Burn(48)

America, thought Kazimir. The satellite was destroyed by a weapon fired from American soil.

Oh, no.

Oh, what have I done? he thought.

He realized his mistake. His unforgivable, irredeemable mistake, the truth that had been sitting right in front of him the whole time.

The prophecy wasn’t about a war between men and dragons. It was about a war between men.

The Russians would see the destruction of their satellite as an act of aggression, and if it took them time to understand that that aggression came not from the United States, but from the world of dragons, how could that matter if the bombs were already falling? This world was over. It was only a matter of days now, perhaps hours.

The Believers hated humans. The Believers worshipped dragons, dragons who might not survive a direct hit from a warhead, but who could withstand radiation humans could not. The Believers thought they were giving the world to dragons. A world without humans.

They didn’t know what doom they had started.

“You have not saved us,” he said to the boy.

He raised his wings to fly, though he had no immediate answer as to where, just somehow to get to the right humans, to tell them where the real fault lay if they would even believe him, to stop the bombs that might even be falling by morning. He made to rise, taking his first muscular swoop to leave the ground. He turned to get away from the ever-growing aura around the Spur.

The truck with the plow attached caught him just offside his chest, mere centimeters away from where a direct blow would have punctured his flame sac, killing him terribly, in agony. Instead the blow was glancing but managed to knock him off to the side.

Into the aura.

Where he disappeared completely.

Agent Woolf saw the blue make to rise—

Then just like that, he was gone.

That would make things much easier in the short term. She cocked her own pistol and shot the sheriff in the back.

“Jason?” Sarah tumbled to the ground with him, unaware that a light was now rising into the sky, unaware that Kazimir had started to breathe fire, unaware even that her father was less than fifty meters away and closing fast. “No, Jason, please.”

He couldn’t speak. The second bullet had angled down his back and out through his lung. Every breath brought more blood to his lips. He looked up at her, and still his main expression was of surprise.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” she said to him, crying. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do—”

His eyes widened at something behind her. She turned and saw Kazimir, all seventy tons of him, vanish into the aura as if he’d tripped through a door.

“What on earth?” she said.

When she turned back to Jason, he was dead.

“Sarah?” her father shouted, getting out of the truck. “Sarah!”

Gareth Dewhurst didn’t know what the hell had happened to the dragon, didn’t know who the hell any of these people were, or what the hell this huge glowing thing was in front of him. He only knew that his daughter was in the midst of it, surrounded by danger.

“Sarah!”

He also didn’t know he’d been shot until he slumped to one knee.

Malcolm waited to die.

(You have not saved us.)

He’d thought it would be in the fire from the blue, but the Spur of the Goddess had stopped that, the aura swallowing it all, and in doing so, turning the aura from him.

Toward where the girl held the boy.

“Malcolm?” he heard Nelson say.

“I’m still alive,” he said, astonished. He turned to look into the face that made his heart lurch with what so briefly might have been. A future outside the destiny he had been given. A future inconceivable, impossible, yet real for a few shining moments.

(You have not saved us.)

“Nelson, I . . . What did he mean?”

“That woman is here,” Nelson said in horror, looking behind Malcolm. “She just shot the policeman and that man from the truck.”

“Daddy?” Jason was dead in Sarah’s lap, an idea so big she couldn’t yet feel it. The aura from the claw was close to her now, and she felt wind buffeting her hair. The edges of the aura were ragged and strange, as if curtains were opening and closing over a road that looked a lot like—but was not exactly like—the one where this was all happening.

The dragon had gone. Her father had pushed it . . . somewhere. Her father, in the truck where the plow had been tied as a weapon. He had gone that far in considering how he might kill the dragon for the invisible people who’d written the letters, she thought.

She watched him jump out of the truck, start running toward her, then he fell to one knee, his hand going to his chest. He looked up at Sarah with the same surprise as Jason, before he fell to the ground and didn’t move, his eyes dying just like Deputy Kelby’s.

“Daddy!” she screamed and started to rise.

The aura surged around her, the curtains of light flapping in whatever torrent of wind was driving them and wrapping her away.

She was no longer there.

“Damn,” Agent Woolf said. “Damn and damn and damn.”

She should have shot the girl first, but she had been obscured by the aura from the Spur, an aura that now seemed to have taken the girl completely.

Well, never mind. Malcolm had done his work. It was complete. This world and all of its human inhabitants would be highly inconvenienced, but that mattered little to Agent Woolf.