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James sighs as he returns to the table and hands me the vial whispering with black swirls of carbon monoxide.
We try again. And fail again. I huff out a frustrated breath before getting to my feet and flinging the face shield on the table beside the bone.
“It’s pointless!” I fume, throwing my hands up in a mock show of surrender. More like giving up, when my arms drop to my sides with defeated smacks. “We need to figure out what that is!”
“What about my initial hypothesis?” James suggests slowly.
Turning back to him, I shake my head. “No… No way…”
“Come on, Yaz!” James pleads, pulling up a chair and taking a seat with the backrest shielding his chest. “We’ve never seen anything that big. At least, not in this lab.”
“Still, it doesn’t mean it belongs to a dragon!” I chuckle nervously, eyes flitting to the large bone that sits pretty at two meters in length. With swollen edges, it mimics the shape of a forearm. Except, it’s as big as a human itself.
“I know it sounds crazy. But think about it.”
“No,” I dismiss, shaking my head as I proceed to the tea station. Coffee is the only thing that will get me through this atrocity of not being able to discern what the fossil is. “I’ve given it enough thought, James,” I throw over my shoulder. “But dragons only exist in folktales and fantasies.”
“Like the ones you read on this thing?”
I turn around quickly, rushing over to grab my Kindle reader out of his hand. “What I read in my free time is my business!” I grunt as I return the device to my handbag. “It doesn’t mean I can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction.”
“You know I’m right,” he taunts as he heads to the tea station and proceeds to pour boiled water into the mugs.
As irritated as I am, I’m grateful for my partner when he hands me a steaming cup of caffeinated goodness. Breathing in the rich aroma of coffee, he catches me off-guard when he says, “We’ve run every possible test. That thing is not only huge, it’s durable too. Almost like it’s immortal.”
I can’t help but burst out laughing. “So your theory is that this…” I point sideways at the bone, “... Belongs to an immortal dragon.”
“Yes,” he admits boldly.
“And that’s why we found it in the depths of a cave in New Zealand. Whatever it is, it’s been dead for a long time.”
“It’s immortal because the bone doesn’t react like other bones react to decay. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t killed,” he shrugs.
Rolling my eyes again, I shrug off my lab coat and take my coffee outside. James follows silently as if he’s adamant about his hypothesis.
Grateful for that silence, I stare out at the road ahead and feel the sudden urge to go home. Like I’ve been met with roadblocks, I haven’t arrived at a result for the fossil we found during an excavation on the uncharted mountains of New Zealand.
I’ve been a paleontologist for five years. In that time, I’ve never stumbled on a fossil I couldn’t detect. This one boggles my mind. The worst part of it all?
I’m actually starting to believe my partner’s theory that it belongs to a dragon.
But we all know that the existence of dragons is a myth. One that I plan on busting and proving wrong.
As soon as I finish my coffee.
“Yazmine?”
“Hm?” I hum as I sip on my coffee, my mind running a mile a minute as I try to make sense of the bone in the lab. Despite my inhibitions toward the idea, I know there’s no other explanation for its existence.
“Would you like me to do some research into dragons?” James offers, prompting me to turn to him with keen attention.
“And relieve me of this torment?”
“Exactly,” he chuckles, big brown eyes twinkling bemusedly. “You seem like you need a break from all of…” He gestures with a hand waving in the air. “... This.”
Letting out the deepest exhale as if it’d been stuck in my throat, I chug down the rest of my coffee before handing him the mug. “Say no more. I need a good night’s sleep.”
After bidding James goodbye, I relish the drive to my apartment. With my window rolled down, the cool night air is crispy and welcoming as it kisses my cheek and offers relief from the craziest twenty-four hours of my career.
