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.