Hellmaw Dragon Dreams

Aleksi Rychenkna prefers death over life. The fossils she studies in museum repositories rarely ridicule her, belittle her, or make her feel insignificant. Unlike people. Death is her milieu, her escape, her refuge… The quiet repose of that which has passed from this earth cannot harm her.

Or so she believes.

But two things lurk in the repository of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology repository that may challenge that theory: the lost specimen of an uncharacterized creature unique to the world, and the daemon who wishes to unlock the power of that specimen. One could transform her. The other seeks to devour her and steal from her the power she has unknowingly unleashed.

When her new advisor, Dr. Dwayne Hutchinson, gives Aleksi an unprecedented opportunity to decode a long-lost Russian paleontologist’s diary, and examine the genetics of his uncategorized specimens, she finds something long hidden that no one could have prophesied. Millennia ago, a member of the Elder race sought to fight a plague of demons invading Earth by creating a new race to fight them. Dragons, long vanished from the world, and humans, the rising dominant species, were melded by magic into a fragile hybrid prototype, but the demons struck before the fledgling dragon was ready, and the Elder’s plan to save Earth from invasion fell into ruins.

Or did it simply go to sleep, to be awakened by a brilliant young paleontologist in the depths of a museum repository twelve thousand years later?