Tesser: A Dragon Among Us (A Reemergence Novel) (13 page)

Abe nodded without thinking.
 

Mr. Doyle stood, leaving his half drunk cup of coffee on the table. His joint pain was long forgotten. His heart was filled with a youthful enthusiasm.

I haven’t been this excited since the summer of 1936 when we hunted down that werewolf in Belgium. Now THAT was a rush.

Chapter Seventeen

Matty Rindahl

Matty's left forearm burned.
 

Fucking commute is going to burn me to a crisp. Man, I hate my skin tone. I need to get some SPF one gazillion on my way home tonight.

The Project Amethyst facility was north of Boston, just off Interstate 93, and just short of the New Hampshire border. Matty rarely drove, so the adjustment to a commute had been an unpleasant one, despite her brand new car. She and Max had driven up to the lakes in central New Hampshire several times, but that had been the extent of her I-93 experience.

It'd also help if I didn't put my damn arm out the window to surf the air all the time either.

Matty sat down in her own office. Her first office. Ground floor. It wasn't on the corner but it had a view of a small pond in the back of the building. The transfer from the main labs to the Amethyst project had been good for her. She'd received a promotion from Lab Technician 2 to Senior Project Analyst. The title came with another 15 grand a year, a large office, a company phone, and a ton more responsibility.

So far, all she'd done is organize her new large office, at an additional seven bucks an hour.

"Miss Rindahl?" A man's voice called out from her office door.

Matty had her back to the door, filing away blank forms that she'd need at some point in her near future. "Yes, can I help you?"

"That is why you're here," the man replied.

Oh, shit. I know that voice.

Matty turned and immediately recognized the man standing in the frame of her open door. It was Alec Fitzgerald. Multi-millionaire, genius, male model and, most importantly, her boss. "Oh, I'm so sorry, Mr. Fitzgerald. That was a bit unprofessional of me." Matty straightened out her slacks and put on her best smile.

"I didn't hire you for the smile, but I'm certainly glad it came with your talents," Alec said, walking into the office. He wore a crisp, blue button-down shirt with a navy tie. The crease in his slacks looked sharp enough to cut your finger on. He was impossibly handsome.

"Well, some days I think my smile might be my only redeeming quality."

"Nonsense. If that were the case, you wouldn't be in this office right now. You're a gifted scientist. Your eye for detail is impeccable," Alec said as he sat in the chair opposite her desk.

"You know an awful lot about me. It's an understatement to say I'm flattered," Matty said as she took her seat behind her desk.

"Can I tell you a secret?" Alec asked as he leaned forward, snagging a Hershey's Kiss from a candy bowl on her desk.

Holy shit, he just took one of my candies.

"Of course. I signed an NDA."

"You're funny. Miss Matilde, I personally oversaw your hiring, knowing you would eventually be transferred to Project Amethyst. Let that one sit with you for a bit." Alec sat back and unwrapped the chocolate, popping it in his mouth with satisfaction.

"That borders on creepy," Matty said with a grin.

Alec grinned with her. "See? Funny. Fringe benefit of hiring you. Can I tell you another secret? The one I actually intended on telling you when I came in here?"

"Ooh. The suspense. Well, I do suppose that I can keep a secret. You are paying me a fair amount of money to do so." Matty rubbed her hands together greedily and leaned forward on her desk.

"I sign off on your salary, Miss Rindahl; it's more than fair. But you deserve it, especially after today." Alec flicked the wadded-up, metallic wrapper across her office and into the small, round trash bin.
 

Geez even his aim is perfect.

Alec's voice lowered and took on a more intense tone, "You recall the conversation from the meeting about the discoveries we made in Asia a decade ago?"
 

"Of course."

Alec leaned in and peered out of the office door before continuing. "That story has more detail to it, as you might imagine. Chief among those details is the fact that we did not discover or collect many species from Asia. We collected a single creature. An entirely new species, undocumented by modern science, known only from the myths of dead civilizations."

Holy shit, I'm tingly. This is like an Indiana Jones moment. He found the Ark of the Covenant. The Holy Grail. The Missing Link. Nessie.

Matty cleared her throat. "What did you find?"

Alec stood. "Walk with me." He gestured to the door.

Matty stood and the two left her office, heading down a window-lined hall. They walked in silence side-by-side, Matty looking out at the lush greenery that Fitzgerald's money grew and maintained. There were dozens of tall, thin birch trees. They looked like spikes of silver and black, covered in greenery. Several coworkers nodded at her and greeted Alec as they walked.
 

I feel like a rock star.

 
They turned down a hall she'd never been down.

"This campus is very secure, as you probably have realized," Alec said idly.

"Yes. Fences and guardhouses and all the electronic card locks."

"Not to mention the security teams that are on the roof, as well as staffing the exits and roaming the campus."

"I—I haven’t seen the men on the roof." Matty was suddenly a bit nervous and it carried in the tone of her voice.

Alec stopped and turned to face her. "Don't fret, Matty. It's a precaution. There's far, far too much money to be made here for me not to employ such a robust form of insurance. These people are here to protect you just as much as they’re here to protect me, and Project Amethyst."
 

I'm gonna die.

"That's reassuring."

Alec turned and continued walking. They took another turn and stopped at the elevators. She'd never seen the building's elevators.

"You'll be issued one of these at day's end," Alec said as he produced a small identification card from his front pocket. It was thicker than a normal ID, and had numerous, strange looking barcodes on the back. After twirling it in front of her eyes, he slid it into a tiny card reader just below the elevator call button. Matty heard the hum of the elevator moving to their floor before the 'ding' signaled it was there. The two entered the elevator and it began to descend automatically. "The card is incredibly important. It allows access to the most secure portions of the facility in our basement. You'll be expected to protect the card as if it were your most prized possession."

We have basement offices?

"Quite a distance below the ground level facility is a two story containment structure that we spent nearly thirty million dollars on over the past five years. The real trick was getting the subject inside the main holding room before sealing it, without anyone noticing. Building the surface facility above was cake after that." Alec made it sound like a task no more challenging than knitting a scarf.

"The things you can do with money," Matty mused.

"Indeed Miss Rindahl. And make no mistake, Project Amethyst is our currency printing press should we do this right. We'll all own a house on an island in the Keys if this goes as expected."

Matty let that sink in before asking her next question, "How far down?"

"That's a secret I can't share, Matty. But the good news is, you get the big secret today." Alec smiled at her, clearly excited to share whatever it was he intended to share.

"I gotta admit, Mr. Fitzgerald, this is putting me off. Armed guards, secret underground bunkers, decoder rings…"

He laughed and flashed that million-dollar smile again. "Reserve judgment. Wait until you meet her."

The elevator doors opened with a hiss before Matty could press for more answers, and the two stepped out into a sterile, fluorescent-lit hallway. It extended forward for a short distance and then terminated in a strong room door. Glass windows lining the hall down both sides revealed several uniformed armed guards that stood in waiting. They held weapons that bristled with extra gadgets. To Matty, they looked like they belonged on a Middle Eastern battlefield instead of in her place of work in suburban Massachusetts. The security guards inclined their heads respectfully as Alec and Matty approached the main door.

"Your ID card will also grant you access to this door," Alec said as he slid the card in a wall-mounted reader. After a few moments wait, a series of small red lights blinked green. The vault door slid in and opened with a mechanical hum. A second door awaited them inside the airlock. Once they had both stepped inside and Alec hit a button, the outer door shut behind them and the inner door released. Matty felt a strange change in the air pressure and her inner ears popped.

"Matty, keep an open mind," Alec said. He waved her to go through the open door and let her pass.

The room was massive and made of industrial concrete that reminded her of a Bond villain's lair. There were a dozen men and women scurrying about, some in head-to-toe clean suits, others in regular clothes. Banks of computer terminals lined the edges of the room, each computer churning away, collecting and processing mountains of data. Machines dedicated night and day to contemplating dark secrets thanklessly. She fully expected to see people wearing nametags that said 'minion' on them, but there weren't any. Just dedicated coworkers who were busy getting things done.

But the center of the room was the true reason for coming here. The room was long; perhaps end-to-end it was as long as the football field on which she'd watched her beloved BU Terriers play. An expansive structure sat in the middle of the space, taking up nearly half of the room. Its walls were twenty feet high or more and transparent; its ceiling was arched in a great dome.

Glistening, glimmering, pearlescent in a way she would never be able to adequately describe for the rest of her life, was something that resembled a reptile nearly a hundred feet long. Its scales weren't green or red like the dragons she'd seen portrayed in movies and on the covers of fantasy novels. Each individual scale looked like a singularly massive chip of luscious, purple Amethyst. There were a million scales in a million variant shades of purple.

The tail was thin and fine, tipped with a large shard of the violet stone-made-flesh. It ran to the back of a thick and powerful body, complete with four limbs.
 
The two limbs nearest the tail were clearly legs, and the two towards the neck and head were clearly the arms. The hands were equipped with thumbs the sizes of Saint Bernards, denoting possible tool use. The claws were equally mammoth. The neck was long, nearly a quarter of the beast's length, and the head that rested on the gray floor was the size of a pickup truck. Gargantuan teeth made of amethyst bone-stone poked down almost elegantly from what Matty could only imagine was an upper lip.

Tubes ran into the creature from a dozen directions. They sprouted from the floor like mechanical vines and pumped fluids in to and out of the monster. Its snout was covered in a clear, massive breathing mask that pumped some kind of oxygen mix for it to breathe.
 
Matty watched as the creature's exhalation caused a faint condensation on the side of the breathing apparatus.
 
On the beast’s body, there were patches of scales that had been surgically removed, revealing what appeared to be normal, pink flesh underneath.
 

I wonder what they do with the scales?

But of all the remarkable things, of all the things from which she could not look away, the butterfly-like gossamer wings were the most incredible. They were translucent. And despite the flaccid, fluorescent light offered by the bulbs high in the ceiling of the room, they were transcendent. They gave off a glimmer that made her stare and brought her back to dreams of things she'd long since forgotten. Memories of invisible friends from her childhood rose to the surface of her mind, as well as the chills of scary campfire stories that kept her awake at night. She remembered tales her father told her of giant Norwegian Trolls that turned to stone in the day and of the vampires he said stalked the dark forests and empty villages of eastern Europe. Suddenly, everything she knew was tossed up in the air. She wasn't sure what would fall and become the truth again, or what would stay floating in the air, myths reborn.

"It's normal," she heard a new voice say suddenly.

Matty snapped back to reality. "What's normal?" A middle-aged man with glasses perched on his nose with lenses that looked several inches thick was standing next to her, an awkward smile on his face. His facial hair was growing in unevenly. He held a touch screen device that, at a glance, she knew monitored many things that happened in the room all at once.

"The strange wanderings of the mind. There's a face we all get when it first hits us. Memories? Sudden doubt of what's real and not real? Was that really the boogey man under my bed when I was a kid? That's normal the first time you see her. It'll happen again every once in awhile. Try not to stare at the wings. We're pretty sure it's her wings that cause it."