Burn(22)

“Baloney, you fell,” Nelson said, but not in a taunting way.

“I got shot,” Malcolm said, unexpectedly.

Nelson sat back. “Yeah, that sounds a bit more like it.” He unrolled the new bandage and started pressing it into place. Malcolm winced. “I don’t have any painkillers.”

“My faith doesn’t believe in them.”

“And that makes the pain go away, does it?” But he didn’t push, just took some adhesive tape and gently set the bandage in place. He finished, once more meeting Malcolm’s eyes. “Who would shoot Malcolm McCormack the Believer?”

Nelson reached out to brush a snowflake from Malcolm’s cheek. Malcolm smelled the tobacco again along with the warm, worn smell of another person. He tipped his nose up involuntarily to follow Nelson’s hand as it left his face. There was a silence, and Nelson’s look was more serious now.

“Is this the time that you kiss me?” Malcolm asked, genuinely curious.

“Is it what, you dipstick?” But Nelson was still smiling. “Kiss you? You want me to kiss you?”

“Have I misunderstood—?”

“You just come right out and say it?”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“You got a woody down there, too?”

Malcolm blinked. “A what?”

Nelson laughed out loud. “Are you for real?”

“I’m not sure. We’ve got a slightly different approach to reality.”

“Do you now?”

Malcolm nodded. “Some of us believe this is all a dream. That reality, whatever it is, never had dragons in it, that this world existed for thousands and thousands of years with just men, until one day, we entered a dream where dragons were with us. Had always been with us.”

Nelson’s eyebrow twitched up in a way that Malcolm found oddly stirring. “That sounds like more of an argument why you shouldn’t be a Believer.”

“It’s more of an argument about why we should never wake up.”

Nelson laughed again, but his confusion was plain. As was a surprising amount of pain. “A world where you never wake up? Sounds like paradise.”

“What do you mean—?”

He stopped because Nelson’s face had frozen in a glance over Malcolm’s shoulder. Malcolm turned.

A black Oldsmobile was pulling up in the campground parking lot.

“Did you get the license plate?” Agent Dernovich asked, out of breath, near the fire the two boys had run from.

“Just that the first numbers were forty-seven,” Agent Woolf said, already scribbling in her notebook.

“It was him, though, wasn’t it?”

Woolf eyed him. “Maybe.”

“Oh, come on.” Agent Dernovich stood now, still out of breath, hand on his side. It hadn’t even been much of a dash after they saw the boys take off. He really needed to cut down on the apple pie and ice cream. “Who else could it have been?”

“We wouldn’t expect our target to have made friends.”

“Friends? Why did they have to be friends? He could have forced the other one to take him. Or they could have—”

“Agent Dernovich,” she said, in a way that stopped him. He saw her bend down by the tent the boys had abandoned, though he’d had a first glance while Agent Woolf—not winded at all—had chased after them as they peeled away, fast as criminals, in a truck that neither agent had seen parked there, disappearing before there was any chance of getting back to the Oldsmobile. He hadn’t seen anything in the few belongings left in the tent that indicated that the second boy, whoever he might be, was any sort of Believer.

But that’s not what Woolf was picking up from the snow. With the tip of her notebook pencil, she had hooked a snow hat. She spun it around to show Dernovich a side that was bloody and torn.

“At last,” Dernovich said. “Proof.”

“Proof that it’s the boy we’re after. Not proof that he’s our target.”

“Oh, for pete’s sake, Woolf!” he said, finally shouting, letting all the frustration out at once. “We have who knows how little time to stop someone from fulfilling a so-called prophecy that just might start an all-out war between men and dragons, and you, of all people, however former a Believer you might be, know damn well that that is a war we do not want. It’s goddamn proof enough.” He stopped, took in a deep breath, losing steam. “Because it’s all the proof we’ve got.”

“I know full well what we’re facing,” she said, her face stern. “I know better than you.”

“Then you won’t complain when I ask you to find a pay phone and tell the Canadians we’ve got an assassin on the loose, now, will you? Let that cat out of the bag. Go! I’m going to keep searching through this stuff.”

She didn’t even say yes as she hurried back to their Oldsmobile. He blinked away the snow as he watched her. So close. So close. But the way the boy (and the other boy, whatever poor unfortunate that kid turned out to be) had run. It couldn’t be anyone else.

They’d found him. And Cutler could go sit on a pole if he doubted them again.

“I lost my tent,” Nelson said, driving.

“I’m sorry.”

“I had a sleeping roll in there.”