Page 3

Chapter Two

A nother town, another cryptozoology conference. Why the organizers had decided on San Francisco when it was one of the most expensive places to stay on the West Coast, Ben Sanders couldn’t say for sure.

The only thing he did know was that the meager collection of books he’d sold in the dealers’ room this weekend wouldn’t begin to put a dent in his hotel tab.

Probably, he shouldn’t have been adding to that tab by nursing a Scotch and soda in the hotel bar, but he needed something to take the sting out of the way he’d had all of five people show up for the presentation he’d worked so hard on — The Goatsucker's Shadow: Ecological Niches and the Plausibility of the Chupacabra .

Oh, well. When he got home, he’d repackage the presentation into a YouTube video and earn some money on all that hard work. These days, in-person events weren’t all they were cracked up to be, but his YouTube channel had turned out to be the one thing keeping him afloat.

He sipped some more of his Scotch and let his gaze casually roam the space.

In a booth over in the corner, Prentiss MacAfee was holding court, and Ben muttered a curse under his breath before he had some more Scotch, a much larger swallow this time.

As far as he was concerned, Prentiss was nothing more than an opinionated windbag with a Sasquatch fixation.

Unfortunately, Bigfoot pulled in the crowds the way chupacabras didn’t.

But chupacabras were real. Ben knew he had seen one during that fateful trip he’d taken with a bunch of graduate students on a dig in the Sonoran desert some five years earlier, where they were working in the ruins of a terraced hillside settlement left there more than a thousand years ago by the Trincheras people.

He’d been wakeful that night…and had seen glowing red eyes just past their encampment.

Maybe it had been stupid to try to get a closer look. Those eyes could have belonged to a bobcat or even a mountain lion.

He’d felt responsible for those students, though. True, he hadn’t been much older than they, just a newly minted Ph.D. working his first solo dig, but he was still the one in charge.

So he’d gone to see what those red eyes belonged to.

Definitely not a bobcat or a mountain lion. No, what he’d seen would haunt his dreams for months afterward…would eventually lead him to abandon the archaeology he loved and fall down the rabbit hole of cryptozoology, the study of creatures that shouldn’t exist.

It had been a little bigger than a coyote, long-legged and almost skeletally lean, with moth-eaten gray fur and a face that looked a little too much like that horrifying death-rabbit mask from the Donnie Darko movie. The eyes had glared at him like a set of red laser pointers, horribly focused.

For one awful moment, he’d thought it might spring at him. But then it seemed to decide he was too big to be viable prey, because it had loped off into the darkness, leaving Ben to stand there and stare at the spot it had occupied and wonder if he’d been having some sort of terrible nightmare.

The creature hadn’t been a nightmare, even if he hadn’t known what it was at the time.

Once he started doing some online research, though, he realized he’d encountered a chupacabra, a monster of legend dismissed by most as a coyote with mange, even though those who’d seen it in person swore it had to be some kind of terrible, mythical beast.

Not so mythical after all, however. No, the creature had been as real as the grad students slumbering a few yards away, blissfully unaware that something right out of a nightmare had been prowling near their encampment.

After they returned to California, Ben had done his best to focus on his classes and his research.

But the siren call of the strange and unknown had already taken hold, and he quit teaching at the end of his first year, knowing he was drawn to something immeasurably stranger than anything he could have imagined.

Too bad that chupacabras weren’t as sexy as the Loch Ness monster or Sasquatch.

A man about twenty-five years his senior occupied the barstool next to him. Ben hadn’t paid the guy much attention, because when you were drinking at a bar — especially at a hotel filled with cryptozoologists and the people who followed them — it was generally a good idea to stay in your own lane.

But then the guy said, “You people are all looking in the wrong place.”

As much as Ben would have liked to ignore the stranger, there wasn’t any real way for him to do so without being downright rude, not when he’d been addressed directly.

“Excuse me?” he returned, doing his best to sound polite even though the last thing he wanted right then was to engage in some kind of verbal parrying with a man who looked like he was already three sheets to the wind.

The guy gestured toward their surroundings — and, Ben assumed, the people occupying the bar, almost all of whom were convention attendees.

“Chasing after Bigfoot,” he sneered, “when the real thing isn’t so far away from here.”

Most likely, the stranger was so drunk, he didn’t know what he was saying, but something about his words piqued Ben’s interest nonetheless. “What do you mean, ‘the real thing’?”

The guy hesitated then, something about his expression almost shame-faced, as if he’d just realized he’d brought up a subject he should have been avoiding.

“Nothing,” he mumbled, and swallowed more of his drink.

Probably Scotch, just like Ben’s, although without any soda to make it a little less potent.

“It didn’t sound like nothing,” he said reasonably.

Which was only true. Why would the guy mention something like that if he didn’t have a reason for doing so? Sure, a lot of people had a tendency to run their mouths when they’d had a few too many, but still, all of Ben’s instincts were telling him something was up here.

Maybe something big.

The man tapped a finger against his glass. A gold band gleamed on his ring finger, signaling that he was married…or at least, wanted people to think he was.

Quite a departure from the usual stereotype of guys taking off their wedding rings before they went into a bar so they wouldn’t have any physical evidence of their unavailability.

The stranger didn’t look as if he was there to pick up women, though.

For just a moment, Ben wondered if the man was trying to hit on him, and then he dismissed the notion right away. He had no idea what was going on with the guy, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t that.

Maybe he should try a different tack.

“What’s ‘not too far away’?”

At once, the stranger shook his head. “Nothing. I guess I was just kind of thrown off by all the whackjobs here.”

Ben didn’t much care for that epithet being used to describe a group of people who shared his own somewhat fringe interests, but he supposed he could see why the man had made the remark.

A lot of people liked to let their freak flag fly when they attended these sorts of events, and over half the attendees currently hanging out in the bar wore T-shirts featuring Bigfoot or Nessie or even the Mothman.

Others had buttons with their cryptozoological favorites pinned to their backpacks or lapels.

All in all, it didn’t look like a gathering of Taylor Swift fans, or whatever.

He shrugged, glad that he’d decided against a chupacabra T-shirt and instead only wore a plain black tee under a black jacket. Anyone looking at him most likely wouldn’t be able to determine that he was part of the convention, which was probably a good thing right now.

“They’re just having fun,” he said, doing his best to sound neutral.

The stranger picked up his Scotch and drained the last of it, then set the empty glass down on the bar. “Sounds like their version of fun is a lot different from mine.”

Well, that was most likely true. Ben had no idea what had driven the man to drink away his sorrows in a hotel bar just blocks away from the Moscone Convention Center, but it seemed pretty obvious that he’d chosen the wrong venue today.

The stranger fished around in his jacket pocket and pulled out his wallet, then put a twenty down on the bar.

Something about the motion appeared almost reluctant, although Ben couldn’t be sure whether that was because the guy didn’t know if he wanted to order another drink, or maybe was just concerned about the cost of a second round of Scotch.

If he’d wanted to save on his alcohol consumption, he probably shouldn’t have been drinking in a hotel bar. Those places were notorious for jacking up their prices.

“Have a better one,” the stranger said as he got down from his barstool.

“You, too,” Ben responded. He had no idea what might have been going on in the man’s life, but it seemed clear that something was weighing on him.

Well, everyone had their own problems to deal with. At the moment, he couldn’t spare much thought for anyone else’s but his own.

As Ben turned back to pick up his Scotch and soda, he noticed that a piece of paper now lay on the floor at the foot of the stool the stranger had occupied up until a moment earlier. Most likely, it had fallen out of his pocket when he reached in to pull out his wallet.

Frowning, Ben leaned down to pick it up, thinking maybe he could go after the guy and let him know he’d dropped something. A quick scan of the lobby, just visible through the entrance to the bar, told him the man didn’t seem to be anywhere in sight.

But maybe the piece of paper would have some information on it, possibly a phone number or something where he could reach the stranger if it turned out whatever he’d dropped was important. After all, he’d hate for him to have a problem reclaiming his dry cleaning or something.

On closer inspection, though, the piece of paper wasn’t a ticket from a dry cleaner’s or a gas station receipt or anything like that.