Burn(79)

“How?”

Malcolm swallowed and met the Other Malcolm’s eyes. “That’s for me to find the solution to. But here, Nelson may be in trouble. From his family. They’ll throw him out when they find out what he is.”

“So would my family. So would most people’s.”

Malcolm frowned. “Not where I come from. Parts of it anyway. The world changes. It keeps on changing. It’ll change here, too.”

“Those are just words.”

“Maybe, but Nelson is real. And he could love you. You could love him. But whatever happens, he deserves better than being thrown out into the world alone.”

“Then why don’t you go to him?”

“Because I have my own Nelson to save.”

“Your what?” Agent Dernovich said.

“Goddess,” Kazimir repeated. He paused, obviously reluctant. “It is forbidden to tell this part to humans. More than forbidden. A taboo so strong it is almost physically difficult to break it.”

He closed his eyes, took a breath, and said, “She created us. Before memory. She brought us into our world and probably many others. But not this one.” He looked at Agent Dernovich. “Not yet.”

“Oh,” Agent Dernovich said, his ease and smile disappearing for the first time. “Oh, dear.”

“It is an old story, the oldest,” Kazimir said. “Assumed by most of my kind to be fable, assumed by me for most of my very short life.”

“How old are you?” Sarah asked.

“Just under two hundred,” he said. “A mere babe. And rare for our world. A stripling like me comes along once a century, perhaps. But I was taught the story of she who created us all. Who burst through the walls between the universes and channelled the magic that brought dragons into our world. She saw a place where dragons would rule, because she is what all gods and goddesses are. Creator and Destroyer. She set out to annihilate humans, and very nearly succeeded.”

“There’s nothing I learned in history about this,” Sarah said. “Even in archaeology.”

“The archaeology of it is . . . yet to be fully discovered, let us say. There is probably awkwardness coming to the dragon/human relationship when you start finding things out, I imagine.”

“Not anymore,” Sarah said. “There’ll be war now. She’ll get what she wanted.”

Kazimir looked very troubled. “Yes. Destruction of man. Which in the willful blindness of a Goddess, she refused to see would be the end of dragons, too.”

“How?” Agent Dernovich asked.

“That, I will not tell you, but rest assured, all mass destruction is eventually mutual. We knew we had to stop her.”

“How did you convince her?”

Kazimir laughed. “Convince? Good grief, no. One does not convince a Goddess. A Goddess takes no advice. She does not change her mind unless she chooses to, and she has no interest in what her creation might think of her. No, there would be no convincing. She had to be defeated.”

“And she clearly wasn’t,” Agent Dernovich said.

“I beg your pardon, she clearly was,” Kazimir said. “Or you and I would not be having this conversation. She would have found your world considerably sooner than yesterday, and trust me when I say, it would be a very different place. You cannot kill a Goddess. If you think dragons are immortal—”

“You are?” Agent Dernovich asked, surprised.

“Then you can imagine how very much more immortal the dragon Goddess would be.”

“So what did you do?”

“Again, I personally did nothing. This was thousands of years before I was even born, and most dragons regard this story as—”

“Myth, yes, you’ve said,” Agent Dernovich urged. “I’m rushing you, Kazimir, because whatever was done once, can be done again. What did the dragons do? And can we repeat it?”

Kazimir looked wary. “As I told Sarah, what the dragons did—or what our legends tell us—was to trap her. In a human body. We took a spur from her so that she would remain forever incomplete, then we confined her to life as one of you.”

“How?” Agent Dernovich asked.

Kazimir gave a little shrug. “The problem with myths, Agent, is that they tend to be light on science. The only explanation that has survived is . . . magic.”

“Magic,” Agent Dernovich said, flatly.

“Yes.”

“Magic isn’t going to be helpful here,” Agent Dernovich said. “Our universe is conspicuously lacking in it.”

“Not anymore,” Darlene said. “We’ve got a great big dragon flying around now. I’d say that was magic.”

“Not a word of this can be real,” the Other Malcolm said. “This is some ugly, horrible joke.”

“It isn’t,” Malcolm said. “How could I look so much like you? Not similar, identical.”

“A twin, maybe. Something my mother—”

“Even if that were true,” Malcolm said, starting to unbutton his shirt, “are these a part of your world?”

He exposed his chest, the tattoos that covered every inch. The Other Malcolm’s eyes opened very wide. He stepped forward slowly, looking. “They’re dragons.”