Amazon Queen by Lori Devoti Read Free Book Online

should take them.”
    I didn’t move; I couldn’t. “Take them?”
    “They are superior weapons to what we have now.” She glanced at the knife I held.
    “So we should take them and use them,” I repeated.
    She opened her mouth to reply, but I was already past her, already headed for the back door. I didn’t bother to check the lock. I lifted my foot and kicked in the door.
    There was a click. Instinct told me to move a step to the side, but heat smacked me in the face and a force flung me backward. After that all I was aware of was noise . . . an explosion and the sensation of my body flying through the air.
    The cabin had blown up.

Chapter 4

    I was thrown twenty
feet, into the woods. My back hit a tree seconds before my butt hit the ground. I cursed and tried to stand. Pain grabbed me, like someone had slipped my spine into a vice and was twisting down the handle, trying to twist me too. I gritted my teeth and tried to convince my mind it didn’t feel the pain, didn’t feel anything at all.
    Doubled over, I staggered forward.
    The cabin was an inferno; smoke billowed from the hole that had been the roof. The leaves on the closest trees, curled from the heat.
    “Thea?” I called. Amazons were hard to kill, harder than humans anyway, but a fire like this? Nothing could survive it. Still bent at the waist, I jerked off my shirt and wrapped it around my face, then I lurched toward the fire. She hadn’t been in the cabin, hadn’t even been as close as I had been. Surely she had survived.
    Heat slammed into me. Fire roared forward like a live beast unleashed and set on destroyting its captors. There was a crash. One of the cabin walls had fallen in; ash and bits of red-hot coals sprinkled the ground and my bare skin.
    I brushed them off and circled to the right. Entering the building without knowing the priestess was inside would be suicide—entering it at all would be suicide, but if I could hear her, knew she was there, I’d do it. It wouldn’t even be a choice.
    I paced slowly over the area near the back door where I’d last seen her, listening and searching for some sign.
    After five minutes I had to stop, had to bend lower to find air not clogged with soot. There was none. Even outside the actual fire, I felt as if I had been dropped down inside a potbelly stove.
    I’d decided walking back and forth like a trapped bear was getting me nowhere when two old farmers in a pickup with a water tank in the back arrived. Based on the hoarse yells of the ragtag pair, I gathered they’d had a hard time making it down the drive. I also knew if one of them had called in the fire, I had fifteen, twenty minutes tops to get out before the real fire department arrived.
    They started spraying the trees closest to the cabin. I’m sure the structure itself appeared to be a lost cause.
    I marched forward, doing the best job I could to hide my still-throbbing back and held out my hand for the hose. The man stared at me as if I’d stepped out of the fire with the complete intention of pulling him back in with me. Frustrated, I grabbed the hose and soaked myself down, shorts, hair, and the shirt tied over my face.
    Then I dropped the still-flowing hose onto the ground and headed back to the fire.
    The other man found his voice. “You can’t go in there.”
    I ignored him, made it all of three steps before it began to rain, soft, almost a mist. It felt insulting, like a god was laughing at me, teasing me. I turned to stare at the cabin. It was already consumed by the fire.
    I had to face that even an Amazon couldn’t have survived that.
    And the fire truck couldn’t be far away.
    I wasn’t too worried about the farmers being able to identify me with my face covered by my shirt and my body by soot or that they would have paid much attention to the Jeep, but the firefighters were a different matter. I would have to move the Jeep before they came down the narrow road and spotted it. I was a witness, chances were they’d at