MEG: Nightstalkers Read Free Page A

match the personality of the stark-white juvenile, who often took a calculated second position to her more ferocious twin, Bela.
    Known to the staff as “the Dark Overlord,” Bela was the only Megalodon offspring born with pigmentation. Though her head was pure white, the rest of her dorsal surface was a dark charcoal gray, giving her a rather bizarre, sinister appearance. Named after Belle Gunness, the infamous “Black Widow” who teased and killed fourteen of her suitors back in 1908, Bela was the brawn to Lizzy’s brains—an aggressive predator that had to be separated from the pack during feeding time by trainers using bang sticks on reach poles to keep her from going after her smaller siblings—the blood in the water driving the forty-six-foot, twenty-one-ton killer into a frenzy.
    As terrifying as the sisters were, they always feared their parent. For filtration purposes, the Meg Pen and the lagoon were connected by a five-foot-wide channel. Angel couldn’t enter, but “mom” could smell her brood. Every once in a while Angel would slap her tail against her side of the grating, antagonizing her maturing pups.
    The intimidation tactics forged a bond between Bela and Lizzy. The two juvenile Megalodons would circle their habitat in tandem—Lizzy in the dominant top position, the darker Bela below, the pigmented shark’s albino head just behind her sibling’s pelvic girdle so that the trough created by her sister’s moving mass towed her effortlessly around the tank.
    And then one day, their domineering parent was gone, drugged and transported inside a refurbished hopper-dredge on her journey back to the Western Pacific. The move was precipitated by pressure exerted by a rogue animal rights group and the fact that Bela and Lizzy were getting too big for the Meg Pen. Bela had already attacked the acrylic walls in the underwater viewing area and the sisters had to be moved into Angel’s lagoon before the damaged glass shattered.
    But the animal rights group wasn’t satisfied and bribed one of Jonas’s staff to release the sisters into open waters—and now every boater, diver, and fisherman from Baja California to Alaska was experiencing more than a bit of anxiety.
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    Situated off the southeastern tip of Vancouver Island is the San Juan archipelago, a cluster of over four hundred islands, islets, and rocks, only a fourth of which were deemed large enough to actually name. The Salish Sea is littered with these oddly shaped landmasses, their forest-covered hills of evergreen and pine dwarfed by the snow-peaked Olympic Mountains which dominate the waterway’s horizon.
    There are no bridges linking the archipelago to Vancouver Island or the Canadian mainland; access being limited to boat or air. The island chain is surrounded by heavily used shipping channels, with swift currents and dangerous riptides fueled by the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the south and the Strait of Georgia to the north. Haro Strait serves as the western channel connecting the Port of Vancouver with other destinations in the Salish Sea. Rosario Strait lies to the east and is used as the major shipping channel for oil tankers originating out of the Cherry Point Refinery to the north.
    San Juan Island is the second-largest and most populated landmass in the archipelago, its year-round residents numbering just below seven thousand. Its main hub is Friday Harbor, an Old World seaport with New World charm, located on the east side of the island. Built on a hill that overlooks the marina’s crystal green water, the community is a tourist Mecca for vacationers looking to experience the unspoiled beauty of nature.

    Eric Germata was an adventurous outdoorsman with a sense of humor; at least that is what the food and beverage manager from Chicago had highlighted in his Match-Date.com profile. He and Ashley Kuehnel had been Skype-dating for three months when the blond twenty-eight-year-old had suggested they plan a whale-watching