Burn(92)

She flapped her great wings to slow herself, landing in a muddy part of the drive.

“You,” she said.

The man stared back at her, eyes wide.

“Dernovich,” she said. The mortars were still firing, loud and heavy, but the barn seemed just slightly out of range. That would change soon, of course, they would be on their way, as would the planes.

“You know me?” the man shouted, astonished but still not fleeing. “How do you know me?”

She didn’t answer. As Veronica Woolf, she had regretted shooting Agent Dernovich, even though in her mind it had been required. He had been an oaf and an overbearing partner, but he had treated her expertise seriously, which was more than most men at the bureau did. And he was dedicated to his job, dedicated—if he’d only known—to stopping her. So she had killed him.

But here he stood.

The feeling was the same as when she had seen the woman. The one who fell. The one she caught. The one she freed. Recognition. A pause. Could she burn this man? She had shot him once before.

But he had no children in the other world. Had regretted it bitterly. And here he obviously had a daughter, they smelled so similar. Could she so consciously kill his little— His little girl.

No.

No.

A girl with no special powers, a girl simply in the right place at the right time, a girl who would be responsible for dooming her— She had paused too long.

As she took in her breath to destroy them, Jason Inagawa, unheard under the artillery, drove a truck directly into her belly, his family’s steel plow attached to the hood.

She cried out. Instead of a blast of pure fire, a rush of acid spilled from her mouth. She fell forward, over the truck as she felt something break inside her, something terrible, something final.

“No,” she said, her great voice gurgling as she collapsed, unable to even flash her claws at the two boys running out from either side. Her head hit the ground. She was unable to raise it as the great engine of fire inside her burst its banks, ravaging her organs, burning them, melting them.

She looked up to the last face she expected to see. The last face she ever would see. “My son,” she said, in agony, in shock. “You killed me, my son.”

“Goodbye, Mitera Thea,” was all Malcolm said.

A pulse of magic flew out of her in a great circle, unleashed from her body, all that had ever bound her together and allowed her to live, to be, to destroy, exploded from her. It blew out the windows of the farmhouse and knocked Malcolm and Jason back as it shot into the great world beyond.

The dragon who had been Agent Veronica Woolf was dead.





Twenty-Eight


“ONE BLOW?” AGENT Dernovich said, as they stood over her corpse later, after he had called off the nukes, after emergency services were flown in to tend the wounded, after Malcolm had made an effort to explain who he was. “All that, and it only took one blow to kill her?”

“You have to know exactly where.” Malcolm glanced up to Agent Dernovich, who was surprised to see tears in his eyes. “It’s a rare chance, almost a folk legend. And exceptionally difficult to pull off.”

“No kidding,” Agent Dernovich said. He was still holding Grace. She hadn’t let him put her down, even when he was making his phone calls, and to be fair, he hadn’t put up much of a fight.

Malcolm kept watching her.

So did Kazimir and Sarah. “It wasn’t me, after all,” Sarah said. “I wasn’t the girl.”

“Without you,” Kazimir said, “I would have never got the Goddess’s blood. Which would have never put her in the right place to see the other girl. Not that I had any idea what was happening at the time, to be honest, but there it is. Prophecy.” He shrugged, back in the clothes of Gareth Dewhurst, another bandanna tied around his lost eye. “You were crucial.”

“My father died in the other world for my crucialness,” she said. “And Jason.”

“But billions here were saved.” He gently put an arm around her. “It feels like a terrible exchange. And it is. But she is defeated, which she would not be if you were not you.”

“Me, the girl who wasn’t special.”

He sighed. “You saved a world. I would take your brand of non-special any day.”

There was a crowd outside the farmhouse. Soldiers guarding what was now a kind of crime scene around the corpse of the dragon. General Kraft wanted Kazimir and Sarah for questioning, but Agent Dernovich had given them his sworn promise that they would be free to go after that, as much as General Kraft wanted to learn more about the dragon hiding under Kazimir’s skin.

“I told the general you wouldn’t take kindly to that,” Agent Dernovich had said to them. “So we’re just going to call you an ambassador, which has a special status.”

“That convinced him, did it?” Kazimir had said in return.

“I hate to say it,” the agent said, “but if you stay here, you’re going to need an ally. I’ll be that ally, if you allow me. I saw what you did here. I won’t forget it.”

“So are you?” Sarah asked Kazimir now.

“Am I what?”

“Staying here? In this world?”

“Give up my dragon form?” He looked at the bandage on his hand, where the blood stained black. “Or face another world war in the one we came from and perhaps give up any form forever?” He looked at her. “Not my favorite choice. What about you?”