Amazon Queen by Lori Devoti Page A

how we learned of the baby.” Someone had been lying to my friend, the sons I guessed, to get her on their side for some reason.
    “She may have spoken with someone, someone who
was
on the high council . . . but they aren’t now because the high council has split. The members aren’t meeting.”
    Split? She was speaking gibberish.
    I spoke slowly. “The council has not split. The high council is the Amazons. It always has been.”
    She leaned forward; magic snapped around her. Even as talentless as I was in that area, I could feel it, like electricity. The hairs on my arms, legs, even inside my nose, stood, but I didn’t back away.
    “You can’t believe the council is the Amazons. You are not that stupid,” she muttered.
    I ground my jaws together. “You’ve gotten brave in the last few months.”
    She laughed. “No, I just realized what’s important, and what’s really worth fighting for. And the council isn’t it.”
    “The Amazons—”
    “Aren’t the council. The council was created to serve the tribe, not the other way around. Somewhere, somehow that got messed up. You can’t follow them blindly. You need to think, Zery—for yourself.”
    I pulled back. “But we are the council; we give them our power when they accept the role.”
    “Do you give them your brain, your soul, your heart? Where does it stop? Have you thought about what killing that baby would mean? It isn’t about one child—horrific as even that act would be. It’s about all of our children. Dana’s baby—he’s the son of a son, and not just any son . . . the one who was strong enough to murder three Amazons and stake out one of their queens.”
    Me. I was that queen.
    I opened my mouth to tell her again
she
was wrong—that I wasn’t looking for the baby to kill her . . .
that it was a her,
not the
he
Mel seemed to think.
    But she looked past me and kept talking. “My son. What about him? He’s second generation. They’re already watching Harmony; don’t think I don’t know that. If they find my son before I do, who will be ordered to kill him? You? Would you?” Her eyes were on me now and I discovered I couldn’t meet them.
    Something was curling around inside my heart, squeezing, making me want to run. Something she was saying rang true.
    The Amazons had killed their infant sons before, and now after we had discovered the Amazon sons had gathered together, that they had powers and one had already used those powers against us . . . it made sense some might want to return to the old ways, especially if the male child was second generation, the son of a son.
    “And Harmony, what about her? Yes, she’s a girl . . . but if she doesn’t agree with the council, doesn’t want to play the role they lay out for her, if she stays with me . . . how long before they want her eliminated too?” Mel stepped closer and forced me to look at her. “What about that? Have you thought of all that? Do you know what you will do when they point at my child or Dana’s or someone else’s you know, maybe love?”
    Despite the sick feeling her words were creating in my gut, I had to try and convince her what she was saying wasn’t true. “I don’t know what you are talking about. The baby I’m looking for is a girl and we don’t want to kill her, we want to . . . ” I paused. I didn’t know what the council had planned for the child because no one had told me . . . because without knowing, I’d raced ahead and done my damnedest to do their bidding.
    Mel leaned forward, her face grim. “It’s a he, Zery. A son of a son and a high council member. The rest of the council doesn’t want to save him, they want to kill him. I know. I’ve talked to his mother. I’ve seen the child.”
    And like that, my world crashed around me. I don’t know how I knew she was speaking the truth . . . No, that wasn’t right, I knew because it was Mel, because despite all of our fallouts I trusted her.
    I took a step back. Thea . . . the knife . . .