Threshold shift

Chapter 8

The word that came back was that adult and juvenile animals had been found injured or killed. Five deaths, ten with severe wounds that hadn't come from pack fighting or predator attacks.

Bullet wounds. Burns. Cuts made from wires that were still embedded in the flesh of legs and necks. One triceratops had a splintered left horn and a deep v-shaped wound in her neck crest that was crusted with blood and looked infected. A pachy was missing two fingers and the eyes would probably stay blind.

Owen felt sick looking at the intel, the images sent back to Carter and the report from the men and women who had gone to Isla Sorna. He had gone to the command center when the other man had called him, had been there for the debrief, and he felt like he wanted to hit something.

Someone.

Anything at all.

Who had done this to all the animals? And why? It looked like senseless violence, inflicting pain on the adults as their babies were stolen... Maybe hunting for sport. Killing the adults, feeling the momentary thrill of bringing down a rare animal.

But there was no sign of the perpetrators.

"No ship located near Isla Sorna," had been the report. "Nothing has moved in the past three weeks. The wounds are too fresh to be from longer than that."

"They're hiding," Carter growled. "Find them, Rodriguez. Turn over every stone of that island, but find them!"

And don't get eaten, was Owen's thought. There were raptor packs roaming the preserve. A family of t-rexes, as well as a carnotaurus. Not to mention the spinosaurus, who had been seen now and again. Quite prominently.

Carter closed down the feed and looked at him, pale blond brows rising over gray eyes. "Thoughts?"

"Give me a gun and a target," he answered coldly. "Or the pack and ten minutes alone."

"Other than murder, Grady. I know how you feel, but right now we need to find them first."

"How good is the intel?"

"Pretty much one hundred percent. Patrols haven't picked up anyone leaving. Since they also haven't seen anyone coming in, there's that margin of error."

"Going in is easy if you know how to hide."

A nod. Cruise ships came and went. There were freighters and fishing vessels, the occasional tourist with his hellishly expensive, floating toy.

Now, leaving after everyone was on high alert, that was the problem.

"Sorna was never completely mapped down to the last dotted i and crossed t," Carter continued. "We have the general lay-out and we know where not to go. The raptors have a pretty big territory, intersecting with the rex, the carnotaurus and the spinosaurus sometimes. They never mingle, and so do the scientists. No one's been eaten yet."

"Lucky."

Spending so much time in the wild, with wild dinosaurs, a good portion of them cunning hunters, was risky. It wasn't something Owen would do voluntarily.

Sure, yes, he was the alpha of a raptor pack and spent almost all his time with them, but that was different. On Isla Sorna they would be just another part of the whole puzzle that made up this biological niche. He had been there once to study wild raptors long before he had attempted to raise and train a pack.

It was exhilarating and terrifying in one.

A stroll through the woods. Sixty-five million years ago.

Nope. It wasn't. Not a stroll. It was a constant on-your-toes sensation, being watched from cunning eyes, sized up and stalked.

"We pulled out the science teams for safety reasons," Carter told him. "As long as we don't know what killed the animals and whether or not they're still there, no researchers are allowed on Isla Sorna. Dr. Ubry did a fast-track autopsy just before we pulled the plug on this research stint."