Burn(51)

Malcolm looked back down at the Mitera Thea. She was in a bad way. Blood across her face, blood flowing from one arm, the other newly broken. But she was looking back up at him with eyes that signaled no defeat. He knew how dangerous she was.

He thought he knew what to do next, though. He knew she probably knew, too, and that she would do her very best to prevent it.

But it would stop all this. For however long, it would stop this.

Which is what Nelson wanted.

“Then I’ll stop it,” Malcolm said, and stepped to the Spur of the Goddess, taking it in his hand.

He disappeared along with it.

“No!” Agent Woolf screamed. She scrambled to her feet, cursing at the pain in her arm, but again trying to shunt it away.

“Malcolm?” Nelson asked, but there was no sign of him at all.

The aura itself was rapidly shrinking, too, like a tornado disappearing down a drain. There was no time to waste. No choice. She’d have to go through and take what consequences would come.

“Where did he go?” the boy demanded of her.

She took a step back to gain momentum, then ran at the ever-shrinking aura.

“What are you doing?” Nelson yelled.

She leapt.

She was gone.

There was a sudden quiet, one that for a moment made Nelson think he had gone deaf, so complete and sudden was it. The aura had vanished, but the spiral in the air was still dissipating. Nelson could see the fading splash of the explosion that had happened way up there, miles above the earth.

It was only the sound of sirens in the distance that stirred him. Surely the spiral in the air had been seen, surely someone had heard all the gunfire.

Police were on their way. Lots of them.

And Nelson was standing alone in a road, surrounded by dead bodies.





Part 2





Fourteen


SARAH’S WORLD HAD disappeared, but somehow also not. There was a moment of shimmer, as if she were underwater, and the world above stretched and ebbed until she broke the surface. But broke the surface where? For all she could tell, she was on a road that for most of its length looked just like the road to her farm. The turn, the small hillock beside it, the gravel, all the same.

But it was daylight, and the hillock was in slightly the wrong place.

There was the usual uniform gray cloud of the Pacific Northwest winter obscuring all horizons, where it had been completely clear just a split-second ago. If there was a Russian satellite flying overhead, no one here would ever see it. She looked back down the road.

“Daddy?” she said.

He was gone, too. She’d seen him put a hand to his chest, stumble to the ground. She’d seen his eyes go out.

Then he was gone.

So was Jason, no longer in her lap. The cars were gone as well. Her father’s truck, the sheriff’s car, the truck that had belonged to the boy with the claw. Who was also gone.

From the utter madness of what was happening, from a crowd of friends and strangers at night, from a bloodbath and a dragon and some sort of world-warping magic thing, she was—in an instant—alone on her road.

But also not her road.

She got to her feet. She could see the roof of her barn from here, a sight so familiar and comfortable it was all but invisible to her on her thousands of walks home to it. It was now taller than it should be, with a second-floor hayloft door looking out at the road. She also shouldn’t have been able to see her house from where she stood, but the rise that crops of onions had curved over for her entire life was now a dip of land instead, still filled with onions, but now leaving a clear view to the farmhouse.

Which was painted white, not the natural wood it had always been. The fields beyond, too, had none of the clearing that Kazimir had done. They were still thick forest, as were the fields next to them, which had been waiting for sugar beets to be planted until a moment ago. The clouds were so low, she couldn’t see Mount Rainier and had a panicked moment wondering if it was there behind the clouds at all.

“What is this?” she said, to herself, to no one, turning in a full circle. Was she just waking up? Had she sleepwalked out here and dreamed a different landscape that had felt so real the one she was seeing now was causing doubts?

But no. Jason had died in her arms. His blood was still all over the front of her work dungarees. Oh, no. Oh, nonono, Jason, her father—

“It is not as I expected,” she heard a voice say, the voice of a young man but oddly deep. She saw him walking side-on to her out of a ditch that also hadn’t been there a few moments before. He was looking around, seeming as befuddled as she was. “I thought it would be . . .” he turned to face her. “Smaller.”

He was about eighteen years old, with wavy blond hair and one impossibly blue eye, the other seemingly sewn shut, plus a cut on his chin that bled dark black blood.

He was also completely naked.

“Try not to scream, Sarah Dewhurst,” he said. “I am Kazimir.”

“You’re young,” was the first thing she said, after her legs had given out from under her. She hadn’t fainted, she didn’t think, but it felt like all the air had left her body, making it a weight she could no longer support.

It wasn’t what he’d said. It wasn’t the eye-stitching or the blood or that he knew her name. It was that she had believed him. She felt the truth of it hit her like a stone. Of course, he was Kazimir. That he looked human, spoke like one, had the shockingly exposed anatomy of one, didn’t seem to matter at all; she immediately knew it was true. It was this that had caused her to tumble. If Kazimir was different but still himself, then she really was elsewhere.