Burn(87)

They were even closer to hatching than she expected. Her instinct had told her days, but now she was thinking one day, maybe less. She could feel herself running hot with magic. Of course it would translate to her offspring.

Very well. She had destroyed one city, all on her own. With her brood, she would do the same again—she could smell Vancouver farther north and Portland to the south—and then she would move on to somewhere truly major. Los Angeles, maybe, so spread out she would need her children.

She would do it until they surrendered. Then she would take their surrender and throw it in their faces as she destroyed New York, London, Paris, Moscow, destroyed so thoroughly they would lose their names, their history, anyone who ever remembered them.

Their world had already fallen. They just didn’t know it yet.

There was one last thing to get. She’d felt it as she destroyed Seattle. That on top of all her strength—

There was yet more.

When she was complete.

She was incomplete. Missing a claw, one that, in the recurring way dragon magic worked, had somehow followed her into this world.

For her to conquer, for her brood to thrive, for all the broods after that to proliferate, she instinctively knew she would have to be whole, knew it with the same clarity she knew she was a Goddess.

She had been foolish to fly straight to safety when she’d entered this world, but she had been disoriented, her body changing with an excruciating violence, her mind suddenly teeming with everything she had been forced to forget. A crime had been committed upon her, and it was no wonder there was a process to go through to uncreate it.

She knew where it was, though. Could smell it even from this distance. It was nearly inert here, but once it was part of her again, dragon magic would start flowing into this world properly.

She would rest. She would, if they kept up at this rate, maybe even see her babies born. Perhaps she would take them all down to reclaim what was hers. Yes, maybe that was actually the next step. They had seen what one dragon could do. They would cower before her and her children.

She hoped this world slept well tonight. It was the last good night they would ever have.

She woke the next morning with a start. At first, she was sure the eggs were hatching, but there they all sat, incipient but not quite there just yet.

There was a new scent in the air.

She took to her wings and flew.





Twenty-Seven


KAZIMIR PULLED THE Spur of the Goddess across his hand. A thickness of black blood filled his palm. The Spur started to glow, still only a little but more than before. Kazimir said the Goddess was awakening to herself, bringing more dragon magic into the world every moment. It was the only plan they had. If she hadn’t come to them by dawn, they would try to give her an invitation she couldn’t resist.

“It’s weird your blood didn’t change,” Sarah said to him now.

“Yes,” he said. “I have enough magic to save that much of myself, but it would be a problem in this world if I ailed, would it not? A doctor here might have strong opinions.” He smiled at her. “Then again, if this does not work, ailing will be the least of my worries.”

Sarah looked across the fields of her farm and the Inagawas’s. The sun was just coming up, the clouds thinning enough for them to actually see it behind Mount Rainier, which had also put in an appearance. But she wasn’t looking at the mountain.

She was looking at the army, not two hundred yards away.

The tanks had started arriving at midnight, on the back of flatbed trucks. Troop trucks followed, and in the space of a few predawn hours, several thousand soldiers were bivouacked around her home.

They all held weapons. Rifles and pistols, but also bazookas and Gatling guns and flamethrowers (“Ridiculous,” Kazimir had said), all to back up the tanks. Agent Dernovich had said missile-carrying planes would be on their way, too.

“What kind of missiles?” Gareth Dewhurst had asked.

Agent Dernovich had not answered.

“They will bomb us with nuclear weapons if this does not work, you know,” Kazimir said, holding the still-glowing Spur up to the breeze.

“At least they evacuated the town,” Sarah said.

“It was for show. If this plan fails, they will bomb this entire county into oblivion, just to be sure.”

She gave him a look. “How do you know that?”

“Do you honestly think the agent would keep his daughter at his side if he thought there was safety elsewhere?”

“Is the dragon coming, Daddy?” Grace asked.

Her father lowered his binoculars. “Not yet, sweetie.”

“But she will.”

“I think she will, yes.”

They were behind the front line, well back at the Dewhurst farm, watching out from the hayloft doors on the second floor of the barn. Darlene and Gareth were there, too, and Hisao Inagawa, though not Jason, as Hisao had forced his son to evacuate with the others, an evacuation that, yes, Agent Dernovich knew was just for show. General Kraft had made his orders quite clear if the plan of the strange-eyed dragon boy and the girl from another world failed. Who knew? Maybe the tanks and the troops would do the job on their own.

They probably wouldn’t.

He stroked his daughter’s hair. The bombs they would drop weren’t the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as terrible as they were. In the nearly twelve years since then, nuclear weapons had grown exponentially more powerful. What they dropped on this county would evaporate everything within twenty miles, burn everything to death sixty miles beyond that, and poison everyone with a fast-killing cancer in at least a two-hundred-mile radius. And still they didn’t know for sure if it was enough to kill the dragon.