Lori Devoti - Amazon Ink

With Harmony’s door shut and Dana tucked back into bed too-she’d wandered into the hall when I’d exploded into my daughter’s room-Mother led me into the kitchen and put a kettle of water on the stove.

Mother cooking. Things were worse than I’d imagined.

After a few minutes, she set a mug of hot water and a packet of instant cocoa on the table in front of me. I shook the packet and poured it into the water, more for something to do than because I wanted the cocoa.

Mother pulled out a chair across from me and sat, just watched me while I stumbled through stirring the mix into the water with a dirty spoon still on the table from dinner.

“There’s something you aren’t telling us,” she announced after I’d finally submerged the last of the mix into the cup.

“There’s much she isn’t telling us.” Bubbe walked into the room, her staff tapping with each step. She stopped next to the table. “Good she starts with the spirits who circle.”

My head snapped up. My grandmother held my gaze. How long had she known?

Mother straightened, her eyes shifting back and forth between Bubbe and me. I glanced at her, then down at my cup.

“I thought the killer…” I wrapped my hands around the cup, let the warmth seep into my fingers. “They came when Zery…I was afraid.”

“Who are they, Mel?” There were lines on Mother’s face I’d never noticed before.

I looked at Bubbe. She took a breath. I didn’t need to tell her. She knew. “How can we help, if you don’t trust?” she asked.

I grabbed the cup tighter and started to talk. I told them about finding the girls, about releasing their spirits and moving their bodies. I told them about going to the safe camp and delivering the totems, about trying to break into Bubbe’s office to learn more. I told them everything-except why I hadn’t told them before.

I saw the hurt and confusion on their faces, the realization that I didn’t trust them. Suddenly, I couldn’t look at them anymore. I dropped my gaze to my cup, stared at the hot cocoa my mother, the warrior, had made for me.

“Both of the girls who were killed went to this one bar, and were pictured on the Web site. Three other girls were too. Dana was one of them. When the girls’ spirits came back, I panicked.”

“You didn’t try to speak with them?” Bubbe moved closer, placed her gnarled hand on mine.

“No, but the last time they came was when Zery-” I looked up. “Zery.”

I shoved my chair back and headed for the steps. Mother and Bubbe were right behind me. The trip down the stairs felt longer than it ever had before. The ridged metal strips attached to the edge of each step cut into my feet.

I reached the doors first, didn’t wait for my family, jerked the doors open and fell onto my knees. A body…blond, face turned away from me, lay on the cold concrete porch. My hands shaking, I couldn’t bring myself to touch her, didn’t want to live this again…didn’t want to know…

“Mel! What? Who?” Zery stood a few feet away, a sword held in a halfway position, like she was lowering or raising it, I couldn’t tell which.

“Zery?” Relief hit me. A laugh exploded from my constricted chest. My hands dropped and brushed the body before me, reminded me Zery might be safe, but someone else wasn’t.

Zery raised her sword higher, crossed the few paces between us. “Step back, Mel.”

When I didn’t move, she pointed the blade at my throat.

I lifted my hands and edged my body backward.

“Who is it?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I thought it was you-was afraid-”

She shook her head in return, her hair moving around her face as she did. “Don’t say anything and don’t move. Whatever you do, don’t move.” Her voice was shaking. There was a slight tremble in the blade as well.

Behind me the doors creaked open. Bubbe and Mother. I could feel them, smell the scents of my home drifting out and mixing with the night air. It should have been comforting, but it wasn’t.

Couldn’t be.

My best friend was holding a sword to my throat, and she meant to use it.

“Put it down.” Mother, her voice strong, missing the deference she’d normally show a queen, was back to the voice she’d used on Zery when we were little and got caught messing with Mother’s weights. Rolling them across the room. Staging races.

Bubbe ignored them both, moved forward to place her hand on the woman’s shoulder and carefully roll her onto her back.

Pisto, her face peaceful, lacking the hate I’d seen sketched there the last time she’d looked at me.

My breath caught and my gaze shot to Zery. The sword moved up and down, as if she’d forgotten she held it. Mother jerked me backward, behind her.

The action seemed to knock Zery out of her trance. Her arm stiffened. She took a step forward.

“Why?”

Mother stood between us, and despite my efforts I couldn’t get around her. “She didn’t do it.”

“I saw her, and she laughed. She sat over Pisto and laughed.”

“From relief. I thought it was you.” I darted far to the right, out of Mother’s reach, made it past her to a spot not far from where Bubbe murmured over Pisto’s body. With my grandmother and Pisto between us, I stared at my old friend, willed her to believe me. “I didn’t care for Pisto, but I didn’t kill her.”

“Like you didn’t kill the other girls? How did you get their totems? Alcippe said you brought them to camp; I didn’t believe her. I convinced myself she’d made a mistake, that her dislike of you was coloring her perceptions. But it was you, wasn’t it? You killed them and now Pisto. Tell me why.” Her sword arm was stiff, her stance stiff too, rigid with anger.

“There is no why. I didn’t kill them, any of them.” I took a breath, prayed she’d believe what I was going to tell her. “I found them, like this, on my front porch.”

“On your front porch?” She shook her head. “I know you. You can do better than that.”

I held out my hands. “I can’t. It’s the truth. I don’t know why, but the killer brought them to me-woke me with a rock tossed at my window. I came down and they were here. The first one…when I realized she was an Amazon…I didn’t know what to do, had no idea who to trust.” I rubbed a hand over my forehead. “What would you expect me to do? What kind of greeting would I have received if I’d shown up at the safe camp with a dead Amazon teen in my truck? I convinced myself I had no choice, took her totem, released her spirit, then left her somewhere I knew she’d be found, so the police would be called in.”

Zery looked away, at the brick wall of my shop. I was sure she wasn’t even seeing the dusty red bricks and cracked mortar, that her mind was spinning as out of control as mine.

“The second…well, I realized the tribe might not even know. I had to do something to alert you. So, I brought the totems.”

“So, you brought the totems,” she repeated, like some kind of automaton.

“But the dead girls, they’ve been visiting me. They came tonight. I knew something had happened. I just didn’t know what.” I looked down at Pisto then, the full reality that she was dead setting in.

Bubbe brushed hair off the dead warrior’s face, started to fold her hands like I’d done with the others, then with her fingers posed above Pisto’s right breast, Bubbe paused and looked up at me.

I pressed my hands together in front of my lips, in a praying posture. “Like the others,” I murmured.

New creases formed on my grandmother’s face. I could tell she was disturbed. I wanted to ask her what she thought it meant, why anyone would mutilate the girls so, but as the question formed in my mind, Zery sprang back to life. She paced forward, her sword extended.