Read Online Bear Claw Bodyguard by Jessica Andersen - Free Book Online Page A

caused by the wind or an animal of some sort.
    She hadn’t let that distract her, though, because the forest needed her…which was why she’d pulled in some favors and gotten some off-the-books help from some truly excellent researchers, including Chondra.
    Tall and statuesque, with dark skin and exotic lavender eyes, Chondra looked more like the former high-fashion model she’d been than the master’s-level biochemical analyst she’d become. Heck, she made even a lab coat look fashionable, with a tuck here and a twist there that showed off her generous curves with a tasteful femininity not normally possessed by a garment that made Tori look like she was wearing a pup tent backward.
    But despite the gap in “it” factor, Tori and Chondra were fast friends—and she had leaned on that friendship without hesitation or remorse when the university had backed up the Park Service’s decision to pull her off the Bear Claw case, forcing her to take personal time and cutting her off from the lab’s resources…at least in theory. In reality, over the two days since she and Jack had both gone more or less rogue, her lab mates had clocked in dozens of hours on the Bear Claw infection, taking things to the next level by fragmenting the genetic material of the fungus and shotgun sequencing it in an effort to figure out the parasite’s nearest evolutionary relatives, in hope that that would lead them to a preventive measure, or even a cure. Because so far, just as the prior research teams had found, the fungus was resistant to all the usual suspects when it came to treating this sort of thing.
    An icon came to life on Tori’s screen, indicating that the download was complete. “I’ve got it.” Aware of the gleamin Chondra’s eyes and her air of suppressed excitement, Tori had to stop herself from holding her breath as she clicked on the file. She skimmed through the basic information on the sequencing—how many fragments had been run for an average of how many base pairs of sequence information, blah, blah, blah—and then stopped dead when she got to the alignment results. “Wait. What?”
    Chondra laughed. “I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what I said when I saw it.”
    “That doesn’t make any sense.” According to the sequencing data, the three best hits—the species with the highest DNA sequence similarities to their unknown contributor—came from members of the amatias and bromeliads, and a rare strain of pseudomonas. In other words, they had a poisonous mushroom, an air plant and a deep-sea bacterium.
    What the hell?
    The amatias were among the most poisonous of mushrooms, and hadn’t even been on her list of possible ancestors for the Bear Claw organism. The bromeliads were the tropical air plants found in Mexico, Central America and South America, in habitats ranging from rainforests to souvenir shops. Which accounted for the white filaments—sort of—but didn’t explain how the two had come to be in the same sample, or why the third-best hit was a deep-sea bacterium that lived near sulfur vents.
    Even more astoundingly, the hits didn’t overlap; instead, the matches came from different places in the DNA of the Bear Claw fungus, suggesting that the parasite infecting the Forgotten was somehow a hybrid of the three.
    Tori just sat there for a few seconds, blinking and trying to assimilate the information. “Well, that’s…weird.”
    “Hello, understatement.” Chondra’s eyes gleamed. “Based on the DNA, it’s an entirely new species. That means you get to name it, right?”
    “If it’s a new species, yes. If it’s a science project gone awry, then, no.” It wouldn’t be the first time that scientists had engineered a hybrid species and then lost control of it.
    There were strictly enforced regulations designed to prevent such things, of course, but Mother Nature had ways of getting around humankind’s attempts to control her. Just as the gypsy moths and starlings had been accidentally