Burn

by Patrick Ness

  Still, she did know her stuff.

  “We’ve got another ten minutes at most,” he said, looking at his watch.

  “Human,” she said, pointing to a rusty stain on the tarmac.

  “How can you possibly tell—?”

  “There are more drops and a stride between them,” she interrupted, another thing she did. “A human stride.”

  Agent Dernovich looked at what she’d found. She was probably right, he had to admit, if only to himself.

  “One of the agents who was here?” he suggested. “We could have an injured man out there—”

  “Oh, no,” she said, rising, “they’re quite dead.” She pointed to a faint white ring at the side of the metal puddle. “Vaporized fat,” she said, as if discussing an order with the butcher. “Plus —” she reached down and picked up what looked like a coin from the tarmac “—remnants of a metal filling.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “I saw the same ring in the forest for the other one.”

  “Well, then, at the very least, there aren’t any FBI bodies to have to explain—”

  “But this,” she interrupted again, gesturing back to the blood trail, “came after, or the blast would have evaporated it.” She walked along the tarmac a few steps across the road. “As I thought.” Dernovich went over to her.

  More spots on the road, smaller, fainter, but there, if you knew where to look, disappearing off the edge of the road.

  “Someone escaped,” he said.

  “They only did if the dragon wanted them to.”

  “And why would they want that? If they so casually broke hundreds of years of canon law about not killing humans?”

  His irritation was not just about the murders—though they altered every single thing in what had seemed like a complete nothing of an investigation up until now—but the thoroughness of the killings. Faint rings of fat and nauseating metal fillings aside, these men, colleagues both, colleagues who had clearly jumped the gun on information they hadn’t seen fit to show anyone else so who knew exactly how they’d ended up here, had been obliterated, disintegrated. By creatures who had stayed out of human affairs for all of Agent Dernovich’s lifetime.

  Even as late as an hour ago, Dernovich had assumed this case—and his pairing with Woolf—had been some kind of punishment from Cutler, their new boss, stitching an agent fresh from success in Havana onto a case with few leads and even fewer possibilities for real trouble just to show that, as new boss, he could. Ninety-five percent of the bureau was currently scouring the country for Communist infiltrators, and here was Paul Dernovich, in Canada, chasing stupidly vague rumors that had been circling around what was a widely despised but, at least in Paul’s lifetime, completely harmless cult. “You’re from the area,” Cutler had said, which was only sort of true, “I need you there.” It felt like an insult, because it was an insult, to a man who came thisclose to getting the job instead of Cutler.

  But now, this. This absurd possibility that the whispers of danger were more than true, they were actually terrifying. If dragons were changing their behavior now, if they were breaking the highest law of human/dragon coexistence and the beasts of unfathomable power decided they no longer needed to coexist with the other beasts of unfathomable power, if that had suddenly changed perhaps on this very morning . . .

  Well, then, Agent Dernovich could only wonder if any of them would actually make it to the end of 1957. The dread was so strong he had, for the moment, forgotten their primary mission. Agent Woolf had not.

  “I think we’ve found him,” she said, a small twitch on her upper lip marking the happiest Agent Dernovich had ever seen her. “I think we’ve finally found him.” She blinked. “Or her.”

  Malcolm’s ear was becoming a problem. The small first-aid parcel in his bag had a single thin bandage that failed within an hour of him tucking it under what remained of his hat.

  He would not die of the wound, but it was annoying. He washed his hands in the river for the fourth time in an hour, watching his coppery blood flake away into the current. All this stopping. He wasn’t getting far enough from the incident with the car. People would be concerned. They would have questions. Insistent ones.

  They would be looking.

  So, the dilemma was thus: He was not moving fast enough, but to move fast enough, he would have to find a ride—he was only supposed to do this in extreme circumstances, which, he felt, this would obviously count—but in a car, not many people would forget someone bleeding from a hole where part of his left ear once was.

  He knelt again to pray. “Help me, Mitera Thea,” he whispered into clenched hands still cold from the icy bite of the river. “I beg your indulgence a second time. What should your servant do?”

  The only answer was the ever-trickling sound of the river.

  “So be it,” he said, standing. “Thank you.”

  He would keep walking. He would ignore his ear. It would stop bleeding or it wouldn’t. Whatever else happened, he had to trust he would be taken care of.

  And so he was, for the rest of the day, at least. The river path wasn’t arduous, sometimes veering back to the road he’d left, leading him under occasional bridges. As the sun crossed low in the winter sky, he grew hungry and his mind returned to the biscuit he had started . . . was it only this morning? It was. A biscuit that had marked the deaths of two men. Men who had wanted him dead.

  “You will be hunted,” the Mitera Thea had told him. “I will help you if I can, but you must not be caught. At any price.”

  At any price, he thought, remembering again the melted car. Remembering the way the first man had just exploded. He breathed deep and tried not to think of it. The Mitera Thea knew best. He prayed to her, after all, even though she wasn’t a dragon or any kind of god. She had always looked out for him, and that was enough. She had chosen him for this mission, trained him, and though he might go a year without seeing her as she went out into the world to spread the Believer message, she was still the closest thing he’d ever had to a mother.

  “Thank you,” he prayed again to her, almost without knowing he’d spoken the words. He stopped under a bridge, digging out the biscuit to finish it. As he swallowed the last of it, waiting for a truck to pass, he stood—

  And woke a moment later, his face in the mud where it had been the only thing that stopped his faint. Now his nose was bleeding, too. He sat up, slowly, still woozy. He took off his ragged hat and put a hand to the sticky mess of his ear. How could it be bleeding this much? Enough to make him light-headed?

  He washed his face in the river, gasping at the coldness of the water, splashing it on his ear. Fresh blood spouted from it.

  “This is ridiculous,” he whispered. “It’s an ear—”

  Then he remembered. The enforcers of law in Canada and the United States sometimes coated their bullets in anticoagulant. Not for when they shot men. For when they shot dragons. Dragonskin was unbelievably hardy, and if it didn’t deflect the shot altogether, the wound would close so quickly you could almost see it happening. The anticoagulant was a development from the last ten years of the West’s Cold War with the Soviet Union, even though neither of them were actually fighting dragons. Who had thought ostensible peacetime would be even more beneficial to weapons research than actual war?

  It did mean one thing: The men today had been prepared to shoot someone other than just him, and now he was going to bleed to death from an ear wound on the first day of his mission. There was nothing for it. He would need a proper bandage, one that would at least hold the wound shut until the anticoagulant was out of his system.

  He would have to find a store.

  “But it would be helpful,” Agent Woolf said, as they drove. “There was a memo on international, interdepartmental cooperation—”

  “You actually read the memos?” Agent Dernovich asked.

  “You don’t?”

  He glanced over to her. Her look of disgust was, apparently, quite real. He sighed to himself again.
“Identifying ourselves and our mission to RCMP Security Services only after two of our agents are killed on Canadian soil might not go down well.” He watched another car in the oncoming lane. A large Oldsmobile, two men in the front seat, each wearing the same hat Dernovich currently wore. “Speak of the Canadian devil,” he murmured, “and he drives right by.”

  Agent Woolf turned to watch them as they drove past.

  “Draw a little more attention to yourself, why don’t you?” he snapped.

  “If you made them as agents,” she said, unbothered, “they surely made us.”

  He glanced in the rearview mirror. They didn’t seem to be turning around. But Agent Woolf was right. Again. Dammit. He sighed once more.

  “Can you please stop that?” she asked. “Once one notices you doing it, one can’t un-notice it, no matter how hard one might try.”

  Agent Dernovich sighed again, louder this time. “You hungry? I missed breakfast.”

  “I had a hard-boiled egg at the hotel.”

  “I’m going to take that as a yes.” Crossing a bridge, he saw a diner on the left, across the street from a small drugstore. It was as good as any. Besides, if the RCMP did decide to turn back and ask them a few questions, it was better to look like he and Woolf had been expecting them all along.

  A bell jingled as Malcolm opened the door of what seemed to be an appropriate business near the bridge. Betty’s Drugstore, the sign read. Please guide my words, he prayed, in his head. And please prevent me from having to kill Betty.

  “Help you?” said a woman’s voice, before the jingling even stopped. He couldn’t see her behind the shelves.

  “Bandages?” he called back.

  “Well, now, let’s see what we’ve got . . .” He heard footsteps coming up the aisle. He panicked slightly, having to fight off the urge to run back out the door—

  But the woman who appeared around a shelf of suppositories was small, roly-poly, with glasses shaped like cat’s eyes. “Oh!” she said, looking right at his ear. “What on earth happened?”

  Malcolm put his hand over it protectively. He had no idea what to answer. I was shot probably wasn’t going to lead to an easy conversation.

  He saw her eyes move from his ear to his wrist. His sleeve had fallen a little, exposing the skin there. Exposing the ink. The woman’s face grew suddenly serious. Malcolm tensed, rapidly going through his options. He could physically overpower her, he thought, but would it have to end with—

  “Was it those bullies again?” she asked. “At the high school?”

  Malcolm barely knew what this meant. “Yes?” he ventured.

  She tutted, took his arm, and led him to a shelf full of bandages. “I thought all that had stopped after that poor kid from Valemount drowned. I mean, I know you people aren’t exactly popular, but violence tells you nothing about the victim and a whole lot about the victimizer, don’t you think?” She took a box off the shelf, opened it, and lifted a ball of cotton up toward his ear.

  “I can do it,” he said.

  “You got eyes on the side of your head?” She swabbed away the blood, then took out a large bandage, peeled back a sticky part, and stuck it firmly over the wound and down the back of his ear. “That’s a lot of bleeding,” she said, as she worked. “I’m Betty, by the way.”

  “Malcolm,” Malcolm said, surprising himself. “You smell like flowers.”

  “It’s my perfume,” she said, a little embarrassed. “It’s called Primitif.” She walked toward the back of the store, clearly expecting Malcolm to follow. He did. “A bit fancy for rural British Columbia, but a woman’s got to have her treats, don’t you think?”

  She went to the register at the back counter, making it ring with a few taps. “Thirty-five cents for the box, young man,” she said, and smiled at him.

  He thought to the money he’d been given. There was something close to five thousand dollars each in Canadian and American in his bag.

  “I have thirty-five cents,” he said.

  “They do make a good corned beef hash up here,” Agent Dernovich said, tucking into his.

  “For lunch, though?” Agent Woolf replied, picking with some distaste through an admittedly dry-looking chicken supreme.

  “I said I didn’t have breakfast.” He took another bite. “Besides, when in Canada . . .”

  “What?”

  “What?”

  “When in Canada what?”

  He blinked at her. “Do as the Canadians do.”

  She blinked back. “And they eat corned beef hash for lunch, do they?”

  “It’s on the menu, Agent Woolf.”

  “So are pancakes. I don’t think I’d have those for lunch.”

  “Just—”

  He stopped because his eye was caught by a young man coming out the door of—he read the sign—Betty’s Drugstore. The young man’s clothes were poor, or perhaps just very old-fashioned, or perhaps this part of Canada still had school uniforms designed with the word “prairie” in mind. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary, though nothing particularly in the ordinary either. If Agent Woolf had asked him straight out why this one boy out of everyone they’d seen on this trip had caught his attention, he wouldn’t exactly have been able to spell it out but—

  “Those are the public clothes of a Believer,” Agent Woolf said.

  Yes, Agent Dernovich thought, that was it.

  Woolf watched the boy, too, as he trudged down the street, bag on his shoulder, hand going once, twice, three times to the side of his head facing away from the agents.

  Agent Dernovich frowned. “Believers. I’ve never seen so many otherwise rational people take such complete leave of their senses. Lost idiots.”

  “I used to be one,” Agent Woolf said, calmly drinking her coffee, seeming to take no offense whatsoever.

  Dernovich damn near sputtered. “You what?”

  She pulled up her sleeve about two inches. Sure enough, a dense set of tattoos started there that Agent Dernovich knew would cover all the skin she wouldn’t be expected to show the world. That it reached her wrists showed how deep her commitment had gone, at least at one point in a previous life Dernovich was now angry with himself for having had insufficient curiosity about.

  Believers. A small cult that had sprung up two hundred years ago in BC and Alberta to worship dragons. It was insular and so surprisingly antihuman—despite being exclusively human in membership—it had never, unlike many North American sects, made the transition into a wider religion. They worshipped in churches they called Cells, observed a disgusting policy of free love and communal family-rearing, and were always led by someone called the Mitera Thea, “Mother Goddess” in Greek—a language neither of dragons nor western Canada—who was a kind of Pope to them, an infallible representative of a living deity. They even prayed to her, rather than any dragon god or goddess because they considered themselves unworthy of direct contact. She controlled every aspect of their daily lives. When she died, the fools didn’t free themselves, they just elected another.

  They had been terrorists for a while, though mostly toward the end of the last century, burning down buildings deemed to be owned by the enemies of dragons, tearing down the border fences of the Canadian Wastes (even though the dragons themselves seemed to prefer the Wastes and obviously cared not for fences), and once—this was the bit that had sent the FBI to Canada, when the verb had resurfaced in their intel—assassinating the U.S. Ambassador to Dragons for being insufficiently respectful in the 1890s. But that was decades ago, before Dernovich was born, before the dragons had withdrawn from communications even. Believers were a historical footnote that, by virtue of decades of quiet, had somehow persisted into an irrelevance to most people.

  The great joke of it all was that—even when Believers were committing crimes on their behalf—the dragons seemed to ignore them as much as they ignored everyone else these days, which was to say, almost completely. What kind of person would worship a god who clearly lived in the world, but who just as
clearly didn’t care whether you lived or died?

  They’d been watched idly by governments, usually by very bored agents nearing retirement, but filed away as a dead case. Until those now-somewhat-less-bored agents started reporting strange plans being made, hints of a prophecy the Believers thought was real, possibly even aided by a dragon or two. Maybe. The details were maddeningly thin and often contradictory. Through an improbably lucky car search at the U.S. border, they’d gotten copies of the runes that supposedly told this prophecy, but Agent Woolf went over them every damn day and could barely make sense of them either. Dragon runes were a spectacularly inexact language that changed with each breed, and so obscure they could mean anything or nothing. Except this time, the Believers clearly saw something that had made them act. The dragons weren’t talking, and worse, by virtue that most of the core Believers actually lived in the Wastes, they were technically under the purview of the dragons. You couldn’t just barge in and start arresting people to get more information, as much as you wanted to.

  Dernovich had considered it all a wild goose chase, even with the word “assassin” showing up now and then. Until Chase and Godwin—who were cold-interviewing members of the non-Waste Cells willing to talk to them (a perishingly small number)—had clearly found something they acted upon without telling the bureau. Dernovich thought they were probably hoping to get in good with the new boss by making an arrest, but had instead turned up melted with their car this morning. Now he had to face the extraordinarily unpleasant possibility that the Believers not only did have a serious plan but seemingly the wherewithal to commence it with gusto. It was enough to make him lose his appetite.

  “You’re Canadian, then?” he asked Agent Woolf, setting down his fork.

  “Montana,” she said. “There are some isolated chapters in the wooded north of our own country, Agent, not just here.”