Pack of Strays (The Fangborn Series Book 2) by Dana Cameron

Parshin’s credit card.
    We went back to the room. I took out the memory stick and handed it to Adam. He booted up his notebook and slotted it in.
    It was nearly blank, the grid of a calendar. There were regular appointments, always the same: an entry with a date. And a code. We tried a few things, but nothing made sense.
    It looked like meetings or events that Buell wanted kept secret. There were a few weeks of this sort of date keeping; then they ended altogether on October 7, about two weeks from today.
    There was only one entry after October 7, written in plain English .
    My blood froze as I showed it to Adam. The last entry said, “Year One.”
    Buell was planning the end of something.

    That night, while I was asleep, I saw the archaeology lab again.
    So much more solid than the vision I’d had earlier in the day, so much clearer to every sense. It smelled like dust, dirt, wet cardboard, rust, and nonporous scientific surfaces, with a chemical overtone of polyvinyl acetate and toluene.
    In other words, it smelled like home. If I couldn’t be working in a perfectly measured, perfectly excavated hole in the ground, trowel in hand, this was my idea of heaven.
    I opened one of the cupboards and saw the bundled brushes, small and large, fine and coarse, for cleaning artifacts. Fine-nibbed pens with ink for marking them, and neat boxes of three-mil plastic artifact bags in every size, with Sharpie markers for labeling. There were paper bags for organic samples, and pens, pencils, and nail polish. Glues for mending. Graph paper in all scales, lined paper, blank paper for making recording sheets, everything in its place, nice and neat and new.
    All of which was wrong.
    Archaeology labs are almost never nice and neat and new. Most often they’re stuck in unused spaces like basements, and even when they are on the newer side, the gear has been reclaimed from decades past. A mix of old and new and very old.
    This was all pristine. And wrong.
    Sean was there again, too. I’d heard his voice in my head, but today was the first time I’d ever seen him. Twice now.
    He’d just finished stuffing the last of a sandwich into his mouth. He threw out the paper bag he’d brought it in and was washing his hands at the sink as he chewed. Large as life, even in death; reddish hair and Van Dyke beard. Sean was in his field clothes. He looked at home.
    He gave me a nod. “Hey.”
    Like it wasn’t anything special, like he was always here. Like I was always here.
    “Hey,” I said. I missed my friend terribly. I wanted to run to him, throw my arms around him, but I tried to be casual, so I wouldn’t scare him off. So I wouldn’t have to leave.
    I was drawn to the shelf next to the fume hood, with the chemicals in carefully labeled brown bottles. Across the room, stacks and stacks of screens in slotted frames for drying artifacts. I pulled one of the wooden frames out and saw all was well: bags washed and drying , artifacts neatly labeled to match the bag’s provenience, everything sorted by type and ready for cataloging. I didn’t recognize the artifacts —they were from someone else’s project—but the ceramics were colorfully decorated with geometric patterns finely delineated in jewel-like colors. I had to squint to confirm they were actually hand-painted and not rendered by some machine.
    Maybe I could just stay here, I thought. It’s heaven—why would I want to leave?
    A crack, hiss, and the smell of sulfur.
    I turned. “Do you smell something? Something burning?”
    Sean looked up from the newspaper he was reading. Sniffed the air. “It’s not in here, Zoe.”
    But my nose told me something was on fire.
    I whirled around, trying to identify the source of the smell. A wisp of smoke, nearly invisible but for its movement, drew me to the fume hood.
    On the shelf inside, a cigarette was smoldering. No more than the tip had been consumed, and I grabbed it, stubbing it out.
    I don’t smoke. Never been able to afford the