Page 29 of Escaping my Dragon

“Are you asking me on a date?”

My lips quirked. “Why yes, Captain, I am. Although, skip the dessert. I have something better planned than what they’ll be offering in the galley.”

Leaving him with his jaw on the floor, I quickly made my way to my room and snagged my laptop. Given how quickly the battery could drain, I plugged in my phone before setting up my hotspot. I could have connected to the station’s internet, but—especially given recent events—I preferred to keep my files private, just in case.

As promised, Gus emailed me everything he had thus far. I spent the first hour reading about Dr. Malone and watching a few videos of the speeches he gave. Definitely the man calling himself Greenfield, albeit lacking the facial scars. I also noted the mockery in the comments section, some of it harsh, despite his compelling arguments. I found the images of the skeleton he’d found in a cave intriguing. The size of it was definitely in dinosaur territory. The small, scattered bones by the ribcage were quite possibly the remains of its wings. However, where his story fell apart? His refusal to divulge the location of his find for independent review. If so confident, why not allow others to confirm?

The articles he’d written, none published in accredited journals, but available online via blogs—many of dubious repute—claimed dragons used to exist but that they’d been wiped out through infighting and because humans hunted them to extinction. According to Malone, those dragons might have left behind eggs inside volcanoes to await an eruption, the extreme heat supposedly a catalyst for their hatching.

The volcano aspect had me thinking of Erebus. Had he been trying to trigger it into exploding because he thought it might birth a dragon?

I studied the areas of his crime next. Read the official reports, then looked up each location in question and discovered a pattern. After another hour of cross-referencing, I noticed what should have been an impossible coincidence that led to me almost missing dinner. Suddenly seeing the time, I ran downstairs to find the captain exiting the galley.

“Noah!” I huffed. “Sorry I’m so late. I got distracted.”

“Apparently,” his dry reply.

“Come with me.” I grabbed him by the hand and dragged him upstairs to my room with him exclaiming as we entered, “Slow down. We’ve got all night.”

“What? Oh. Yeah. Sex will have to wait. I found something.”

Some men might have moped or whined about me changing my mind, but the captain instead glanced at the paper strewn on my bed, floor and desk and stated, “This is about Greenfield.”

“Malone, yes. Turns out he wasn’t just obsessed with dragons. He wanted to bring them back.”

“Kind of hard to bring back something that didn’t exist.”

“Actually, that’s debatable.”

Noah’s mouth rounded. “Wait, you think dragons are real?”

“I think that, like many myths, there is a basis in truth. Likely a dinosaur that didn’t die out during the ice age, but I’m getting off topic. Malone believed dragons laid eggs in volcanoes and that, in order for them to hatch, they needed to be exposed to extreme heat, AKA magma.”

“Are you suggesting he dive-bombed into Erebus because of a delusion?”

“I haven’t figured out that part yet. But here, look.” I began shuffling pieces of paper and pointing. “Not long after he was in China, a volcano thought to be permanently dormant, Aibulou, began steaming and fissures opened up near the place he got caught trespassing. In Australia, Mount Napier and Mount Gambier both erupted, despite being inactive for millennia.”

“What about Hawaii? Didn’t he get in trouble there too?”

“No volcanoes erupted during his most recent trip. But…” I shuffled around my papers before yanking out the one I needed. “It did erupt a few years back, and, as it turns out, he was there in the weeks prior for a conference.”

“How the hell did you find that out?”

“Easy. I got Gus to hack the passport office and pull Malone’s trip dates. In the last five years or so, of the three dozen places he’s visited, more than half within weeks, had a dead cone reactivate to some extent. Most just spitting steam, but a few fully erupted.”

“Shouldn’t that be impossible?” asked on a dubious note.

I bit my lip. “That’s what I would have assumed too, but you have to admit, it’s a hell of a coincidence. Here you have a cryptozoologist who is convinced volcanoes hold dragon eggs and places he visits soon see volcanoes that haven’t been active in more than thirty thousand years or more suddenly go kaboom.”

“Let’s say he is responsible and has been doing this for years. Don’t you think by now he’d realize there’s no dragons?”

“Or he’s found them and kept them under wraps.” An alternative that didn’t convince Noah.

“In the stories, dragons are the size of cars or bigger. Not exactly easy to hide.”

“You’re assuming they’re born big. Look at any animal on the planet. We start out small and grow as we age. If he captured them as babies, it would be easy to tuck them away until he’s ready to reveal them to the world.”

Looking at Noah’s face, I could tell he didn’t believe me. Hell, I had a hard time believing it myself. However, the more I dug, the more things made sense, but at the same time, also didn’t.