Lori Devoti: Amazon Ink

The first book in the Amazon series, 2009

Thanks for making this book a reality go to my editor, Paula Guran, who took a chance on something a little different, and to Holly Root, agent extraordinaire and professional Slurpee splitter. Next time, you get your own straw!

And thanks to Madison, Wisconsin, for being the perfect place for a family of Amazons to blend.

Not again.

My gaze darted around the old school yard, searching for whoever had left the dead teenager on my front porch.

I was hoping the intruder was still nearby, close enough to catch and deal with myself-right now and for good-but the acre of grass and trees that surrounded our home and business was quiet.

No more than a minute or two had passed since the rattle of stones thrown at my bedroom window had roused me. I knew-this time-to go to the front door. But there was nothing. No cars. No autumn wind. Nothing. Even at one in the morning, at least an occasional car should have been zipping down the street that lay only a football field’s length away. My home was a little over a mile from the University of Wisconsin campus and it was a Saturday night, Sunday morning, technically; a few drunken students if no one else should have been traveling along Monroe Street, but the night was silent-deadly so.

I glanced down at the girl lying on her back on my front steps.

I almost stepped on her. There was something particularly disturbing about that. My hands shaking, I shoved the hair back from my face, tucked it behind my ears, and knelt next to her.

Maybe this one is different. A thin hope at best, but I clung to it, my fingers wrapping around the tiny wolf fetish that hung from a cord around my neck. The stone figure in my hand offered a small amount of reassurance, calmed me.

Maybe my first impression was wrong…maybe she was still alive. Maybe, unlike the first girl I’d found dead on my doorstep only weeks before, this one still lived.

I repeated the words in my mind: maybe she is different…

A prayer to Artemis leaving my lips, I reached out, ready to lay my fingers against her throat. As I did, I couldn’t help but take in her youth, her closed eyes. So innocent. So like Harmony.

My fingers curled back into my palm and my heart pounded; the words echoed through my head. Harmony. A flash of panic, then forced calm. It wasn’t Harmony. My daughter was asleep, safe inside. I stood anyway, started to turn back to the wide double door of the old school behind me-to check-but I stopped myself. My need to see her was just maternal instinct pushed into overdrive. I had to stay calm, controlled. I couldn’t leave this girl alone, not yet. I glanced back at her.

I took a deep breath and kneeled again, but even as I did, I knew I was lying to myself. There was no heart beating inside the body beside me.

Still, I pressed my fingers to the girl’s throat.

Her neck was stiff, hard to my touch. I ran my fingers down her arm, met with the same cold, unresponsive feel. She wasn’t alive, hadn’t been for hours.

A curse formed in the back of my head, but I tamped it down. Whoever, whatever this girl had been, she’d suffered enough indignities. I had no right to add to them. My duty now was to ease her passage, not soil it with my own anger, frustration, and fear.

I lowered my chin to my chest, reflected for a minute, and tried to slow my racing mind enough to draw on my past, my training. I didn’t practice the skills taught by my Amazon high priestess grandmother, but they were still a part of me, as impossible to deny as the horrible truth of this girl’s death.

Pretending the moisture threatening to escape the corners of my eyes didn’t exist, I took one more calming breath, then did the best I could to fold the girl’s stiff arms over her chest, touched my thumb against the bridge of her nose, and murmured another prayer. This one asking for free and peaceful passage of her spirit-that whatever took her life wouldn’t hold back her journey from this world to the next.

I tried to steel myself for what came next, but it was just as hard this time as last. The girl’s body sighed, not audibly, more of a feeling, a whisper of energy as her soul slipped from her form and wafted away, hopefully to join whatever loved ones had preceded her in death.

The ritual drained me, a piece of my own spirit leaving with hers, accompanying her. I’d recover, but not until her soul found peace. By performing the rites, I’d promised her that.

Normally, I would have been myself again in a matter of minutes, hours at the most, but I had yet to recover from the last one.

Which meant something was terribly wrong.

Like finding two dead girls on my doorstep wasn’t wrong enough.

I rested my weight back on my heels and stared down at her.

Just like the first one, she was young-under twenty. Older than Harmony, but not enough that I didn’t still fight the urge to go check on my sleeping child. I forced myself not to, though. Harmony was fine. No one had intruded our home. Only the yard…the steps. That was as far as my visitor had got.

After successfully reassuring myself, my attention went back to the girl.

Did the similarity between the two dead teens stop with their age? Only one way to know.

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.