by Jadyn Chase
She laid her cards on the table. She had three queens and two sevens. “Full house.”
She put out her hands to retrieve the chips, but I stopped her. I spread out my hand to reveal four fours. “Sorry. Nice try.”
She slammed her fist on the table. “You little…..”
“Don’t be a sore loser.” I pushed the chips toward her. “Here. Take it. It’s yours anyway.”
She laughed again and drained the rest of her drink. “Thanks. That’s my gas money for getting back to Charlotte.”
I jerked my thumb toward the bar. “How about you join me for a drink instead?”
She accompanied me to the bar where Larry refilled her glass. “Willie called you his cousin. Are you really related to him?”
“Distantly,” I replied, “but that’s not saying much. Everyone around here is related to everyone else. I’m distantly related to Aiden, too, but I wouldn’t call him my cousin. It’s just a figure of speech.”
She nodded and sat down on a bar stools. “I understand. They’re nice guys. I wasn’t expecting anyone to welcome me the way they did, but they invited me to play poker with them like they’d known me all their lives.”
“I bet they weren’t expecting you to win the way you did,” I pointed out.
“No.” She blushed and lowered her eyes to her drink. “I guess they weren’t.”
I sat down on the stool next to her. “So you’re here studying bats. How long do you plan to stick around?”
A cloud crossed her face. She twisted her glass between her fingers. “I don’t know.”
I watched her expression change. “Did I say something wrong? Don’t tell me you plan to stick around until you rob every man in town of his hard-earned savings.”
She didn’t smile. She glanced up at me and immediately lowered her eyes to her drink again. “I was planning on staying two weeks, but after last night, I’m not so sure.”
“Why?” I asked. “What happened last night?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I got some good footage last night.”
I frowned at her. Something was definitely bothering her. “Did someone hurt you, or try too?”
She shook her hair out of her eyes. When she looked up at me, I barely recognized her as the same person. The self-assured smile that disarmed everyone at the poker table completely disappeared and left a scared little girl in its place. “Not someone. Something.”
I took a swallow of my beer. “You’re going to have to use plain English if you want me to understand what you’re talking about. If anyone bothered you or did anything to threaten you, I’ll cut his nuts off for you, but if it was just something, there’s not a lot I can do about that.”
She threw back her shoulders and faced me. “You know about the Flying Fox, don’t you?”
“I told you I did. What do you want to know about it?”
“I already know about it,” she countered. “I want to know if you know Whistler’s Gulch outside of town.”
“Of course I know it. I was born there.”
She waved her hand. “I’m camped down there. I put motion-activated cameras around the Gulch to film the bats when they came out of their holes at sunset.”
I nodded. “Smart. That’s where they nest.”
“I know that!” she snapped. “I got them all on video last night.”
I knit my brows at her again. “So what’s the problem? Isn’t that what you came up here for?”
“Is there anything else living in Whistler’s Gulch?” she asked. “Is there anything living there I ought to know about?”
I blinked. “What do you mean?”
She turned back to the bar and hunched over her glass. “Forget it. It was nothing.”
I studied her profile. Nothing she said made sense. “I can think of a lot of things living in Whistler’s Gulch. There are birds and squirrels and raccoons and mountain lions and…”
“No!” she snapped. “Nothing like that.”
“What, then?” I asked. “What did you see up there?”
She refused to look at me. “I didn’t see anything.”
“Now I know you’re messing with me. You wouldn’t ask if you didn’t see something up there. What was it?”
She glanced sideways at me. She looked away before coming back to study me. “You’ll say I’m crazy.”
“I might,” I remarked. “Then again, I might not. I’ve seen a lot of strange things up there. Try me.”
She took a deep breath. “I was recording the bats on my tablet. The cameras all record in night-vision. The bats were swarming all over the sky the way they do. All at once, they all just dropped into the trees. They descended in a flock and the sky went dark. Then this huge shape crossed the screen. It vanished in a second, and then the bats came out again like nothing happened. I thought I imagined the whole thing, but a few seconds later, I saw the same thing pass right in front of me. It looked like a giant bat with black wings and a black body. I ran away and it came and fluttered right over my head. It had red eyes that glowed in the dark. It looked like a…. well, it looked like an enormous dragon, but that’s not possible, is it?”
I stared at her in astonishment. She couldn’t have seen that in Whistler’s Gulch. That was impossible.
She snorted and turned away. “I told you you’d think I was crazy.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy.” I gulped down more beer to avoid looking at her. “You saw what you saw.”
“I got it on video,” she ventured.
I didn’t say anything. What could I say to her—that I knew what it was? Not likely.
“I guess I imagined the whole thing,” she went on. “Maybe I hallucinated it in my sleep-deprived state.”
She snorted with forced laughter. I smiled at her, but I said nothing. I should have been more careful about getting into a conversation with her about something like this.
“No ideas?” she asked. “You don’t know what it was, do you?”
I chose my words with care. “Do you know of a giant bat with glow-in-the-dark eyes?”
She cracked a grin. “Right. I must have imagined it.”
“So are you going back down the Gulch again?”
“I have to,” she replied. “I want to get some more footage of the bats. The more I get, the more conclusive our findings will be.”
“What findings?” I asked. “What are you trying to prove?”
“That they behave in certain ways when they flock in the wild. We have only their behavior in captivity to go on. This could change our whole idea about their hunting behavior.”
I nodded, but my mind kept spinning in a thousand directions. No creature matching that description should have been in Whistler’s Gulch last night. Certainly no dragon should have been down there. If there was a dragon down there, it shouldn’t have been fluttering around any biologist out studying bats after dark.
I could think of a few dragons flying around after dark, but they shouldn’t have been in Whistler’s Gulch. I made up my mind to take a look for myself.
3
Piper
I lay awake in my sleeping bag for hours the next morning. I listened to the birds and watched the sunlight creep through the trees to light the forest. The events of the last two days weighed heavily on my mind.
After that strange creature came upon me in the dark, I dreaded staying out in the woods to record the bats. At least the computer activated the cameras and took the footage whether I was there or not, but I should have been on hand to see the bats for myself.
Instead, I spent last night in that bar in town talking to the locals. Wyatt Kelly’s reaction to my story didn’t make me any more certain that it actually happened.
Wyatt Kelly. I couldn’t fail to notice that guy in a crowded bar. He stood there where I had no choice but to look at him while I played cards with Aiden and Willie and Big Bill.
Close-buzzed dark hair covered his scalp and flowed into a short brown beard covering the low
er half of his face. That beard didn’t hide his soft lips, though. It didn’t conceal his sparkling blue eyes, either. It couldn’t. If anything, it only highlighted them and made them more obvious.
The sharp points of a hidden tattoo coiled around his arms under a tight black t-shirt that drew my eye to his chiseled chest and shoulders. His blue jeans guided my gaze to the long muscles of his legs and calves. On the surface, he looked like a man, but every feature of his body and clothes only served to draw attention to him until he stood out like a beacon from everyone around him.
His cheeks flushed when he smiled, and those lips curved in such an appealing way that thrilled my heart. He gripped my hand when he shook it, and he locked his eyes on me in a way that refused to ignore the instant connection between us.
The way he played poker mesmerized me, too. He didn’t fall into a daze over me the way the others did. He didn’t go goggle-eyed when I smiled. He didn’t lose his cool or his ability to think when I tried to bluff him.
He existed in a bubble of self-possession even when I told him about that thing I saw at Whistler’s Gulch. He didn’t fly off the handle or tell me I was stupid or deluded. He listened. He couldn’t exactly take it seriously because it wasn’t, but at least he listened.
I kicked off the sleeping bag. I didn’t come down here to sleep and play poker. I had a job to do. I would get one more night of footage. If I didn’t come across any other strange phenomena, I could safely pack up and hit the road back home.
I made breakfast on the camp stove and went over my notes. After I finished my coffee, I packed up my backpack for the day and headed to the site to check my cameras.
I made it halfway there when I heard footsteps coming toward me. I froze in my tracks to listen, but they sounded like ordinary footsteps, not some monster creeping up to eat me alive.
I waited for them to get closer. The foliage parted and I blinked up at a familiar figure. “Wyatt! What are you doing out here?”
“I came to check on your story last night.” He walked past me toward the site where I set up my cameras. “If something strange is out here, I better find out about it. Can you show me where you saw the thing?”
I stared at him trying to put the events of last night together with my experience. Then I hurried after him. “I’m sure it was nothing. I just imagined it.”
“I hear you,” he called over his shoulder. “I just want to see. If a fine biologist like you is fossicking around in the woods in the middle of the night, I want to make sure there’s nothing to come along and chomp you from behind.”
He grinned at me with that boyish sparkle in his blue eyes and continued on an unerring line toward the spot where I filmed the bats. He halted right next to one of my camera pins.
He squatted down next to it. He scowled at the camera and then surveyed the surroundings. I studied him from behind. His shoulders dropped to an indentation where his neck curved out of his spine. He propped one arm on his knee and inspected the ground next to the pin.
“There’s nothing out here but a bunch of bats,” I told him. “You didn’t have to come all this way.”
“I didn’t have to, but like I told you, this is my territory. Is this where you first saw the thing?”
My eyes widened. “How did you know that?”
“Look at that.” He pointed to the ground. “See those tracks?”
I came to his side and looked at the soil under his feet. A huge footprint indented the Earth where I first saw the strange creature. I gasped out loud. “What made that?”
“The tracks come from over here.” He pushed his way farther into the thicket to the space surrounded by my cameras.
I tried to hang back. I shouldn’t go deeper into the woods with someone I barely knew, but curiosity spurred me on. “How do you know so much about this?”
“I told you. I’m from here.”
“You said you were born in Whistler’s Gulch,” I recalled. “What did you mean? No one lives down here.”
“I’m actually from up there.” He pointed up the mountain to a high point of rock towering overhead.
I shielded my eyes. “What is that?”
“It’s Smokey Ridge. My family lives over there to the east where Whistler’s Gulch starts. My cousins live there at the very top. I’m just staying with them for a few weeks while we build a new barn, but when you told me you were down here and you saw that thing, I decided to come and take a look. See? The tracks keep going all the way over there.”
He followed one large footprint after another until he stumbled upon my campsite. He took one look at my sleeping bag and camp stove and chuckled. “I guess this is where the trail ends.”
“Do you know what made those tracks?” I asked.
“I might, but that doesn’t help you at all. What are you doing today?”
“I don’t have any big plans,” I told him. “I was just going to double check my cameras, get some footage tonight, and then head back to Charlotte in the morning.”
He nodded, but he didn’t look at me. His expression hardened. “Makes sense. It’s probably a good idea. You don’t want to run into that thing again.”
“What was it?” I asked. “I never saw anything that big before.”
“I couldn’t tell you, exactly.” He shifted around with his back to me. “Show me the rest of your cameras.”
Now that my attention diverted to work, I pushed the strange sighting out of my mind. It matched no biological shape I could think of, so it must not exist, right?
I led the way back to the camera pins and showed Wyatt them all. I pointed up at the sky. “This is where they come out to hunt. I recorded them flying around here.”
He squinted up at the canopy. “That’s pretty good. You must have gotten some good footage.”
I took out my tablet and ran through the video feed. “I recorded that thing, too. Do you want to see?”
He shrugged and watched while I rolled through the images of the bats flocking over the trees. Wyatt craned his head around to stare when the bats plunged into the trees and that black thing crossed the screen.
He raised his eyebrows. “Interesting.”
“Do you have any idea what it was?” I asked.
“I couldn’t tell you.” He looked away. “Are you sure you want to stick around tonight?”
I put the tablet away. “I can’t leave just yet. I don’t want to chicken out and run for the hills just because I thought I saw something.”
He pointed to my tablet. “It looks like you did more than that.”
I crammed the device into my back pocket. “It doesn’t matter. I doubt it will come back.” I continued on to the next pin. “Oh, look. This cable came out.”
I crouched down to plug in the cable. I pretended not to notice another one of those tracks next to the camera. The thing must have knocked the wire loose.
I couldn’t hold all this in my mind at once. Either that thing really existed and left its tracks all over my work zone—in which case I ought to run for the hills—or it didn’t exist and I needed my head examined—in which case I had nothing to worry about spending tonight and however many other nights out here in the Georgia wilderness recording my precious bats.
Wyatt gave no indication of seeing those tracks, either, even though he was the one who pointed them out to me in the first place. He waited while I plugged in the wire. Then we strolled on to the next pin.
I chattered away while we checked all my placements. “The bats were so amazing the other night. You’re lucky you live nearby. You can come and watch them whenever you like. I never imagined they could swarm the way they did. Most times in the Wildlife Sanctuary, they just flutter around at random. We never supposed they would coordinate their flight into organic patterns to cover a maximum area in the sky.”
“Birds do it,” Wyatt pointed out. “Why not bats?”
“I know, but it still shows a level of social organization we never imagined.” I tripped over the words gett
ing them out so fast. “This could be the biggest discovery in bat ecology in decades.”
He halted. “Does that mean more people will be coming around to verify your findings?”
My shoulders drooped. “I doubt it. I’m the only one crazy enough to study these bats. Why do you ask?”
“I just wondered.” He glanced up at the mountain. “People are pretty private around here. I don’t think they’d like strangers invading all the time.”
“Who do you mean by people?” I asked. “Do you mean your family?”
“All the Kellys.” He waved at the mountain again. “This is their territory. They protect it from outside incursions.”
I froze. “Is that supposed to be some kind of threat?”
“Not at all. I’m just saying no one ever comes out here and the Kellys like it that way. A single person coming to study the bats is one thing. I would hate to think of a whole army of biologists setting up shop here. That would ruin the place.”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” I replied. “I only know two people in the world who study these bats—me and my supervisor Jack, and he never leaves the Wildlife Sanctuary. I’m the only one stupid enough to study these bats in the field.”
His head whipped around, and he stared at me. “You’re not stupid, Piper.”
“You know what I mean,” I replied. “Other biologists have areas of expertise that the world cares about. No one cares about these bats the way I do. That’s why I’m the only one dedicating my career to studying them.”
He shook his head and turned away. “You shouldn’t insult yourself like that. You’re not stupid for studying them and trying to save them. You’re smart.”
My cheeks burned at the compliment and I lowered my gaze. I couldn’t stand him looking at me like that with his piercing eyes. “Anyway, the cameras are all set up. I guess I don’t have anything else to do until tonight.”
“What will you do in the meantime?” he asked.
I glanced over my shoulder toward my campsite. “I ought to collate my notes and maybe try to write up some of my findings. That would be the smart thing to do—since you think I’m so smart.”