First to Burn (21 page)

One question—how long he’d owned this secret room—wouldn’t tell her what she needed to understand, but she couldn’t move on without knowing.

When he met her eyes, a single raised eyebrow defied her. “Six hundred years.”

Her heart seized with the same chest-tightening confusion she’d felt struggling in the mountains to reach Nazdana’s village. She couldn’t have heard him correctly.

“I’m immortal.”

Chapter Seventeen

Theresa’s dark eyes were the sole color on her chalky face.

“At least I’m not a vampire.” Wulf tried to smile. “I wouldn’t know as many great restaurants.” His joke bombed.

“What do you mean by...immortal?” Her voice revealed nothing of her thoughts.

“I can’t die. I can’t be killed.” Sharing his secret directly was a step he’d never risked even with Deavers. “You’ve seen my injuries heal. They always do. And I don’t age.”

She studied him, her face as immobile as a Byzantine mosaic.

Seconds lengthened into a minute while he wondered for the ten-thousandth time what went on in a woman’s mind. Although she relied on science, maybe she was one of the rare people who could believe and accept his story.

“I still don’t understand. Are you...” Her inflections were choppy, with pauses where words ought to flow. “Like that movie.
Highlander?
”

“Not exactly.” His jaw clenched at the comparison. Two deployments ago a new guy had thought it would make an entertaining movie night. After the captain snapped the DVD in half, he’d transferred the guy to a desk at Headquarters Company. It took a month of Judy Garland and Julie Andrews to expunge the swords, beheadings and stupid motto. “Fifteen hundred years ago I was a regular man. You would’ve called me a Viking. Then—” he forced himself to open his fists, “—I became this.”

“How?”

No nonsense Captain Chiesa, the straight-lipped woman who’d accosted his team in the gym, had returned. He couldn’t complain, because he’d wanted someone who’d listen and believe and maybe even care. When she leaned forward to speak, her breasts jiggled, which sent tiny waves lapping over to his side of the pool with an invitation. Then she raised a hand, and water drops followed veins down the pale inside of her wrist. If he bent forward, he could—

“Stop it.” She snapped her fingers. “You were finally talking. Keep talking. Tell me how you became immortal.”

“Right.” He chose a comb from the box by the pool’s edge. It felt insubstantial, so he swapped it for the weightier shampoo. “Have you read
Beowulf?
”

“The English epic? With the monster?” Her eyebrows drew together, and she brushed his hands aside. “You’ve done my hair. Give me that bottle before you crush it.”

Orders from her were a sign that his world might be intact, so he leaned back to let her touch him while he continued talking. “The
Beowulf
saga is true.” When Galan had recorded their history in writing, he’d left out most of the men’s names to protect them, but he’d included the songs and stories and even Hrothgar’s queen’s flirtation with Beowulf, all the parts that Wulf himself forgot whenever he remembered the monster.

She pressed on top of his head, circled and released. Her fingers must have deactivated most of his muscle groups, because his limbs flopped. “Are you saying you’re Beowulf?”

“No, he was our liege lord.”

“Our?”

“My brother and I.” Ivar would knock out his teeth for talking openly, but he couldn’t live in his brother’s form of isolation. “We joined Beowulf’s quest, looking for a bit of adventure, a bigger slice of reward. And of course we had our honor to prove. Common story. Ask any grunt today.” They’d been desperate, the belly hunger of their childhood replaced by a thirst to restore their family name, but their father had gambled away their sea gear. Beowulf had gifted Ivar with a seal-fur cloak and outfitted Wulf with a boar’s head helmet. From that moment they’d become more faithful than his hounds, willing to die for him.

Instead they’d been sentenced to live.

“Go on,” she murmured.

“The first night at Heorot, we lost Handscio.” Her doctor fingers moved to the nerves at the base of his skull and forced his eyes to shut. Never had the telling of this tale, nor even the thinking of it, come so easily, but with her hands digging into his muscles, he could recall the monster without shuddering. A half dozen arms had sprung from its body, enough arms to pin a man and claw him open and fight off other men all at once. When their swords hadn’t cut the monster’s hide, he and Ivar had been as helpless as newborns thrown in a fjord. All of them had been, except their leader.

“After Beowulf ripped the monster apart, we thought we’d earned our gold.” He could keep talking if she kept touching him. Maybe he could even sleep afterward if she massaged his shoulders. “Hrothgar’s men didn’t touch Grendel’s arm. Years of fear had destroyed their nerve, but we showed our bravery by passing the limb through the hall.”
Young and stupid.
“All I remember is someone—we were drunk—joked about roasting the arm, but Ivar stopped it.”

Her fingers traced through the hair at his temple and curved around the line of his ear, again and again, until the rhythm calmed his heart. She wasn’t leaving.

“The next night the hag, Grendel’s mother, appeared. We fought to save the man she grabbed, one of the king’s, but couldn’t. We all lived, but none of us worried about
that
while we followed her to the bog.”

“Close your eyes while I rinse.” She dribbled water across his forehead.

Submerging would be faster, but for a moment the dark water looked like the murk where Beowulf had plunged after the monster. Despite the heat, his balls shrank to his body. They’d seen blood rise to the water’s surface, and the others had begged to leave, but Ivar had refused to abandon watch. He’d backed his brother because that was his job, then and now. The others had also stayed—out of fear or faith, who knew?—but Ivar’s allegiance in the marsh had earned him the position he held today.

“Beowulf came back with Grendel’s head. He said its mother was also dead.” The monsters had received mercy denied to the rest of them, all except their liege who’d been cursed—or blessed—to find a dragon. Sometimes over the last fifteen hundred years, he’d envied Grendel and the hag, but today, with a warm spot growing in his chest while Theresa rubbed his shoulders, today he did not envy the dead.

“That head was our trophy. We carried it on our spears, even though it dripped on us and stunk of rot.” He inhaled the lingering orange blossoms and vanilla of shampoo, smells that never occurred in the swamp, ones he’d first encountered in the court of Constantinople and now would always associate with Theresa.

“Wulf, you don’t have to...” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and draped herself across his back. She felt so vibrantly alive against him.

“I do. I need to finish.” Then they’d never speak of it again. “The blood stung my hands, like vinegar.” He looked at his hands, where there were faint lines from adolescent scars. The last permanent mark on his body was the scar next to his eye, caused when Grendel had thrown him headfirst into a bench. “I searched for a place to rinse but the water was so green no one would touch it. I wiped my hands on my shirt. Since then I’ve been immortal.”

“Hmm.” In the silence he could almost hear her brain clicking. “So was it an infection?”

“Most likely.” Jurik had explained the discovery of microbes to the rest of them a century before. The thirteen of them hadn’t been cursed by God, merely by a microscopic organism.

“Are you...” She wasn’t doubting or dismissing his story. “Infectious?”

“Apparently not. Everyone else I’ve known has died.”

“Known as in met, or as in—” Her voice rose before she stopped.

“Everyone.” Even if he could choose a woman to share his life forever, would he? Would he doom her to this cycle of perpetual loss? That wasn’t an easy question to answer.

He felt drained, and the shadows under Theresa’s eyes reminded him of her mortal body’s limitations, so he helped her from the pool and toweled her dry. Although she raised her arms and turned at his prompts, she was close to asleep by the time he wrapped them both in robes and settled her on floor cushions.

“Relax. I’ll take care of your hair.” The comb drew dark, wet lines from the crown of her head past her shoulders as he carefully worked through each section. “I’ll not mistreat you.”

“Sometimes you sound—” her voice slurred as she started to doze, “—old-fashioned.”

When he wanted to feel modern and energetic, he went to America. In Italy the past slowed him until he could appreciate beauty like the strands of her hair rippling from the comb. The lapels of her robe slid apart as she sagged onto his knee, asleep. His strokes slowed. How long could they stay in the moment, at peace like this?

Her sleeping profile, the shape of her lips and the sweep of eyelashes on her cheek, didn’t change as he shifted her to the bed.

Trying to lie next to her was futile. His need to prowl and protect forced him to his feet. He cleaned and reloaded the HK semi, tidied the bath and inventoried breakfast supplies. Ivar would undoubtedly find some way to make him pay for compromising their security, but his brother’s displeasure wasn’t what kept him pacing after he’d finished his tasks.

The
Horizon Kaptan
would dock in Albania the next week. If he contacted police, he’d lose the opportunity to monitor the ship, because the operation would be gummed up by layers of law enforcement crossing the jurisdictions of Italy, Albania and America, plus European Union antinarcotics squads. He owed it to his team and the Night Stalker pilots to continue, but he couldn’t leave Theresa alone while he went to Albania.

Montebelli was the solution. Besides being on the Adriatic and offering a boat or a plane for a quick trip to Albania, the fortress would be safe. Whatever the contractors had uncovered about him through the army, they couldn’t know about Ivar’s castle.

Tomorrow he’d take Theresa to Montebelli, Ivar or no Ivar.

* * *

Theresa’s eyes shot open, and her ears filled with the loaded silence that signals a failed alarm. She’d overslept. Was it her morning at the battle update—no.

She wasn’t in Afghanistan.

She was naked in Wulf’s bed in an underground apartment. Last night she’d slept with him, which had been magnificent, except for the part where they’d skipped using protection, and the other part where it was a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Shit.

“You’re awake.” In fresh clothes, he smiled from the foot of the bed. Once again he resembled a European playboy. No matted hair, sandy eyes or fetid breath for him.

He must’ve sensed her unease, because his eyebrows gathered together. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” She closed her mouth over her self-recrimination.

“Something is.” Coming closer, he held out a small cup filled with espresso. A tiny rock of raw sugar and a spoon barely bigger than a toothpick sat on the saucer. “Will this help?”

She jammed the blankets into her armpits and inhaled the coffee, which smelled fabulous but wouldn’t change the facts. His life was all immortality, intrigue and excess income, but she lived in the real world where she needed to stay alive, employed and without kids. Yesterday hadn’t increased her odds of continuing those states.

“Please don’t decide anything until after your caffeine.”

As she drained her cup, he leaned on the bedpost with his own espresso. The man didn’t play fair. His morning offering beat army coffee with the same superlatives as last night compared to losing her virginity.

“I didn’t know what you’d like.” A faint red marked his cheeks as he nodded to a formation of three chairs sporting three outfits: a daisy-print sundress and white sweater, a black lace dress and khakis with a skinny pink polo.

“How did you—?” She stumbled into silence, aware that crossing to the new clothes would require loosening the security blanket tucked over her breasts.

“Checked your sizes.” He pointed to her ruined clothes folded on an ottoman.

“And shopped in the middle of the night?”

He threw back his head and laughed, showing his corded throat muscles. “Not even in Italy. It’s fourteen hundred.”

“Whaaat?” Two o’clock in the afternoon? She glanced at the pool. “Do you have a regular shower? With a door?”

“The pool has a handheld nozzle.” He unbuttoned a shirt cuff, grinning in a way that implied plans to use the shower nozzle for purposes not listed in the manufacturer’s instructions. “You can use it while I cook.”

She couldn’t look away from his forearms. He took his time rolling his sleeves, folding one cuff over itself twice before starting the other. She wanted to lay her arm next to his and stare at them, comparing the textures and shapes, the way his veins and bulges declared he was a man and her wrists could belong to no one but a woman. If she wanted to keep any backbone whatsoever, she would study the bed drapes or the walls instead of him, but he had the chiseled lines of a Michelangelo. She hoped she wasn’t panting.

“If you hurry, I won’t have time to peek.” He pointed at the pool.

“You’ve admitted to being a habitual liar.” She was no longer nervous, or not about the same things. These flutters stirred lower than her stomach and carried a deeper rhythm.

The moment he turned his back, she slipped from the covers. Sharing a shower unit with sixteen women had taught her speed, and she was toweling dry before he finished cracking eggs. The sundress and white sweater mimicked the Audrey Hepburn look her mother had chosen, which had proven its impracticality yesterday. If he thought she’d actually wear the black dress with the Versace label, last night in the pool must have been as boiling hot for him as it had been for her, because he’d purchased a complete man-fantasy outfit. Unfortunately she didn’t know how to sit, walk or bend in a dress that stopped that close to her belly button. When she considered the third outfit, a pink polo and cropped pants, what he’d done clicked.

He’d purchased three costumes for her: a lady, a hot babe and a slightly fashionable nerd. Which way did he see her? Or as a bit of all three?

Then the realization that none of the outfits included underwear made her snort.

“On the table by the bed,” he said without turning around.

“You should cook.” She glared at his back. “Not eaves-look.”

“Your huff was easy to interpret.”

The table held a glossy black box tied with silver ribbon embossed with the name La Bellezza. She’d passed the flagship store on Via Condotti but hadn’t needed to check prices to recognize a shop out of her league. Beneath tissue paper nestled two sets of lingerie, one fuchsia and the other black. Lace cups connected with a tiny bow and matching lace evoked orchids twining across the sides of the boy shorts. Only a tiny panel between the legs had any substance.