Burn(10)

Still no response. She turned and left again, but hadn’t gotten more than three steps before she heard, low, in the dark and the night, “I know your name, Sarah Dewhurst.”

She turned back immediately. The dragon uncurled slowly from the trees, his great neck swinging around to her. She was suddenly more afraid than she’d expected to be.

“Kazimir,” the dragon said.

“What?”

“My name.”

“Cashmere?”

“Kaz-i-mir,” the dragon enunciated. “It means ‘Famed For Destruction.’”

“Kazimir,” Sarah repeated, then asked, “how did you know mine?”

But as with her father, Kazimir simply acted as if the universe had never spoken such a question. He re-curled his neck into the trees and, for all intents and purposes, fell back to sleep.

After a moment, still shivering, Sarah walked back to the only house she had ever known.

The dragon was not asleep, however. He had positioned his head so he could watch the girl pick her way deftly along the path back to the farmhouse. He didn’t stop watching her until his one keen eye—so much sharper in darkness than a pitiful human one—saw her reenter the house.

She was brave, much braver than most humans, to come out here on her own, at night, to speak to a dragon she did not know. He could already see the yearning in her, the reach so many humans had when they wished for more, a reach that was almost a magic on its own, if they only knew it.

Good, she would need all that in the days to come. There was so very, very much she didn’t know. But she would learn, thought Kazimir. Yes, she would learn.

And oh, what a glory that might yet be.





Four


“A RED,” SAID Agent Woolf, and Agent Dernovich could already feel his heartburn flaring.

“We’re in western Canada, Agent Woolf,” he said, a grump in his voice. “What sort of dragon would you expect it to be?”

She ignored him. She did that a lot, especially when dragons were the topic of conversation, and with Agent Woolf, there weren’t many other topics. He watched as she bent over the uneven puddle of hardened steel that had, at some point this morning, been a fully operating car.

“We can’t dally, Woolf. Even you must realize how this changes things.”

“You can tell by the smell, mainly.” She blinked at him with eyes that always felt like they were pinning him down to an opinion he was forced to make up on the spot. “The reds alone leave a trace of sulfur behind.”

“Tell me something useful,” Agent Dernovich said, “or don’t tell me anything at all.”

The FBI were allowed in Canada—the Cold War demanded cooperation, and Americans were always happy to take a mile when Canadians offered an inch—but Agents Woolf and Dernovich almost certainly weren’t allowed here. Their mole on the local police force could only promise to keep the site secret for an hour, maybe two, before their Canadian counterparts—the Special Branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—showed up.

Canada had an international reputation for politeness. The RCMP Special Branch did not.

Then Agent Woolf did say something that made this stolen hour worth all the future trouble it might cause. “This isn’t dragon blood.”

She was down the road from the wreckage—if “wreckage” was even the right word for such complete obliteration—kneeling directly onto the cold tarmac. The knees of Agent Woolf’s cheap, Bureau-issued stockings were always full of runs and tears because she always raised her bureau-issued skirt above them to kneel, which, to Dernovich, made absolutely no sense—the fabric of the skirt could probably stop your lazier bullets—but which he’d given up trying to explain as anything other than the typical behavior of Agent Veronica Woolf.

That name, first of all. Veronica Woolf sounded like a femme fatale in a detective movie. Or the girl from college you could never introduce to your mother. It didn’t even sound real, much less accurate for the dowdy, distracted, frequently-with-mustard-stuck-in-her-hair agent he’d been partnered with for the last eight months.

Female agents weren’t common, but they weren’t such unique ducks either. Paul Dernovich had even worked with one who’d done a sterling job gathering intelligence in Cuba. But Woolf was one of the bureau’s dragon specialists, who were already weirdos to begin with. They almost never went out into the field, and Dernovich thought Woolf was a pretty good example why.

Still, she did know her stuff.

“We’ve got another ten minutes at most,” he said, looking at his watch.

“Human,” she said, pointing to a rusty stain on the tarmac.

“How can you possibly tell—?”

“There are more drops and a stride between them,” she interrupted, another thing she did. “A human stride.”

Agent Dernovich looked at what she’d found. She was probably right, he had to admit, if only to himself.

“One of the agents who was here?” he suggested. “We could have an injured man out there—”

“Oh, no,” she said, rising, “they’re quite dead.” She pointed to a faint white ring at the side of the metal puddle. “Vaporized fat,” she said, as if discussing an order with the butcher. “Plus —” she reached down and picked up what looked like a coin from the tarmac “—remnants of a metal filling.”