Burn(45)

“Stop talking,” Jason said. He held the gun, but he looked very nervous. “I’ve shot people before.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You should,” said a voice from the sky. The dragon landed in the road in front of them. “You are the assassin,” he said to Malcolm, simply.

“Yes,” Malcolm answered. “And you, oh, Great One”—he moved his arm so that the item he’d hidden in his other sleeve dropped into his free hand—“are exactly what is needed.”

Gareth Dewhurst, still holding his shotgun, stopped himself from running after his daughter. The dragon was on the road now. Whatever important thing everyone had been waiting for was now clearly happening. His daughter was running right toward it.

He took off for the barn where he’d parked his truck.

After tying the steel blade of his plow to the front.

“Jason, don’t!” Sarah shouted as she neared them: Kazimir, Jason, what looked like a teenage boy getting out of a truck, and was there another in the passenger seat? Surely, these couldn’t be assassins?

Kazimir’s neck was arched, his wings out, like a cat that had been threatened and was showing how big it could get. For Kazimir, this was very, very big.

“These are the guys, Sarah!” Jason yelled. “Stay back!”

The boy who had got out of the truck turned to face her. He had a look that suggested he’d known her for a long, long time.

Kazimir put out a wing, abruptly stopping her progress. “No closer,” he said. “He is more dangerous than you could possibly imagine.”

“He’s a boy.”

“He is a boy with power.”

Sarah was shaken more than she thought possible by the fear she heard in Kazimir’s voice.

“What are you talking about?”

Kazimir swung that great, one-eyed head back toward the boy, who she now saw held a blade in one hand and . . . something in the other.

“He has the Spur of the Goddess,” Kazimir said.

Malcolm felt no fear. True, the other boy had a gun on him. True, the dragon could incinerate him with a single breath, but he held his blade in one hand.

And the Spur of the Goddess in the other.

Sacred nearly beyond speaking, a holy relic to every dragon the world over, regardless of color or mythology, missing for centuries. A dragon claw, blackened and ancient, believed to have been torn from the Goddess herself, and carried for these many days in Malcolm’s travel bag, the item without which all this was lost.

Dragons were not quite of this reality, were they? Even Believers acknowledged that. Breathing fire, living for a possible eternity (Malcolm believed in that eternity, so did the Mitera Thea, so did Kazimir), intelligent, obviously historic but somehow with no past evidence in the geological record. They were, for all that science could confirm, sui generis.

They were not of this world. And then they were.

The Spur was the proof of their power. Believers had stumbled upon it in the Wastes, indeed it was the artifact that had founded the whole religion. They had kept it hidden away all these years.

In the right hands, it held power unimaginable.

“I do not wish to harm you, Great One,” Malcolm said with reverence that was not manufactured, “but I will if I must.”

“And what do you plan on doing if I allow you to continue, boy?” Kazimir asked, trying to keep up his haughtiness, but Sarah could tell there was a strain behind it. That fear again.

“You don’t know?” the boy holding the claw asked, surprised.

“I know the result that you believe. War between men and dragons. War unceasing. The death of us all.”

Malcolm’s eyes widened in astonishment. “No, oh, Great One, that is exactly what I’m here to stop. I’m the only chance at peace.”

Jason’s voice was strained. “Well, both can’t be true.”

“Oh, they can,” Kazimir said, ruefully. “Prophecy is slippery, dangerous, open to fatal misinterpretation.”

“I’m not afraid of fatal,” Malcolm said. “I only wish to do my duty.”

“And there is no doubt in your mind that you will complete it?”

“None,” the boy said, firmly. “It’s been foreseen.”

“Well, then,” said Kazimir, “I suppose there is nothing left but to let you get on with it.”

The boy looked astonished.

“That was not foreseen,” Kazimir said, the playful tinge Sarah was familiar with back in his voice. He raised his long head, looked directly at Jason, and said, “Shoot him.”

Jason Inagawa raised the gun. The boy with the claw turned to him. In fact, everyone turned to him.

“Jason!” he heard Sarah shout, but just his name, no call of yes or no. She was clearly as confused as he was.

“Jason is your name,” the boy with the claw said. “Mine is Malcolm. I have a great work to accomplish.”

“One that involves killing Sarah,” Jason said. “I’ll shoot you before that happens.”

“Shoot me then,” the boy with the claw said, opening his arms. “I won’t stop otherwise.”

“Do it,” Kazimir said to Jason.

“You said Sarah was the important one,” Jason said.

“She is, and believe me when I say, only one of them will live to the end of this day.”