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She was sitting in a state-of-the-art lab facility at the University of Alabama—not some wattle-and-daub hut in a North Georgia field.
    She forced herself to look around the room. She wasn’t surrounded by cave paintings and questionable herbs that doubled as hallucinogens. She was here with the gas and ion chromatographs, an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer, electron microprobe, isotope ratio mass spectrometer, her electron microscope …
    Her world consisted of things such as Betsy guns, single- and three-component geophones, StrataVisor seismic acquisition systems, and CHIRP subbottom profilers. She was a scientist, not a medicine woman doling out concoctions made from things she grew in her garden.
    She refused to believe in any of this. There was a logical explanation for what had killed Fernando. There had to be. “What do you think happened to him?” she asked Enrique.
    Like her, he was a scientist who didn’t buy into mumbo-jumbo.
    “ El chupacabra .”
    Well, so much for that theory. She rolled her eyes at him. “Really? A goat sucker? Last I checked, they only drank blood, and that from animals. I’ve never heard of one taking a human heart.”
    “Yeah, but you don’t know, right?” His accent changed from regular American to a thicker Spanish that only came out whenever he was excited or angry. “ Abuela , she used to tell me stories of el peuchen where she grew up.”
    And here she’d foolishly thought she was up to date on the scary legends. Leave it to Enrique to find one she’d never heard of before. “ El peuchen ?”
    “ Si. It’s a gigantic flying snake, right? Or sometimes it can change its shape to other things, but it’s mostly a feathered snake that hunts at night. And it’s a cousin or something to el chupacabra . Abuela used to tell me how it would come out and suck their blood or eat their hearts. In the morning, they’d find the hapless victims in fields or near streams. Her mother was the village machi and, to protect the village, she would drum it out whenever it started feeding. So I’m thinking el peuchen must have hitched a ride on the plane and got him.”
    “Then why did you say chupacabra ?”
    “’Cause no one outside of Chile or Argentina has ever heard of el peuchen . It’s not exactly big up here, you know? Besides, I’ve never heard of one of them coming this far north. Chupacabra , on the other hand…”
    As much as she hated to admit it, he had a point. Still … “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
    “I know you want me to say no, Doc. I do. But … Abuela knew things. She saw things. Things no one could explain, no matter how much science you want to put on it. She said they were visions given to her by the Holy Mother back in the day. When I was a boy, she told me I could see them, too. But I didn’t want to see them and so I didn’t. Just because we study science, it doesn’t mean there aren’t things that defy us. For everything we know, there is much more we don’t. Things no one can find out with an empirical test.” He jerked his chin at her computer screen. “And that is something we definitely don’t know.”
    He was right about that.
    Not wanting to admit it, she went back to unwrapping what felt like a giant round rock.
    Enrique helped her until they uncovered …
    A giant round rock.
    His scowl deepened along with hers as she pulled the plastic back to reveal a hand-chiseled wheel the likes of which she hadn’t seen since they left the dig months ago.
    “What is that?” he asked.
    She ran her fingers over the intricate carvings as she studied the giant red stone that had to be thousands of years old, judging by its worn condition. “It appears to be a Mayan calendar, but the glyphs aren’t exactly Mayan.” More than that, there was writing on it, too. Not glyphs, but something that appeared to be an ancient Greek script.
    Okay … someone had to be screwing with her. They had to be. One of her friends