“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.