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have missed it, she had gotten lucky when she discovered the bog body. The odds of something like that happening again were slim.
    Bree searched more methodically. She began on the surface. After circling outward from the holes and covering a twenty-foot diameter without discovering anything, she started digging, hoping she wouldn’t damage the hand in the process.
    Cutting through the thick peat wasn’t as easy as it looked. Moving it proved to be more difficult. The waterlogged blocks felt like they weighed a ton. Once she cut six blocks, she examined each for signs of the hand, gently breaking up the peat with her fingers to expose the middles. But no luck.
    Bree sensed someone was watching her. Had that woman really left? She peeked over each shoulder but saw nothing unusual, so she went back to work. After another dozen blocks, Bree stabbed her shovel into the peat, wiped her sweaty hands on her pants, and massaged her shoulder. She’d been working for close to an hour and still nothing. The hand had to be here. It just had to be. And if that meant digging all day to find it, she would.
    She sent a text to her dad that she was running late so he wouldn’t worry. As she slid her cell back into her pocket, her eyes settled on one of the holes the woman had dug. She hadn’t even thought to check them, assuming the woman hadn’t found anything. But there, on the side of the hole near the bottom, was a piece of something—the edge of a stick or maybe a rock.
    From her pack Bree withdrew a brush and began removing the peat from around the object. On closer inspection, it was most likely a bone or a crude tool. She wouldn’t know for sure until she got it uncovered.
    Excitement urged her to rush, but training told Bree to take her time. Each stroke begged patience so she wouldn’t damage the object. Another inch revealed thin shreds of something, and lots of it. As she brushed away the peat, she realized the shreds were stuck to the object. What was it? She couldn’t wait to find out.
    The more she uncovered the more the object took shape—and the more Bree was convinced she had found something significant.
    And something very weird.
    This was not the human hand she was expecting to find.
    This hand was monstrous—at least double the length and width of her hand—with knuckles the size of walnuts.
    And it was covered with hair.

Chapter Eight
     
    Bree’s dad knelt to look down at the hand for the first time since the team arrived at the site. Any anger he’d had about Bree’s subterfuge had been quickly replaced by his excitement over the hairy hand with its long fingers and claw-like nails, although she expected a lecture later.
    “It looks like it’s from a lycanthrope,” Bree said, thinking back to the pictures she’d seen in her dad’s mythology books.
    Kelsi chuckled. “You got to be kidding.”
    “It looks just like one.”
    “Oh come on now,” Kelsi said with a condescending tone. “There’s no scientific evidence that lycanthropes exist.”
    Bree had to admit her opinion was hard to justify, although that didn’t keep her from trying. “True, but there’s plenty of stuff people can’t explain.”
    “This isn’t one of them,” Kelsi said.
    “Then how do you explain it?” Bree asked.
    Kelsi shifted and blocked Bree’s view of the hand. “I don’t know. It could be a new species of mammal, possibly from the Ice Age.”
    “What do you think it is, Dr. Sunderland?” Liam asked, breaking the tension.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “But Bree was right. It’s strange. Really strange . I’ve never seen anything like it.” He turned to Kelsi and added, “Shooting down a creative hypothesis only slows scientific advancement. The only way to solve this is to look at it logically, and by looking at the science. Let’s get a closer look.”
    They squatted around the hand and studied it, and then her dad said, “The hand’s so badly desiccated it’s hard to tell what it is—human or