Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

A oife Gallagher wore a name tag with her name on it in Irish, and then below that, parenthetically and phonetically, (EEE-fah). It had been a mostly-successful venture in teaching tourists how to say her name in the four years she'd worked at the Shamrock Safari Wildlife Park, just off the coast of Cork, Ireland.

A mostly successful venture. There were still a fair number of people who went at it from an attempt to make the letters do what they would in English. Those people called her A-oy-fee, or Oi-fee, and Aoife tried not to let it drive her mad.

Over those four years, unrelated to the issue of her name, Aoife had been fighting a second slow descent into madness, one over which she had much less control.

There were day trippers at the wildlife park.

Not the humans, obviously. People were expected to come for a day. Some of them had annual passes, and were there several days a month. Sometimes even several days a week. Aoife knew them . They were the artists who brought sketchpads and umbrellas so they could work even in the rain. They were the photographers who sat motionlessly beside the cheetah run for hours on end, or propped their cameras on a tree stump and waited for the moment a pelican flew ponderously across the lake. They were the young mothers whose toddling children were simultaneously contained on the island's hundred-acre, fenced park, and also able to run free. Aoife knew them. They were fine .

No, it was the animal day trippers that were the problem.

The golden eagle who had been there just in time for the August bank holiday, for example, which had—to the best of Aoife's ability to tell—left at 6 o'clock pm every day, as soon as the park closed, just like all the park attendees. She'd stopped by early on the Tuesday morning after the long weekend to admire it, and it was gone. The zookeeper cleaning the cage shrugged it off as a loaner, but people didn't really have golden eagles just sitting around to loan , for heaven's sake.

Or the African elephant that had been there the following June, over the midsummer celebrations. It had been a beautiful huge animal, ears fanning the air like the Irish sun was hot enough even for its sub-Saharan heritage. People flooded to the park to see the new visitor.

And at the end of the week, it was gone.

Elephants did not just travel casually from one zoo or wildlife park to another. It was a massive, major undertaking to get an elephant from one location to another, unless you walked it, Aoife guessed, but that would just be a different kind of major undertaking. And nobody had walked an African elephant across Ireland. Or across the Irish Sea, for that matter, because all the elephants in Ireland were Asian elephants. She knew this. Everyone in Ireland who paid any attention to the zoos knew this, especially because the Dublin Zoo's elephant breeding program was world-famous for its success, so elephants were a big deal around these parts. In more ways than one!

Then there'd been the orangutan family staying for a short visit "while their habitat was rebuilt," just before Halloween. Aoife had actually gotten on the train and gone up to Dublin to visit the zoo and see if the orangutans were there, that time. They were. All of them, tolerating the gibbons who shared an island with them. Actually, one of the female orangutans was great friends with one of the gibbons, who had recently been very eager to introduce her new baby to her giant orange friend. Aoife thought that was lovely, really.

But it didn't explain where the safari park's week-long orangutan visitors had come from. It didn't explain how a black bear family had by all appearances dropped by for the Teddy Bear's Picnic theme day. It didn't explain why the local news occasionally mentioned a sighting of one of the island's great birds, except it was never a bird the wildlife park actually had .

Aoife tried very hard to put it all out of her mind, most of the time. However the animals appeared, they were great for business. Even Aoife herself had been none-too-secretly thrilled by the bears and the elephant, which were well outside the park's usual fare.

They had a tremendous range of fantastic beasts there all the time, of course. The park focused on conservation and preservation, and allowed the animals to roam freely within the constraints of safety. But bears were unusual, and getting to see some up close and personal had been pretty neat, even if their presence at the park was inexplicable.

Her determination to not think about it fell apart every time a new, unexpected visitor arrived for a few days. Fortunately it didn't happen quite often enough to haunt her every waking thought. Not quite often enough. For almost every major holiday, yes, but also not quite often enough to send her spare.

The park kept her busy, anyway: Aoife's official job was education and outreach. She spent most of every day talking to visitors, answering questions about zoos in general and the wildlife park in particular. She also maintained an encyclopedic personal knowledge of not only the animals at the Shamrock Safari park, but also the inhabitants of the Dublin and Belfast Zoos, and, unexpectedly, dinosaurs.

Aoife had not, honestly, imagined she would need to know anything about dinosaurs when she'd gotten a degree in wildlife resource management and gone to work for the park. She had somehow assumed the questions asked of her would be more or less limited to living or recently extinct animals, and how to shape the world so they could save more species from extinction.

On the positive side, she had learned more about dinosaurs than she ever expected to know, and could now talk confidently to any child under the age of nine on a topic upon which they all had opinions. It was frankly astonishing how many of them could yank a conversation around to dinosaurs, regardless of what she'd been talking about in the first place. She'd learned to recognize a certain gleam in childish eyes that preceded a dinosaur question, and could usually head them off with a well-timed, "And we'll talk about dinosaurs later!"

It confused the adults, or at least, the ones without children, but it usually bought her enough time to finish her lecture before the kids started asking about dinosaurs. And today her tour group was entirely made up of adults, which meant she could have a whole blissful day with no dinosaurs.

She'd come in the back gate near the capybara lake, and was now working her way toward the front gate, where she'd be meeting the tour group in about an hour. Coming in early meant she could take the slow way around and greet whatever animals were up and awake already, which always felt like a grand way to start her day. She turned left at the 'African Savannah,' where the giraffes, zebras, oryx and (unexpectedly and thematically inappropriately) wallabies lived. Her plan was to walk all the way around to visit the tigers before greeting the tour group at half nine.

Whistling and singing along to her ear buds and bumping her elbow against the work radio she wore on her hip, she was about two enclosures before the tigers when she noticed a lion in the ‘bear pit.'

Aoife stopped. She stepped back, one step, two, three. Turned her head, and looked down into the enclosure.

It wasn't really a bear pit, and never had been. It was actually a sort of all-purpose enclosure, unusually shallow by comparison to most of the others in the park. Aoife had never understood why it they hadn't deepened it for safety.

As it was, it had room for even a large, pacing carnivore like the lion. There were also places to climb and lounge for the orangutans who had been its most recent occupants, or for smaller animals like some red pandas who had once stayed there briefly. There were no overhangs to let most animals climb and jump out, but its glass walls also weren't very high.

More importantly, they weren't very high and they didn't have inward-slanted tops to keep gigantic cats who were excellent leapers from jumping out.

Aoife's stomach gurgled horribly. The lion, which was lying on his back, legs sprawled in an undignified manner so he could absorb as much sunshine as possible, lifted his head. The effort made his tail curl between his legs, and he looked at her with interest, then chuffed.

Hairs sprang up on Aoife's arms and on her nape, a chill down her spine as her hind brain informed her that now was a very good time to run.

Except she was quite, quite certain the lion could clear the top of the enclosure if it felt like it, and running away from a 200-kilo predator seemed like an extremely bad idea. Trying very hard not to shiver, she inched a foot forward, which was as much as she could convince herself to move. After several inches she had almost taken a whole step.

The lion, however, had taken several. He flipped over onto its feet and paced closer to her. His tail lashed and he tilted its head, which was slightly better than him crouching on its belly with its tail lashing, but was not actually great.

In fact, it was so not great that Aoife very suddenly had to pee very badly, and wanted nothing more than to run very far away, very fast. She scooted her foot forward some more, until she was stretched out so much she actually had to move her back foot or she'd fall over, and all of a sudden she was walking like it was something she'd done her whole life.

It was half an hour before the park opened to the public, and more than that before she had to meet her tour group. Aoife veered away from the lion's den, and, trembling, went to talk to the boss.

Dr. Maureen Kelly was a tall, confident woman with a square jaw, short hair, and an endless well of patience for the vagaries of running a wildlife park. Despite that, she also looked wary when Aoife knocked on her office door and stepped inside. "What can I do for you this morning, Aoife?"

"Did you know there's a—" Motion outside caught her eye, and Aoife stopped mid-word, watching someone she'd never seen before walking by the boss's window. Tall, with a lot of long dark brown hair, sun-bleached at the ends, wide shoulders, and a confident stride. She stood up to get a better look without meaning to: he was that good-looking, even at a glance. As if her movement had caught his notice, his head turned toward her and a dazzling grin flashed through the window.

Dr. Kelly said, "Aoife?" again, as if unsure she wanted to.

Blushing, Aoife sat down. "Sorry. I saw somebody new. Visitors don't usually get back here into the weeds where the offices are. I didn't mean that in a bad way!" she added hastily. "It's just, you know, it's a bit of a trek from the main park to get here. Look, Dr. Kelly, did you know there's a lion in the spare enclosure?"

"Ah. Yes. I?—"

"I'm sorry to be bothering you, but I don't understand and it's sending me around the bend. The bears last summer. The orangutans. The elephant , Dr. Kelly. And now a lion in the empty enclosure? That's not safe at all. It was terrifying, to tell the truth. I thought it would jump out and eat me."

Dr. Kelly drew a deep, deep breath, like she was about to say something she really didn't want to. "I can assure you that you're in no danger from the lion or any other temporary residents of that enclosure, Aoife. Or our occasional visitors to the plains, for that matter. I can't explain why in greater detail, but I'd like you to trust me on this matter."

"With all due respect, ma'am, even if I wanted to trust you, and I do, I don't see how you can ask the public to take your word for the fact that a dangerous predator is being kept in an inadequate enclosure. That lion got up and looked at me like I was lunch not ten minutes ago, and I at least have the wit to not run from…immortals," Aoife finished with a sigh.

The park director blinked at her, clearly bewildered, and Aoife sighed again. "'Don't run from immortals. It attracts their attention.' It's a line from Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn . I'm sure it also applies to lions."

"Oh." Dr. Kelly's cheek twitched like she was trying to hide a smile. "Yes, I see your point. Aoife, all I can tell you is?—"

She cut herself off as the door opened, and the good-looking guy from outside the window poked his head in. On second glance, Aoife upgraded him from good-looking to absurdly handsome : he was square-jawed, brown-eyed, and even in just glancing around the door, had an inquisitive, open air that somehow combined with a sharp, almost predatory awareness of the space around him. He looked, Aoife thought, corn-fed , if corn-fed was also a look that had teeth.

He stopped looking quite so predatory as he got the lay of the room and offered a huge, bright smile. "Dr. Kelly. Hi. Just wanted to introduce myself! And to you too…?" He had an American accent that went with the corn-fed look, the dark eyes he turned on Aoife were full of hope.

Aoife's mouth went dry and she immediately forgot her own name.

"Aoife Gallagher," Dr. Kelly said after a moment, her tone trying to contain her amusement. "Aoife's our second in command for Education and Outreach, although I'm beginning to think she has ambitions to be our facilities manager."

Aoife made a faint spluttering sound that wasn't entirely disagreement, but before she could speak, the extremely fit man strode over to her and offered his hand. "Aoife, hi, it's great to meet you. I'm Elliott Harkness, the lion on loan."