I gently rolled the girl onto her side and pulled her thin T-shirt up, baring her lower back to the night air.

A tattoo of a leopard snarled at me. What appeared to be a telios, the Amazon symbol of their family clan.

My lips thinned to nothing more than a line. Not the same, but similar. Now the hard part. I lowered the girl onto her back and again adjusted her shirt, this time to pull it low, down to the top of her right breast. A round circle of skin about the size of my balled fist was missing-the cut precise, even, and unending. Done with either great skill or care.

I stared blindly. The coincidence was too great. The tattoo on her back-a leopard, one of the twelve totems of the Amazon tribe. The other girl bore a bear. And both had the missing skin-exactly where a givnomai, personal power tattoo, would be. Removed either right before or right after their deaths.

Please, Artemis, let it be after.

The girl’s blond hair caught in the breeze, tangling across her face, the motion in the dim light of my battery-powered lantern making her look alive for just a second.

I lowered my chin to my chest again and let emotion I’d denied earlier waft over me-sorrow, frustration, then anger. Someone was killing these girls…Amazon girls…and leaving them on my doorstep. A threat? Some kind of twisted gift? Or a warning?

Did the killer know the symbolism of the animals on the girls’ backs and of the fetishes hanging from their necks? All Amazons did. Thoughts that had been nagging at me, that I hadn’t let fully form in my brain, forced their way forward. Two dead girls, both Amazons. Could the killer be an Amazon-or just someone the tribe had angered? If another body were to show up, would it bear yet another of the twelve totems? Was there a plan to target each family? If so, it would mean the killer had to be an Amazon. No one else knew about the tribe and certainly not the significance of our totems.