work-kind of.

“Maybe we should talk about what you do do.” I riffled through her file, searching for her résumé. I pulled it out and scanned it. “You have a very impressive list of experience here.”

“I know my stuff.” She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back against the wooden office chair. Her slashed tee slipped off one shoulder.

“So, what you do…” I prompted.

“’Bout anything. I’m not picky. If they can pay, I’ll tattoo ’em.” She reached up to pat the shell of hair spray that kept her streaked hair in its high-rise ponytail. “Oh, except memorials. Can’t stand memorials. Had a guy a few years ago who was blubbering before I even had the stencil on him. It was embarrassing.”

Okay. No feet, no cover-ups, and no memorials. She had just described 40 percent of our business.

“Well, let’s look at what you brought with you.” I held out my hand for the manila envelope she had shoved into the chair beside her.

As she pried it out from beneath a leather-covered thigh, I tried to maintain a positive outlook. I just needed an extra set of hands. So, she had a few self-imposed limits. I could work around that.

Ignoring the coffee stains on the outside of the envelope, I pulled out a stack of papers. On the top was a giant red rose with a feather dangling from one leaf.

“Nice,” I commented and flipped to the next page. A group of yellow roses designed to fit onto the lower back. I smiled and turned to the next one. A rose wrapped around a heart. I was beginning to see a theme. Giving my guest a weak smile, I spread the remaining pages across my desktop. Nothing but roses in the entire bunch.

“You like roses.”

She gave me a surprised look. “Of course; it’s my thing.”

At my blank stare, she continued, “Rose.” She pointed to herself.

Oh yeah, her name-Rose. “But you do other things, right?” I tried to keep the statement positive.

“Sure, sure. I told you. I do it all.”

“Except feet, cover-ups, and memorials,” I couldn’t help but add.

“That’s right.” She nodded her head, a look of complete sincerity on her face.

While I was trying to decide if Rose was worth her numerous thorns, Bubbe appeared by the open door. When she saw I was inside the office, she disappeared. She was quick, but not quick enough. There was no missing the ancient bone knife she grasped in one hand, or the squirming rabbit dangling from the other.

Uh-oh. My chair screeched across the wood floor as I shoved it away from my desk. My gaze shot back to Rose. “Well, thanks for stopping by. I have a few more interviews today, then you’ll hear back from us.”

She frowned. “Hey, but what’s the pay? My last job, I rented. Gave the shop twenty percent for the space. You work out a deal like that?”

“Hard to say.” I grabbed her by her fuchsia fingertips and jerked her out of her seat. “My office manager will give you a call.”

Checking her manicure, she cast a suspicious look over her shoulder at me and stomped out. I waited until the door to the shop closed behind her before spinning on my heel and going in search of Bubbe.

The door to her basement office was closed.

I didn’t knock.

“Bubbe, what exactly do you think-” I stopped midtirade. A suburban mom dressed in yoga pants and pink cami top glanced up at me. In her hands was the stone knife, which shook violently above the quivering body of the rabbit. Bubbe held the rabbit by feet and ears.

“Bubbe!” I shrieked.

The soccer mom jumped backward, letting the knife clatter onto the cement floor. Bubbe barely cocked an eyebrow.

“Yes, devochka moya,” she replied.

Bubbe liked to speak in Russian, especially in front of her clients. Her childhood was spent roaming the steppes in what is now called Russia, and everything from her clothing to her accent was calculated to remind you of that. Never mind that she had lived in America for around a hundred and fifty years.

“Drop the rabbit,” I ordered. I wasn’t completely sure what Bubbe had in mind for the little cottontail, but I didn’t need locals thinking we practiced animal sacrifice.

“Pfft.” She turned her back on me and gestured to the wide-eyed woman who had pressed her back so tightly against the wall I was afraid she’d leave a perfect size-six impression in the concrete. “Pick up the knife,” Bubbe told her.

The woman glanced from me to Bubbe, obviously weighing which one of us was more dangerous. It was times like this I wished I’d inherited my mother’s six-foot-two-inch frame. Unfortunately, without it, I just didn’t look intimidating. And, thanks to Bubbe’s high priestess status, she didn’t need it.

My grandmother murmured a few words, and the air around her seemed to shift, making her look larger and darker. Cool air nipped at my ankles. The old reprobate was actually casting a spell to strengthen her position. I could have countercast but, number one, I didn’t want to alert her to my newly found powers and, number two, me taking on Bubbe magically would have been like a field mouse taking on a cougar.

I still could have stopped her, but it would have meant throwing myself across the room and knocking her to the ground. Not exactly a tale I wanted Bubbe’s client to be sharing with her friends over lattes. I couldn’t give up completely, though. So, drawing myself up as tall as I could, I took a step forward and did my best to look threatening.

The soccer mom’s gaze danced from me to Bubbe to the knife. Her hands quivered, and a thin sheen of sweat appeared over her upper lip.

I stared her down, willing her to stay safely against her wall and away from my grandmother’s bunny-killing plans.

Bubbe murmured something else and flicked one finger toward the other woman’s midsection. Her lower lip clamped between her teeth; the suburban mom folded her hands over her lower stomach, then with a breath that made her entire body shiver, squatted and slid her hand toward the knife.

I hated when my bluff was called.

“Bubbe,” I warned.

My grandmother ignored me. “Remember what I told you. Just run it down his body.”

I couldn’t let this go on. Annoyed with Bubbe for giving me no more notice than she would a snot-nosed youngster, I took a step forward, right into the soccer mom’s path.

“I said to stop.” I faced Bubbe, fairly confident the other woman wouldn’t decide to use the knife on me instead of the rabbit.

Still holding the bunny tight, Bubbe sighed, her lined face tired and sad. “What are you so afraid of, devochka?”

“Nothing, but you can’t do this”-I motioned around the room-“here.”

“This?” She shook her head. “You don’t even know what ‘this’ is. If you did, you wouldn’t have your-what you call it?-panties in such a wad.”

I flushed. This was not a conversation I wanted to have in front of a customer-even if she was Bubbe’s customer.

“She will not hurt the little bunny. Just give him a shave. Hair, that is all. No blood.” She looked back at the woman. “You want a baby? Come. Let’s finish this.”

I blinked. Hair? That was it? I’d embarrassed myself to save a rabbit from a close shave-literally? Even more embarrassed, I mumbled an apology under my breath and stumbled from the room.

“Amazons gave up paying a blood price, even rabbit blood, four hundred years ago.” Mother stood in the doorway of her gym, dabbing her chest with a damp towel. Wet with sweat, her light brown hair looked almost as dark as mine. “You know that.”

My mind stuttered. Blood price-could that be what the dead teens were? An arrow in my head began to whirl. Was this the killer’s motivation?

“All Amazons?” I asked, my mind wrestling with the suspicion.

“We’re talking about Bubbe.” She gave the towel an impatient snap and stalked back into her gym.

I glanced toward my grandmother’s workroom, guilt causing my gaze to fall short. I loved Bubbe, but still…I thought of the rabbit, his ears clutched in Bubbe’s fingers. How could Mother expect me not to think she was going to kill the little carrot snatcher?

Feeling somewhat justified, I turned and followed Mother. Her gym was cool and quiet, as if the stacks of iron weights soaked up any stray noise that dared attempt to enter the room. Usually I found the place relaxing, but today tension streamed from Mother. My sense of vindication quickly dissipated, and I had to resist the urge to twist with discomfort like a guilty two-year-old. I covered with attitude.

“I never know what Bubbe may do,” I said, defensiveness raising my voice.

She snorted. “You know what she won’t do. She never supported the blood price or the mutilation. None of it. None of her children ever suffered-not even her sons.”

“Not even her sons,” I repeated, my fingernails jabbing into palms. Yet another sore spot. In the last few days it seemed like every scab I had had been picked to bleeding.

I’d first learned about my grandmother’s sons when I was pregnant with my own. When they were only hours old, she’d left them on a doctor’s doorstep-helpless little bundles, discarded, forgotten. I hadn’t understood it then, and I didn’t understand it now.

Mother picked up a fifty-pound dumbbell and began doing curls. I’d have thought she hadn’t noticed the effect this topic still had on me, except for her next words. “Just because you didn’t want to give up the boy you carried, doesn’t mean Bubbe did anything wrong. You need to let it go.”

Harsh as her words sounded, she didn’t say them in a bad way-more resolved and a tad morose-like she had let me down. Which she had. Pretty much everyone had.

I’d never considered the abortion that many pregnant Amazons chose when they carried a male child. And at first I’d even agreed to give my son up for a human adoption, thinking in the long run it would be for his best, but then, as he grew inside me, as I’d felt him move, seen his foot shoving against my stomach, I’d lost my resolve.

It was almost the twenty-first century at the time. Amazons had all but disappeared from history, most people thinking us nothing more than legend, made up. Wasn’t it time for us to give up the old ways we still clung to? To blend with humans rather than live on the outskirts, stealing and cheating while telling ourselves it was okay because we were superior-descended from gods?

I’d told everyone my plan, knowing it would be rough at first, but trusting that the women around me would understand, that those I’d grown up with, especially, would support me. I’d been wrong.

And then the unthinkable had happened. An otherwise problem-free pregnancy had ended-but my child didn’t survive. I didn’t even get to hold him. His body was carted off while I was still passed out, buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in the northern Illinois woods.

Amazons were strong. They didn’t die in childbirth, and neither did their children.

Try as they might, no one could convince me my child had been the first. I even knew who had been responsible, but no one wanted to listen. The loss of a son? Not worth stirring up trouble in the tribe-if my accusations were true, the Amazon in question had just done what she thought was right. And as current high priestess of the safe camp, she’d had that right.

I had taken my daughter and left.

Bubbe and Mother had followed. They had never asked forgiveness for not standing by my side, but they had left the tribe, and that was huge. For Harmony’s sake, I’d found it within myself to forgive them, but not the rest. Nothing in the world could make me forgive them-just like nothing in the world could make me encourage Harmony to become one of them.

Lost in unpleasant thoughts of the past, I walked over to spot Mother as she slid under a barbell loaded with weights.

She pushed the heavy load up and held it for a count of ten before lowering it again to her chest. She completed eight more reps before continuing.

“You need to let it go.”

“What happened? Where are they?” I couldn’t help but ask, my anger melting into something close to melancholy. I’d wanted to keep my child so badly; how had Bubbe turned her back on not one son, but three?

My mother jumped up, took two more ten-pound weights from the nearby rack, and slid one on each end of the bar. “I don’t know. It was long before me. She gave them away. You know that.”

Something flickered in Mother’s eyes, making me wonder if there was more she didn’t want to tell me-didn’t want to risk opening my only partially closed wounds even further. Or maybe she actually experienced regret for not knowing her brothers.

I picked up the towel Mother had dropped and ran the rough material through my hands.

“You think they’re still alive?” I asked, my gaze drifting to the corner of the room. Somehow I couldn’t bear to look at Mother when she answered.

“Who?” Mother had slid back under the bar.

I let my gaze flit back. She knew what I was talking about-it was just her way of telling me she’d had enough. Well, I hadn’t.

“Your brothers,” I replied.

Hands tight around the bar, she stared up at me. “Half brothers.”

I made a whatever motion with my hand. To ensure secrecy and survival, Amazons didn’t go for long-term relationships. Most likely all of Bubbe’s children were from different fathers.

Mother huffed out an impatient breath. “Alive? I doubt it. Men can’t be Amazons. They would have had mortal life spans.”

I hadn’t thought of that. It made it all sadder somehow. “How about their kids?” I asked.

“More like great-great-grandkids, if anything. Too many greats to matter.” She started to lift the bar but stopped, letting it settle back onto the stand. “You’re forgetting the point. Bubbe never went along with tradition for tradition’s sake and she never sanctioned harming a living creature without cause. You need to trust her-trust us. Trust that being an Amazon is a good thing-something you should share with Harmony.”

Like that was ever going to happen, especially now, when my suspicions were growing that the person who had deposited the dead teens on my doorstep was an Amazon sending me some ugly message. Disgusted with the whole topic, I dropped the towel onto her bare midriff and turned to leave.

“Melanippe,” she called after me. I was tempted to keep walking, but catching a glimpse of her expression, I waited. The flicker I’d noticed earlier was back in her eyes. “The people you can count on most are those like you-start trusting them.”

Then she plopped back down on her back, gritted her teeth, and bench-pressed more weight than a pair of NFL linebackers hyped up on two thousand dollars’ worth of illegal steroids could.

I shook my head. People like me? If they were out there, they weren’t Amazons. That I knew for sure.

Swallowing the dry lump in my throat, I left.

I took the front steps, the ones that led to the main entrance of the school and a small landing, then continued on to the first floor and my shop. Mandy had left the doors open, and a crisp fall breeze tossed a few early leaves onto the parquet.

My chat with Mother had left me disturbed, again. It added to the angst I’d been barely keeping reined in since discovering the first dead teen and being forced to get back in touch with my Amazon skills.

I had spent the last ten years trying not to think about the whole Amazon thing. And although living with Mother and Bubbe had made that difficult, if I tried really hard, I could go weeks, months, without dwelling on what the Amazons took from me-how my life would be different if I had been born something other than an Amazon.

Thinking about Bubbe’s sons out there, somewhere-or at least their descendents-brought it all screaming back at me. What an insane tradition. Cutting off half the population, your own sons, brothers, and fathers, because they were male. Not that humans hadn’t done it too, didn’t still do it some places. The irony being they tended to dispose of their females, leave them out in the cold or drop them down a well. However, human wrongdoings didn’t lessen those of the Amazons.

And…I paused on the landing and placed a shaking hand against the wall…I wasn’t guilt-free. The realization rocked me to my core. I couldn’t do something as simple as hire a man to work for me.

How could I expect to get past what had happened to me and to raise Harmony as a modern, accepting human when I refused to even consider a highly qualified male as a tattoo artist? I was a total hypocrite.

The realization lowered my already dipping self-image to something barely above complete waste of water and carbon.

I leaned my forehead against the cool plaster and closed my eyes. I’d spent the last ten years feeling all high and mighty, superior for lowering myself to mingle with humans, but when you boiled it down, I was as biased as any Amazon.

The only thing I had done differently since my son had died was hide-from other Amazons, our past, and the truth of who I was.

I lifted my forehead and stared out into the front yard at the crumbling base of the old flagpole and the sign propped against it stating our hours.

I might not be able to undo thousands of years of wrongs. I might not even be able to lead the dead teens’ souls to their loved ones, at least right now, but I could change a few hard-held prejudices. I thumped my fist against my chest.

I turned and ran up the steps to my office and my phone.

My unpleasant self-realization and my decision to break the chain of old prejudices made me feel better for the rest of my workday. But as I puttered around, getting ready for bed, the glow wore off and the faces of the two dead teens floated back to the forefront of my brain. I brushed my teeth seeing their images instead of my own in the bathroom mirror. After forcing myself to return to my room and bed, I managed to get to sleep, but awakened less than an hour later, still thinking of them. I waited another hour to do something about it.

I crept out the front and walked around to our small side yard. The way the school was angled on the lot protected the area from street view, and a row of eight-foot-tall holly bushes cut us off from our neighbor’s house. Someone could look down from the windows above; Mother’s bedroom was on this side, but it was toward the back. I picked a spot close to the front, under the kitchen window.

After a quick glance around, I squatted back on my heels and placed the flashlight I’d covered with cloth to dim the beam onto the dirt next to me. It was one A.M., a time of morning I’d come to dread-waking tense, alert for any sound. This time no outside force had awakened me-just my own nagging guilt. I had to know if the Amazons had gotten my message, and the middle of the night was really the only time I could be somewhat confident my family would be occupied and not stumble over me casting spells. Any of them discovering I even could cast spells was not something I wanted to deal with.

So one A.M. and here I was, squatting in the dirt, ready to call on Artemis and find out if the Amazons had gotten my message. Artemis might not be able to direct me to the girls’ killer, but she could certainly help me plug into the tribe.

I flattened my bare palms into the soil, connecting, letting my body soak in the power that pulsed from deep in the earth’s core. I needed all the strength I could get to do this. Linking myself spiritually to the Amazons again, after all these years…it was something I’d thought I’d never do.

Shaking off a renewed swell of anger-this one completely selfish, angry that the killer had chosen me to suck into her twisted world, leaving me with no choice but to face my heritage, at least to a degree-I carefully plucked acorns from the leather pouch I’d stolen from Bubbe’s workroom and piled them in front of me. Next, I unwrapped two tiny stone figures: a bear and a leopard, not too different from the ones I’d left at the safe camp. The fetishes would help me link to the girls’ families. If my message had been received, the totems would tell me; their clans’ mourning would tell me.

I built the fire, a tiny one, but big enough, I hoped. I couldn’t risk anything larger; performing the ceremony in my side yard was risky enough. I certainly didn’t need the neighbors calling the fire department on me.

As the fire crackled, I tossed one of the acorns onto the blaze and murmured a prayer to Artemis.

“Artemis, huntress of the moon, guide me along the path to truth. Grant me the strength to see through the mist, to feel what those of this totem feel, to know what otherwise they might hide from me.”

Smoke snaked from the fire: twisting, turning, morphing.

The world shifted beneath me and my nails gouged into the damp earth. The musky scent of decayed leaves filled my nostrils, then the smoke shifted again, this time taking on the round shape of a bear ambling through the woods. My breath caught in my chest. I reached out and grasped the bear totem in my hand.

Sorrow pierced me like a spear. The pain was so sudden and intense that I almost dropped the tiny stone figure. Gasping in a breath, I clutched the fetish tighter, pushed past the sorrow, and felt for what I knew would follow.

Anger pulsed against me. Revenge, retribution, the need was tangible. Flashes of steel, women flipping across a grassy clearing, fighting, training…my heart beat faster, as if I shared their exertion. Then the mood switched-darker, faces I couldn’t make out gathered around a fire, a big fire, a council fire.

My own anger leapt at the sight. My hate for the council that had cost me so much was interfering with the vision.

Nostrils flaring, I tried to separate myself from the vision, to keep my past and emotion from intruding. I gripped the bear figure tighter in my hand and rubbed my thumb over its head, apologizing for my weakness, begging Artemis to forgive my digression. I squeezed my eyes shut until tears leaked out, but the effort was fruitless. The connection was lost.

I opened my eyes and, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, watched as the smoke thinned, spiraling down back into the fire, until I stared at nothing but a few smoldering embers.

I still held the tiny bear. Unclenching my fist, I let it drop onto the dirt. My palms pressed into the earth again; I hung my head and struggled to breathe.

My message had been received-at least for the first girl, and since I’d left the fetishes together, reason said for the second too. I waited for the guilt to diminish. I’d done my part. I’d warned the Amazons. But my wait was futile. There was no relief, no feeling of completion-just a hollow sickness deep in the pit of my stomach.

The girls were still dead, and I was still involved.

After hiding all signs of my clandestine spell-casting, I stumbled back to bed. I didn’t expect to sleep, but somehow I did. Then around three, the sound of crying woke me. I clutched the wool blanket, my thoughts first rushing to Harmony-my mommy instincts in full force even though she hadn’t suffered from night terrors since she’d been four. But the door to my bedroom was closed, no towheaded preschooler gazing up at me from the side of the bed.

Now, sitting upright, I touched my fingers to my fevered cheeks. They came back wet. The sobs had been coming from me.

A nightmare. I must have been having a nightmare. Not surprising, considering my life lately.

Scrubbing the moisture off my face with the wool blanket, I tried to settle back down, to brush aside the anxiety that still clung to me.

Then I felt them. The dead girls. Their presence weighed on me, then flitted away, only to return an instant later to tug at me like the impatient child I’d imagined when I first awoke.

They wanted me to help them, were becoming more restless as their fruitless wandering went on.

I tried to shake the feeling off and told myself it was just the remnants of my nightmare-the heightened sense that came with waking deep in the night.

But it was a lie. As my mind wakened more fully and became less hazy, their presence grew stronger, not weaker.

Something had them trapped, and the little piece of my soul that had gone with them when I’d performed the death rites wasn’t enough to keep them calm much longer. Their panic was growing, was big enough to be a tangible force in the small space of my bedroom, clawing over my skin, making me want to curl into a ball to protect myself.

Why is this my problem? Why did their killer choose me?

I picked up my pillow and flung it across the room, knocking a lamp to the ground with an earth-shattering crash.

The noise seemed to settle them. I waited for them to reappear or one of my family, awakened by the noise, to knock on my door, but all was quiet. I breathed in, my chin dropping to my chest, and my fingers crimped the blanket.

Damn it all. I didn’t want to be involved, didn’t want to face my past. Didn’t want to be responsible for the souls of two dead teenagers.

Something flickered past me then, just a whisper of a touch, as if the girls were waiting, watching.

I refused to look up, as if staring at the navy blue wool of my blanket would make the nightmare I’d been thrown into disappear. I sat there the rest of the night, until dawn turned the sky outside my window a peachy pink and the morning sun broke the link between spirit and mortal.

No dead girls’ spirits around to plead with me for help, to make me question who was more barbarous-the Amazons I’d left behind or me.