survive.'
A chill tripped up my spine. The bowl of oil, the knife. . 'She had been setting up for the ceremony when I arrived.'
'The knife will be with her, in the house,' Kale murmured. 'We need it too, to keep this from happening again.'
I agreed. I couldn't wait to see Thea again, to call her Padia to her face and expose exactly who and what she was to the tribe.
I just prayed Mel was right and any power she had over the camp was fleeting. If so, all we had to do was separate her from them and everything would go back to normal.
She didn't play by Amazon rules, but she knew them. Which meant she also knew what to expect from us.
The only way to defeat her was to do something she wouldn't have planned for, something completely out of character for Amazons.
Meaning we couldn't rush in, we couldn't depend on our hearts, we had to use our heads.
When I made the announcement, Bubbe muttered, but then she clasped her hands behind her back and didn't object further.
We had waited until full dark to gather in a crescent in view of the moon. Athena was a sun goddess, Artemis a moon goddess. From now on, if our battle went past this night, Mel insisted we plan our attacks for when the moon was in the sky, when Artemis was the strongest and Athena the weakest.
Kale had objected that it would be what Thea expected, but she was overruled. As Mel said, we had to assume the safe camp Amazons were under Padia's influence, at least for now. Which meant we were still outnumbered and in need of every advantage we could find.
So, change one: night was our friend.
Change two: we didn't attack head-on.
We were outnumbered. Approaching your enemy from the front might be honorable, but in these conditions it wasn't logical.
Tonight we would become spies. We would sneak into the safe camp and grab Padia without waking anyone else.
That, at least, was the plan.
Change three: we spent actual time discussing how best to unarm the priestess.
We had decided her powers were mental: putting thoughts into people's heads, blocking memories, and, I suggested, moving things.
'What kind of things?' Jack asked.
'Rocks, knife blades.' I described the rocks exploding from the ground and the knife moving in my hand while I battled to hold it still.
No one spoke. We looked at Bubbe.
'It is possible,' she replied, her face solemn.
'Anything else?' Mel asked.
I glanced at Mateo. He had returned an hour earlier. I hadn't had a chance to talk to him yet, but I suspected he had another of Padia's skills to tell us about.
'She has spies,' he said, his accented baritone startling in the gloom. We hadn't lit a fire or torches. We weren't calling on the goddess and didn't want to risk a fire alerting anyone to our presence, something we hadn't worried about earlier. . another change.
'What kind of spies?' Mel again.
'Owls.'
Another wave of silence.
'When you found Cleo in the hay, an owl flew from the rafters.'
'We startled him,' Kale said.
Mateo moved, I sensed he was smiling although I couldn't see his expression in the dark. 'Yes, but he didn't fly because he was afraid; he flew because it was his job. He was a lookout, there to let Padia know if Cleo escaped.'
'Let her know. . ' Mel's skepticism was palatable.
'I followed the owl, kept him from returning to the camp, then snatched him from the sky. Owls here aren't used to having to fear other birds. . ' I sensed the smile again. 'He screamed his warning, his message that the nest had been violated.'
'The nest?'
'Cleo's storage place,' Mateo explained. 'He fought to escape, but not for his life. . to deliver his message. His message, the warning, consumed him. I held him as long as I could, to allow you all to escape, then I released him, followed him back to whoever had planted the mission in his brain.'
'And?'
'The priestess, Thea. She was standing outside the barn with the warriors. He landed on her shoulder. . '
'He did?' Kale asked.
'He did,' Mateo spat. 'She broke him. His freedom is gone. His mind is gone. He sat on her shoulder for only a second, then flew off again. He seemed lost, searching for something he couldn't find. . '
'Perhaps he was looking for something else,' I offered.
'No, Mateo is right. If she could do what she did to me and Cleo. . imagine what she could do to a bird,' Kale said, her voice soft but bitter. 'She has to be destroyed. We shouldn't wait. We should find the blade and kill her tonight.'
Kale's words had been harsh, and understandably so, but I couldn't give in to the temptation of acting on them. We needed Thea alive long enough to tell us where she had hidden Tess and Andres. I made sure everyone understood that before we set out to capture the priestess.
It was midnight. The moon was no longer full, but there was enough light that I could see the house clearly. We had come through the woods. Our plan was to escape that way too, although escaping really wasn't part of my personal plan. Tonight I meant to take back my camp, or to lose the battle completely.
This time Jack would have to drag me out of the fight; I wouldn't let him reason me out of it again.
Bubbe had got us this far. She'd walked ahead of the group, checking for wards. She hadn't found any new ones, which meant either our visit wasn't expected or Padia was depending on her alternative alarm-the owls.
Mateo had taken care of them. Despite the foggy state he claimed they had been reduced to, the sight of the condor had roused three from their perches. He'd run them off, then circled the area. With the disappearance of the owls and the appearance of the giant condor, silence had settled over the woods.
Not even a tree frog or a cicada hazarded a sound.
Or maybe it was Jack keeping the forest quiet. He roamed the woods in his animal form, searching for any other sign things weren't normal in the trees.
The rest of the group had been assigned watch points too. Cleo and Kale took the barn where many of the warriors would be bedded down. Mel and Bern held positions at the front and back of the house. Lao had the driveway. And I had the house itself, the inside where Padia/Thea slept.
My fingers tingled as I strung the rope I meant to bind her with from my hand to the underside of my elbow and back up, forming an easy-to-manage loop. I was antsy, but controlled. I had to be. . head, not heart tonight.
As I pulled the rope off my arm and hooked it to my belt, my hand brushed over my new art-not tattoos, no time for that-drawings compliments of Mel and a Sharpie marker: the praying mantis for patience and focus; the dog for his ability to read humans, to anticipate our next most likely move; the leopard for stealth; and the meerkat.
