Archer explained how the filming went, signaled Lars and Isidro, and then red lights flicked on across the array of cameras and equipment in a half-circle around me. My mouth dried and I tried not to stare into the cameras. This was a terrible idea. Filming myself in the woods was one thing, but sitting in front of what felt like a preppy firing squad…
Not so much.
Giselle moved some paperwork on her clipboard, making notes even though I hadn’t said anything, and smiled with too many teeth on display. “Well, Ms. Montgomery.”
“It’s Doctor Montgomery,” I said automatically. “I didn’t go to evil medical school to be called ‘Miss.’”
Isidro snorted but ducked when Giselle shot him a dirty look.
I sighed, already exhausted with her inability to be amused. “I have two PhDs and I like dumb movies about time travel and cloning. Call me Doctor Montgomery or Ada. Anything in between is just weird.”
Her nose wrinkled. “So, Ada. When did you start searching for Bigfoot?”
My eyebrows arched. Maybe she hadn’t done research at all. “I’m not looking for Bigfoot. First of all...”
I talked and talked, and they filmed and filmed, and still Archer said nothing. He didn’t ask any questions nor did he try to redirect Giselle as her questioning grew more invasive, the questions deliberately provocative.
With the pain from my injuries simmering and moving toward a full boil, I focused on not making an ass of myself and keeping those little white lies lined up nice and straight. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell the truth about everything, but Dragomir’s warning kept coming back to me, stronger and stronger until I knew he deliberately used his weird powers to fuck things up.
My mind had wandered too far and I’d paused along with it, and blinked when Giselle tapped her pen on the clipboard. “Ada. We were talking about your recent trip to the woods. Before the attack. What were you doing?”
“Counting Rose-breasted grosbeaks for the Park Service.”
Archer laughed, covering it with a hand over his mouth, and those beautiful eyes sparkled as he watched me. I had to admit it sounded like a smart-ass comment even to me, and I knew it was true. My cheeks heated. “I’m serious. The Park Service pays me to help catalogue the migratory patterns of certain species of birds.”
“What about Mothman?”
I choked on air and struggled to breathe. Pounding my chest helped a little, though it made my ribs scream, and I dabbed at my eyes for a second as I coughed. Even a sip of water from the glass Archer handed me didn’t really clear my throat. My voice rasped into a croak as I faced Giselle. “No, not Mothman. There have been some sightings of the Snallygaster near here and possible a sasquatch, but the Park Service doesn’t pay for cryptid tracking.”
She nodded, her gaze sharp. “Of course not. How do you fund your efforts?”
“Mostly the Park Service paycheck allows me to count birds and search for evidence of cryptids at the same time,” I said warily. The Park Service definitely wouldn’t want to be brought into the documentary, since the local rangers already had issues with their headquarters questioning my employment. “But like I said, the Park Service doesn’t have anything to do with my own research. I spent most of the time searching for cryptids on my own dime.”
Archer spoke for the first time. “What about all the expensive lab equipment? Who paid for that? It looked like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tech out there.”
I shouldn’t have felt betrayed. He didn’t have any loyalty to me, he was there to do a job. Even though I knew that, it felt like he’d just blurted out a secret I’d shared in confidence. I sipped more water and shrugged. “On loan from the university. I’m running some basic tests for them.”
His head tilted and the cobalt eyes stopped looking so sweet and safe. “That’s interesting. I called the company and they said an LLC based out of Chicago ordered it just two days ago. Some kind of business development firm with no ties to any universities.”
My heart sank and I sat back, bewildered. That was why he’d gotten the card from the delivery guy? To check up on my story? And why the fuck hadn’t Dragomir and I worked out a story before the vampire decided to do something so ostentatious?
All five of them watched me as they waited for an answer. I finally smiled and played dumb. “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s from the university.”
“But it’s not,” Giselle said, staring at me like I’d just said an asteroid was going to hit Earth in five seconds.
Archer handed me a printed purchase order from the company with the name of a business at the top. Sighisoara Development LLC. I scanned the rest of it for any useful information on how Dragomir moved his money, and handed the papers back. “I don’t know what to tell you. Never heard of the place.”
The silence stretched uncomfortably. I waited for them to speak. I was perfectly comfortable in awkward silences. One of the few perks of having very few social skills. My attention wandered to elsewhere in the room, then on to whether I could order a discount generator and have it delivered in a day or so. Or maybe I could just tell Dragomir to order a mobile lab and container, although there was no telling how Archer would investigate that and what conclusions he would draw.
Finally, Giselle sat up, her eyes glinting with annoyance. “All right. On this last excursion, what was your plan? What were you looking for?”
I knew the issue of the equipment and the mystery LLC wasn’t resolved, and with the determination in the woman’s eyes, she’d find her answer or die trying.
It was just her bad luck that looking too hard might actually kill her, if Dragomir found out.
I pretended none of the uncomfortable stuff happened, and went on like it was all a perfectly friendly conversation. “I always have a plan. It’s just that most of the time the rest of the world gets a vote and the mountains don’t like when people get too confident.”
“So you think the mountains are sentient here? They want to keep people out?”
I laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous.” The Latin slipped out before I thought about it, and I repeated Dragomir’s admonishment that nature didn’t give a shit about human endeavors. “Natura non constristatur.”
Which earned me five more sets of raised eyebrows.
I waited again, wanting Giselle to earn every damn word I said.
She finally cracked. “Is that Latin? What does that mean, and what does it have to do with your mountains?”
“It’s Latin, yes. It means ‘nature is not saddened.’ Nature doesn’t care about your plans, the system continues to operate whether we are present or not. Weather changes in moments on the mountains, and wild animals go where they want to go. We are only a very small speck in a very wide world, and losing sight of that can be deadly.”
Hopefully they took the warning and didn’t go wandering off into the park on their own.
“Interesting,” Giselle murmured. “Do you speak Latin?”
“I need to brush up on my grammar, but I know some. It helps to know the basics in science.” And it also intimidated people when used selectively.
“Of course.” Giselle leaned forward, her expression turning predatory. “On this trip, as the mountains tried to keep you out, you persisted. Why did you push through if the weather and everything told you to turn back?”
“Because I wanted to film a few areas where I’d found evidence of potential cryptid activity to send to LA for a project I was working on: a documentary similar to this one, but with fewer accusations.”
Isidro and Lars grinned behind their cameras.
The producer didn’t blink. “When did the attack occur?”
My heartbeat started to climb. I didn’t want to relive the whole episode on camera. I glanced away from her and the camera, looking for an escape or just a distraction. Sometimes that worked — focusing on something else entirely so the whole story filtered out in an impersonal narrative. “A couple days after I went out.”
“Please use a full sentence. They don’t want my questions on camera, so we need you to narrate.”
I glanced back at her. “Fine. The attack happened a couple days after I went out to get film of certain areas where cryptids likely hide. I’d gone farther than I intended in a new direction, but I changed course so I could get back to a main road and have a friend pick me up to drive back to town to meet a deadline.”
Archer spoke, his voice low and calm — the very opposite of Giselle’s interrogation. “Can you describe what happened?”
Telling him was easier than revealing every sordid detail to Giselle and the cameras. The words came to me as I detailed the changing weather, the campsite being out of reach, the need to find the cave for shelter... All of it. My voice dropped as I went on, and my hands knotted in my lap as I got to facing the wild man. Like maybe I wouldn’t plummet down the ravine again.
“Describe the creature that attacked you,” Giselle said abruptly, snapping me out of the haze of memories.
I tried not to look to Archer for support or grimace when I faced Giselle. “An older man — maybe sixty or older — with wild shaggy hair and a beard that hadn’t been cut in a long damn time. Yellowed teeth and — red-rimmed eyes. Like he’d been out in the mountains for a long, long time. His clothes were pretty much just rags, and he was — dirty. He smelled terrible. Unwashed. Almost rotten.”
Giselle’s eyes narrowed. “Could it have been an animal? A bear, maybe?”
“It wasn’t a bear. He wasn’t a bear. He was definitely a man.”
“Come on, Ada. Surely it’s possible…”
“Honey, you’ve obviously never seen a bear in real life,” I said. My ribs ached and a headache built behind my eyes from the emotions and bright lights and aggravation of guarding against her cutting questions. “There’s no mistaking it.”
“How can you be sure?”
“The man who attacked me walked upright, yelled at me, and then tried to grab me with hands instead of paws. And then he tried to bite me with human teeth.”
Archer sat forward so suddenly I flinched. His attention never wavered, and he looked more like Giselle than I liked. “He tried to bite you? Did he?”
“No,” I said. “I got the rifle between us and shoved him away so he couldn’t sink his teeth in, and that’s when he yelled.”
“He yelled at you?” Archer asked, his head tilted. “You haven’t mentioned that in the other interviews you’ve done. What did he say?”
My heart jumped to my throat and made it difficult to speak. Had I mentioned it before? Did I even remember correctly what had happened? It felt like I’d talked about it so much that it all blended into a half-dream, half-memory. “It was garbled when he yelled. But he was — grinning or snarling, and the noises sounded like words. It could have been words.”
Even I thought I sounded like I was hiding something. Lars even leaned around his camera to give me a look like “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.”
Giselle shifted her weight and leaned forward, though she was careful to stay out of the camera’s view. “Do you know for sure it spoke to you? Maybe you dreamed about it. Maybe you heard a bear snarling and thought —”
“He wasn’t a bear,” I said, my tone sharp. “Okay? He definitely wasn’t a bear. He grabbed me and got his hands on my rifle, and when I wrestled for it, I fell off the path.”
“You fell?” Archer glanced at Giselle, then lowered his voice. “Yesterday you said he pushed you.”
“I —” I wracked my brain for when I might have told him such a thing, but only the blank spot in my memory after I took the pain medication offered any explanation. Flashes of a wide-ranging conversation about his scars and my family and other blurry topics. Had Archer interrogated me while I was loopy from the drugs? “I don’t remember talking about that. The wild man might have — he could have pushed me. We were fighting over the rifle and everything was wet from the rain. I don’t — remember if he pushed me or I just fell. It all blurs together.”
My shirt clung to my back as sweat trickled between my shoulder blades. Picking up the glass of water next to my chair only made me more aware of how much my hands trembled. It might have been my imagination, but Archer’s attention went to my fingers as I tried to sip without dumping it in my lap.
Giselle’s mouth twitched in the first smile I’d seen from her. “Interesting. So it’s possible you don’t remember everything. And that you’re misremembering or hallucinating parts or all of what actually happened.”
“I...” I looked to Archer but didn’t really expect him to help. It made good television, no doubt. “Maybe if I show you where this happened, it’ll be clear what I mean.”
“Great.” Giselle smiled wider until I could practically see her vocal cords. “That sounds like a plan. We can even recreate it. Without the bear, of course.”
I’d give the rest of the group real bear mace, but she’d get some Febreze in her can. She could die in a bear attack smellin’ like Airy Linen. Then we could talk about telling the difference between bears and weird mountain men. “He wasn’t a bear.”
“Whatever you say,” Giselle said cheerfully. She signaled the crew and Ryan lowered the boom mic as Lars and Isidro turned off cameras and checked various things. The producer checked her watch and glanced at Archer. “We’ve got an appointment with the rangers to film some maps and background on the park and other sightings. You coming?”
“I’ll settle up the bill and catch up.”
The four departed without another word, disappearing into the main restaurant. All of me trembled with adrenaline; it felt as threatening as facing an actual bear.
Looking at Archer didn’t help calm my racing heart. After the encounter with Giselle, he looked less like a pleasant distraction and more like a mistake I’d already made. He hadn’t helped me with Giselle’s questioning, and asked me ‘gotcha’ questions about the lab equipment he’d researched. Why would he if he actually felt something more than just idle curiosity at the loony Sasquatch researcher? Maybe he came that night just to fish for information he could use against me. I’d misread the signals, obviously, even if he’d talked about his family and his gnarly scars. He wasn’t interested in me except as an interesting specimen for his documentary.
He waited until the door closed before he exhaled and gestured for us to relocate to the table. He didn’t say anything as a waitress returned with desserts and more drinks, but smiled when she finally departed with his credit card. “You did well.”
“If that’s what this whole thing is going to be like, I’m out.” I fiddled with the contract and regretted signing it without a clause that I didn’t have to speak to or even see Giselle. “What the hell is she trying to prove?”
“That she can make a viable, addictive documentary.” Archer grimaced. “There’s a purpose to it, Ada, even if it’s uncomfortable. And we can’t warn you because then your reaction wouldn’t be genuine.”
I gathered up my stuff, thinking of the boxes waiting in my truck and the work waiting at home. “I wasn’t planning on staying much longer, thanks. I’ll skip dessert.”
The scars buckled on his hand as he examined what looked like chocolate-cherry cake. “Indulge me, Ada.”
My mental alarm jangled in warning. His expression remained too closed off, indifferent, the opposite of the man who’d sat on my couch in front of the fire and encouraged me to find adventure in Nepal. Once more I had to wonder who the real Archer was: the calculating professional in front of me, or the smiling flirt?
Who would I face? Who did I want to face?
As I searched his eyes for a hint, I started releasing any hope I’d carried that the little spark between us would grow into something more.