Predator Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The author makes no claims to, but instead acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the word marks mentioned in this work of fiction.

  Copyright © 2014 by Janice Gable Bashman

  PREDATOR by Janice Gable Bashman

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by Month9Books, LLC.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Edited by Lindsay Leggett

  Published by Month9Books

  Cover and typography designed by Victoria Faye

  Cover Copyright © 2014 Month9Books

  In memory of Devorah Kay Gable.

  And for Sam—you inspire me, always.

  Acknowledgements

  Without those who gave so willingly of their insight and expertise, Predator would not have existed. Thanks to genetics and anthropology expert Mark Stoneking of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and to bioanthropology expert Ronald G. Beckett, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Quinnipiac University, for their invaluable help with the technical information in this book (any errors are the author’s fault). My thanks to David Naughton-Shires, Patricia Prior, and Cathal Walsh for all things Irish; to automotive expert Lee Parkin; and to Marie Lamba, Nancy Keim Comley, and Al Sirois for their suggestions and input regarding early drafts of the manuscript. Thanks to Frannie Townsend, Maggie Stohler, and Caroline Stohler. Many thanks to Kathryn Craft whose keen eye and top-notch editing skills helped shape the manuscript. And thanks to Lisa Pistilli, Robyn Gable, Donna Galanti, Tori Bond, Lisa Papp, Rita Ashley, Sara Jo West, Lorie Greenspan, Lisa Gressen, and The Liars Club for your continued encouragement and support.

  Very special thanks to Jonathan Maberry. You are a true inspiration, great friend, mentor, and colleague. Thanks for always being there for me.

  Many thanks to the men and women in the armed forces who serve our country—true heroes in every sense of the word.

  Heartfelt thanks to my wonderful husband, my dad, and my brother. You’ve made my life richer, and I’m honored to have you as a part of it.

  And finally, thanks to my agent Lucienne Diver, my publisher Georgia McBride, my editor Lindsay Leggett, and the wonderful team at Month9Books.

  PRAISE for PREDATOR

  “Predator is a fast-paced, creepy page-turner! Bashman had me at the opening sentence and she's still got me. I want more!”

  — Nancy Holder, New York Times Bestselling Author, The Rules

  “I thought I had read all there was about werewolves, until I read Ms. Bashman’s novel. WOW.”

  — Kimberly S. Mason

  “If you like Teen Wolf, you should read Predator.”

  — Nick Rosenburg

  “Cool book. Love the cover and the vibe. Will definitely read her next book in the series.”

  — Vanessa C.

  “Thanks for letting me read Predator by Janice Gable Bashman. Not what I expected at all. Really loved the different take on werewolves.”

  — Anna Brand

  Chapter One

  Galamonga Peat Bog, Connemara, Ireland

  Bree Sunderland stared at the body and didn’t know which was worse—that her dad wouldn’t let her touch it, or that she really wanted to.

  She’d never seen any dead bodies, just body parts, like the hands and feet and hearts and livers he stored in those huge liquid-filled mason jars back home.

  But this was different.

  Big time—she was the one who had discovered the body.

  “It’s amazing isn’t it?” Her dad hiked up his jeans and squatted with his hands on his knees, leaning in as close as he could without touching the bog body; his work boots squished in the moist Irish peat.

  Amazing didn’t even begin to describe it.

  The body looked so life-like, especially after being buried in the bog for so long. The man lay face up with his right leg jutted out at an odd angle. His gaping mouth revealed two bottom teeth and a broken upper front tooth. His nose and ears were mashed against his skull as if someone had pressed them there, and his cheeks were sunken. Bones and large veins were outlined clearly beneath his dark brown skin.

  Bones once strong, like her brother’s.

  Troy.

  That horrible, haunting bugle playing “Taps” at Troy’s funeral resounded in Bree’s head.

  A sudden breeze dashed across the bog and sent chills down her arms.

  “Dad?” she said.

  “Yeah, Bree?”

  “Is this what…?” She sucked in a short breath. “Is this…?” She couldn’t continue. Sure, she had wondered for a second. But she really didn’t want to know what Troy’s body looked like.

  Her dad turned around and looked up at her, clearly annoyed. “What is it?”

  There was not an ounce of compassion in his voice. The only thing he seemed concerned about was the bog body. She shoved Troy from her thoughts and refocused on the body.

  “I can’t believe he still has skin,” she said, forcing her tone to sound normal. “You can see every wrinkle. It looks like leather.”

  “That’s the power of the bog. The cold mixed with the acid in the peat and the lack of oxygen touching the body preserves the flesh. Kind of like an ancient mummy.”

  “How old is he?” Bree asked.

  Her dad drummed his fingers on his knee. “I’m not sure. He could be thousands of years old. I’ll know better later after I run some tests.”

  Thick uneven scratches on the bog body’s upper arm grabbed Bree’s attention. “What are those strange marks?” she asked. As she reached forward she slipped, lurching toward the body.

  Her dad shoved her back with both hands, and she landed on her side.

  “Why’d you do that?” Bree said, eyeing him with disbelief.

  “I had to protect the body.”

  “You chose a dead body over me?” The question hung in the air, gaining meaning with each passing second. Ever since Troy’s death eight months ago, right after Bree’s sixteenth birthday, her dad had been more pre-occupied with Troy’s absence than her presence. Whenever she tried to talk to him about it, the topic always changed back to that one, simple fact: Troy was gone and nothing was ever the same once you lost a child.

  “You would have crushed it,” he said.

  Bree didn’t even try to stifle her anger. “We wouldn’t even be here if I hadn’t found it. And I could have sprained my wrist or broken a finger. Did you even consider that? Or didn’t it even cross your mind?”

  “But you didn’t. And you know I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

  Her dad extended a hand to help Bree up, but she ignored it. She pushed to her feet—the right side of her clothes, face, and hair were covered in wet peat—and brushed off the front of her sweatshirt. She heard laughter from behind and turned toward her dad’s assistant Kelsi, who had returned from the field tent with her cameras. Kelsi was a local he had hired—along with Conor and his cute son Liam—on the advice of his colleagues at the Ireland Archeology Institute where they were working that summer. “It’s not funny,” Bree said.

  Kelsi slung a camera strap over her neck and slid it back and forth until the Nikon hung evenly. “You’ve got gobs of peat everywhere.”

  “So what? It’s still not funny.” She was relieved
Liam wasn’t here to see her like this.

  Kelsi pressed her lips tightly together and struggled to suppress her smile. A moment later, she snorted and then burst into laughter, infectious if only because she was typically so aloof and quiet.

  Bree wiped the peat from her cheek with a clean sleeve and tightened the scrunchie holding back her hair. Kelsi reached over and pulled some peat off Bree’s forehead.

  “Thanks.” Bree turned toward her dad and said, “I’ll be right back, okay?”

  Her dad didn’t answer. He was already engrossed in a visual exam of the body.

  Bree had decided to come along on this trip to help her dad find a way to get back to work. Losing Troy had plunged him into depression, and the failure of his wound repair serum that had promised to save other soldiers with injuries like Troy’s had made it worse. It was great to see him in the field again, where he felt so alive. But she hadn’t meant to sacrifice him completely. She still needed him too. She’d give everything to have things the way they were before. Even if it meant she never would have met Liam.

  Bree climbed the crudely-formed steps carved in the peat and crossed the bog to the field tent, where she found Conor examining soil samples.

  He broke into a broad smile. “What happened to you?”

  Bree’s mind carved the words from his thick brogue. After three weeks, she was getting better at it. “I gotta change.”

  “Right.” He bent back over his samples.

  “You mind?”

  “I won’t look at you. Just trying to get this done.”

  Bree crossed her arms. It was bad enough changing in front of everyone in the locker room at school, but at least they were all girls and not Liam’s dad. “Well how about doing something else?”

  Without saying a word, Conor wandered off toward her dad and Kelsi. Bree scrubbed off what peat she could using a bucket of water and, in clean clothes, joined the team a few minutes later with the rich, earthy smell still clinging to her.

  Kelsi was snapping pictures of the man’s head, and Conor was taking a soil sample next to the feet. Liam had returned from the van with the stretcher and was mapping the rest of the area; he smiled at her and then got back to work. Her dad looked like he hadn’t moved a muscle since Bree left him.

  Bree stepped to her dad’s side and saw that he had finished uncovering the last section of the torso. Her eyes locked onto four deep gashes, almost parallel, in the skin on the torso’s left side. Each gash was at least six inches long, and there was a ragged tennis-ball-sized hole directly below them. “What are those?” she said, pointing.

  “I think something mauled the body,” her dad said, “and then partially devoured it. The marks are really strange. I don’t recognize the wound pattern.”

  Bree considered the wounds. “What if this guy was alive when it happened, when whatever it was ripped into him like that? It must have hurt like crazy.”

  “It’s possible.”

  She averted her eyes and noticed a slight indentation in the neck. “What is that?”

  Her dad brushed off the lingering peat and exposed a large puncture mark, right at the jugular.

  The hole was large enough to fit Bree’s finger. “Do you think that’s what killed him?”

  “If he bled to death, he died quickly.” Conor scratched the side of his nose, leaving behind a trail of peat.

  “Or else the injuries occurred post-mortem and something else killed him first,” her dad said.

  Bree looked from the neck to the torso and back again. “But if something mauled him, what was it?”

  Her dad stood and ran his fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair. “I’ve been wondering that myself. But it’s difficult to know much of anything right now. Sometimes these things just take a while to figure out. Let’s finish excavating the body and get it back to the lab.”

  He handed her a brush. “The acid in the peat destroyed most of the bones,” he said, “and there’s not much more than the flesh holding the pieces together. So be careful not to damage the soft tissue when you remove the rest of the peat.”

  He grabbed a brush of his own and went to work.

  Now that Bree had her dad’s trust, and he was finally letting her work on the body, she wasn’t going to blow it. He didn’t work elbow-to-elbow with just anyone.

  She brushed away the peat next to the knee and revealed something small…and pointed. What was that? She looked closely at the object and then at the bog body trying to make sense of it.

  “Wait a minute.” Bree’s voice was a mix of excitement and confusion. “I think I might have found what punctured the neck.”

  Chapter Two

  Conor and Liam rushed to Bree’s side.

  She pointed to the object protruding from beneath the knee. “Most of it’s under the body.”

  Liam drew in closer, but Kelsi wormed her way in and blocked their view.

  Bree couldn’t believe it. Of course Kelsi was just doing her job. But still…she could have waited another minute or two to snap her close-ups.

  Bree scooted around to the other side of the body. Not that it helped; she couldn’t tell a peat-covered bone from a petrified stick or whatever the thing was. But it was definitely sharp enough to be used as a weapon.

  Her dad elbowed Kelsi out of the way and knelt down to examine the object. “It’s definitely not a tooth. It’s too long.”

  “What do you think it is?” Liam asked as he joined Bree. He was so close she could almost feel him touching her.

  Her dad shook his head. “We won’t learn more until we move the body.”

  Bree sighed. Waiting was the hardest part about working with her dad. How did he have the patience to wait days, weeks, or months before learning something significant? It was like someone giving her a present and not letting her open it.

  “We’ll figure it out,” Liam said as he placed a gentle hand on her arm.

  Her skin tingled from his simple touch. She looked up into his blue eyes, saw comfort there, and nodded.

  “I’ll be right back,” Kelsi said. “I have to find a dry spot for the camera gear.” She took the steps two at a time and quickly disappeared from sight.

  Conor grabbed a clipboard and pencil from atop his field kit. “I want to get some more soil samples,” he said to Liam. “Can you go get my gear?”

  “Sure.” Liam headed off to the field tent.

  Bree studied the body, trying to memorize everything she saw, so she could talk to Liam about it later. Meeting him had turned out to be the best part of this trip.

  She focused on uncovering the left arm and hand, the only parts of the body still totally encased in peat.

  “Dad. You have to see this.” Where there should have been a right hand she found only a few pieces of ripped flesh attached to bone.

  Her dad examined the mangled wrist. “Whoever severed this hand certainly wasn’t a surgeon.”

  “We have to find it.” Bree whisked away more dirt.

  “Work outward from wrist. Maybe it’s nearby.”

  Eventually the temperature dropped. Skylarks sang and dragonflies buzzed about in search of food, and still Bree had found nothing of the missing hand. She looked up and gazed across the bog. In the distance, the setting sunlight cast a brilliant array of oranges and yellows and greens across the Twelve Bens Mountains.

  “I’ll go grab the tarp and the body bag,” Kelsi said.

  “We can’t leave yet,” Bree said to her dad. “Not without the missing hand.”

  “It could be anywhere.”

  Bree’s voice faltered. “But he’s not whole.”

  “Sometimes that’s the way things are.”

  She knew that only too well. “If he was Troy you’d keep looking for it.”

  Her dad looked at her like he’d been slapped. Fine. At least she had his attention. “I’m coming back later to find the hand.”

  “No, you’re not. It’s too dangerous.” H
e took a quick breath. “Dozens of people have drowned over the years after they thought they were stepping onto a somewhat solid surface and fell into a bog and couldn’t find a way out. You got lucky when you discovered the bog body where we could excavate it. And I’m really grateful that you did, but you have to promise me you’ll stay away from the bog.”

  Bree hesitated and then lied. “I will. I promise.”

  A moment later Kelsi hopped back down the embankment like she owned it. Several inches taller than Bree—five-foot-seven, Bree guessed—Kelsi was all lean muscle and agility.

  Bree’s dad set down his brush. Kelsi and Liam held the tarp while her dad and Conor eased the body onto the tarp and then into the body bag. When Conor zipped the bag closed, a wave of nausea surged from Bree’s gut to her mouth. She averted her gaze and swallowed hard.

  “You okay?” Liam said quietly.

  “I’m fine.” There was no way Bree was going to admit putting the body inside the bag freaked her out. Scientists didn’t get grossed out by this kind of stuff. And if she ever wanted to be a biological anthropologist, she’d better get used to it.

  “I still don’t know what this is,” her dad said, holding up a clear container.

  Now this—this Bree could wrap her curiosity around. It was the object she had spotted sticking out from under the knee. It was approximately three inches long and an inch and a half wide—blunt on one end and tapered to a sharp point on the other. Thin parallel ridges ran vertically along the entire length; and where the peat hadn’t marred the surface, mainly near the blunt end, it was dark yellow with a bit of black.

  Her dad studied the object. “It’s hard like a fingernail, harder really, almost as hard as bone but not quite. Could be due to some sort of calcification.”

  “You think it’s part of the missing hand?” Bree asked.

  Her dad shrugged. “I don’t think so, but anything’s possible at this point. It could be organic or—”