First to Burn (23 page)

Seconds later, a glint crossed the corner of his vision as his high-speed, low-drag doc kicked a silver bowl at an invader’s head. He parried another pike thrust and glanced back at her in time to see her slide tackle her man in the balls. That Valkyrie was
his
, by the gods,
his.

“No!” he heard her yell. “Let go!”

Pain exploded in his temple and knocked him to his knees.
Shouldn’t have taken my eyes off my opponent.
Rolling away before his foe impaled him, Wulf popped to one knee and swung his blade upward to flip the pike out of the other man’s grasp.

At the same moment, the attacker stepped forward to stab with the barbed end, his arm moving on a collision course with Wulf’s sword edge.

The severed arm landed two feet away from its owner, whose momentum carried him to Wulf’s feet. The answers Wulf needed spread across the floor with the man’s lifeblood.

“Doc!” he yelled, and he grabbed a table runner, stuffing cloth on the arm stump as fast as blood soaked through. “Need some help here.”

“Me...too.” Her answer sounded like two croaks.

“Medical help.” He kept pressure on the wad of cloth while he unbuckled his belt one-handed. “Got one dying.”

“I...do not...care...” Her voice trailed off as she crawled into his sight line. “Damn.” She scrambled to shove her hands alongside his. “Your belt—tourniquet.”

As soon as he had it out of the loops, she ordered him to call an ambulance.

“Are you serious?”

“Want him to live?” Her face scrunched with concentration. “He needs blood.”

“Too late.” Wulf sat on his heels and stared at the guy’s fixed pupils. He’d never find out how these men had discovered Montebelli. “He’s zipped in.”

* * *

Leaving rather than waiting for the mercenaries to return had been about survival, but ninety minutes after Draycott had dropped them at the trail leading to the beach below Wardsen’s hideaway, his phone hadn’t rung with a call for pick up. Nada, nothing, zip. Thanks to Wardsen, the South Africans weren’t looking for the last name on tonight’s kill list. Instead, they’d punched out. The sergeant would never know, but he’d done Draycott a big favor.

This wasn’t the moment to celebrate. Jane wasn’t answering, and the one person he could trust to pass the signal that she had to run hadn’t called back. If Em couldn’t reach her mother first, if, God forbid, Em was gone, then evading the Director was time-wasting futility, not worth even as much as the bald tires on his crappy van.

Jane and Em. Mother and daughter. Smiles so alike they could be mistaken for each other in photos.

He pushed the minibus to its tottering top speed, which had already brought him one hundred and twenty miles closer to the French-Italian border. Either he still had far to go tonight, or he had nothing at all. Except payback.

* * *

Despite showering after he’d tucked Theresa and an ice pack for her foot into the most secure tower room, Wulf couldn’t eradicate the smell of smoke from his skin. Whiffs clung as tenaciously as the cold fear in his gut. They’d stay at Montebelli until morning, when he could have more confidence that the roads were safe for them to move on. Until then, the papal tower where Ivar had once retreated from an eleven-week siege would have to shelter Theresa too.

One task remained before he joined Lorenzo to restore the Great Room: calling his brother. New York City was six hours earlier, so Ivar would be awake. Although he and his brother had spent centuries fighting back-to-back from Denmark to Samarkand, they’d drifted so far apart that Wulf had to calculate how long had passed since they’d been in the same place at the same time. Maybe three years. He liked to stop in Manhattan when his sibling was in Italy or at his island, and he visited Italy when Ivar was in New York. Keeping an ocean between them had become a habit during the Cold War, one that hadn’t fallen with the Berlin Wall.

No matter how long he rubbed a towel across his chest, the phone squatted conveniently on a hall table near the bathroom door. Its taupe handset and curled cord were twenty-five years out-of-date, but change came slowly at the
fortezza.

Ivar picked up in the middle of the second ring.

“I’m at Montebelli.” No point in gilding the conversation. “The shit’s hit the fire. Literally.”

“How did you not understand the message I gave Lorenzo? Have you never met a woman who didn’t take you for everything?”

With one question, Ivar had pissed him off. Two questions took him back a thousand years to that morning in Chang’an when he’d had to explain to his big brother why he’d lent a prostitute their Silk Road profit. Ivar never had appreciated that the girl wanted to buy her sister a respectable position as a Buddhist nun, or that their earnings were only money, something they had time to acquire again. Helping others was a connection. Ivar couldn’t understand how much Wulf needed to be around normal people. His brother preferred to bond with money.

Tonight he wouldn’t feel guilty about defying his big brother. He’d spit it out and not argue. “The good news is, all the men who invaded are dead and the damage to the Great Hall isn’t structural. The bad news is, one of your French chairs has gone to meet its maker.”

“You joke as if you don’t know what you’ve unleashed.” Deliberately precise, Ivar’s voice conveyed more than disapproval. “You don’t, do you? Because you’ve always led with your fists or your prick, not your head. Nothing changes.”

No, nothing ever did, certainly not his brother’s ability to send him to the flash point with a handful of sentences. “Tell me, if you’re playing Odin Allfather, what
have
I unleashed?”

“You would know that answer if you’d researched Black and Swan.”

“Why should I? You’re dying to share.” Wulf felt the hammer poised above his head.

“It’s a closely held private company registered in the Caribbean.”

Always, his brother had been agonizingly slow to make a point. The slower he was, the worse the point.

“Cayman records aren’t easy to pry open, but after Lorenzo alerted me, I acquired the names of the three shareholders. You may recall them from a prior engagement, if you can think about something other than your libido. Francis Bannister. Uziah Gruble.”

That second, uncommon name meant Wulf didn’t need to hear more to be engulfed with the enormity of his mistake. But of course his brother told him.

“And Baird Durfey.”

While Ivar had guided the Continental Congress through financial negotiations with the French, Wulf’s militia had chased those three and their men across the colonies, too often arriving too late to save the women and children in their path.

“You’ve been playing games with Unferth.” Baird Durfey. The bard, Unferth. The singer-skald at Hrothgar’s court had been accustomed to controlling from behind the old king’s throne, and he’d resented Beowulf’s success and popularity. He’d never agreed with the dictate to remain anonymous and conceal their abilities from mortals. Gradually Unferth’s disputes with Ivar had shifted to a quest for power, a vendetta fought through the proxy of human wars. Using the same aliases they’d employed to rampage through the colonies to double as shareholders for Black and Swan, a company that supplied the modern American military, undoubtedly amused the cast-outs.

“You will immediately cease your activities.”

“He’s smuggling heroin.” He was failing to make Ivar understand, failing to speak as an equal or to explain his side with clarity.

“Unferth’s business interests don’t matter. You understand our law. We don’t risk exposure or chance injuring mortals by challenging each other.” Ivar had continued the rules established by Beowulf. “Now I must resolve this crisis you’ve created.”

By the Hammer
,
if an immortal had joined tonight’s raiders
,
the fight wouldn’t have ended.
And Theresa was there.
“I have to keep her safe.” He hadn’t realized he’d spoken until Ivar snorted.

“I doubt that woman needs your help. You’ve told her about us, but she hasn’t told you who she is, has she?”

“Meaning?” On the receiver, Wulf’s hand grew sticky.

“What has she shared, besides the obvious?” He didn’t want to hear his brother sully what Theresa and he were building, but Ivar continued. “Did she tell you her stepfather’s a capo in the Gambino family in New Jersey? Indicted three times, never convicted.”

“No...” In front of his eyes, the stone wall seemed to film over.

“By chance did she mention her stepbrother’s on parole for running what is termed a chop shop?” Every word flayed him until he felt like he had a hundred bleeding wounds, but Ivar had more to say. “Or that she has a cousin in the U.S. penitentiary at Hazelton?”

“Stop.” Ivar didn’t have to list more for Wulf to realized how mistaken he’d been, how his naive lust had led Theresa’s connections to him. At least his brother shut up, giving him a moment to shred all his growing hopes without sibling assistance.

Eventually Ivar muttered, “Now you know. Move on. Lorenzo said—”

“Don’t, for the glory in Valhalla, say another word.” The phone handset would be lucky to survive his grip, but he wouldn’t throw it across the room, because of all of them, the phone hadn’t done anything regrettable. Even dumb plastic was smarter than he was.

“He said she acts as if she genuinely cares for you. Anyone could have—”

“Doesn’t matter, does it? It was a setup. And now it’s over.” He hung up. This burning anger would get him through the cleanup, and then he’d take the five bodies far out in the Adriatic. And he wouldn’t come back. Lorenzo could get rid of that woman.

Chapter Nineteen

No matter what happened in the outside world, nothing changed on a deployment. Even though Italy and Wulf had turned Theresa’s life upside down, Camp Cadwalader offered the same rocks, the same schedule and the same people.

“Keep talking.” Jennifer handed a water bottle to Theresa and then perched on the foot of the bunk, eyes wide and inquiring. “There’s more to your story than getting robbed.”

“Not really.” Theresa hunched in her ratty robe, glad to be out of the cruddy clothes she’d worn for thirty-six hours on the flights from Italy. Her roommate had overcome surprise at her unexpected return better than the clerks who’d processed her at Bagram Air Field in Kabul, but barely. In the history of army deployments, she must have had the honor of being the first to show up early from leave. “Nothing happened.”

“Liar.” She fished in Theresa’s laundry bag. “I apologize for touching your crap, and normally I would never handle your you-know-whattie’s, but these—” a pair of the lacy La Bellezzas dangled off one finger, “—are not the undies I saw you pack. No
way
you bought these.”

Hoping Jen would get the hint, she turned her head and shoulders toward the wall, but her roommate was as persistent as a plantar wart.

“We’ve shared a room for more than seven months. Spill.”

“I met a guy?” Because of their ranks, Italy couldn’t have ended with her and Wulf arriving at Camp Caddie hand in hand. From their first candlelit dinner, she’d acknowledged that fact, even mentally prepared for it, but the way he’d ditched her—going so far as to have his butler drive her to the airport without even a note—had sliced to the bone.

“That’s a question? Like you don’t know if he was a guy, or you didn’t meet him, or you’re trying to put one over on your best buddy?”

In a way, her roommate had hit the trifecta, because Wulf wasn’t really “a guy.” Surrounded by her real life, at a fundamental level she doubted the carnage in Italy had really happened, and, if it had, then there was a whole lot she couldn’t tell Jen.

“What am I going to find if I dig deeper?”

“Nothing.” Regardless of whether Jen meant to dig in the laundry or in her head, she wouldn’t find answers. “I was robbed.”

Jennifer’s eyes darted around the room, confirming that their four other roommates were absent, before she continued. “Given how Chris Deavers pumped me for your hotel, and then a
certain
hottie pants left for parts unknown the same time you did, I’m putting one and one together.” She rubbed her two pointer fingers against each other and waited, eyebrows raised.

The gesture was nothing but a simple joke, the type of teasing she and Jen had shared two weeks ago, before the helicopter crash, before her discovery of Wulf’s immortality, before Italy. She should have grinned and tossed off a reply, maybe thrown in a line of New Jersey-style crudeness, but the muscles in her cheeks burned from the effort to contain her tears.

“I was so bored while you were gone, and I kept imagining you drinking Bellinis all day and soaking up Rome. Come on, I need to live vicariously.”

Her control burst like a gallbladder, flooding her with hot pain as she wrapped her arms around her knees and curled into a ball. Even though her arms and legs felt icy and shivers drove her deeper into her robe, her face and throat felt acid etched by tears.

“I’m so sorry!” Jen’s hug was solid and warm across her back. “Shhh, whatever he did, he’s scum, lower than norovirus, and I’ll string him up for you. What’d he do?”

“Nuhh—” she could barely speak through her heaves, “—thing.”

Jennifer patted her back. “Babe, if you’re crying, he did something, and it was wrong.”

* * *

Time heals
, Jennifer had spouted at least a dozen times over the past two days. Theresa felt like she was rooming with someone’s mother. Her own mother would have tracked Wulf down and introduced him to her car bumper, but crap like
time heals
was what she imagined normal mothers like Jen’s said. As she marched toward her B-hut, the laptop case she’d borrowed from her friend bounced on her left hip. She’d been so immersed in the internet at Camp Caddie’s Burger King stand that she hadn’t realized the midnight closing time had arrived. Now she had to skulk home without her reflective belt. The visibility aid was mandatory after dark. Ironic to worry about being hit by a vehicle in a war zone, but that was the army.

When she picked up her pace, the briefcase strap slipped from her shoulder. She was already out of uniform without the yellow safety belt, so she gave in and slung the strap across her body, another violation of arcane regulations. She found it unusually hard to care about the petty rules when she’d decided to devote the remaining months of her service commitment to shaping her career, nothing else. She could probably get away with screwing the reflective belt, but not the sergeant.

The hassle of issuing orders to change her pay status from on leave to on duty meant she’d been forbidden to step inside her office for two days. Two full days to mope on her bed. Finally Jennifer had ordered her to get a burger and surround herself with people, as if the mere presence of twenty-two-year-olds video chatting with their nineteen-year-old girlfriends would solve all her problems.

Oddly, it
had
helped, unless that was the three orders of fries she’d scarfed while her glutes were parked in front of the computer. Jennifer would probably initiate psych eval paperwork when the boxes arrived, but before she filed Wulf in her mental cabinet and locked the drawer, she needed to understand. Presumably other women binged on chocolate, drank or got their hair cut to forget about a loser, but at Camp Caddie she had to settle for reading.

She had a lot of reading coming to her. The
Beowulf
epic had a bewildering 4,146 results at the leading internet bookstore. Some writer named Seamus Heaney had probably made it 4,147 while she’d been researching. With the royalties from her dozens of purchases, maybe Mr. Heaney could take a cruise.

Inside her hut, she hung her holster over a bedpost, aligned her boot toes pointing out with the tongue open wide enough to stuff her feet in if they had to run for the bunkers, and snagged her sleep shorts. The same routine as every other night in Afghanistan.

Tonight her fingertip poked a corner of stiff paper.

“I’ve been waiting two hours,” Jennifer whispered. “I almost got dressed to go find you.”

“What’s this?” Her roommates would probably be able to hear the thump in her chest, but she managed to keep her voice low. The thing felt like an envelope.

“
He
gave it to me.” The emphasis on the pronoun made clear who.

“No!” She hadn’t decided how to act when Wulf inevitably reappeared, but she’d thought she’d have at least a week.

“Yes! I’ve been dying. Here.” Jennifer clicked a keychain flashlight. “Read it!”

Theresa tried to rip the envelope quietly, but the noise sounded like a fire alarm.

“Well?” Her roommate bounced on the top mattress.

The envelope contained a sheet of paper with a single unsigned sentence:
Please join me at the track at 0530.

“I’m still here. Waiting.” Even in the dark, Theresa could see Jennifer’s hurry-up hand-circles.

“He invited me to run.” How would she be able to look at him, at the lips that had said so many things that had sounded like promises, and pretend he hadn’t hurt her? She wasn’t ready.

“That’s it? Nothing else? No I’m-so-sorry-I-was-a-frigging-donkey-dick?” Jennifer’s hand shot from the upper bunk to grab the note and penlight. “That’s in less than six hours!”

Her friend’s panic fed hers. She wanted to see him, and she didn’t. She wanted to talk to him, but she couldn’t. “What should I do?”

“You should SHUT THE FUCK UP!” the transportation officer in the far bunk snapped. “An artillery battery is more fucking quiet!”

* * *

The morning was clear and almost cool enough for dew while Wulf stretched at the dirt track around the helicopter landing zone. He hoped Theresa would accept his invitation. To outsiders this would look like a casual encounter, but he churned with his need to apologize. The day after he’d ordered Lorenzo to take her to the airport, he’d stood on his boat deck with the coast of Italy behind him, and his brain had accepted what his heart had been shouting. It wasn’t possible for the woman he’d watched with her patients to be so immersed in the criminal world that she’d plan murders, or kill two men herself, to further a drug-smuggling scheme. Regardless of what his brother said, he knew Theresa. It didn’t matter who her family was, he knew
her
, and she wasn’t a criminal.

Wearing the black-and-gray army physical training uniform, she loped around the corner of the building. A thousand women could stand in formation wearing the same shorts and shirt and he’d find her in an instant. Images of wrapping her ponytail through his fist to pin her in place while he kissed her against the wall, then removing the elastic and spreading her hair through his fingers, surged from his imagination to his groin. To cover his reaction, he bent to tighten his shoelaces.

Without a word, she stretched a careful six feet away.

“You came.” The line of her calf drew his eyes. “Thank you.”

“I needed a run.” Her voice was icier than the Hindu Kush. “Ready, Sergeant?”

“When you are, ma’am.”

She set the pace. Within moments their steps thudded into a matching rhythm.

“I’m sorry,” he started. “At Montebelli, I reacted without thinking. I wanted you out of there, but I should have spoken with you.” As far as his apology went, it was one-hundred-percent truth.

“Why’d you change your mind?”

“About what?” His breath caught, but surely she’d assume it was from running. She couldn’t know he’d briefly believed she and her family were involved with the heroin.

Next to him, she huffed. “When I wanted to go back to Caddie, you said it wasn’t safe. Then, pfft.” Her hand waved in the air, then dropped to swing loosely at her side. “You ditched me like an express delivery. Why?”

Rocks and sand crunched under their shoes. Not a good idea to admit Ivar had researched her family; women didn’t like that type of thing. Instead he opted for a limited truth. “When I called my brother to tell him about the attack, he told me who runs Black and Swan. I decided you were safest away from me.”

“So who...is it?” Panting, Theresa realized anger had pushed her to sprint through their first two laps, but no matter how fast she ran, he stayed next to her, damn him. “Who?”

“One of us.”

“One of you?” She stumbled on a stone. “A Viking?”

“Black and Swan’s controlled by an immortal named Unferth. He wasn’t part of our crew.” His words echoed the rhythm of their pounding feet. “He was a skald—a bard—for King Hrothgar.” Beside her, he snorted. “Like today’s cable talk show hosts, but with a harp.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Unferth and my brother have a long-standing feud. Seems like I reopened it.”

“Huh.” As they rounded the far curve a third time, she felt better that he’d apologized, but that wasn’t why she’d come. Alongside the blank wall of the hangar, she slowed to walk and linked her hands on her head to open her lungs. “I’m here because...” She had to choke out her rehearsed speech while she had the resolve. “I came to say...what happened in Italy...is over.”

“Not for me.” When he tugged her elbow to turn her, the slide of his hand on her sweat-slick forearm called up memories of moving against his body. This close she could see beads of sweat on his face and neck as he searched her face. “I don’t think it’s over for you either.”

“It is. I have too much invested in the army to risk it.” She stepped back and dropped her hands to her knees, bending to conceal her face in case she couldn’t erase all her desire from her expression. “I’m an officer. I’m not allowed to—”

“You care about those rules?”

“We wouldn’t have met if I didn’t care about the rules!” She locked her eyes on the dirt and concentrated on two things: breathing and remembering the rest of her speech.

“Forget about fraternization. No one enforces that.”

“Maybe not against you, Indispensable Special Forces Hotshot.” That this man, who seemed to get every freaking army thing effortlessly right, would counsel her to forget about the rules—it started a fire in her stomach that pulled her up until she stood toe-to-toe with him. “Fact of life, officer or enlisted, it’s the female whose career gets most screwed. But it won’t be me.” Her finger stopped an inch from his chest. “Do you hear? It won’t be me.”

“Yeah, I hear you.” His chin stuck out as if daring her. “We might have something rare, something that doesn’t happen to everyone, but I hear that you’ll sacrifice our chance because of a
rule.
”

“It’s not about following rules.” How could a man whose life revolved around honor not understand? “I owe the army my best. I won’t give less. In seven months I’m finished, out, and I’m not willing to blow my good service for some crazy sex. Can’t you see?”

“In seven months, when I fit your plans, how about dinner?” His flared nostrils and narrowed eyes challenged her to disagree.

How she wanted to say yes, to make a date and carry it in her pocket like a lucky charm, or even make reservations. Crap, if she was honest she’d admit that rehearsals of this kiss-off speech had competed with dreams about caterers and florists. But rather than admit her silly fantasies, she crossed her arms and shook her head.

“Then this isn’t about fraternization, is it?” The fight left his voice.

“Not really, I guess.” She saw her own anguish reflected in his eyes.

“Whatever you want—” he spoke so quietly she strained to hear, “—I’ll do it. I’ll get it. I’ll—”

“I want a regular life.” Asking for the one thing he couldn’t give her started a major bleed in the cavity around her heart. “Growing up, my family was different. We had a lot of secrets.” She didn’t want to share the details. “I dreamed of being regular.”

“I under—”

“Let me finish.” The best way to inflict pain was to do it quickly and be done. “Have you ever had a daydream or read a book, and you know
that’s
how it’s supposed to be?”