Destiny by Alex Archer Read Free Book Online Page A

large enough to allow her passage. The bad news was that wolves were in the area, as well as bears. Large predators weren’t going to be welcome. Especially not in their den.
    A swift examination of the chamber revealed a passage. She went to it, finding she had to hunch down to pass through and that the floor was canted. At least the structure looked sound. No cracks or fissures showed in the strata. If there was another tremor, she felt reasonably certain the rock would stay intact and not come down on top of her.
    The passage went on for fifteen or twenty feet, then jogged left and opened into another chamber nearly twice the size of the one she’d fallen into.
    When she passed the flashlight beam over the wall to her right, drawings stood out against the stone. Seeing what they were, guessing that no one in hundreds or thousands or millions of years had seen them, all thoughts of anything else—the earth tremors, the motorcyclists, the old man—were gone.
    Playing the flashlight beam over the rough rock surface, Annja made out mastodons, handprints, figures of people, fires, aurochs—ancestors of modern cattle—and other images of Cro-Magnon life.
    Excitement flared through her. During her career, she’d seen cave paintings. She’d even seen similar paintings at Lascaux after the cave had been closed to the public.
    But she had never found something like this.
    Hypnotized by the images, she took a credit-card-sized digital camera from her backpack. With the low light, she didn’t know if the images would turn out, but whatever the camera captured would surely be enough to get funding for a dig site.
    The Cro-Magnon painters had used animal fat and minerals to make colors. Black had been a favorite and easy to make. All that was required was charred bone ground into a fine powder mixed with animal fat.
    She walked along the wall, taking image after image. Only a little farther on, the scenes on the wall were marred. Long, deep scratches ran through them, as if they’d been dug into the stone by great, dull claws. The claw marks were seven and eight feet high, so close together it looked as if an animal had been in a frenzy.
    An animal marking its territory? she wondered. Or the desperation of an animal trapped inside this cave?
    In that moment, Annja remembered she’d traveled to the Cévennes looking for La Bête. Then she tripped and nearly fell. Something furry brushed against her ankle.
    For one moment she thought she felt it move. Stepping back quickly, she swung the flashlight around, prepared to use it as a weapon.
    The light beam fell in a bright ellipse over a scene straight out of a nightmare. The half-eaten and mummified corpse of a sheep lay on the floor amid a pile of bones.
    Tracking the bone debris, Annja shone her beam over the stack of skulls that had been arranged in an irregular notch in the chamber. At least seventy or eighty skulls filled the area.
    Was this a place of worship? Annja wondered. Or an altar celebrating past triumphs?
    She tried to imagine Cro-Magnon men sitting in the cave bragging about their success as fierce hunters. Except that the sheep’s body was anachronistic. None of the sheep’s forebears had looked like that in Cro-Magnon times. This sheep was small and compact, bred for meat and wool, not far removed from the sheep Annja had seen on farms she’d passed on her way to the mountain range.
    Looking closely, she noticed that several of the skulls were human.
    Used to handling human remains on dig sites, she had no fear of the dead. She set down the flashlight to illuminate the scene.
    Upon further inspection, she discovered that several of the ribs, and arm and leg bones were likely human, as well. Shreds of clothing that looked hundreds of years old clung to some of the bones. Boots stood and lay amid the clutter.
    A cold chill ran down her spine. Whatever had lived in the cave had preyed on humans.
    Shifting the light,