She burrowed deeper into her parka, shielding her eyes from blowing snow with one hand. It might be cold out here on deck, but 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 that blew 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, but that experience 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 tossed 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, but she 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.”
“But 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, but that’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 that aren’t 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 that had 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 bound 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 runup. What’d you find?”
“Something truly ancient. It’s made up of archaea, but 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 ameba, right?”
“Not exactly. Ameba 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 that we know of.” 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, but Zoe held up a hand. “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 spend one summer there.”
The hopeful look on Ketha’s face folded in on itself. “Damn but I miss libraries and my collections of scientific 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? That’s why I’m here. I was hoping you might have relevant information that could feed into figuring this out.”
“I understand it’s important,” Zoe said, picking her words with care. “I’m not blowing you off, just 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 flats 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, that I have. ’Tis so unpleasant, I’ve always shut it down before 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. “That’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 too fantastic 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 into the bathroom long enough to sluice water over her face, and then she sat at the desk and pulled paper and a pencil from its 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...
Also by Ann Gimpel
Alphas in the Wild
Hello Darkness
Alpine Attraction
A Run For Her Money
Fire Moon
Bitter Harvest
Deceived
Twisted
Coven Enforcers
Blood and Magic
Blood and Sorcery
Blood and Illusion
Demon Assassins
Witch's Bounty
Witch's Bane
Witches Rule
Dragon Lore
Highland Secrets
To Love A Highland Dragon
Dragon Maid
Dragon's Dare
Earth Reclaimed
Earth's Requiem
Earth's Blood
Earth's Hope
Earth Reclaimed Series
GenTech Rebellion
Winning Glory
Honor Bound
Claiming Charity
Loving Hope
Keeping Faith
Rubicon International
Garen
Lars
Tarnished Beginnings
Tarnished Legacy
Tarnished Prophecy
Tarnished Journey
Soul Storm
Dark Prophecy
Dark Pursuit
Dark Promise
Wolf Clan Shifters
Alice's Alphas
Megan's Mates
Sophie's Shifters
Standalone
Red Dawn
Marked by Fortune
Shadows in Time
Alphas in the Wild Collection
Midnight Magic
Heart's Flame
Icy Passage
Dark Storm, Soul Storm Books Collection
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Shadow Play
Melis's Gambit
Rubicon International Series Bundle
Coven Enforcers Series
Edge of Night