Bear Claw Bodyguard

by Jessica Andersen

  Tori held his eyes. “I’d feel better if it’s you out there with me.”

  Damn it. To Tucker, he said, “You’ll square it with Mendoza, right? It’s not like he really wants to see my face right now anyway.”

  Tucker nodded. “I’ll put you in for vacation, say you needed more time.”

  At Tori’s look, Jack shook his head. The sting of guilt at turning down a chance to get back on the Death Stare case was his problem, not hers.

  To Tucker, he said, “Do it.” To Tori, he said, “Looks like you’ve got yourself an escort, Dr. Bay.” And anybody who wanted to hurt her was going to have to go through him to do it.

  Chapter Six

  Two days later, as she sat in her small room under the eaves of the observatory talking to her head lab tech via webcam, Tori finally started feeling like she was getting somewhere with the investigation.

  “I’ve got those sequencing results you were waiting on,” Chondra’s voice and image said from the screen of her laptop. “It’s a big file. The download may take a minute.”

  “Especially given that I’m in the middle of nowhere,” Tori agreed wryly. But although the signal was patchy and there was a good chance she could lose the uplink at any second, she was grateful to have even that much.

  Overall, life out at Station Fourteen hadn’t been as onerous as she had initially feared. She and Jack had dropped off the grid without major problems, and they’d been up to the Forgotten twice more. Granted, there had been some hairy moments—there always were on a field assignment—but nothing she couldn’t handle. And if once or twice she’d thought she saw movement in the distance, or it felt like someone was watching her, that was just the power of suggestion, just as the two times the motion sensors had gone off in the middle of the night, causing Jack to closet her safely away while he searched the observatory, had been false alarms caused by the wind or an animal of some sort.

  She hadn’t let that distract her, though, because the forest needed her…which was why she’d pulled in some favors and gotten some off-the-books help from some truly excellent researchers, including Chondra.

  Tall and statuesque, with dark skin and exotic lavender eyes, Chondra looked more like the former high-fashion model she’d been than the master’s-level biochemical analyst she’d become. Heck, she made even a lab coat look fashionable, with a tuck here and a twist there that showed off her generous curves with a tasteful femininity not normally possessed by a garment that made Tori look like she was wearing a pup tent backward.

  But despite the gap in “it” factor, Tori and Chondra were fast friends—and she had leaned on that friendship without hesitation or remorse when the university had backed up the Park Service’s decision to pull her off the Bear Claw case, forcing her to take personal time and cutting her off from the lab’s resources…at least in theory. In reality, over the two days since she and Jack had both gone more or less rogue, her lab mates had clocked in dozens of hours on the Bear Claw infection, taking things to the next level by fragmenting the genetic material of the fungus and shotgun sequencing it in an effort to figure out the parasite’s nearest evolutionary relatives, in hope that that would lead them to a preventive measure, or even a cure. Because so far, just as the prior research teams had found, the fungus was resistant to all the usual suspects when it came to treating this sort of thing.

  An icon came to life on Tori’s screen, indicating that the download was complete. “I’ve got it.” Aware of the gleam in Chondra’s eyes and her air of suppressed excitement, Tori had to stop herself from holding her breath as she clicked on the file. She skimmed through the basic information on the sequencing—how many fragments had been run for an average of how many base pairs of sequence information, blah, blah, blah—and then stopped dead when she got to the alignment results. “Wait. What?”

  Chondra laughed. “I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what I said when I saw it.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” According to the sequencing data, the three best hits—the species with the highest DNA sequence similarities to their unknown contributor—came from members of the amatias and bromeliads, and a rare strain of pseudomonas. In other words, they had a poisonous mushroom, an air plant and a deep-sea bacterium.

  What the hell?

  The amatias were among the most poisonous of mushrooms, and hadn’t even been on her list of possible ancestors for the Bear Claw organism. The bromeliads were the tropical air plants found in Mexico, Central America and South America, in habitats ranging from rainforests to souvenir shops. Which accounted for the white filaments—sort of—but didn’t explain how the two had come to be in the same sample, or why the third-best hit was a deep-sea bacterium that lived near sulfur vents.

  Even more astoundingly, the hits didn’t overlap; instead, the matches came from different places in the DNA of the Bear Claw fungus, suggesting that the parasite infecting the Forgotten was somehow a hybrid of the three.

  Tori just sat there for a few seconds, blinking and trying to assimilate the information. “Well, that’s…weird.”

  “Hello, understatement.” Chondra’s eyes gleamed. “Based on the DNA, it’s an entirely new species. That means you get to name it, right?”

  “If it’s a new species, yes. If it’s a science project gone awry, then, no.” It wouldn’t be the first time that scientists had engineered a hybrid species and then lost control of it.

  There were strictly enforced regulations designed to prevent such things, of course, but Mother Nature had ways of getting around humankind’s attempts to control her. Just as the gypsy moths and starlings had been accidentally introduced to North America and took over their ecological niches, different strains of bioengineered plants had “escaped” from their test fields and outcompeted the native strains to take over. In most cases, the damage had been contained. Perhaps not in this one, though.

  “A science—oh.” Chondra’s mouth stayed round in surprise for a moment, and then she rolled her eyes up and slapped her forehead. “Duh, why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Probably because you’re doing your own official lab work in addition to the queries I keep piling on you,” Tori said, “and you’re running ragged.” Lord knows, she was, though not for the same reason. She thrived on being overworked, and usually did fine on just a few hours of sleep per night when she was off on an assignment. Now, though, she was low on sleep, but not because of work. Instead, she had spent the past two nights tossing and turning restlessly, all too aware of the man sleeping on the floor below, and the fact that there wasn’t anybody else around for miles.

  And she so wasn’t going there.

  Forcing herself back on track—it was bad enough she was asking Chondra and a couple of the others to sneak around to help her out, worse if she was only giving the conversation half her attention—she said, “See if you can find out who might have been doing work like this, and what they were trying to accomplish. Don’t contact them, though. Just get me the names.”

  Chondra’s eyes widened fractionally. “You’re going to turn them in?”

  “I’m going to do whatever gets me a handle on controlling this thing the fastest. The forest is the priority here, not the politics.” At least for right now. Once she’d dealt with the Forgotten, she would blow the whistle on the culprits. Because losing track of a genetically engineered organism—especially one that she suspected would be highly toxic to humans, based on the amatia DNA—and then failing to call the proper authorities wasn’t just irresponsible, it was criminal.

  “Anything else?”

  “How is June coming with that life-cycle analysis?” Another of Tori’s techs—and also a trusted friend—had pitched in immediately when she heard what was going on. She had been analyzing different samples, trying to figure out how the fungus—or fungus hybrid?—reproduced, and how its youngest stages spread.

  In several sections of the Forgotten, Tori had found areas where the fungal growth was far thinner and younger-seeming
than that in the surrounding areas, as if an acre or so of the stuff had died off and then been re-seeded onto the trees. She was hoping that if they could figure out why the die-offs were happening, then she might be able to trigger a more widespread killing of the fungus.

  Maybe. Hopefully.

  “Her preliminary report should be in your email,” Chondra answered. “As far as I know, she hadn’t cracked the die-offs yet, though she’d got some info on the spores.”

  “And not good info,” Tori muttered after pulling up the report and scanning the first few lines. “They’re fire-resistant.” Which meant that torching the Forgotten with a series of controlled burns designed to wipe out the sick trees wouldn’t take care of the problem. If anything, that would make it worse by sending the protected spores into the air.

  “We’ll keep on it,” Chondra said. “There’s an answer. We just need to make sure we’re asking the right questions.”

  “And based on the sequencing data, those questions might be less about natural life cycles and more about which labs have been trying to engineer a potentially toxic, definitely parasitic fungus that contains sulfur-bacteria DNA.” Tori shook her head. “This is getting weird.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, it got weird the second some guy took a potshot at you and you didn’t get on the first plane coming home.” Chondra crossed her arms and gave a disapproving look. “Are you sure you don’t have enough to come back and run this from the lab?”

  Tori shook her head. “I’m sure, and there’s no more danger really. The guy’s story checked out, cave and all.” And the other stuff was just false alarms and an overactive imagination.

  “That doesn’t explain why you still need to be there.”

  “I just do, that’s all. Something’s telling me to stay put, and over the years I’ve learned to listen to my gut on stuff like this.”

  But as Tori said goodbye and ended the transmission, she hoped she had sounded far more convincing than she felt. Because, really, she didn’t have a clue whether the urge to stay was coming from her instincts as a researcher, or from something far more primal and way less logical—namely, desire.

  She might be a plant researcher, but she was plenty familiar with animal attraction. And although she and Jack had kept a very professional distance after that one kiss—that one crazy kiss—there was an added sizzle between them now.

  It wasn’t solely physical either, nor was it leftover gratitude from him having saved her butt. Instead, it had turned out that they actually kind of liked each other. Not to mention that they worked well together, with him offering help when she needed it and backing off when she didn’t, and once or twice stepping in when he thought she was straying over the line of safety. Although their conversations had mostly centered on her investigation, she had gotten him to share a few memories of his childhood adventures in the forest, and she had told a story or two on herself, mostly mishaps during field investigations. And despite her intentions to focus on the case and not her hottie bodyguard, she found herself looking forward to the drive there and back, when they were closed in together, breathing the same air and darting sidelong looks when each thought the other wasn’t looking.

  She was thirty-one and at the top of her game, career-wise. She had a great lab, solid funding, good classes to teach and a hugely flexible travel schedule. There was nothing about her life she wanted to change right now.

  But she couldn’t get Jack out of her mind. Normally, that wouldn’t have been an issue—although she didn’t change her men quite as often as she changed her locale, she’d had more than her share of fieldwork flings. Even given the potentially serious threat she was dealing with here, she could have made the time for some fun.

  Jack, though, didn’t seem to consider dating—or, in her case, hooking up—as anything remotely approaching fun. The few times they had skirted the edges of the issue in conversation, he’d made it plenty clear that he wasn’t interested in quick and casual, and that he had some heavy thoughts when it came to relationships.

  Not that there was anything wrong with that, to coin a Seinfeld-ism, but it wasn’t her style by a long shot, which meant that it wasn’t smart for her to remember their kiss…and it definitely wasn’t smart for her to wonder what it would feel like to take it further.

  Still, smart or not, dozens of butterflies dipped and spun inside her as she headed down the spiral staircase to the lower level, and they got worse when she caught a whiff of red sauce and garlic and heard cookware clanging softly over the refrain from “Home on the Range.”

  Oh, God. He was cooking. And humming. The two together tipped her a little further from “like” to “lust” and warning bells went off.

  Pausing on the lowest rung of the stairs, she told herself to go back upstairs and chow down on the camping rations she kept in her bag for emergencies. But she was starving and she was a sucker for pasta.

  Her feet were moving before her brain had fully weighed the decision. And before she could second-guess herself, she was in the kitchen doorway, and he was turning to greet her with a raised eyebrow that said he’d heard her on the stairs and knew how long she’d stood there debating.

  He’d stopped humming, leaving the kitchen filled with the sounds of boiling water, bubbling sauce, and the low-pitched churn of the vent over the stove…and nothing else, as they stood there, staring at each other. After a moment, he said, “This doesn’t need to be weird. I wanted spaghetti and apparently Matt and Gigi don’t believe in the jarred stuff. So because I was cooking, I made enough for two plus leftovers. You want some or you don’t want some, that’s cool. You want to take it upstairs, go for it. Or we could sit down and share a meal. Your call.”

  A smart woman would have gone with takeout. Tori, though, grinned and said, “I’m starving and it smells great. Let’s eat.”

  THEY STUCK CAREFULLY to neutral subjects as they ate—the case, her work, Bear Claw and a handful of other topics suited to a couple of relative strangers who didn’t need to get to know each other because they were only in each other’s lives very fleetingly. And if the careful neutrality of it irritated Jack, rubbing at the raw, edgy parts of him that had been worn down past the point of restraint by two days of being out in the wilderness with a woman who wasn’t like anyone he’d ever thought he would go for, yet had gotten thoroughly under his skin, he held himself in check, reminding himself of all the reasons he’d decided not to go there.

  He needed to focus on protecting her and she needed to focus on saving Bear Claw Canyon, and as distracting as the tension might be between them, the alternative would be even more distracting. Problem was, he was starting to wonder just how much protection she really needed. Because aside from a couple of false alarms, the Forgotten had proven remarkably tame, and she was fully capable out in the backcountry—more than capable really.

  While she might not have hiked circles around him—his longer reach and greater strength gave him the advantage in places—she’d held her own out in the Forgotten, clambering out on edgy precipices and high into the gnarled limbs of the sickened trees to get the samples she wanted. She had brushed him off a few times when he’d wanted to rein her in, but her instincts had proven good and he’d eventually backed off even further.

  With the shooter’s story checking out and no concrete sign of the Shadow Militia—though he was keeping a damn sharp eye out—he’d had far too much time to think about other things. Like the Death Stare case…and Tori. She wasn’t like anyone he’d ever known before—an intriguing mix of occasional shyness when it came to him, guts when it came to just about everything else…including, it seemed, relationships.

  Their lives were completely different, their styles worlds apart, yet he liked her. More than liked, in fact, although he was fighting the urge to make it be anything else. He knew what worked for him, and quick and temporary wasn’t it. Which meant they needed to stay on a professional level, he reminded himself, and made himself focus on her rundown of the lab resu
lts, which he’d been only halfway paying attention to.

  One piece of information, though, had stuck out. “Hang on, back up. It’s a genetically engineered organism?”

  “It’s looking that way, possibly a hybrid of a mushroom, an air plant and a sulfur bacterium at the very least.”

  “Why would you want to cross those together?”

  She gave an eloquent shrug. “Your guess is as good as mine. The air plant allows it to live suspended. As for the others, we’re looking at a toxic fungus and an anaerobe. It’ll take more of an expert than me to figure out why you’d put those two together unless you wanted…I don’t know, a long-lived poison, maybe?”

  Jack stilled. “How about a drug that’s addictive at low doses but deadly at higher doses?”

  Excitement seared through him. Had they just found the source of the Death Stare?

  Chapter Seven

  “A drug?” Tori frowned, then shook her head. “I’m not an expert, but I’d tend to say that would be a long shot. A poison, sure. But the amatia isn’t a ’shroom of the psychedelic variety.” She thought back to a couple of snippets she’d overheard during his nightly base-touch with his boss. “Are you thinking of this Death Stare case?” At his clipped nod, she pressed, “Tell me about it.” When he hesitated, she said, “I learned a long time ago not to discount even the most far-fetched-sounding idea. Occam’s razor doesn’t always apply when it comes to Mother Nature…or humankind.”

  His lips twitched. “The simplest explanation isn’t always the right one?”

  “Not in my experience. So, the Death Stare. Start talking.” It wasn’t just the case she was curious about either. Clearly this one was personal to him.