by Ann Gimpel
“Really,” she reassured her bondmate.
“What if another wicked mage shows up? And you need my magic to strengthen yours?”
“I have a feeling you’d know. No matter where you were.” Caring and gratitude for the coyote tracked from her toes to her head. Its last bondmate had died in a bloody skirmish during the First World War, and it had always blamed itself for not keeping its human partner safe from the shrapnel that had torn him to bits.
Wars had been simpler then. At least they’d had beginnings and ends. Winners and losers. Not anymore. From the time a magical barricade trapped them inside Ushuaia, they’d fought an amorphous enemy. One without defined boundaries that was a magnet for evil. Zoe shivered and set her teeth together to keep them from chattering.
They’d fought Vampires too, but they were pikers in the evil department. Nowhere near as daunting as demons or powerful mages. Besides, Vamps seemed to be on their way out. The battle against the Cataclysm had paved the way for them to lose their fangs and, if they chose to do so, welcome a bond animal.
Zoe broke into a shambling trot. Perpetually cold outside. Stifling heat within. She reminded herself it was good to have choices. Any choices at all. Those years in Ushuaia hadn’t offered much in the way of alternatives. She’d spent most of her time helping humans survive and avoiding Vampires.
She burrowed deeper into her parka, shielding her eyes from blowing snow with one hand. It might be cold out here on deck; at least it wasn’t claustrophobic. They’d been en route from Antarctica’s Palmer Peninsula to McMurdo Research Station for the past week. Between pack ice that had surrounded the ship—and forced them to slow down—and storms blowing up out of nowhere, their progress hadn’t been as brisk as they’d hoped.
Or as Viktor and Juan had hoped, she corrected herself. They were the only ones who actually knew anything about sailing a ship as large as Arkady. As she’d recently reminded her bondmate, she’d done her share of piloting skiffs and day sailors in the murky zone where Scotland and Ireland were separated by the Irish Sea. Those experiences had scarcely prepared her for a three-hundred-foot-long vessel.
Vik and Juan had parceled out tasks, training the rest of them as fast as they could, but the ship’s array of instrumentation was daunting. Zoe doubted anything as prosaic as sitting down with an instruction manual would be sufficient to teach her the basics of what she needed to know. Guiding Arkady required years of hands-on practice. Sailing for Dummies wouldn’t cut it.
“There you are,” sounded from behind her.
Zoe spun to face Ketha, a wolf Shifter and seer, who was also Viktor’s wife. “Here I am,” she agreed, surprised by how flat and hard the words sounded.
Ketha had slung a parka over her tall, slender frame. Dark hair shot with red and gold streamed around her, tossed by the wind, and her golden eyes held a worried cast. “Is something wrong?”
Zoe choked on a groan at the memory of what she’d dragged out of her coyote by asking the same question.
Ketha grappled with her parka hood with one bare hand. Clearly, she hadn’t expected to remain outside very long.
“Come on.” Zoe trotted twenty feet and yanked the first door she came to open. “You’re not dressed to be out here.”
“Judging from how white your skin is, neither are you,” Ketha retorted and dove through the door Zoe held for her.
“My skin is always white. ’Tis an Irish redhead’s curse.”
“Looks like frostbite to me.” Ketha stopped in the long corridor spanning Deck Three and turned to look askance at Zoe. “Och, sure and ye’ve a wee bit of Scots blood too, lassie.”
A laugh bubbled from Zoe’s belly. Ketha had a quirky optimism, and it was impossible to remain annoyed with her. “Drop the brogue, sweetie.”
“I speak Gaelic,” Ketha protested.
“Aye, but it doesn’t translate well when you pretend you were born on the old side of the Atlantic.”
“North America is every bit as old. It’s not why I came hunting for you. We could use your archeology skills.”
Zoe frowned. “Why? Surely you didn’t unearth any pot shards or strips of fabric or bits of buildings for me to examine.”
“Yes and no.”
“Equivocate, why don’t you?” Zoe rolled her eyes and hustled down the corridor to her cabin. “You may as well come on in and tell me what’s going on while I ditch some of these clothes. I’ll cook if I keep all these layers on.”
Ketha followed her into her cabin and pushed the door shut. “What do you know about genetic blends?”
Zoe unzipped her parka and slung it over a hook next to the door. Next, she toed off the Arctic Pac boots so she could get out of her bibs. “By genetic blends, do you mean two species not normally associated with one another?” Ketha nodded, so Zoe went on. “You’re the microbiologist. Why ask me?”
Ketha laid her parka on one of the bunks and settled next to it. “I didn’t mean on a cellular level. What I was fishing for was evidence—and it can be anecdotal—of beings not explainable by any normal selection process.”
“Do you mean mythical creatures? Like the Phoenix? Or Selkies?”
“More like Gryphons since they’re a mix of eagles and lions.”
“Ah.” Zoe unhooked the bibs and stepped out of them, hanging them next to the jacket. Once she’d stuffed her feet into slippers, she perched on the bed catty-corner to Ketha’s. “And you’d be asking this, why?”
Ketha blew out a tight breath and stretched out fingers she’d rounded into fists. “We’ve been at this for the last two days. Ever since the weather turned to shit and lab time was about the only avenue open to us—”
“Who’s us?”
“Karin, Recco, Daide, and me.”
Zoe nodded. It made sense. Karin was an MD, and the two men had been veterinarians before being turned into Vampires. Courtesy of the standoff with the Cataclysm, they were Shifters now.
“Go on.” Zoe made come-along motions with one hand.
Ketha pressed her lips into a thin line. “You know how Karin’s first evaluation yielded unrelated bits of genetic material?”
“Yeah. And we figured the dark mage shaped the protoplasm to his liking when he created those impossible animals.”
“Exactly. Well, the unrelated DNA strings are there, but there’s more. We’ve checked it nine different ways—except it feels like a hundred—and we keep coming up with the same result.”
Zoe leaned forward and rested a hand on Ketha’s knee. “You don’t have to justify yourself to a jury of your overeducated peers. This is only me. I don’t need the run-up. What’d you find?”
“Something truly ancient. It’s made up of archaea. Odd thing is, they’re arranged in an intelligent fashion. I’ve never seen anything like it. Never read about it, either.”
Zoe culled through her memory. “Those are what? Some kind of amoeba, right?”
“Not exactly. Amoeba have a cellular nucleus, and these don’t. Archaea are the oldest, simplest single-cell organisms. The original building blocks of life. They’re a type of prokaryote, and they date back three and a half billion years or more.” She stopped to take a measured breath. “I’m here to ask you to generate a list of possibilities.”
Zoe got to her feet and clasped her hands behind her as she covered the distance to the door and back again, stopping in front of Ketha. “So you have a microscopic piece of...of something. And you want me to come up with a list of everything that used to live in this neck of the woods millions—or billions—of years ago? Without the Internet or access to textbooks?”
Ketha opened her mouth. Zoe held up a hand before she said anything. “Archaeologists are exactly like any other scientific discipline. We have areas of specialization. Mine was Native and indigenous peoples. I had colleagues who fell in love with the polar regions, but I only spent one summer there.”
The hopeful look on Ketha’s face folded in on itself. “Damn, I miss libraries and my collection of sci
entific journals. This could be the find of the millennium. A sentient prehistoric creature that migrated to Antarctica before the continent turned into nature’s icebox.”
“How did you get from prokaryotes arranged in unusual ways to a sentient prehistoric creature?”
Ketha screwed her mouth into a grimace. “Bit of a leap, eh? It’s why I’m here. I was hoping you might have relevant information I could feed into figuring this out.”
“I understand it’s important,” Zoe said, picking her words with care. “I’m not blowing you off, merely cautioning you this isn’t exactly my area of expertise. I’ll try to remember what I can, and I’ll ask my bond animal. It’s one of the older ones. Have you asked Juan what his mountain lion remembers? It wasn’t one of the first Shifters, but it wasn’t far removed from them, either.”
“Grand idea. Ashamed I didn’t think of it first.” Ketha jumped to her feet, snapped up her parka, and headed for the door.
A blast of discordant music rocked Zoe. The timing couldn’t be accidental. “Did you hear that?” she demanded.
Ketha pulled her hand away from the door latch and turned to face Zoe. “Hear what?”
“It sounds like a five-year-old pounding the flat of both hands on a keyboard.”
“Fascinating. Do you think something is trying to communicate with you?” Ketha skewered Zoe with troubled eyes. “Have you heard it before?”
“Aye, I have. ’Tis so unpleasant, I’ve always shut it down afore it had a chance to be more than annoying.”
Ketha screwed her face into a reprimand. “When were you going to get around to telling the rest of us about this toddler piano player?”
“Skip the lecture. I told you now. I was worried maybe I’d brought a piece of the Cataclysm along with us. I hoped it would go away. I—”
“Sorry. I was way too harsh. There might be a connection between my tissue sample in the lab and whatever is singing to you.”
Zoe rolled her eyes. “It’s another really big stretch.”
Ketha rolled her eyes back and squeezed Zoe’s shoulder. “When you have no fucking idea what you’re dealing with, no idea is fantastic enough to discard out of hand. I’m going back to the lab.”
“I’ll see if I can remember any of the legends unique to the poles.”
“Good woman.” Ketha pulled the door open and left at a quick pace.
Zoe stepped to the sink long enough to sluice water over her face and then sat at the desk and pulled paper and a pencil from the top drawer.
“Monsters from the North and South Poles, huh?” she muttered and cleared her mind.
It didn’t take long before her eidetic memory regurgitated materials she’d studied during a long-ago summer spent above the Arctic Circle, researching the Inuit and the hunter-gatherer forbearers of Scandinavians. She stared at the page centered in front of her, stabbed her pencil onto it, and began to write.
Adlet: A type of werewolf with the upper body of a man and the hindquarters of a wolf.
Keelut: Evil earth spirit that takes the form of a large, hairless black dog...
Chapter Two: Oddities
Recco—Ricardo Cardoza, except it had been so long since he’d heard his full name, he wondered if he’d even respond to it—hunched over a microscope in the makeshift lab on Deck Two. The room had originally been a common area for the ship’s crew, and it was about twenty feet by thirty. Three tables were bolted to the floor, and several straight-back chairs lay scattered about. Half rested on their sides on the floor, a byproduct of rough seas.
The stained sample beneath Recco’s dual eyepieces twitched. He stared harder, and it did it again. A rippling motion from left to right and back again.
Impossible.
He had to be imagining it. Dead tissue didn’t move. Straightening, he squinched his eyes shut to give them a break before bending low over the scope one more time. Shades of blue and red stared back, quiescent, looking like they were supposed to this time. He waited through a count of ten, but nothing changed.
“Hey, amigo.” Daide walked up behind him. Diego Vegas had been Recco’s practice partner since they graduated veterinary school twenty some odd years before. When they’d stopped being vets because the world imploded, they’d stuck it out as Vampires. Daide’s dark hair was chopped to uneven lengths; some strands hit chin level, others brushed his shoulders. Tall and lanky, his stark bone structure—high cheekbones and a squared-off chin—revealed Native blood. He twisted until his dark eyes were trained on Recco’s face.
“Hey, amigo, what?” Recco countered, taking in the other man’s black pants, stretchy red top, and puffy vest.
“You were muttering in Spanish. Did you figure anything out?”
Recco pushed to his feet and gestured to his vacated chair. “You tell me. Take a look.”
Nodding, Daide perched on the chair and adjusted the optics to his liking. They’d had plenty of arguments over the years about Recco’s tendency to ratchet the focus on one side to compensate for a slight astigmatism.
Over on the other side of the room, Karin stumbled to her slipper-clad feet and raised her hands over her head, rotating her upper torso. Medium height, she looked as if she’d once had a pleasant roundness. Ten years of short rations in Ushuaia had yielded the same gauntness they all sported. A pair of fuzzy green sweats hung low on her hips, and she’d stripped out of her jacket to a silver long-underwear top.
“I sat for way too long,” she muttered. “I’m taking a break. Anyone feel like coffee?”
Recco crossed to where the wolf Shifter stood, not wanting to disturb Daide’s concentration. “Coffee would be great,” he said. “Daide likes tea.”
“Yes. I remember. While I’m gone, I’ll hunt Ketha down. No idea what’s taking her so long. All she was going to do was see if Zoe had any ideas to shed light on those odd prokaryote patterns.”
“Black with two sugars,” Daide called without looking up. “None of that chai crap for me.”
“Got it.” She made a smothered snorting sound. “Who knows? I might have a future as a waitress if the world ever sets itself to rights.” Karin’s lined face split into a warm smile. White hair fell in curls to waist level, and her copper eyes radiated a keen intelligence. Schooled in traditional Western medicine as well as magical interventions, not much rattled her.
“Back in half an hour.” She walked purposefully through the open doorway.
Recco returned to Daide. “Well?”
Daide straightened. When he angled his head to look at Recco, his forehead was drawn into a mass of confused wrinkles. “The dye colors are changing. Did you add something to the original stains?”
“Nope.” Recco shook his head.
“The structure is clearer than it was before. I didn’t realize prokaryotes could even do this.”
“You mean join together to form something more complex than a single-celled organism?”
“Yeah. It’s kind of what I guess I mean.” Daide pushed heavily upright. “Maybe Karin is onto something, and we could all stand a break. Granted, my science is rusty, but none of this makes a whole lot of sense.”
Recco shrugged. “Nothing has since that fucker, Raphael, turned us into Vampires. Why should this be any different?”
Daide narrowed his eyes. “You asked me to look through this scope for a reason. Was it because the colors were different?”
“No. I could have sworn the sample moved. Twice.” Recco sucked in a tight breath and waited for Daide to ask what he’d been smoking.
“Moved, how?” Daide’s question was carefully neutral.
Recco offered him points for not laughing his head off—or running out of the room to escape what had to feel like a plunge into madness.
“You know”—Recco spun one hand in a small circle—“rippled from side to side. Kind of like you’d expect from a live tissue sample.”
“Might explain the colors changing.”
Recco fell back a pace as understanding drove a wedge i
nto his midsection, forcing breath from his lungs. “You think it’s alive.”
“Pretty much has to be. Dead things don’t move. And if it’s turning into something, it would absorb the stain differentially. Ergo, the color shift.” Daide dusted his hands together. “Mystery solved.”
“For some reason, it doesn’t make me feel any better.” Recco sifted his fingers through his hair. It fell past his shoulders and had escaped the rubber band he’d tied it back with.
Ketha walked through the open door. “What doesn’t make you feel any better?” she inquired brightly, followed by, “Where’s Karin?”
“That’s the easy question,” Daide replied. “She’s getting coffee and looking for you.”
“What’s stuck in my craw is the cell cluster seems to be...changing,” Recco muttered.
“Changing how?” Ketha asked.
“Reproducing. Growing. However you want to label it. Even the stained portions aren’t the same.”
Instead of asking more questions, Ketha crossed the room to the microscope she’d been using. It was one of the ones they’d taken from the lab in Grytviken and was far more sophisticated than their other instruments. Bending, she gazed through the eyepieces, but not for very long.
“This slide has changed too. Not much more than it was doing before I left, though.”
Recco hunted for words that wouldn’t be offensive. “The alteration doesn’t seem to bother you. Why not?”
“Magic is afoot here. I’m more used to it than you are, and I’m curious to see what we end up with.” She angled her head to one side and looked from Recco to Daide. “Brace yourselves. The plot thickens. Something is singing to Zoe.”
“What do you mean, singing? Is she all right?” The words escaped before Recco could stop them. He cared about Zoe. A lot. So far, they hadn’t done much more than share coffee and conversation, but worry for the red-haired coyote Shifter filled him with a crawling sensation. The same sense of creeping doom that had snuck in when the clump of cells slithered beneath his eyepieces.
Ketha quirked a dark brow and sent a pointed look Recco’s way. “She’s fine. Researching mythological creatures in her cabin if you want to check for yourself.”