Dragon Dreams

by Chris A. Jackson

  Dragon Dreams

  Dragons of Boston Book I

  Chris A. Jackson

  This books is for all of my friends who are, like Aleksi, battling for their lives against a horrific disease.

  Contents

  Prelude

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Falstaff Books

  About the Author

  Also by Chris A. Jackson

  Prelude

  She huddled in a warm nook of rock, sheltering her new daughter under her wings. Wind howled overhead, icy and harsh, but heat radiated up from the ground and from her body to keep her daughter warm while the changes molded her fragile flesh and bone into her new shape.

  Calm. Warm. Sleep, she thought, remembering her own birth, the confusion, painful changes, hunger. Soon, she would hunt again and bring back more meat. Soon, when her daughter's changes were near complete, they would part, never to see one another again. They would each seek out more humans to protect from the predators of the world, from other humans, and make more daughters. Such was their way.

  The ground rumbled, which was why this nook was warm, a haven in this bitter frozen landscape. It was not the ideal place to make a daughter, but it was either that or kill the poor thing. The girl's human family had perished, and only chance had brought her salvation…of a sort. When the pack of carnivores that had killed the other humans were scattered and slain, she had been alone. She would not have survived long. This was the kinder fate, by far, but she remembered the horror in the poor girl's eyes as the leathery wings enfolded her.

  Calm…warm…sleep…

  The earth shook, harder this time and longer, and she lifted her head to peer out. The sky was grey, but it was not cloud that blotted out the sun. Worried, she examined her daughter; the changes were nearly complete. Soon…soon you will fly.

  Not soon enough.

  The earth heaved up beneath her, and her worry flashed into panic. She looked up the slope and saw a sheet of grey death falling down upon them. With a shriek, she flung herself up, her wings clawing the air to escape the deadly cloud. As she streaked away, she glanced back, lamenting her poor doomed daughter huddled there in the rock. The poor thing would never know the joy of her new life. She would never fly, never hunt, and never make a daughter of her own.

  She would never know what it was to be a dragon.

  1

  Death was her milieu.

  Aleksi breathed in the faint scent of formalin and plaster of Paris, a contented smile tugging at her mouth. The musty scents of quiet repose, the chill echoes of remembered life; these were the things she lived for. The catacombs of museums' deep basements and repositories, more than any other place in the world, were her home. Here she could think. She could look thorough the old disused or forgotten samples, caress the ancient fossilized memories of organisms that had passed from this Earth. Here she could dream without interruption. Only here did she feel truly safe.

  Here, no one would ask her why she never went out, why she didn't have a boyfriend, or think her strange for preferring science to social interaction. From her earliest disconsolate excursions into the museums of Manhattan in an effort to escape the yelling, the smell of alcohol, the ridicule, this had been her refuge. Museums were cleaner, quieter, and friendlier, with their long-desiccated denizens, than the bustling, noisy, onerous world of the living. There was death in paleontology, but there was also peace.

  Her latex-covered fingertips brushed the faces of the closed drawers, her eyes scanning the numbers on their cards, the paper yellowed with age. She found the number she was looking for and smiled. The wide, thin drawer slid open, and the protective plastic shield folded back to reveal rows and rows of fossilized therapsid bones. Cynognathus' link to Megazostrodon, the evolution of mammal-like reptiles to true mammals, could easily lie in this drawer, tucked away and forgotten, unrecognized and undiscovered for a hundred years.

  Aleksi removed a jeweler's loupe from her pocket—a present from her father upon her graduation from NYU, and the only thing he ever gave her that she actually used—flipped on the tiny LED light, and leaned over the samples. This was where the real finds were in paleontology today, not digging through strata or imaging with sonar. Thousands upon thousands of poorly categorized samples waited to be discovered in the repositories of the great museums, miss-labeled and long forgotten. Modern paleontologists tended to believe what they read, and the label on the drawer cover clearly stated, "Various Therapsids," but what if they were wrong?

  Finding a doctoral dissertation in a drawer was also much easier, cheaper, and cleaner than applying for a grant to visit some distant site in Nebraska or China. Too much traveling, too many airports, and way too many people. No, Aleksi was not a digger, she was a discoverer, and she preferred to do it alone, in the peace and quiet of these cool, dim places, away from people and interruptions.

  As if to remind her of her fallacious notion, her phone twittered in her back pocket. The list of people who had her number was short, and there was no way her parents would be calling her in the middle of the morning. That left her roommate, her landlord, the graduate coordinator, and her advisor as the only likely potentials. She retrieved the interruptive implement and saw that it was only a text. She stripped off one latex glove and swept the screen. The message was from her advisor, Dr. Oliver.

  "Oh, please not now…" Aleksi tapped the screen to retrieve the message with a cringe. Whenever Dr. Oliver called, it meant more work.

  The message simply read: "My office pre 10AM today, pls."

  The time display on her phone read 0945.

  Aleksi swore under her breath, tapped in "BRT" and hit send. Luckily she was in the archives and not working at home, which was a ten-minute bike ride in good weather. The recent snow had her walking, which meant closer to twenty.

  Aleksi stuffed the phone back in her pocket, closed the drawer, and hurried out of the repository, a hundred possible nightmares trundling through her head. She was scheduled to take her qualifying exams this semester, and had to teach a lab, as well as finish up her own compulsory course schedule. If Oliver piled any more work on her, she wouldn't get her dissertation proposal in on time. As she pushed the heavy door open, a voice surprised her.

  "Did you find what you were looking for?"

  Aleksi started before she recognized the young man as one of the curator's assistants. He was smiling like they were old friends or something, but she barely knew him, didn't even remember his name. She only met his eyes for an instant before she looked down. "Oh, um, no. I got
called away. Sorry." She grabbed her heavy coat and brushed past him up the stairs.

  "See you later then," he called after her.

  "Um, maybe. Sure." Aleksi hurried up and burst through the double doors of the Museum of Comparative Zoology into the blustery Cambridge winter.

  Skeletal trees and a few snow-shrouded evergreens dotted the deserted quad along Oxford Street. Winter break had sent most of the undergraduate population home for the holidays. Only faculty, maintenance staff, and a few die-hard graduate students remained on campus, which made the place almost as peaceful as the repository.

  Aleksi shivered as the biting wind tried to invade her layers of clothing, but cold and wind were nothing new for her. She stuffed her hands in her coat pockets and strode around the corner of the museum toward the glass and steel megalith of the Northwest Science Building. The sciences departments had outgrown the more traditional red brick buildings, and many of the faculty offices had moved to this larger and more modern facility. The Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Department, of which Aleksi was a part, made up only a fraction of the School of Arts and Sciences, and there was little real organization to the offices of the faculty. One might have thought that proximity to primary buildings of their field of study would dictate location, but politics, grant funding, and prestige played greater roles. The NWS building was newer, plush, flashy, and very "front page"; consequently, the higher profile faculty resided here, Dr. Oliver among them.

  The wind intensified as she approached the gap between Conant Hall and the NWS building, her long coat flapping in the frigid air. Aleksi ducked against the onslaught and yanked open the huge glass door without taking her hand from her pocket. The metal handle would be cold enough to stick to her hand, and she hadn't donned her gloves. She dashed up the stairwell on her left to the third floor—she detested elevators; too close, and people always wanted to talk—and entered the long, polished hallway dotted with lecture halls, labs and offices. Dr. Oliver's office, one in a suite of four, stood open. Aleksi heard her advisor talking in that voice that said she was on the phone, so she peeked cautiously into the room.

  Oliver sat at her desk, phone wedged between her shoulder and ear, tapping on her computer and talking at the same time. She was the queen of multi-tasking. Oliver saw her, and waved her in, pointing at the phone and mouthing the word, "Lawson", the graduate director. Aleksi entered, her nerves jangling. If Oliver was talking to Dr. Lawson about her…

  "Okay, fine." Dr. Oliver waved at a chair. "Yes, she just walked in, and I know she'll pick up the ball on this. Right. Thanks, Daniel. Later, then." She ended the call and smiled; a bad sign.

  "Thanks for coming in, Alexi," she said, mispronouncing her name, as usual. "Lawson called with a minor issue, and I thought you might be able to solve it for me. Have a seat."

  "An issue?" Aleksi shuffled in and sank into the indicated chair, clenching her hands in her pockets. "I was just working on my project, and I—"

  "I thought you might be, and that's why I texted." Oliver made a dismissive gesture with one hand, as she always did when she thought whatever had just come out of someone's mouth was irrelevant. "The January at GSAS schedule is all set, but we've had a fall-out. Jim Felton was going to give a series on the new paleosciences virtual library system, but he had to cancel. Family emergency. Out for the semester. I know you're familiar with the system."

  "But we agreed that I'd use winter recess to—"

  "Oh, I know, Lexi," Oliver interrupted, mangling her name even worse, making the contraction rhyme with 'sexy', a taunt throughout her mortifying high-school years. "But that was before this emergency. It's only a two-week series, and you don't have any classes to teach during the recess, so you'll have time." She glanced at her watch and began shutting down her computer.

  "But I was hoping to do some imaging during the recess. I've just found some Therapsid samples that might be—"

  "Oh, don't worry, Lexi; you'll have plenty of time for that. The series doesn't start until the eighth, and you said you weren't going to be away long for the holidays, right?" She stuffed a folder and some other items into her bag, obviously having decided that the issue was settled. She stood and rounded the desk. "I appreciate you picking up the ball on this, Lexi. There's plenty of time for your imaging analysis. I've got to go, so we can talk about this later."

  Aleksi stood, opening her mouth to object, but Oliver was already past her and standing at the door. She knew there would be no other discussion; it was set. There went her winter recess.

  "I've emailed you Jim's outline, though you know the system well enough that you'll probably be able to wing it." Oliver ushered her out and locked her office door. "Oh, and because Jim's out for the semester, Lawson needed someone to pick up his general bio lab, too. I knew you could teach it in your sleep, so I put you in for it. You can use the extra money, I'm sure."

  Aleksi gaped at her in shock. "But I'm already teaching the Comp Zoology lab, and I'm taking my qualifying exams this semester."

  "Oh, you'll do fine, Lexi. You won't have any problem with your quals, and they're both just labs." She dropped her keys into her bag and fixed Aleksi with a stare. "I've already bent the rules allowing you to fulfill your teaching requirements with lab courses. You should have to teach a lecture, you know."

  Aleksi clenched her anger between her teeth. Heat rushed to her face at that same old threat; Oliver knew Aleksi didn't like teaching lectures and used that as a bludgeon every time she piled on more work. Oliver also knew she would fold under the pressure of a confrontation, which only made Aleksi angrier.

  "I know that." Aleksi hated the crack in her voice, the weakness. She clenched her hands until her nails bit into her palms.

  "Then we don't have a problem, do we?" Oliver gave her a tight smile and turned to go. "Lawson will email you the course outline, and you should get in touch with the course coordinator before he leaves for the holidays." Oliver walked away without another word.

  Aleksi stood there shaking. Oliver had just increased her workload by half and obliterated her winter recess, but Aleksi was angrier with herself than her advisor. She had never been able to deal with situations like this, and Oliver knew it. She caved every time, and it only got worse the longer she let it continue. A thousand similar discussions with her mother screamed through her mind, the results always the same: submission, capitulation, surrender. She trembled, her vision blurring with unshed tears.

  "Aleksandrovna Rychenkna?"

  She started at the perfect pronunciation of her name and whirled, sniffing and blinking, mortified that someone had been watching her in mid-breakdown. A man stood in another open office door, and she recognized him immediately.

  "Dr. Hutchinson!" She wondered if he'd heard the entire discussion, and her embarrassment doubled. "I'm sorry, I…" She bit her lip; why was she apologizing, and for what?

  "I didn't mean to startle you, but I couldn't help overhearing." He nodded down the hall where Dr. Oliver had gone and cocked an eyebrow. "You shouldn't feel bad about that; she runs roughshod over all her students. That's why most of them abandon ship by their second year. You've lasted longer than most."

  "She does? I mean, I didn't mean to…" She faltered again, fixing her eyes on his feet.

  "Don't worry about it. I won't tell her she's a bitch if you don't."

  She gaped at that, opened her mouth to say something, but couldn't imagine defending Dr. Oliver. Dr. Hutchinson saved her from more embarrassment by changing the subject.

  "You took my class on Cryptozoology last spring, right?" At her nod, he asked, "That was the first time the course was offered, and I didn't get much feedback. What did you think?"

  "I, uh…" Her mind stumbled at the question; he wanted her opinion on his class? "I enjoyed it. It wasn't what I expected going in, and you made it fun."

  "Good. Most scientists think it's a bunch of bunk. You know, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, but I wanted to introduce the discipline in a new light."
He leaned against the door jam and crossed his arms. "Look, Aleksi, I'll be frank with you; I think it's crappy how Oliver's treating you, and I want to make you an offer. Actually, I was going to email you yesterday and got sidetracked. I'm about as organized as the average train wreck. Then you showed up here, so I thought I'd just ask."

  "Ask?" She wondered what kind of offer he was talking about. Probably more work, and she was already swamped. "I don't think I can take any more projects on right now, Dr. Hutchinson."

  "I'm not trying to pile more work on you, Aleksi," he said, once again pronouncing her name perfectly. "This wouldn't be on top of what you're doing with Dr. Oliver, but instead of."

  "Instead?" Realization struck through her unease. He wanted to take her on as a student, to be her advisor. He wanted to steal her away from Oliver. "But I've already got a project, and I'm right in the middle of—"

  "I know, imaging Therapsids." He pursed his lips and stared at her for a heartbeat. She fixed her eyes on his shoes again. "Tell you what; let me buy you a coffee and give me thirty minutes to explain what I'm offering. If you want to stay with Oliver when I'm through, I won't tell a soul. But I guarantee I can get you out of January at GSAS, and probably find someone to take the freshman bio lab. I can also promise you a finished dissertation proposal by mid semester."