First to Burn (27 page)

Ivar was gone.

Ivar hadn’t been here for weeks.

Centered in front of his brother’s chair, a padded postal mailer seemed to be waiting for someone to sit and open it. The exterior was completely blank, without postage or a cancelation mark, as if it had been hand-delivered. His brother never left clutter, or anything except a writing blotter and one antique fountain pen, on his desk. The foreboding that swept Wulf as he picked up the envelope was completely inverse to its almost weightlessness.

The sound of pull tape ripping across the flap raised his neck hairs. Whatever this envelope contained, the twisting in his gut told him it too would be his fault.

Inside were two photos and a scrap of cloth, simple items that spun the room under him until he had to cling to the desktop. The first picture showed a man’s back, arms manacled overhead to a stone wall. Among the oozing round sores that covered his skin, randomly placed unmarked areas made his body resemble a half-played checkerboard.

Buzzing filled Wulf’s head as he absorbed the second image. On a reflective stainless-steel background, a triquetra tattoo marked a chunk of skin that lay between a man’s wrist and the hand that had been removed from it. A glossy, wet-looking triangle on the inner forearm showed where the piece of flesh had been excised. Wulf knew that tattoo. Fifteen hundred years ago, when those three dark-blue interlocking circles had been inked on his still-mortal brother, Wulf had stood next to him and sung with drunken enthusiasm.

The photo of Ivar’s amputated hand—he suddenly understood how Unferth had bypassed the house security to leave this package—was revolting, but even it was surpassed by the depravity of the third item. Decorated with the triquetra’s infinitely looping lines, the scrap in Wulf’s hand was as flexible as suede.

It was his brother’s skin.

Struggling against a need to vomit, to purge himself in the most visceral way, he swept the skin and photos to the floor and pounded the desk. The wood held as he pounded again and again. It wouldn’t break. His fist wouldn’t break either.

It should have been him.

A drawer front cracked from his kicks, then the chair toppled, but the destruction didn’t stop his fury.

It should have been his arm. Not Ivar’s. His fault.

Somehow he found a thread of control, grabbed the edge of the desk and forced himself to be still. His knuckles looked more like a goat carcass after a buzkashi tournament than like human anatomy, but the pain didn’t change the facts. Theresa was in New Jersey, but his brother was in hell, and he’d caused it, so he’d have to fix it.

On the far wall, a flat television screen showed his dark reflection, chest heaving as he rubbed his face. The streaks of blood his hands left on his cheekbones resembled the war markings of the Papuan tribe. Staring at his own ghostly image, he recalled the anonymous letter sent to Deavers.
Tell Wardsen to begin hunting for a lab in Morocco.

He had a destination.

Theresa would have to wait.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Wulf didn’t stop scanning out the taxi’s rear window even when the X-shaped concrete terminals of Marrakesh’s international airport came into view through the windshield. After four months of solo vigilance, he’d need serious distance from Morocco before he stopped looking over his shoulder. Too much could still go wrong, and all the responsibility fell to him.

Ivar was useless. His head bounced off Wulf’s shoulder and rolled across the seat back as the car jarred through another pothole. What had Unferth’s scientists pumped into his brother? It was stronger and longer-lasting than the ketamine used in Rome. Even stuffing Ivar with squares of chocolate roused him only temporarily before he reverted to the near-vegetable Wulf had found in the hidden facility.

“
Quel terminal
,
m’sieur?
” Entering the airport zone, the taxi driver slowed from the pace Wulf had urged for the ride from the cloth-dying district.

He’d searched Rabat and Casablanca, until finally in Marrakesh’s walled center he’d noticed a half dozen Asian and Caucasian men who came every morning and left every night, as if they had jobs among the tourist traps and cloth dyers. They didn’t look like they sold beaten brass bowls, so he’d tracked their patterns. They’d tried to use different routes, but they were too conspicuous, and they’d led him to an underground lab that stretched under blocks of the old souk.

“
Quel terminal?
” the driver repeated.

“Cargo,” he answered in French. No rushing SUVs or darkened sedans behind them, and he doubted Unferth would give chase with a rickety Moroccan cab, so maybe he’d have time to load his brother onto the jet without a problem. The scientists and guards were probably still busy repairing generators to pump out the flood from the underground cistern Wulf had breached into their facility. They might not even realize he’d used the diversion to snatch Ivar.

“I am sorry, sir, but that area is off-limits. Security—”

Wulf stuffed a handful of euros and dirhams over the seat. “Get us through.”

Fear and greed warred in the driver’s expression. Thankfully, economic need won and he took the exit labeled Cargo Only and bumped through several more potholes.

“Sit up.” Wulf shoved another piece of candy in his brother’s mouth and straightened the black leather jacket every Moroccan male seemed to wear in winter months. If security peered at the backseat, Ivar needed to seem as normal as possible despite blond hair, sun-deprived skin and a wrist that ended with a raw wound covered by odoriferous gauze and surgical tape. It wasn’t easy to keep the concealing glove from falling out of his brother’s jacket sleeve.

His confrontation with Unferth had caused this as surely as it had caused Theresa’s injury, and he had no idea how to square accounts with either of them. It might require a thousand years before the image of his brother’s wrecked and naked body faded to a hazy nightmare, like the girl burned by dragon fire had become, but he would have time to atone.

The wad of money created its own green lights as they drove to the Embraer 650 jet. A red-haired man, larger than Wulf by six inches and fifty pounds, trotted out of the hangar before the taxi driver had cut his engine. He’d been Beowulf’s navigator, and he could sail, fly or drive everything that moved.

“Bjorn’s here to fly us out.” The other immortal had dropped his boat-recovery service when Wulf called him to bring Ivar’s Bombardier jet for their escape. “You’re safe, brother.”

“Ba—ba—” Ivar’s tongue was missing, and his humiliation at being unable to speak was obvious from his squinted eyes and dipped head. Wulf didn’t want to think about how long it had been since someone had carved it out. Ivar’s healing process was really and truly fucked.

The stairs to the cabin were too narrow to haul Ivar in tandem, so he transferred his brother’s arm to Bjorn’s shoulder. The other Viking hefted Ivar around the waist until only his toes touched the steps. As Wulf followed, the clank of boots on the metal treads beat like a countdown, but until the jet left the Atlas Mountains in its exhaust stream, he wouldn’t calculate the number of days—
months
—that had passed since he’d seen Theresa. Too many soldiers screwed up by thinking about home when they needed to have their minds in the game, so he’d never allowed the sight of a dark-haired tourist wandering the old city to conjure memories of her. The complete annihilation of distraction had been a brutal price to pay, but a man on a solitary op didn’t have downtime.

Soon he’d have infinite time for Theresa.

* * *

Theresa preferred staring out her bedroom window at piles of brown street snow to loafing in the media room with her stepbrother and his cousin, whose jobs for Carl apparently involved dating the couch or being official food tasters. Although they claimed to be incognito game testers for Resident Criminal version whatever, the closest she saw them come to real work was washing road salt off the Caddie after driving her to physical therapy.

The emotion journal on her lap reminded her it was time to create insights for tomorrow’s VA counseling group. She hadn’t touched the notebook in two weeks. With her pen poised on the first page, she tried to remember her psych rotation. What she needed was an opening sentence that found the small space between crazy and fake.

“Theresa!”

Her mother’s surprise appearance in the doorway startled her into bumping into her headboard, and she shoved the journal under her pillow to hide the ink-edged hole she’d driven through the paper.

“What do you do up here all day?” Her mother sank to the bed next to her and hugged her as if she was a kid. “You should come downstairs.”

Theresa’s heart plummeted. Not because she wanted to stay shut in her room, but because she had no idea what else to do. Four months ago she’d expected Wulf to arrive, but he hadn’t. She’d spent weeks notating books that explained his origins and developing models of starfish replication without anyone to answer her questions. Now she didn’t want to see him, but without confronting him she had no idea how to achieve closure and progress forward, a phrase her counselor liked to use at group sessions.

As if anyone wanted to progress backward.

Her mother was staring, waiting for her to answer or do something. She opened her mouth.

“I made so many mistakes.” Where had that come from?

“Shhh, don’t say that.” Squeezing tighter, Theresa’s mother propped her chin on top of Theresa’s head. “I’m proud of everything you’ve done, my little girl. You’re strong.” The movement of her mother’s chin against her hair, talking, always talking, was one of Theresa’s earliest memories. “You never let Carl’s business take you down the easy path. You always have such clear goals.” Her mother stopped, and Theresa heard her swallow before she continued in a thicker voice. “Did something bad happen? Before your leg? Something else?”

Please don’t let my mother cry.
She couldn’t possibly bear that.

“When you phoned me and said you left Italy early, you sounded terrible, but I thought you had enough to worry about so I didn’t push...”

“I’m okay, Mom.” She’d used the line so often, sometimes she believed it.

“No, you’re not. You barely leave this room. You don’t see any of the girls from Holy Names or college—”

“Ma, they all have kids—”

“And you haven’t laughed in six months.”

“You’re exaggerating.” She’d had to relearn how to walk, run, even how to stand up from a toilet without tipping, and her mother expected a sense of humor?

“I don’t count rolling your eyes at me or making fun of Raymond as laughing.” Cupping Theresa’s shoulders in her hands, her mother leaned away to look in her daughter’s eyes. “The man I met in your hospital room—was he someone special?”

So special, her last words to him had called him sneaky for spying on her.

“Was he hurt?” Her mother stumbled over the question but pushed on. “Or something?”

“He’s not hurt.”

“Dead?”

“No.” She couldn’t tell her mother that he was in fact the opposite.

“Married?” Her mother sounded unable to believe that any living, single man in his right mind wouldn’t be courting her daughter.

She shook her head.

“Then we’ll forget about him. He didn’t look Italian anyway. You’ll meet someone new.”

If that was as easy to do as it was for her mother to say, stand up and grab a hairbrush, she would’ve been at the movies every night. Instead she was scooting toward the middle of the bed and trying to dodge a pink-handled implement of pain.

“I made stuffed flank roll.”

That was special company food. “Which old boyfriend did you invite this time?” Since Christmas, enduring her mother’s fix-ups had become a Jersey City survival show. She didn’t want to spend another dinner next to some guido with gelled hair who smelled like the last decade’s leftover body spray.

“Nobody. Family.” Her shrug was utterly unconvincing.

Theresa tipped her head and shoulders almost to the far side of the bed, but she couldn’t escape the brush of the woman who thought nothing stood between her daughter and a wedding Mass except a bad hair day. “I take it your expected guest doesn’t wear a ring?”

“How did I raise such a cynical daughter?”

The bristles caught a tangle. “Ouch, Mom!”

That caused a frown, but not a cease-fire. “You have to put your best foot forward.”

“Not much choice there.”

Her mother shook the brush. “You know what I meant.”

“Give me that already.” She reached up and finished her hair herself.

“Why don’t you try on that new sweater I bought last week? The pink angora one.” She opened drawers. “And some earrings and lipstick so you feel festive.”

“I’ll feel itchy.” At her mother’s next tag sale, she’d probably list one daughter, as is, price: full carat or best offer. “Please say you didn’t invite one of your bunko partners’ sons.”

“You are so suspicious.” Her mother didn’t turn around. “Nobody’s coming to dinner.”

The doorbell rang.

Chapter Twenty-Four

As Wulf waited on the porch for someone—Carl, Jeanne, Theresa, a chihuahua—to answer the bell, he knew that Ivar’s guards were filming his arrival. He hoped his brother was watching the video link as he balanced a pink pastry box and two motorcycle helmets. Anything that connected Ivar with the world beyond his dark, dead-bolted town house was a plus.

“Wulf! My boy, welcome, welcome.”

Without crushing the cake box, he fielded Carl’s massive hug. At least one member of Theresa’s family was rooting for him. Apparently a New Jersey real estate company owned by Beo Holdings had tipped Carl a generous recycling contract.

“Let me take these for you.” The helmets dangled from Carl’s meaty fingers as he led Wulf into the foyer. “I haven’t told Jeanne or Theresa who was coming tonight.”

When Wulf saw Theresa’s mother bustling down the stairs, he prepared to drop the pastry box if necessary to catch her, but her spiky heels didn’t snag the thick carpet and she arrived without tripping. Her zip-tie grip hauled him into the wedding-cake-white living room. “Don’t I recognize you?”

“The hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, ma’am.” He stood very still, suspecting that if his boots smudged the carpet, he’d be ejected. “But I’m out of the army now. Plain Wulf Wilson these days.” His new surname didn’t feel natural yet, and he hoped they wouldn’t recall his old one.

“After that, where did you go?” Based on the way her tight cheeks pretended to smile, she was considering tossing him out. Perhaps he should offer to vacuum.

“Jeanne,” Carl warned, “that’s his business.”

Her lips thinned to a single line, as sharp as concertina wire.

“I brought this, ma’am, hoping to share better circumstances at this meeting.” He garbled his planned speech, but the cake box seemed to have survived the trip strapped to the rear of his bike. He tried to present the gift, but Jeanne didn’t drop his arm. “May I set this—”

“You!” Theresa’s voice sounded exactly like it had at Caddie when she went toe-to-toe with him. Maybe when he turned around everything would be the same.
Please.

He turned.

She stood in the doorway, wearing a pink sweater that begged to be stroked. Some dark strands of her hair caught in the nubby fabric across her shoulders, and others crackled loosely around her face. Her eyes wanted to incinerate him in the middle of her mother’s living room, but she was on her feet, hands on her hips, and damn if she didn’t lick her lips.

He took a step, ready to sweep her against his chest and seize the greeting he’d dreamed of, the welcome he
needed
after everything he’d seen and done in Morocco, but Jeanne tightened her grip and muttered, “She’s very angry.”

“We should go.” Carl yanked on Jeanne’s other arm.

They made a human chain, Carl pulling Jeanne, who held Wulf, as if they could prevent him scooping his woman in his arms. He’d missed her for seven months. Seven months without touching her warmth or seeing her smile, and now she was this close.

“Let’s go to the kitchen, Jeanne.” Carl tugged again.

“But—”

“Strolling in here like nothing happened!” The sparks shooting from Theresa’s eyes weren’t the welcome he’d imagined, but they were totally part of the woman he wanted.

“I smell food burning
in the kitchen
.” Carl dragged his wife through the other doors.

Theresa crossed the room as if unaware that she was moving, as if they were magnets, north and south, drawn toward each other. If he hadn’t relived the moment when she’d stormed away from him and climbed into that SUV every day for seven months, he might not have seen the difference, but her gait carried less authority, less confidence. His mistakes had stolen her stomp.

“Then you waltz in after six—or is it seven? I forget—months.” Gold hoops emphasized her soft earlobes as she grabbed a motorcycle helmet from the chair where Carl had dumped them. The red helmet, the pink sweater—she infused this white room with colorful, buzzing life.

He saw the windup start and held the cake box above harm’s way.

“Not a call.” The helmet glanced off his ribs and thankfully didn’t rebound into her chin.

He remembered her lethal kicks at Montebelli, but really, she had the worst girl arm. “Guessing you didn’t play as much softball as soccer.”
Skīta
,
that was a mistake.

She yanked the bakery box from his hands. “Not a word.” The best chocolate-blackout cake in Manhattan, a bid to win her mother’s approval, was about to become part of this fiasco. “Not even a fricking postcard.”

“Theresa, I’m sorry.” He’d anticipated groveling, but he had no idea how to defuse this level of anger. “Please—”

“Don’t take that fake soothing tone with me.” Five layers of chocolate came out of the box at an angle that resembled the last moments of the Titanic.

“Uh, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” He balanced on the balls of his feet, hands out, ready to dive to catch the cake. “Please, please—” he’d be trounced before he began if that chocolate-custard-frosted missile launched, “—think of your mother’s carpet.”

She looked at the cake as if weighing the consequences of gooey chocolate, white wool pile and Jeanne. The calculations must have clicked because she carefully set the cardboard circle and its listing cargo on the glass-topped table.

“Thank you.” He told his body to stand down, relax, because he still had a chance. Perhaps no greater than Lord Cardigan’s Light Brigade, but he’d worked with less.

Then she hefted a cut crystal vase from a table and tossed its white silk lilies next to a bowl of decorative seashells.

Oh no.
“That’s probably your mother’s—”

“If she knew you like I know you—” she gripped the vase with both hands and lifted it over her shoulder as if preparing to chop wood, “—she’d totally approve.” The weight pulled her shoulders past her spine until she teetered. “Underneath the mascara, she’s that kind of lady.”

“She seems very gracious.” He reached forward, ready to haul her into his arms if she tipped further. “I’m sure she doesn’t condone violence.” Actually, he suspected Jeanne would spike his balls with her pointy heels if he hurt Theresa, but he knew enough not to say that to her daughter. Theresa didn’t need suggestions.

“Seven months might be nothing to you. What’s that compared to fifteen hundred years? One three-thousandth of your life?” Her elbows dropped to her waist and the vase rested on her shoulder. She sounded choked as she turned away. “It’s a bit more of mine.”

“I’m here now.” He didn’t think his breathing would steady until she set the crystal down completely and he could hold her. “I’m staying.”

“It’s too late!” The couch pillows muffled the slam of the vase as she threw it onto the cushions. “Go away. Just. Go. Away.” She sounded close to tears.

“I won’t. Not again.” If he could connect with her, stroke her cheek or her hair, maybe they could heal together. “Not if I can help it.”

“Well, that’s a convenient qualifier, isn’t it? Then I’ll leave.” She turned to the door.

He couldn’t let her walk away this time, not without taking action.

* * *

“Hey! Put me down!” Theresa hadn’t expected to see the floor from this angle.

“You wanted to leave.”

“I meant alone!” As Wulf climbed the stairs, the jostling made her grab for any anchor within reach. His butt was as firm as she remembered, and the surprising desire to keep squeezing caused her to let go. Then she realized how far away the hall had receded.

Below them, her mother popped into the foyer. “Ca-a-a-rl, Ra-a-ay-mond,” she yelled over her shoulder. “You won’t believe this.”

As Wulf passed the first landing, Theresa stuck her tongue out at the woman who would trade her soul for a son-in-law. “Aren’t you going to stop him? Or rescue your only daughter?”

“Mr. Wilson, would you like coffee?”

A
simper.
Her mother had
simpered
at the barbarian
.

“No, thank you, ma’am. I suspect your daughter would dump it on me and I don’t want to cause a mess.” Politeness would secure his spot at the top of her mother’s list. Not that many others remained on the list, but still. His manners made her grind her teeth with anger.

“Stop sucking up!” She smacked the only thing she could reach—that very nice butt—while he chuckled, dammit. “Pillaging and carrying off maidens comes naturally to you, brute.”

“Maidens?” His laughter vibrated her thighs as he climbed the top steps. “Haven’t met one in years, but yeah, it’s like biking.” When his hand curved over her bottom, she tried to kick him, but he clamped an arm across her knees. “You never forget how to grab a wench.” He paused in the hall. “Which door?”

“I’m not telling.” That was a new low in maturity, and totally his fault. Totally.

He shouldered open the correct one. “Were you
ever
this frilly?”

She made the rudest sound she could manage while hanging upside down, but all he did was laugh again. Half expecting him to thump her on the bed and fall on her—half wanting him to, if she was honest—she refused to be disappointed when he lowered her gently and hovered. The individual amber-and-brown flecks that gave depth to his blue eyes drew her hand closer, and she touched his freshly shaved cheek. It felt as smooth as the silk embroidery he’d once given her, a scrap stuffed away with the rest of her dreams.

“Theresa.” The whisper in her palm conjured memories of nights and days side by side in Italy. When he lowered himself to the bed, mere inches separated them, not oceans or ranks.

“Why didn’t you call?” She bit her tongue for asking and stuck her hand under her pillow. “Forget it.”

His cheeks and mouth sagged into something softer than anger, perhaps sorrow or resignation or...she’d never be a pity fuck. Never.

“Don’t. Don’t you dare feel sorry for me.”

“I don’t.” He’d moved so close that it forced her to move to the far edge of her pillow, but she couldn’t evade the hand that fell onto her arm like a weight. “I feel guilty.”

“The IED wasn’t your fault.”

“You don’t know?” His expression grew tenser, and the lines on his forehead and around his mouth deepened. “No one told you about the bomb?”

“Told me what?” Cold leached into her bones at his use of the word
bomb
instead of
IED
. He wasn’t the type of man who would be imprecise about munitions. Somehow her flesh knew before the rest of her that something was about to break very bad.

“It wasn’t the Taliban.”

Oh
,
Mother of God.
Fear and memories of the carnage at Montebelli choked her.

“Black and Swan planted a bomb on the SUV’s frame. Inside the wire.”

The minutes that passed might have been hours as her arms hugged her chest. A detached part of her knew the onset of chills resulted from deep shock, and she needed to be warmer. Wulf’s body anchored the quilt to the bed, leaving her no choice but to shift close enough to steal his heat. Thigh to thigh with him, she burrowed her forehead against his chest while he ran one of his hands from her shoulder to her elbow and back, but even that contact didn’t stop her shivers. The ticking part of her brain recognized she should have been upset or demanded answers, but a surreal clarity prompted her to wonder why it mattered. Taliban or Black and Swan, the result was identical. Her leg was gone. So was her job and her independence. The who and why felt irrelevant.

“It’s my fault.” His voice was so low that even meshed this close, she barely heard.

“Because your team was fighting the heroin smuggling?” At the VA, the Senate hearings on Black and Swan’s drug corruption had been a constant on television.

“More than that.” He paused for a long time. “I told you about the other immortal, the head of Black and Swan. With the personal vendetta against my brother.”

His collar button would leave a dent in her cheek, but she didn’t want to move.

“He must have known it was only a matter of time until the money was cut off. Apparently because I refused to give up, Ivar intended to negotiate compensation, but Unferth drugged him.”

While he talked, his arms squeezed her until she could barely inflate her chest enough to breathe the air that had been warmed by his skin.

“He tortured Ivar. Badly. If you hadn’t saved me in the sewer...”

Her, save him? Was that how he remembered their time in Rome?

“Unferth sent pictures of what he’d done to my brother.” His voice cracked, and he paused to gulp air.

Pressed this close, she couldn’t see his face, but she recognized his need to absorb the comfort of another person’s hold. She’d felt that need for months, with nothing but her pillow on hand, but now she had him. Breathing the outdoor scent of his soap and another she thought of as Wulf himself, she clutched him tightly.

“I was Ivar’s only chance and I couldn’t risk breaking cover, not even a phone call to you. I’m sorry. Will you give me—us—another shot?”

Instead of disturbing her, his revelations seemed to slip the missing pieces into place, mirroring how their legs and torsos fit naturally together. “Yes.”

The moment stretched until her eyes drifted closed and her heart steadied to match the beat under her ear.

“Will you do something completely normal with me?” His voice sounded slow and thick with lethargy to match hers.

“No sewers, castles or firebug ninjas?”

“Afraid my plans aren’t that exciting. Just your mother’s cooking and whatever vino Carl serves.” He loosened his hold and tucked her hair behind her ear to look into her face. “What do you say to a hot date downstairs while I let your family grill me?”

“As long as you don’t ask me to treat your burns.”

“They can’t hurt me.” He trailed a finger from her ear to her lips. “Only you can do that.”

* * *

“I don’t want help with the dishes.” Theresa’s mother flipped a towel at Wulf to chase him from the sink. “I want you two to vanish, vamoose, scoot outta here.”

“No, you and Carl should go.” Theresa dodged the towel coming for her and scraped a plate into the garbage. Knowing Wulf shared the same kitchen, feeling his eyes on her, made even this mundane task exhilarating. Each move they made around the space felt like a dance performance, a dance she’d never thought to do again, and the bubbling in her veins signaled the finale. “You know, most mothers don’t encourage their daughters to ride motorcycles down dark, icy roads.”