Burn(93)

Sarah saw her parents—well, she saw Darlene and Gareth Dewhurst standing together, really together. They’d not left each other’s side. Darlene had offered her her old room back if she wanted it.

“I’ve got nothing to go back to,” she told Kazimir.

He squeezed her shoulders. “It will be nice to have a friend here.”

“Does that mean you’ll never be a dragon again?”

“I will always be a dragon, Sarah Dewhurst, no matter how I look.” He turned to the corpse of the Goddess, massive still, terrifying still, a hill all on its own on this little farm, tucked away in this little corner of the state. “Besides, you saw it when she died. We all saw it.”

“That pulse?”

“That pulse. A Goddess can never truly be killed. Her magic is all over the world now. Dragon magic.”

“Which means?”

He looked concerned. “It means this world may have some adjusting to do.”

Sheriff Kelby got to his feet in his office. He hadn’t evacuated with everyone else and was still fuming that he hadn’t been allowed to take part in the army maneuvers against the monster. In his own town! He was brooding over ways to make that agent pay for the slight when a kind of pulse had come through the wall, throwing him off his feet, banging his head against his desk, and knocking him out cold.

He was awake now. He assumed at first it had been the shockwave from another bomb, closer this time, but if that were true, how could he still be breathing?

He shifted his arm, which still hurt in his cast.

He felt weird. He felt . . .

Strong.

“Better not be radiation,” he said, putting his free hand to the back of his head, feeling the wound there from the desk, still wet.

He drew back his hand to look at the blood.

His eyes widened when he saw it was black.

“But I feel strong,” Kazimir said. “Stronger than I have felt since I got here. The magic rises. Who knows where it will stop? Perhaps I will be able to change shapes at will.”

“That’s a terrifying thought.”

“An exciting one.” He turned and smirked as he backed away toward the approaching general. “Especially if you are the ambassador.”

While Kazimir walked toward the general’s temporary tent—Agent Dernovich and daughter by his side—Sarah found Jason with Malcolm, looking at the wreckage of the truck.

“How’s your dad taking it?” she asked him.

“Pretty well,” Jason said, “what with me being alive and the dragon being dead and all.” He smiled in that shy way she’d known so well from the Jason in her world. “Still think he’s kinda mad, though. The plow was the most valuable thing we owned and it melted in the belly of a dragon.”

“He’ll get over it,” she said. “Everyone likes a hero for a son.”

Jason nodded toward Malcolm. “He’s the hero. His idea. He’s the one who insisted we drive through that warzone with explosions all over the place. We could have died.”

She saw that his hands were shaking a little. She reached over and took one. He let her hold it.

“But you didn’t,” she said.

He smiled that shy smile again. Malcolm approached them. “The general’s taken Kazimir into his tent,” he said to Sarah. “I think now’s the time.”

“Are you sure?” she asked him.

“Absolutely,” he said.

Kazimir barely engaged with the general’s questions, listening and answering with only part of his mind. He talked about the Goddess, how she had created dragons, how they had all come to be in his world, but sorry, the Spur of the Goddess had been destroyed in the battle so there would be no more going back and forth. This was a lie, but not one that required his full attention.

With the rest of his brain, he considered the future, now that there was one. The Goddess would find a way to return, if not completely as herself, then as the vast wave of magic he still felt rippling through this world. There might even be dragons born today, and not from her brood. If not now, then probably soon, and it was another reason for him to stay that he had not told Sarah, nor quite yet the general, who would be heavily discomfited.

Because that was the great secret. The greatest of them all. The Goddess hatched dragons, of course, as the Creator across worlds, but that was only the smallest part of the dragon population, a dozen here, a dozen there, over millennia. It was not, however, where most dragons had come from, still came from.

Most dragons started as human.

And so did the Goddess herself.

She’d been the first to find an accidental hole in the world, one that she reached into with a hand and pulled out of with the Spur. She was a woman so impressive, so powerful, this untamed magic had not killed her. It had changed her instead. She became the Goddess in an explosion that tore the skins from certain men and women across many worlds, those too fiery, too prickly with yearning, too much—good and bad—for the normal world. A whole society was born, one that, in its arrogance, immediately set about erasing all knowledge of its origins. The Goddess even made herself forget she was human become myth.

Because this was the other secret. There was no dragon magic. There was only human magic. All they wished for, all they yearned for, all their unfulfilled reach that shone out of them like the sun. It burned from them every day, boiling just out of sight between worlds. The simple fact was, if there were not humans around to create it, the unreality of dragons would cease to be.