Dragon Conjurer 5, page 6
The blond dude might look like a lanky nymph, but he ate about as often as a Hobbit. He flipped the bacon in the pan and gobbled up what I could only assume was part of his second breakfast.
“Yeah, yeah.” I smirked at Nick and sighed. “I’m gonna go see what the good doctor wants with me.”
“Have fun,” Nick snickered through a mouthful of food, and I sent him a shameless grin on my way to Elisabeth.
“See you later,” Elisabeth smiled softly and tipped her teacup to her mouth.
“Be good,” I said with a sly wink, and I leaned down to press a gentle kiss against her luscious lips before I walked to the door.
I stepped out into the hall and pulled our door closed behind me, and I took a bite of the juicy peach in my hand as I nodded a greeting to the Men in Black who were waiting for me.
“Dr. Hastings will meet you on the first basement level,” one of the huge, black-suited guards said in his robotic voice.
“Geez,” I sighed. “Don’t you guys ever say hello or anything? Maybe ‘good morning, how about that weather?’ ‘Did you catch that game last night, what a nail biter.’”
“No,” the other man said, but I could see a very tiny smirk trying to break out at the corners of his stern mouth. “First basement level, Cooper.”
I stood and watched them as, without another word, the two men turned and stomped down the hall. As they walked beside each other, I saw that they were wide enough that their suit-covered shoulders nearly brushed along the beige painted walls. They stopped in perfect unison outside the elevator doors and stepped into it to march off to their next assignment.
It was still early enough that the halls were quiet, and I didn’t pass anybody else as I made my way slowly to the elevator. After the metal doors slid open, and I stepped inside, I pressed the button for basement level one as the doors closed quietly in front of me.
I chewed at my peach while I thought back over my last encounters with the Academy’s resident genius hottie. I’d been down to see Dr. Hastings in AIMM’s basements twice since my team’s battle with the Hydra two weeks ago.
The first time, the supermodel doctor had wanted another blood sample. She said it was because I’d summoned a new dragon, and she was interested to see how that affected me on a biological level. The sexy blonde in the pencil skirt and heels had led me back into a monster examination room and drew several vials of my blood, and the whole time, she flirted and made intense eye contact with me.
“How much of my blood do you intend to take?” I’d asked as she pressed the third tube into place at my arm.
“Oh, just a little more.” Dr. Hastings winked.
After she’d drawn the needle out of my vein and pressed a gauze into the crook of my elbow, Dr. Hastings laid one perfectly manicured hand on my thigh. The heat of her touch had burned through my uniform, and I could smell her minty breath as she leaned in close to my face.
“I wanted to let you know.” Her gray eyes twinkled mischievously a second before she’d pulled away. “You’re my favorite subject, Mr. Cooper.”
“Happy to help,” I’d almost choked on my words as I willed my dick to go back down.
“Thank you for being so cooperative,” Dr. Hastings had practically purred at me. “Sorry, I don’t have any lollipops for you.”
I’d stumbled out of the lab that day with a painful erection and confused thoughts. I still had no idea if the way she talked to me and touched me was considered out of line, or if she had made it her personal mission in life to intentionally try and drive me completely insane with lust.
Although, I didn't really care what the circumstances were, I just wanted to know so I could adjust my tactics accordingly.
The second time I’d been summoned down to the basements of AIMM’s main building was a few days later. Dr. Hastings had brought me back down to the lower monster containment level to speak with the Siguanaba again.
The horse-faced demon woman had been about as expressive as a lunatic brick wall. She’d cackled maniacally in that disturbing raspy voice of hers as I tried my damndest to string the right words together to elicit a response that was fractionally helpful.
“What do you know about the monsters working together?” I’d asked. “Is someone leading them all? Who’s in charge?”
The Siguanaba rocked back and forth as she hummed nonsense sounds at me through the reinforced glass of her cell for a good thirty minutes.
“What do you know?” I finally demanded as I lost my cool and slammed my fists against the barricade. “Tell me!”
The Siguanaba’s long greasy hair fell over her face, and she just giggled at me from the darkened corner of her cell. Then she slowly turned to look at me, and her hair fell away from her eerie skull-face as she stared at me out of empty eye sockets that haunted my dreams.
Her words from our first encounter kept replaying over and over in my mind as I walked back to our suite that afternoon to join my teammates for an early dinner.
“For every one you kill… two more will rise.”
The Siguanaba had been locked away in AIMM’s basement for decades, how could she know anything about what went on in the outside world?
Unless the monsters of the world hatched this plan decades before I was even born.
Now, I shuddered once more as the monstrous demon’s scratchy voice sent a chill of impending doom down my spine. I shook the image of her ghastly bone-face away and stepped off the elevator onto the first underground level of the facility.
“Good morning, Mr. Cooper,” Dr. Hastings murmured with a stern look on her gorgeous face as the sleek metal doors of the elevator slid closed behind me.
“Good morning,” I said.
The good doctor’s gray eyes lacked their usual playful glint, and her red lips were drawn into a thin line. She had an air of seriousness about her elegantly dressed frame that doused any hint of flirtatious banter from the air and solidified a brick of trepidation in my gut.
“This way, if you please.” Dr. Hastings turned on her stiletto heels and strode purposefully down the brightly lit corridor.
“Everything okay?” I asked hesitantly. “You seem a little… tense.”
“There has been a, well, a worrying new development, Mr. Cooper.” Dr. Hastings faced forward as the click clack of her red heels echoed down the empty hall around us.
She stopped at a plain door that was identifiable only by the small, engraved name plate on the wall beside it. The white sign was the size of a postcard and read “Dr. Emma Hastings - Head of Monster Biology, Physiology, and Genetics” in elegant silver letters. She pushed the door open and gestured for me to enter the room.
The room was a tastefully furnished office with a large steel-framed desk and book-lined walls. A sleek computer monitor was anchored on the wall over the desk which was stacked with a few short piles of perfectly tidy manilla files. The office was as meticulous as the good doctor herself, and I was unsurprised to see a single black and white photograph hanging on the only space of wall that wasn’t dedicated to shelves lined with well cared for tomes from all over the world. The photo was a scenic landscape of rolling hills dotted with fruit trees on a delightfully sunny afternoon. A coffee cup with the words “Yes, I’m a Doctor. No, not that kind of Doctor” printed across the front in a sleek font held several perfectly organized pens, and a leather daybook sat squarely on the corner of the metal desk.
“Have a seat,” Dr. Hastings said and pointed at a pair of modern armchairs upholstered in a plush heather gray.
I sank wearily into the chair, and the platinum-haired woman tapped her red stiletto on the floor in a fast cadence as she leaned her palms back on the sleek surface of her desk.
“Am I in trouble?” I finally asked, and I felt her nervous energy seep into my body from my dragons where they began to wriggle with agitation.
“What?” The doctor looked at me, and her gray eyes were wide with surprise. “No, no, of course not.”
“Okay, then, please tell me what’s going on,” I said with short-lived relief. “You’re kind of freaking me out.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Cooper,” Dr. Hastings sighed and smiled lightly at me as she lowered herself into the chair behind her desk. “I’ve been studying your blood work from two weeks ago, just after you summoned your latest dragon.”
“And?” I prompted after a moment.
“And.” Dr. Hastings furrowed her brow, and somehow, it only served to make her more beautiful. “Well, your DNA is mutating at an alarming rate.”
“Mutating?” Confusion spun in my mind as her words bounced around my skull without really sticking anywhere. “Mutating how? What would even be a non-alarming rate? DNA isn’t supposed to just mutate, right? Shit, is it cancerous?”
“Let me show you,” the blonde woman said and turned to her computer screen. She clicked the mouse a few times, and three images of DNA sequences popped up on the wall-mounted monitor. She pointed at the far-left image. “This is your DNA when you first arrived here at AIMM back in October.”
“Yeah.” I nodded but biology had never really been my thing, and all three samples looked fairly similar to me. “Okay.”
“This one is from after you’d summoned three dragons.” Her perfectly manicured finger pointed at the image in the center of her screen before she moved on to the far-right image. “And this one is your DNA from after your battle with the Hydra.”
“After I summoned Thor,” I said, but the dire circumstances of my DNA still eluded me.
“Thor.” Dr. Hastings’ face finally lightened a little at the name of my storm dragon. “How perfectly appropriate.”
“Thanks,” I said with a half-hearted smile. “Doctor, these all look the same to me, what are you trying to say?”
“Oh, silly me. Maybe this will help illustrate my concern,” the doctor said with a small smile as she clicked her mouse a few more times. Then a new image appeared beside the three slides of my DNA. “This is the DNA from a highly sentient monster.”
I leaned forward in my chair, and my mouth fell open as the issue suddenly became clear.
The fourth sequence of genetic material was alarmingly different from my first sample in that the rungs that crossed between the spiraling double helix frame poked out in extra segments like little spikes. Extra protein bonds jutted out from the familiar structure in every direction.
“What…” I gulped.
My eyes bounced rapidly between the sentient monster’s DNA sequence and my most recent one. Those seemingly random extra pieces that connected to nothing at all had begun to sprout up all along my DNA, too.
My blood ran cold as the realization hit me.
“My DNA is mutating into monster DNA?” I half-croaked.
“Not entirely,” Dr. Hastings said quickly as she wheeled her desk chair close to me, and she laid an elegant hand gently on my knee. “There are similarities between your DNA and that of the Shiwanna here, but yours is still predominantly human in nature.”
“Shiwanna?” I furrowed my brow and wracked my brain for any information on the creature the gorgeous cougar mentioned, but I was so dumb-struck by the news about my genetic code rewriting itself that I was at a total loss.
“Yes, this sample is from a Shiwanna.” Dr. Hastings looked over her shoulder at the fourth DNA sequence. “Sometimes referred to as ‘The Cloud People’, they’re from Native American lore. The Pueblo legend says they come up from the underworld, or sometimes they live in mountains or lakes, and they bring rainfall with them. They’re supposed to be a mostly benevolent creature, in fact. The Indigenous people of this country often use them as inspiration for their kachina dolls and dress like them and dance in traditional ceremonies. We managed to gather this blood sample from one a few decades ago on a chance encounter during a mission in New Mexico.”
“Right.” I took a deep breath and finally asked the real question that hung unspoken between us. “So, what does this mean for me?”
“I won’t lie to you, Mr. Cooper.” Dr. Hastings pulled her chic glasses away from her face. Her platinum-blonde hair was tucked elegantly away from her left cheek with a single large clip. “I have no idea.”
“Well, that’s reassuring,” I joked, but my voice had no humor in it.
“I wish I had more information for you, truly I do,” the doctor said and pressed her red lips into a thin line. “I promise, I will continue to research this matter and investigate further into anything that might shed some light on your situation. Unfortunately, we are simply in uncharted territory here. We’ve never known anyone quite like you before, Mr. Cooper.”
“I understand,” I sighed and nodded as unanswered questions ricocheted around my brain. Suddenly the questions started to tumble unbidden out of my mouth. “Do you have any theories? Is this why I can communicate with the sentient monsters? Am I going to be able to talk to less sentient ones? I thought I could almost understand the Grunch from yesterday. How sentient are they? Is it going to affect how I communicate or act? Will my DNA keep mutating until I turn completely into a monster?”
“My only theory at this point is that, as you summon more dragons, they have a marked impact on your genetic code.” Dr. Hastings patted my knee gently and turned around to stare at the images on her screen once more. “Whether the mutation comes from the summoning of a dragon or from the moment the dragons become one with your body in the form of their tattoos, I simply can’t say.”
“I wonder if this mutating of my genetic code has anything to do with the new connections with my dragons,” I wondered out loud.
“What new connections?” Dr. Hastings asked as she turned back to me with the curious expression I was used to seeing on her gorgeous face. “Has there been some new developments since the last time we spoke?”
“Yeah.” I nodded and couldn’t help but smile at the doctor’s enthusiasm. “Just yesterday, actually. My team and I were out in the hundred acres of campus the headmaster allocated for my dragons.”
“Oh, good.” A slightly smug smile crossed the sexy doctor’s face as she leaned back in her chair and crossed one stockinged leg over the other. Her skirt rode up dangerously to expose the tiniest bit of lace around her upper thigh. “I’m glad he found space for your whole team to use.”
“Yeah,” I chuckled. “Just in time, too. Ky and the others were really restless after yesterday’s mission. So, we all went outside, and I was thinking about Ky when this, like, string of awareness formed out of nowhere between us. And suddenly, I could sense where he was and how he was feeling.”
“That’s incredible, Mr. Cooper.” Dr. Hastings placed her glasses back on her face, and she whipped out a notepad and pen from I didn’t even know where. Then she started rapidly scribbling notes on the page as I talked. “Go, on.”
“It’s hard to explain, really, but I guess I would say it’s kind of like a personal Wi-Fi connection.” I furrowed my brow while I tried to describe the sensation of the invisible tether between myself and my icy dragon. “I don’t know, I can just… connect… directly to Ky.”
“Fascinating.” Dr. Hastings’ pen flew rapidly across her notepad. “Did you connect with any of the other dragons in this way?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I tried but there was nothing like that with Beyblade or Thor.”
“What about Goldie?” The blonde woman looked up at me over the top of her glasses, and she bit gently into her bottom lip.
“N-No,” I murmured. “Uh… no, I couldn’t connect with Goldie like I did with Ky, but something else happened with her.”
“Go on.” Dr. Hastings stared intently at me with bright gray eyes and waited for me to continue.
“I could hear through her ears,” I said.
“Oh, that is incredible.” The blonde doctor’s pen flew across her page again as she pondered this new revelation. “Please, tell me about it.”
“I wasn’t sure what was happening at first,” I explained as I thought back to my confusion yesterday evening. “I could hear this weird chewing and beating noise, and then when I realized I was hearing what Goldie was hearing, it was a pretty big shock. I don’t know how it happened or even if I have any control over this. The connection stopped almost as abruptly as it started, and I didn’t really get a chance to explore it any more than that.”
“Hmm.” Dr. Hastings sat quietly a moment, and she tapped the end of her pen against her full lip. “Mr. Cooper…”
“Yes?” My heart picked up its pace a little as the sexy doctor removed her glasses slowly and stared hard at me.
“I think it would be wise for you to spend as much time as possible on the grounds with your dragons.” She stood from her chair and leaned over her desk so that her dusty pink skirt hugged the curves of her ass in all the right places. “Use that time and try to focus your energies on strengthening these connections with your dragons.”
Dr. Hastings plucked something out of her coffee cup pencil holder and turned back to face me, and I knew it was just about time for me to leave her alluring presence.
“Do you think the changes in my DNA have anything to do with the new communication with my dragons?” I asked to stall a moment and allow my highly-aroused body the chance to relax. The good doctor probably knew already, but I preferred to avoid making it painfully obvious how attracted I was to the intellectual cougar before me.
“It’s entirely possible this is the case, but here. For being such a good patient…” Dr. Hastings held out a lollipop to me with a smile. “It’s also possible that these developments are entirely unrelated, and it is your extended time with the dragons that is forging these new connections. We have so little information about Conjurers in general, let alone Dragon Conjurers, that this is all merely speculation and educated guesses.”
“I understand.” I nodded and finally rose from my chair to take the lollipop from her, and I flashed her what I hoped was a charming smile. “Thanks for the candy.”
“Certainly, Mr. Cooper,” the sexy blonde woman said with a sly wink. “Keep me abreast of any new developments and enjoy your day.”
