Prologue
The only barrier between the beast’s teeth and the hunter’s throat was the barrel of a Winchester Model 1895.
Mud surged around the hunter’s shoulders, threatening to swallow him up as a great weight bore down on him. The taste of blood gushed across his tongue as he bit into his cheeks, his bottom lip, and he turned his head as the beast once more lunged forward with an audible snap of its jaws.
The hunter meant for this to be a swift kill, one done with a single shot. The sooner this hunt was over, the sooner he could revel in the guilt that would haunt him afterward. But the hesitation that caused his grip to shake and aim to lower resulted in the bullet lodging in the beast’s shoulder, angering it instead of killing.
He barely had time to load another bullet before the beast burst from the fringes of the nearby forest—the glow of its yellow eyes and hunch of its back were unmistakable—and charged athim. Claws tore through mud, a maw was set on tasting vengeance.
It tackled him to the ground just as his thumb tapped the hammer. The force of monstrous paws suddenly upon his chest and the onslaught of rain from the heavens robbed him of his breath. The rifle was thrust upward to parry gnashing, starved teeth before they had a chance to taste his skin.
A full moon hung high above them, peering through the thick overcast to outline the beast in an unholy halo of light. Drool and blood leaked from its huffing mouth as teeth scraped against gunmetal and the hunter’s raw knuckles.
Strength was beginning to bleed from the hunter’s arms and he felt as though he were drowning, beneath the beast, mud, rain, and blood. It would be easy to let such happen: to forgo what had been requested of him to end this monster’s misery. But the guilt of leaving a task incomplete and the guilt of committing murder were so similar that he couldn’t decide which he’d rather live with.
His body seemingly made the decision for him when the muscles in his thighs bunched and he kicked until his boots met the beast’s groin.
The beast choked on the air forced from its lungs with a choked squeal. It flinched back but failed to relent.
The hunter sucked in a breath the moment his cheeks no longer sweated beneath the blood-soaked stank of its breath and grunted as he heaved the beast back with another kick.
He didn’t need an escape, he just needed enough space to pull that trigger…
The ground shuddered when the beast fell, showering the hunter in a spray of mud, blood, and rain.
Blood leaking from its shoulder, the beast wheezed. The vapor of its breath clouded its stained jaws and the bristle of itsmane was made silver by the moon’s waning light. Between its awful sounds, it let out what may have been a mewling whine. It was a sight equal parts pathetic and horrifying, though the hunter felt neither sympathy nor fear. Only the dread of duty.
The hunter raised the rifle until it nestled comfortably against his shoulder.
The beast whined as it looked at him with those sickly yellow eyes, and flashed its even yellower teeth. A challenge. A plea.
The hunter swallowed.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he uttered—and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER
One
14 NOVEMBER, 1905
The hollow belly of a whale gaped down at Jane, yawning open like a maw of curved teeth.
The skeleton watched her closely with hollowed sockets, eyes that could no longer see, smelling her with nostrils that could no longer smell, and hungered with a belly that could no longer be starved. The preserved baleen’s sleek, black bristles shone like obsidian beneath the sunlight that filtered through the museum’s windows. A plaque told her that it was once a fin whale, whose body had washed up on a beach in Sussex, but to her, it was a monster, with its wide-open ribs waiting to gobble her up.
It both frightened and left her in awe knowing that such a creature swam the seas, and wasreal, was once alive, much likethe skeletons of elephants and gorillas that occupied the museum in Milwaukee. To picture it being wrapped in the sarcophagus of blubbery flesh, stuffed with guts while pirouetting through the depths of the pitch-black ocean with an elegance that betrayed its awesome size made her lips tickle with a grin.
Jane had never been to Cambridge’s University Museum of Zoology, but so far she was impressed by its rich collections, both anatomical and zoological. She struggled to decide if she favored this museum over London’s Natural History Museum—though, to her, no collection could hold a candle to London’s greater, grander specimen that was the wholeDiplodocusskeleton. It was just back in May when she’d witnessed the ancient spectacle unveiled. An ancient creature resurrected to enamor modern eyes.
She wished she could’ve spent more time exploring this particular museum. She wanted to burrow and snoop through the whole extent of the collections stored in the depths of its belly, even if it did lack a whole dinosaur skeleton for her to fawn over. It certainly would’ve been far more exhilarating than sitting through another bore of a lecture.
She had once loved attending such lectures as a little girl. Seeing fossils displayed and discussed, reborn by academic mouths, she fooled herself into believing that her own interest in paleontology somehow made her an equal to those men. So much so that, more often than not, she allowed herself to be swept up in daydreams of standing upon those podiums, displaying whatever ancient bones she would have found in her pretend archeological digs in the garden or on the shores of the Great Lakes, shaped with arched horns and thousands of teeth like a dragon, to a gaslit theater of academics who would applaud her efforts.
Such interest waned as she matured and realized that such lectures were less of a celebration of enlightenment but rather acompetition to see who had enough money to sound the most educated. It was why Jane was saddened that her father couldn’t attend this particular series of lectures (which were about findings of the recent Saurian Expeditions in the States); she thought Dr. Simon Sterling was the only man ever of decent intelligence in a room.
At least none of these men were detonating each others’ fossil finds—that Jane knew of. Though their war wasn’t nearly as ruinous as the one waged between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Marsh (Jane would forever mourn any and all species lost in that Bone War, the ultimate fatalities), these academics still used bones and antiquity in an eternal act of posturing.
For a moment, Jane found a kinship in the assemblage of whale bones above her: suspended in time, forced to endure stuffy, academic competitions whilst yearning for freedom of the open ocean. Or, in Jane’s circumstance, the freedom of the university’s collections. Or a clothing shop, with her fingers plunged deep within the silken folds of a new gown.
