Predator (8 page)

“Really?” Bree refrained from getting her hopes up. If Seamus recognized it that fast, how unusual or important could it be?

“Hang on.” Seamus crossed to a table next to the glass tanks, slid out a box from underneath, and rummaged through it. “I thought it was here…” He dragged out another box and piled the contents on the floor. Once the box was empty he said, “I remember it well. It was shorter and not as thick, but just as sharp at the end. Looked almost exactly like that one. Don’t know for sure what it is, but I can tell ya it’s like nothing I ever seen. Maybe part of some prehistoric animal or something?”

“Where’d you get it?” Liam asked.

“It came in with a bunch of other stuff, maybe two, three years ago. Some guy cleaning out his da’s collection after he died. Couldn’t wait to get rid of the stuff. The da was some kind of digger. Always searching for buried treasures and such. If I remember right, that’s also where the shrunken head came from.”

Although Seamus had no idea what the object was, Bree was excited. There was more out there. A world of buried things not yet discovered. Things that would further reinforce her belief about the bog body and prove she was right.

A young couple entered the tent. “Come in. Come in,” Seamus said, waving them further inside.

“Thanks for the help,” Liam said.

“Ya sure there’s nothing else I can do for ya mate?”

Liam shook his head.

“I’ll text ya before we leave town. Maybe we can get together for a bit. It’s been a while. We’re heading out to Dublin day after tomorrow and then a half dozen cities after that. Won’t be back for weeks.”

“That’d be great,” Liam said. “And thanks again.”

“Any time, mate. Ya know I’m here for ya.”

Bree and Liam left the tent and Liam said, “Come on. Let’s go have some fun. We can worry about the bog body later.”

He pulled her by the arm, and they headed over to the haunted house. Moans and groans piped through the outdoor speakers. They pushed through the door and were met with cackles, and laughs, and screams. Fog everywhere. Dim yellow lights leading the way.

Three steps in, a bloodied zombie popped up from behind a gravestone on Bree’s right; another quickly followed on the left; two more behind her. The zombies shuffled closer and closer, forcing Bree and Liam to move farther into the haunted house.

At the end of the passageway, the zombies dropped out of sight, and a door slammed shut behind Bree and Liam, plunging them into darkness. Far ahead a faint red glow was the only source of light. From out of the near pitch black, sets of bright yellow eyes appeared and then disappeared. Dozens of them. First on one side and then the other. They were all around her. The eyes kept moving, appearing and disappearing, never revealing their positions for longer than a second or two.

To Bree the eyes didn’t feel like any simple haunted house effect. It was as if the eyes belonged to Kelsi. The bog body. The mysterious woman at the bog. And the person in green outside Doolin’s. Unknown eyes demanding so much of her.

A sick wail pierced the air, shot through her, and whisked away her power to speak. She fished for Liam’s hand and laced her fingers through his. Holding on tightly, Bree took a tentative step and then another. The eyes moved closer and closer together until they formed a wall around Bree and Liam. Bree moved a few paces forward and the eyes moved with her, narrowing the space between them.

Just when it seemed the eyes were within Bree’s reach, a blast of cold air hit the back of her neck. Bree screamed and Liam jumped. She spun around and wrenched Liam’s arm in the process, but she couldn’t see much of anything in the dark, not a hint of movement or a shadow or a zombie.

A bang at the back of the room startled Bree. She turned to see a group of rowdy kids pushing past the door and into the space. The kid in the lead must have caught sight of the yellow eyes because he froze all of a sudden, and the guy behind him plowed into his back.

Liam chuckled. “Let’s go,” he said and pulled Bree with him.

A door in front of them flew open. They stepped through it, left the kids behind, and entered a room filled with giant bloodied beasts at least twice Bree’s size. The beasts were ugly and scary and huge. They had distorted faces and long hands and held an assortment of weapons straight out of a sci-fi movie. They lumbered toward Bree and Liam like they meant business.

Laughing and holding hands, Bree raced with Liam through the rest of the haunted house. The last room was dark, empty, and silent. They passed through it without waiting to see what would happen. When they pushed back outside, the sights and sounds of the carnival assaulted Bree’s senses.

“That was fun,” Liam said. “Did you like it?”

She didn’t tell him how deeply the events of the past few days had rattled her and how creepy goings-on were becoming a bit too real in her life. Instead Bree nodded. “Yeah, it was great.”

It took four long days to get the results they so desperately wanted. When Bree and her dad heard Conor yell that the DNA results were ready, her dad pushed off of his stool so quickly it rolled across the floor and smashed into a table behind him. He rushed out of the lab.

Bree followed her dad down the hall. He headed straight for the sequencer and studied the results without saying a word. Bree searched her dad’s face for clues, but it was as readable as a rock.

She looked over at Liam. He fiddled with a pen, and when his eyes settled on hers, she knew he was as eager to hear the results as much she was.

“Well?” Bree said, thinking it would be so cool if her dad confirmed she had discovered a lycanthrope hand. She’d go on “Good Morning America” and be in all the papers and on the news; everyone at school would be jealous.

“Now I have to compare this DNA sequence from the hand to our database to see if it matches humans or some other species.” While her dad worked, he shifted from foot to foot. It took some time to compare the sequences. When he finished, he turned to her and Conor and regarded them both in silence.

A burst of energy surged through Bree, and she struggled to stay still; it was like she had downed a six-pack of energy drinks.

Finally, her dad said, “The initial results show the hand is human.”

“What?” Bree said sharply. “How that’s possible? No human has a hand like that.”

Her dad gave her arm a squeeze. “Even if we assume lycanthropes exist, there’s no lycanthrope genome to compare it to. The good news, at least for me anyway, is that it’s obvious the hand is very strange. There’s more to this than meets the eye.”

“Like what?” Bree asked.

“I think there’s a genetic condition that may have caused the anomalies in this hand. If I’m correct, it’s some kind of mutation.”

“How could that have happened?” Liam asked as Conor leaned in to get a look at the sequence.

Her dad thought for a moment before responding. “That’s what I intend to find out. We need to sequence the entire genome to look for a mutation in some other part of the DNA, and that’s going to take time.”

“I’m confused,” Bree said. She tried to make sense of the information in front of her, but all she could see was a bunch of multi-colored wave-like lines.

Her dad smiled. “Maybe lycanthropes were really humans that carried a strange mutated gene.”

After spending the whole day in the lab, Bree's dad treated them to dinner at a nearby restaurant. They were both tired of eating at the hotel all the time. During dessert, her dad received a call from the Garda, and they raced over to the lab.
When they arrived, a Garda car was parked in front. Two officers Bree didn’t recognize were on the scene, conferring with two security guards. They jotted notes in official-looking black books.

A quick flick of the wrist and her dad shut the engine. In a few strides they reached the closest officer.

“I’m Dr. Sunderland. The one you called.” His words were rushed, as if he couldn’t spit them out fast enough.

“The security guard saw two women in dark clothes running out of the building. You know anyone who would want to break into the lab?”

“Kelsi,” Bree and her dad said in unison. “Doyle,” her dad added. “Kelsi Doyle.”

“What would she want?” the officer asked.

Her dad crossed his arms. “My daughter found a hand in the bog the other day and she tried to steal it. We filed a report at the Garda Station, but as far as I know they haven’t found her.”

The officer nodded. “The black market is big for those kinds of things.”

“She’s worked with us for weeks and she came highly recommended. I still can’t believe she’d do something like this.” Her dad’s voice was quiet yet tense.

“There must be a reason,” Bree said, wishing she knew what it was.

“There always is,” the officer said. “Although it’s not often the reason we want.”

Bree eyed the security guards—both now spoke with the other officer—and then she turned her attention back to the man in front of her. “What about the other security guard? What did he see?”

“Not a thing,” the officer said. “Apparently they picked the lock and were in and out before he returned from his rounds. Only reason the other guard caught sight of them was because he left his post to, uh, use the men’s room.”

“That’s great, just great,” her dad said. “Two security guards and they’re good for nothing.”

The officer kept his voice steady. “Why don’t I take you inside so you can see what’s missing.”

Bree let out a heavy sigh. It had to be the hand. What else could it be? And Kelsi knew that lab inside and out.

Her dad headed straight for the case where he had stored the hand. “Damn!” he said. He double-checked the storage case and then checked a few others.

No one would have moved the hand without telling her dad first. It had to be Kelsi.

“It’s gone,” her dad said. His shoulders slumped and his voice dropped as he drew out his words.

A moment later, as if someone shot her with a jolt of electricity, Bree raced from the room. She charged down the hall and up the stairs and into the storage area outside the DNA lab.

“What is it?” her dad said as he came up behind her. Panting, he seemed as though he would fall over if someone gave him the slightest push. An officer stood next to him.

“The bone samples,” Bree said. “Kelsi took them too. Is she after the DNA, Dad?”

“Most likely it’s a private collector who’s after the hand,” the officer said. “My task force sees it happen all the time, especially with art and ancient pottery. But they want everything associated with a find, no matter what it is, and I guess that would include the bone samples. They’ve got these huge collections hidden in their homes. Sometimes even their guests don’t know they’re eating and drinking in what’s essentially a small museum. There are even private chat boards where people place requests, and when an item becomes available—and I mean that in the loosest sense of the word, since they’re stolen—then the buyer is matched with the thief. We shut them down and another board pops up. It’s impossible to keep track of these things.”

Bree knew there was no way Kelsi wanted to sell the hand. But she didn’t say anything to the Garda.

“Well,” her dad said. “I guess there’s not much we can do about it now. I’m just glad we sequenced the DNA when we did.”

“But now no one will believe what we discovered,” Bree said, “not without evidence to back it up.”

“We still have the bog body,” her dad said.

“But it’s not enough, not without the hand.”

He gave her a reassuring smile. “Progress always experiences reversals. Fortunately, this time, no one got hurt.”

Bree nodded. He hated to see anyone hurt. He even removed spiders from the house instead of killing them. But if it was Kelsi who stole the hand, then who was the other woman with her? And what were they going to do with the hand?

Mashey Hotel, Largheal, Ireland

Sweat dripped off Bree’s forehead, and her t-shirt and shorts clung to her skin. With the music blaring on her iPod, she ran on the treadmill at a steady 5.3 miles per hour. Across the room, in the otherwise empty gym, a man in a tight tank top lifted weights; his muscles rippled with each rep. She wondered what that kind of power felt like.

Bree cranked the incline to six and felt the ache in her calves but pushed through it. Maybe if she kept going, if she ran until she couldn’t take another step, then she’d feel so tired she could just flop into bed and fall right asleep. She was exhausted, but her mind just wouldn’t shut down. For the first time in a long time she had felt really excited about something. Her dad did too. And now it was gone, thanks to Kelsi.

Bree ran faster, harder, in an attempt to burn through the anger that consumed her.

Why couldn’t something go right in her life?

Just this once.

Nine minutes later, winded and just about ready to call it quits, Bree startled at the touch of a hand on her shoulder. She lost her balance and grabbed the handrails, feet still keeping pace with the treadmill. When she was steady again, she hit the stop button and hopped off. “What is it?”

Her dad moved his lips. Bree held up a finger and pulled the ear buds from her ears. Before she could turn off the iPod he said, “That’s really loud.”

“It is, sorry. It’s the only way I can hear it over the treadmill.” A quick tap of the iPod and the clanking of weights and the whooshing of the air conditioner replaced the thump, thump, thump of the music.

“We have to go,” her dad said.

“I was getting tired anyway.”

“Not to bed, I’m afraid. The police found Kelsi at her aunt’s house.”

He was already halfway to the door. Bree grabbed her water bottle and jogged to catch up.

“Dad—what’s the rush? They’ll detain her.”

Her dad looked at her with an almost maniacal gleam in his eye. “They didn’t just find Kelsi. They found the hand.”

O’Malley House, Fairich, Ireland

Bree stepped from the car, and acrid smoke made her gag. She drew the front of her shirt up and over her mouth and nose, but it was no match for the stench, so she pinched her nose through her shirt and examined her surroundings, taking in everything.