I snapped to attention then. He knew about the telios.

He turned around, lifted his shirt up to his shoulders. A fox peered at me from the center of his back. The animal’s paw was poised above the stream, like he was about to dip it into the current, search for a fish. It was a beautiful tattoo, alive and real enough it could have been a telios, but it was wrong-the wrong animal, in the wrong place, and on a male back.

“That isn’t a telios,” I replied.

He pulled his shirt the rest of the way off, high on his right shoulder was another tattoo, a lynx. Again the vibrancy of the colors, the way it seemed to glisten and move as if alive, gave it the appearance of a givnomai, but it was also wrong.

He pointed at it.

I shrugged. “Nice.” That’s all I was giving him. I didn’t know where he’d learned as much as he had, but I wasn’t giving him any more.

He stepped closer. “Touch it.”

His arm moved. The skin under the tattoo shifted, making the lynx seem to move too-but it was an illusion, that was all. There was no magic in that ink. There couldn’t be.

“It won’t bite.” He grinned-a challenge.

I placed my palm on his arm and immediately jerked back, stunned. The tattoo had pulsed under my hand, vibrated with power.

I stared at the lynx, half expecting the tiny animal to jump off Peter’s arm onto my desk. I’d seen…survived…stranger things in the last eight hours.

Peter held out his arm again, in an impossible to miss invitation. I swallowed my hesitancy and placed my palm to his skin. There was no missing the power in that ink. I pulled my hand back a second time, but slower.

Peter turned, presenting his back. Prepared this time, I stroked the line that formed the fox’s head, followed it down his back to the orangey-red, then white, then black stripes on his tail. Throughout, Peter stood still, but I could sense him reacting. His muscles tensed, as if the skin were sensitive, as if he were containing some response.

When he turned, his eyes were almost black, dilated. My body reacted in return. I licked my lips and tried to stop my mind from wondering how it would feel to have his fingers stroking my givnomai and telios. Did he feel my power when I touched his?

But what he was saying wasn’t possible. Mother would surely have noticed something as obvious as telios and givnomai tattoos on any man she was intimate with.

I tapped my fingertips against my palm. “Even Mother wouldn’t have missed those.”

He stared at me, as if reluctant to be pulled out of the moment. Finally, he yanked his shirt back over his head. “You missed them.”

At my startled look, he continued, “When you were fathered, not everyone had the tattoos. As I said, you were the first. We’ve grown a lot since then, learned a lot.”

I couldn’t let his earlier statement go. “But you said, I missed them? You and I, we never…”

He smiled, that sexy slow smile that had drawn me to him in the first place.

“Not me, Harmony’s father…and your son’s.”

“Michael?” There was a quaver in the word.

“Did you think it was strange they kept their shirts on, didn’t let you touch their bare backs or shoulders?”

I frowned, thinking back. It was true both men had worn shirts every time I’d seen them…been with them. And Michael…he’d preferred a position where my hands couldn’t reach his back, not easily. Harmony’s father…he’d held my hands, something I’d thought was sweet and sensitive at the time.

I looked up at Peter, knew he saw the realization in my eyes. “So, Harmony and…?” I paused. My son. It suddenly occurred to me he was alive somewhere. I’d been so focused on my grandmother’s betrayal, I hadn’t taken time to consider what it meant. But if what Peter said was true, if the sons were organized, kept track of each other…maybe somehow they could help me find him. Joy shot through me. My son. I might be able to meet him.

“Second lineage.” Pride shone from Peter’s eyes.

I frowned. There was something I was missing here, something important. “Was it planned? Did Michael and Harmony’s fathers seek me out?” An ugly, dark feeling crept over my skin, dimming the joy I’d felt just seconds earlier. “What are you doing? Selective breeding?” The queasiness was back.

“It isn’t like that.”

I curled my lip. “What is it like? These ‘sons’ sought my mother and me out, planned for us to get pregnant. Who does that? And why?”

“I think you have this backward. Your mother and you-all the Amazons-seek out men with the plan of getting pregnant. And you have criteria when you do. Don’t lie and say you don’t. Has any Amazon you know picked a man who didn’t fit some ‘ideal’?”

Dana. Dana hadn’t, but he was right. Most Amazons picked their men based on the obvious genes they’d bring to the match. Physical strength being number one in desirability. We were shallow because it didn’t matter. We didn’t plan on building a life with this person. I started to say as much, then realized there was no way to make that sound good.

“Maybe it’s in our DNA,” he continued, “but the Amazons’ sons want the same thing. We want our children to be as strong as they can be-we just had a different set of ideal traits.”

“And all of them had to come from Amazons.”

He raised a brow. “We weren’t interested in getting stronger-not physically. We were interested in regaining some of what the Amazons have lost over the thousands of years since being fathered by Ares.”

No mention of Otrera, mother of the Amazons, I noted.

“And what’s that?” I asked.

“Ares was a god-immortal, magical, all powerful.”

“You want to be immortal?” This was beginning to sound like a bad villain speech. He just needed a mustache to twirl.

“No.” He hesitated, averting his gaze for a second before looking back. “We want to rejoin the Amazons-to be seen as equal, not something to be tossed aside.”

It felt like all the oxygen had been sucked from the room. I couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. “All the sons. They want to join the tribe?”

“Not all.” He moved his gaze again-a move I’d seen my daughter use just last week when she had wanted to go to the mall with Rachel and “claimed” all her homework was done.

“What do the rest want?” I asked, tension coiling inside me.

“The sons who survived have been through a lot. Best case they were abandoned by their mothers, worst they were killed or maimed.” He touched his right shoulder, where the lynx was.

“Your givnomai…?”

“Is on the limb the Amazons seemed to prefer when they mutilated their sons.”

The right arm, made sense. It was the arm Amazons most often broke or removed to keep their sons weak. It was also completely sick and made me once again despise where I’d come from. And in an even sicker way, those Amazons of old had been right. They’d mutilated their male offspring to keep them from growing up strong, from becoming a threat.

But Bubbe and a few others of her generation had put a stop to that.

Bubbe. How would she react to this?

Unable to take any more, I sat. Confusion, twisted loyalties, ancient truths that weren’t-all of it swirled around me until I couldn’t sort one thought from another.

Then suddenly everything fell into place. “Finish. What do the rest want?” But I didn’t need to hear his answer. What would I have wanted? What had I wanted?

His lips thinned. “We’ve tried to track down every son, to tell them who they are if they are old enough to understand. The little ones…we position ourselves in their lives. Train them without their adopted parents finding out.”

At my questioning look, he continued. “Teachers, softball coaches, even babysitters. We take whatever job we can to get close to them and gain their trust.”

“And?” He hadn’t got to the ugly part yet, and there was an ugly part-uglier than what he’d told me so far. There had to be.