Burn(19)

And we will stop a war?

No, my son, you will stop a war.

“My path is guarded,” he said again now, watching the clouds. “My path is blessed.”

If it did snow, he had instructions on the options he might take. Hotels were out because they required a record of his presence—no matter what name he might give, they’d still have something to attach to the memory of his face—but no one required him to freeze to death.

Make a solitary camp, if he could, with a fire. That was first choice. He had a small tent in his bag, and even if there had been those who’d questioned his skills and suitability for this journey, there was never any question about whether a Believer could make a fire. It was like asking ice to make water. But where? Civilization had started to creep in, and there were any number of houses who would see a stray column of smoke and worry about an odd stray fire, even in a wintry forest.

It had to be a campground. Fires were normal; even if others used them, Malcolm could blend in. He knew the locations of several along his route, both official and itinerant. One wasn’t too far, and the first snowflakes of what promised to be many more eased his decision.

He turned off the road, waiting for a tractor to pass so he could climb a fence and cross a long-harvested field without being seen. On the other side, he ducked through some trees, crossed a creek, and found himself behind a sign indicating the campground, right where he expected.

He carried no map except the memorized one in his head. It was reassuring to know it matched reality. He looked into the clearing that made up a poor but clean camping area. There was already a fire going, in what seemed to be a concrete communal hearth. Malcolm could see only one tent, planted close to the fire, with a young man in front of it, warming himself on the flames.

One man. Malcolm could handle one man if he had to, and who said he would have to? The long and short of it was that it had been two days since he’d left the pharmacy, two days since he’d spoken to anyone except in prayer, and Malcolm . . . well, he was ashamed to admit it as that, too, was one of the questions about his suitability for this, but out here, with no one to judge him, he could admit it to himself. He was lonely.

The campfire seemed safe enough.

So Malcolm stepped out of the trees and met Nelson, and the fate of billions was changed.

“One more day,” Agent Dernovich begged into the phone, and it was begging.

“You’ve found nothing, Agent Dernovich,” said Cutler, crackling across a long-distance line from Washington, D.C.

“We found evidence of murderous dragon activity—”

“You’ve found nothing since.” Cutler’s voice was a granite cliff. Waves could crash on it for thousands of years before he’d change his mind. “Which is rather more to the point.”

“Our guy must be nearing the border—”

“You know you should be looking for a woman. Believer cults are heavily matriarchal.”

Dernovich glanced over to Agent Woolf, who was writing god only knew what in painfully tiny lettering in her notebook. She was hard to think of as a matriarch.

“I have a hunch it’s a he,” Dernovich said now.

“A hunch is worth exactly jack in this office. We have a very dangerous set of murders-by-dragon to solve before it becomes an international incident, Agent. Unless you’ve got facts . . .”

Agent Dernovich didn’t have facts, but he did think he had more than a hunch. The trail—if it had ever been one—had vanished. Drops of blood in a forest turned out to be a better metaphor for something hopelessly lost than needles and haystacks—

But that boy. That Believer coming out of the pharmacy who had vanished into the riverbank. Dernovich had followed up on him, after it had gnawed on his brain all night in that horrible hotel room where he could hear Woolf snoring through the walls. The boy wasn’t a student at either of the local schools. The pharmacist had never seen him before either, but she did say he gave his name as Malcolm.

She also said it looked like he might have been shot.

“We’re still looking for that boy,” Dernovich said to Cutler.

“That boy you watched walk away and did nothing about? That teenage boy we’ve had an APB on for the last thirty-six hours who’d stick out like a sore thumb in what the Canadians think of as a populated area.”

“He would have been trained to be inconspicuous—”

“They would not send a boy for this job!” Cutler shouted. “It was the women who did all the dirty work in the past. You and I both know they would send someone who looked like Woolf. Or either of my ex-wives.”

Dernovich glanced again at Woolf, now taking a sip from her root beer in the booth of what felt like the thousandth diner they’d eaten at this week. What Cutler said made a lot of sense. In fact, it made so much obvious sense that Dernovich was increasingly certain that Cutler was one hundred percent wrong.

“One more day,” he said, as calmly as possible. “I’ll get you proof.”

“One more day,” Cutler relented, “but you won’t.”

He hung up. Dernovich idly put his finger in the coin return to see if any money had come back, then headed to the booth. Woolf didn’t greet him or ask how it went with Cutler; she just said, “I’ve been thinking we should check a certain kind of campground.”