Лори Девоти - Amazon Queen

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.