“Tell me something useful,” Agent Dernovich said, “or don’t tell me anything at all.”
The FBI were allowed in Canada—the Cold War demanded cooperation, and Americans were always happy to take a mile when Canadians offered an inch—but Agents Woolf and Dernovich almost certainly weren’t allowed here. Their mole on the local police force could only promise to keep the site secret for an hour, maybe two, before their Canadian counterparts—the Special Branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—showed up.
Canada had an international reputation for politeness. The RCMP Special Branch did not.
Then Agent Woolf did say something that made this stolen hour worth all the future trouble it might cause. “This isn’t dragon blood.”
She was down the road from the wreckage—if “wreckage” was even the right word for such complete obliteration—kneeling directly onto the cold tarmac. The knees of Agent Woolf’s cheap, Bureau-issued stockings were always full of runs and tears because she always raised her bureau-issued skirt above them to kneel, which, to Dernovich, made absolutely no sense—the fabric of the skirt could probably stop your lazier bullets—but which he’d given up trying to explain as anything other than the typical behavior of Agent Veronica Woolf.
That name, first of all. Veronica Woolf sounded like a femme fatale in a detective movie. Or the girl from college you could never introduce to your mother. It didn’t even sound real, much less accurate for the dowdy, distracted, frequently-with-mustard-stuck-in-her-hair agent he’d been partnered with for the last eight months.
Female agents weren’t common, but they weren’t such unique ducks either. Paul Dernovich had even worked with one who’d done a sterling job gathering intelligence in Cuba. But Woolf was one of the bureau’s dragon specialists, who were already weirdos to begin with. They almost never went out into the field, and Dernovich thought Woolf was a pretty good example why.
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.