Burn(12)

And woke a moment later, his face in the mud where it had been the only thing that stopped his faint. Now his nose was bleeding, too. He sat up, slowly, still woozy. He took off his ragged hat and put a hand to the sticky mess of his ear. How could it be bleeding this much? Enough to make him light-headed?

He washed his face in the river, gasping at the coldness of the water, splashing it on his ear. Fresh blood spouted from it.

“This is ridiculous,” he whispered. “It’s an ear—”

Then he remembered. The enforcers of law in Canada and the United States sometimes coated their bullets in anticoagulant. Not for when they shot men. For when they shot dragons. Dragonskin was unbelievably hardy, and if it didn’t deflect the shot altogether, the wound would close so quickly you could almost see it happening. The anticoagulant was a development from the last ten years of the West’s Cold War with the Soviet Union, even though neither of them were actually fighting dragons. Who had thought ostensible peacetime would be even more beneficial to weapons research than actual war?

It did mean one thing: The men today had been prepared to shoot someone other than just him, and now he was going to bleed to death from an ear wound on the first day of his mission. There was nothing for it. He would need a proper bandage, one that would at least hold the wound shut until the anticoagulant was out of his system.

He would have to find a store.

“But it would be helpful,” Agent Woolf said, as they drove. “There was a memo on international, interdepartmental cooperation—”

“You actually read the memos?” Agent Dernovich asked.

“You don’t?”

He glanced over to her. Her look of disgust was, apparently, quite real. He sighed to himself again. “Identifying ourselves and our mission to RCMP Security Services only after two of our agents are killed on Canadian soil might not go down well.” He watched another car in the oncoming lane. A large Oldsmobile, two men in the front seat, each wearing the same hat Dernovich currently wore. “Speak of the Canadian devil,” he murmured, “and he drives right by.”

Agent Woolf turned to watch them as they drove past.

“Draw a little more attention to yourself, why don’t you?” he snapped.

“If you made them as agents,” she said, unbothered, “they surely made us.”

He glanced in the rearview mirror. They didn’t seem to be turning around. But Agent Woolf was right. Again. Dammit. He sighed once more.

“Can you please stop that?” she asked. “Once one notices you doing it, one can’t un-notice it, no matter how hard one might try.”

Agent Dernovich sighed again, louder this time. “You hungry? I missed breakfast.”

“I had a hard-boiled egg at the hotel.”

“I’m going to take that as a yes.” Crossing a bridge, he saw a diner on the left, across the street from a small drugstore. It was as good as any. Besides, if the RCMP did decide to turn back and ask them a few questions, it was better to look like he and Woolf had been expecting them all along.

A bell jingled as Malcolm opened the door of what seemed to be an appropriate business near the bridge. Betty’s Drugstore, the sign read. Please guide my words, he prayed, in his head. And please prevent me from having to kill Betty.

“Help you?” said a woman’s voice, before the jingling even stopped. He couldn’t see her behind the shelves.

“Bandages?” he called back.

“Well, now, let’s see what we’ve got . . .” He heard footsteps coming up the aisle. He panicked slightly, having to fight off the urge to run back out the door—

But the woman who appeared around a shelf of suppositories was small, roly-poly, with glasses shaped like cat’s eyes. “Oh!” she said, looking right at his ear. “What on earth happened?”

Malcolm put his hand over it protectively. He had no idea what to answer. I was shot probably wasn’t going to lead to an easy conversation.

He saw her eyes move from his ear to his wrist. His sleeve had fallen a little, exposing the skin there. Exposing the ink. The woman’s face grew suddenly serious. Malcolm tensed, rapidly going through his options. He could physically overpower her, he thought, but would it have to end with—

“Was it those bullies again?” she asked. “At the high school?”

Malcolm barely knew what this meant. “Yes?” he ventured.

She tutted, took his arm, and led him to a shelf full of bandages. “I thought all that had stopped after that poor kid from Valemount drowned. I mean, I know you people aren’t exactly popular, but violence tells you nothing about the victim and a whole lot about the victimizer, don’t you think?” She took a box off the shelf, opened it, and lifted a ball of cotton up toward his ear.

“I can do it,” he said.

“You got eyes on the side of your head?” She swabbed away the blood, then took out a large bandage, peeled back a sticky part, and stuck it firmly over the wound and down the back of his ear. “That’s a lot of bleeding,” she said, as she worked. “I’m Betty, by the way.”

“Malcolm,” Malcolm said, surprising himself. “You smell like flowers.”

“It’s my perfume,” she said, a little embarrassed. “It’s called Primitif.” She walked toward the back of the store, clearly expecting Malcolm to follow. He did. “A bit fancy for rural British Columbia, but a woman’s got to have her treats, don’t you think?”