Burn(53)

“It was a lie,” he said, looking up at them. “It was all a lie.”

“So it seems,” Kazimir said, only the slightest surprise arching his eyebrows.

The boy—Malcolm, Sarah remembered now—held the claw in his hand, but there was no aura around it. It just looked like a claw. Nothing more.

“Everything she said,” Malcolm continued. “Everything I was taught.”

“Not everything,” Kazimir said, approaching him. “There would have been some truth or it would not have been believable.”

He held out his hand. Malcolm lifted the claw, questioningly, not to give it to Kazimir, but almost as if wondering what it was. “I felt its power before,” he said. “Even when it was buried deep in my bag, I could feel it.” He looked at Kazimir. “I don’t feel it now.”

Kazimir reached for it. Malcolm pulled it back, but it was half-hearted. After the smallest of hesitations, he handed it over, a question on his face. Kazimir took the claw and—there was no other word for it—growled. He spun it in his hand, feeling with it, stabbing at the air. He then touched it to the drying blood on his chin. There was a brief shimmer of the aura around the claw, but it was gone in an instant. “It is the same . . .”

“But it’s also not the same,” Malcolm said. “You feel it, too. Or is that because you’re human now, Great One?”

“And how do you know so surely who I am?” Kazimir growled again. “Don’t let this shape fool you. I am still dragon.”

“Can you breathe fire?” Sarah asked. “Can you fly?”

Kazimir just spun the claw again.

“Take us back,” Sarah said, feeling the panic all over, the image of her dad falling, the craziness of the world-that-just-was. “You’ve got the claw thing, take us back.”

“Again, Sarah Dewhurst, that is not a world to be going back to.”

“And again, I don’t care what you think. Take me back. Now.”

Kazimir flipped the claw in his hand one more time. “I cannot.” He tossed the claw casually back to Malcolm. “It seems here, for me and for all of us, it is now just a dragon claw.”

“What are you saying?” Sarah asked.

“I am saying,” Kazimir said, frowning finally, “that it has always worked because of the magic of dragons. Our blood. Blood stronger than what flows through me in my current shape.”

“Well, we’ll just find a real dragon then,” Sarah snapped.

There was a tearing sound in front of them, horrible to hear. None of them were sure what they were seeing at first. The woman—who Sarah knew as the one who’d shot her father, who Malcolm knew as Mitera Thea—was somehow running straight at them as the aura opened again. Her arm seemed broken, her other hand bleeding terribly, but she was running, swallowing her pain, and now jumping—

And while a woman jumped into the aura—

A red dragon the size of a battleship flew out.

They threw themselves to the ground, the great belly of the dragon passing over them by mere inches, and not even that in the case of Kazimir, who was knocked back into the ditch where Sarah had first seen him.

She watched the dragon pass with awe and horror. She had seen red farm dragons, bigger than Kazimir, certainly, but nothing as big as this. This was an eagle to Kazimir’s hummingbird. A creature large enough to destroy whole towns, whole cities, should it choose. It was favoring its foreleg—where the woman had had a broken arm—and its flight was uneven, but it was still powerful enough for the downdraft to press Sarah into the ground. The dragon rose, heading east, toward the forest and clouds and the mountain range that Sarah assumed still existed beyond.

“She didn’t kill us,” Malcolm said, getting up.

“Yes,” Kazimir called back, dragging himself out of the ditch. “Why not?”

“She was injured,” Malcolm said. “Maybe—”

“What on earth was that?”

A voice, behind them. They whirled around. The aura where the dragon had flown was gone. It was now just a road again. A woman with a bicycle she had clearly just been riding was staring at them, mouth open.

“And who are you?” the woman demanded, her frightened eyes alighting first on Malcolm, then on the approaching and still naked Kazimir, before settling on Sarah.

If the sight of a plane-sized dragon wasn’t enough to make her drop her bicycle, the sight of Sarah was. The woman put a hand over her mouth, her eyes widening. Then a second hand, as if to stop what she was seeing. “This is a trick,” the woman said, her voice taut behind her hands. “This is all some sort of filthy, dirty trick.”

Sarah felt the world swooning around her again, like it had when she recognized Kazimir, but this time she actually fainted, in the way that people so rarely do.

Because the woman looking back at her as she fell to the ground was her mother.





Fifteen


“I DON’T KNOW who you people are,” a distant voice said, “or what trick you’re trying to play, but that is not my daughter.”

“In an important way,” said another voice, one she thought she recognized, “you are correct.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? And why aren’t you wearing any clothes?”