Burn(47)

Malcolm had stopped when the sheriff got out of his car, but Sarah saw him slowly leaning toward the aura again, his hand getting closer and closer to the claw.

“Stop!” Jason shouted at him.

“Everyone just stop!” the sheriff ordered. “Even you with the rock!”

The boy who’d struck Malcolm on the back of the head dropped it. “He murdered a Mountie,” the boy mumbled, sadder than anything Sarah had ever heard. “He did it right there on the road.”

Sarah saw the sheriff’s eyes going back and forth among them all, trying to figure out this scene. But there could be no figuring. Nothing here made sense. The sun had set, the moon was up—the snowclouds had vanished somehow, going against all the weather she’d ever seen in her state—and nothing, nothing, nothing made sense.

“There it is,” Malcolm said, turning his eyes to the sky.

They all looked, almost involuntarily, even the sheriff. A little light blinked among the stars, faint but there, blink, blink, blink.

“The satellite,” Sarah whispered.

“The world is watching us now,” Malcolm said.

Agent Woolf pulled up to a stop behind the police car. No one seemed to note her arriving. They were all looking up.

Ah, yes. The satellite.

She took her gun and got out of the car. This was what she had worked for. Why she had folded herself into the FBI with her dazzling dragon expertise, disappearing for months at a time to do “research” that only dazzled them more when she returned, the gullible idiots. It had been tricky, to say the least, balancing her role as Mitera Thea and being undercover, but she had needed their best information on the satellite and what they knew about her and her mission. Taking over the search for herself and any potential assassin had seemed only natural. Then after a while, it was simply fun, the best way to keep Malcolm safe while he fulfilled his destiny.

His destiny not as assassin. The real destiny he had remained unaware of even up until this moment that he was about to fulfill it.

Oh, no, he was definitely not the assassin.

She was.

She was about to murder the entire world of men.

So many things happened at once then, so many terrible, terrible things, that it was only later, after the world had already burned, that Sarah could sort it out completely and even then, she could only see her small part in it.

The satellite was first.

While they were all looking at it, Malcolm had—of course he had, of course—used their distraction to move for the claw, as he frantically muttered in a language she didn’t understand.

“No!” she heard Kazimir growl.

And then she heard—

Oh, God—

She heard the dragon start an inhalation of breath.

“Don’t touch it!” Jason shouted, still pointing the gun at Malcolm.

“You don’t even know what you protect,” Malcolm said, almost sadly, his hand an inch away.

“I protect her,” Jason said, seeing Sarah move out of the corner of his vision.

“I will shoot both of you if you don’t stop right now!” the sheriff yelled.

Malcolm ignored him and continued talking to Jason. “She’ll try to stop me,” he said. “If she doesn’t, no harm will come to her.”

“No harm will come to her anyway,” Jason said.

Malcolm lunged for the claw—

Jason cocked his pistol—

The sheriff fired first.

“Jason! Get out of the way!” Sarah shouted, leaping for him.

She meant the fire she knew Kazimir was about to breathe. There was so much shouting, she didn’t even hear the gunshot, only saw the pistol flip out of Jason’s hand, saw the blood erupt from his wrist. Then a second eruption from his back as he turned from the force of the first. It was only pure luck that neither bullet struck her as well, another thing she would only realize later.

For now, she was catching him in her arms, noting the look of complete surprise on his face as he slumped. He said her name, “Sarah,” but it was more exhalation than word, a wet exhalation, small bubbles of blood floating out on his breath.

“The dragon,” she said, still not quite understanding what had happened. “He’s going to fire.”

Malcolm could hear the blue drawing in its breath, knew there was oblivion coming—

But also knew victory was his.

He felt more than saw the blue rise above him, the great chest expand, the head pull itself back in the preamble to incinerating Malcolm and pretty much everything within a circle large enough to include the girl the dragon was supposed to be protecting.

But the prophecy had been wrong. The girl had not interrupted. She’d run to the other boy instead, right at the critical moment. And something was happening to the other boy, he was falling, falling—

Malcolm had no time for that, no eyes for anything but the Spur of the Goddess. He grasped it. He spoke the final words, words of pure dragon, thinking of the blinking eye in the sky above them.

His mission was complete.

There was a pulse. And a light.

Kazimir exhaled, and the flames ceased just past his mouth. The pulse and the light from the Spur of the Goddess stretched the aura to swallow his fire as if it were nothing more than mist.

The pulse and the light rocketed into the air above them all, in a spiral to the antenna on the hill, which lit up like the transmitter it was, shooting an even bigger spiral up to the cold, improbably clear sky, twisting around itself farther and farther, faster and faster. Until a small flash of light, high up in the atmosphere, signaled the end of the satellite the Russians had sent to spy on America . . .