Burn(57)

They would change her.

“When it turned out,” she said now, aloud, reveling in the depth of her voice, its timbre, its power. “When it turned out,” she said again, even louder, “all I needed to do was cross to a world that would recognize me for what I was all along.”

She laughed. And laughed again. And melted more rocks.

Then the laughing faltered.

The prophecy had told of a girl who would save the world, that girl, the one she’d sent Malcolm after.

Well, that was clearly wrong, yes? It sure seemed so, now that the other world would almost certainly be at war before the week was out. Perhaps the prophecy meant that the girl would go back and save it. Yes, that must be it. Who even cared if she did? This world had turned Agent Woolf into a dragon.

But then . . .

What if the prophecy hadn’t meant her old world at all?

What if the prophecy had meant this world? The girl would save this one.

Save it from her.

But how? She was a puny girl, and this dragon, this one right here, on this mountaintop, she was the mightiest of the mighty. The mightiest thing—if her nose was right—on this whole planet.

What an unexpected bonus indeed. And what a nasty surprise for nasty little girls.

She had seen Malcolm as she flew past, and he would be in for a surprise, as well. He would accept her as his proper Mother Goddess now, or he could easily be disposed of. There had been a third with them, too. A boy who . . .

She sniffed. She sniffed again, deeper. She went right to the rim of the crater and sniffed again.

No.

No, it couldn’t be.

The passage through had turned her from human to dragon . . .

And him from dragon to human.

Oh, how delicious. How perfectly, ridiculously delicious. What a wonderful place this world must be, to recognize your true nature so easily, so beautifully.

Well, wait until her foreleg healed. Wait until she was full strength.

Then they would see. They would all see.

They might ask, what could one dragon do to a world?

But that was the great secret, one revealed to her now, this instant, as sure as she’d known how to breathe fire.

She wouldn’t be one dragon for long.

She rubbed her stomach. In her new dragon state, she could feel them in there. A litter. A proper dragon litter.

Which was impossible. And highly alarming. Agent Woolf had been very much a virgin. She hated humans far too much to touch any one of them in that way.

So, how then?

Destiny, was all she could think. This world had given her every tool to dominate it with this shape, so why not also the means to proliferate? How they must beg for something to worship here.

Very well, then, she would just have to start the new age for them, wouldn’t she?

The thumping of her dragon heart told her, made her know, that she could.

The dragon that had been Agent Woolf settled in to make her plans.





Seventeen


SARAH COULDN’T SETTLE on whether to run or walk, so she ended up doing both. She would hurry along the road to the farm, desperate to see her mother, then it would all become too much, and she would slow down. Then she’d think again how her mother—her mother—was actually within reach and off she’d go.

She was having a difficult day, it had to be said.

She came around the last bend of the drive and looked at the white-painted house and the too-tall barn. Only the bicycle, dropped hastily on the front lawn, its wheel still spinning, showed any clue that someone lived here. She couldn’t see her father’s truck. Then she remembered what her mother had said about being “a woman alone.” Was he dead here, too? Was that the exchange she was going to have to make?

She heard oinking. She looked around the side of the house to the sty, in the same place as in her own world. There they were, her three perfect sows. They recognized her, too, as she approached, all three standing their forelegs on the low fence. She put her hands out and they fought to nuzzle them.

Her pigs. Her three not little but quite large pigs.

“Hello, ladies,” she said, with a gasping sob. There had been so much going on, she hadn’t known how much the loss of them hurt until suddenly here they were, grunting and nuzzling and acting like it was she who had risen from the dead and not them.

When it seemed she had. In this world, where her mother hadn’t fallen to cancer, something else had come along, some reckoning that clearly stretched across universes to make sure the Dewhurst family was brought low, and had taken this world’s Sarah and seemingly her father with it.

“How did I die here?” she whispered to the pigs. Bess, the greediest, was already over to the trough, nudging it the way she did when Sarah was late with feed. The pigs didn’t care. She was here, they were happy to see her, and looking to get a free meal out of it.

“You’re not her,” she heard. She turned.

“I don’t think I am,” Sarah said to her mother. Mamie and Eleanor still reached for her with their snouts. She couldn’t help but scratch them. “Or if I am, I’m not all the way.”

Her mother looked suspicious, a look Sarah didn’t like seeing. Darlene Dewhurst had been slighted plenty by the town, by the people in it, both overtly and covertly, things Sarah knew all too well herself. Darlene’s face had shown anger, and hurt, and fortitude, and humor, and acceptance, and fear, and strength.