Burn(11)

“Oh, Christ.”

“I saw the same ring in the forest for the other one.”

“Well, then, at the very least, there aren’t any FBI bodies to have to explain—”

“But this,” she interrupted again, gesturing back to the blood trail, “came after, or the blast would have evaporated it.” She walked along the tarmac a few steps across the road. “As I thought.” Dernovich went over to her.

More spots on the road, smaller, fainter, but there, if you knew where to look, disappearing off the edge of the road.

“Someone escaped,” he said.

“They only did if the dragon wanted them to.”

“And why would they want that? If they so casually broke hundreds of years of canon law about not killing humans?”

His irritation was not just about the murders—though they altered every single thing in what had seemed like a complete nothing of an investigation up until now—but the thoroughness of the killings. Faint rings of fat and nauseating metal fillings aside, these men, colleagues both, colleagues who had clearly jumped the gun on information they hadn’t seen fit to show anyone else so who knew exactly how they’d ended up here, had been obliterated, disintegrated. By creatures who had stayed out of human affairs for all of Agent Dernovich’s lifetime.

Even as late as an hour ago, Dernovich had assumed this case—and his pairing with Woolf—had been some kind of punishment from Cutler, their new boss, stitching an agent fresh from success in Havana onto a case with few leads and even fewer possibilities for real trouble just to show that, as new boss, he could. Ninety-five percent of the bureau was currently scouring the country for Communist infiltrators, and here was Paul Dernovich, in Canada, chasing stupidly vague rumors that had been circling around what was a widely despised but, at least in Paul’s lifetime, completely harmless cult. “You’re from the area,” Cutler had said, which was only sort of true, “I need you there.” It felt like an insult, because it was an insult, to a man who came thisclose to getting the job instead of Cutler.

But now, this. This absurd possibility that the whispers of danger were more than true, they were actually terrifying. If dragons were changing their behavior now, if they were breaking the highest law of human/dragon coexistence and the beasts of unfathomable power decided they no longer needed to coexist with the other beasts of unfathomable power, if that had suddenly changed perhaps on this very morning . . .

Well, then, Agent Dernovich could only wonder if any of them would actually make it to the end of 1957. The dread was so strong he had, for the moment, forgotten their primary mission. Agent Woolf had not.

“I think we’ve found him,” she said, a small twitch on her upper lip marking the happiest Agent Dernovich had ever seen her. “I think we’ve finally found him.” She blinked. “Or her.”

Malcolm’s ear was becoming a problem. The small first-aid parcel in his bag had a single thin bandage that failed within an hour of him tucking it under what remained of his hat.

He would not die of the wound, but it was annoying. He washed his hands in the river for the fourth time in an hour, watching his coppery blood flake away into the current. All this stopping. He wasn’t getting far enough from the incident with the car. People would be concerned. They would have questions. Insistent ones.

They would be looking.

So, the dilemma was thus: He was not moving fast enough, but to move fast enough, he would have to find a ride—he was only supposed to do this in extreme circumstances, which, he felt, this would obviously count—but in a car, not many people would forget someone bleeding from a hole where part of his left ear once was.

He knelt again to pray. “Help me, Mitera Thea,” he whispered into clenched hands still cold from the icy bite of the river. “I beg your indulgence a second time. What should your servant do?”

The only answer was the ever-trickling sound of the river.

“So be it,” he said, standing. “Thank you.”

He would keep walking. He would ignore his ear. It would stop bleeding or it wouldn’t. Whatever else happened, he had to trust he would be taken care of.

And so he was, for the rest of the day, at least. The river path wasn’t arduous, sometimes veering back to the road he’d left, leading him under occasional bridges. As the sun crossed low in the winter sky, he grew hungry and his mind returned to the biscuit he had started . . . was it only this morning? It was. A biscuit that had marked the deaths of two men. Men who had wanted him dead.

“You will be hunted,” the Mitera Thea had told him. “I will help you if I can, but you must not be caught. At any price.”

At any price, he thought, remembering again the melted car. Remembering the way the first man had just exploded. He breathed deep and tried not to think of it. The Mitera Thea knew best. He prayed to her, after all, even though she wasn’t a dragon or any kind of god. She had always looked out for him, and that was enough. She had chosen him for this mission, trained him, and though he might go a year without seeing her as she went out into the world to spread the Believer message, she was still the closest thing he’d ever had to a mother.

“Thank you,” he prayed again to her, almost without knowing he’d spoken the words. He stopped under a bridge, digging out the biscuit to finish it. As he swallowed the last of it, waiting for a truck to pass, he stood—