First to Burn (31 page)

The heavy bag didn’t contain clothing. Wulf had bought more versions of the legend.

He wanted her to pursue the threads she’d started to unravel.

* * *

At Camp Caddie’s running track, Wulf had told her people who lived in multimillion-dollar brownstones had problems like everyone else. Studying Ivar’s art collection, she’d disagreed, but after three and a half days sharing the house, she knew the brothers had problems completely different from regular people’s worries over debts, love or jobs. Ivar flinched at noises, so the others living with him strove to be extremely quiet. He also consumed collegiate levels of beer and whiskey, which Wulf explained as an efficient source of calories, but which seemed to her to fulfill a more traditional desire for oblivion.

For his part, Wulf apparently suffered from an epic case of insomnia. Every morning she found a warm dent in an easy chair by her bed, and the cushion smelled vaguely woodsy like his soap, but she never caught him. When she left her office by the kitchen, he materialized with whatever she sought, whether it was towels or her water bottle. In short, he hovered, but other than one accidental brush of her arm, he hadn’t touched her since the first night.

She hadn’t summoned the nerve to touch him either.

Tonight, like on other evenings, she joined Ivar and Wulf for an eight o’clock dinner in the dining room. Unlike on other evenings, Laura had plans with a group of photographers. Without a partner in small talk, she spent the soup course studying Ivar. His pressed suit contrasted with his hunched shoulders and determined drinking. His hand was out of sight, but she’d noticed earlier that his fingers resembled bleached, shriveled beans.

A question had nagged her for three days. “Have you always had your arm injury?”

Both immortals froze, spoons in air, until Ivar slowly replaced his on the charger under his bowl. “No.”

“So it’s from your imprisonment?”

“Yes.”

She’d immersed herself in academic abstracts on the internet, taken notes on DNA replication, read about starfish and salamander regeneration and studied retroviral drug treatments. Anomalies led to breakthroughs. “What’s different this time?”

Ivar squeezed his eyelids shut, and his good hand pinched the bridge of his nose. Wulf neither spoke nor moved. The silence stretched.

“I’m sorry.” Of all people, she knew how uncomfortable others’ curiosity could be. “I shouldn’t pry. I—”

He made a cutting-off gesture. “A valid question. I should answer.”

Theresa felt Wulf’s gaze. Turning, she received an almost imperceptible nod, as if he too wanted his brother to open up.

“Unferth’s scientists removed my forearm. I’ve lost limbs in battle. Bone regrowth aches for an hour at most.” Ivar’s monotone betrayed nothing. “However, they applied an ointment to the stub and the bandages. My healing radically slowed.” His words scraped along her nerves, like a metal pick on ice. “Every time my arm and hand regrew, they cut them off.”

Phantom pain had been common for her first months of rehab. Sometimes charley horses in the missing calf had been so strong she’d woken in the night, but lately they’d decreased. The sympathetic pain that Ivar’s words caused surprised a gasp from her.

“Each time, it took longer. And less of the hand grew.”

She covered her mouth to keep from making another sound that would interrupt him. His emotions were so raw, his anger so palpable and yet so contained, that she wondered how he could sit at the table without destroying every dish and glass set in front of him.

“I lost count after the sixth amputation.”

* * *

Next to her, Wulf made a sound between a moan and gasp, and she gripped his thigh below the table. It was the first touch they’d shared in several days.

He laid his palm, warm and firm like an anchor, over hers and squeezed. Out of nowhere she thought of cookies,
Cinderella
and the first time they’d held hands. Her own leg pain, or not-leg pain, lessened.

Lifting from his shoulder, Ivar raised his sling above the edge of the table. The bloodless fingertips resembled a cadaver’s, only smaller and flaccid. His other hand was hard and fit where it lay alongside. “This took nearly a week to regrow, and I still do not have muscle control.”

“A growth retardant?” she asked, more to herself than to the men. “Something that affects nerve regeneration?”

Released from his retelling, Ivar shrugged and reached for his whiskey.

“I’ve been reading that echinoderms—starfish—regrow to complete size from one arm and a portion of the central disk.” That had been one of her more interesting discoveries.

“I’d rather not picture six more big brothers.”

“Don’t be facetious.” She glared at Wulf as Ivar drained another glass. “I’m thinking about how to
fix
his arm.” Ideas welled up like lava, the hot excitement of untangling a research puzzle filling her the way it always had when she’d walked into her thesis advisor’s lab. “There’s a study that shows that an injection of a single-strand type of RNA molecules can enable live chicks to regenerate a wing.”

“Not a language I speak, Doc.” Wulf grinned. “Can you translate to plain English? Could that counteract what Unferth did to my brother?”

“I don’t know. Honestly, it could make it worse.” This part had scared her yesterday. “Something similar resulted in a flatworm regrowing a tail where it should’ve had a head.”

“I am not interested in having an appendage other than a hand at the end of my arm.”

“He’s already a big enough dick,” Wulf muttered. “Doesn’t need a spare.”

“Beg your pardon?” His brother stared back with one raised eyebrow.

“I was saying that near the prison in Marrakesh, I saw a five-legged dog.”

“Are you certain that wasn’t your brain between its rear legs?” The insult seemed to revive Ivar enough that he ate a bite of steak. “No one removed my ears.”

Concealing her laughter by coughing into her napkin, Theresa felt a bubbling desire to share more of her research. “I’ve been reading a lot.” She’d spent days immersed in the office Wulf had created for her. Interesting and intriguing days, fascinating days, but lonely days. Maybe since her theories were about their condition, they’d want to know. “Symbiotic microbes can enhance their hosts, like a glowing bacteria that helps squid improve their camouflage. I know you think you have a virus, but I’m more inclined to believe you have a parasite or bacterial infection, because their genomes are so much bigger and they’re more likely to need an intermediate host like Grendel before they can become infectious. Like malaria needs mosquitoes.”

From the corner of her eye she saw Wulf’s grin, the one that meant she was babbling. For the first time in days, instead of grooves leading down from his mouth, he had tiny crinkles around his eyes, as if he wanted to laugh, so she took a deep breath and offered her latest, craziest idea. “If we started our own research lab, we could isolate and perhaps treat the immortality.” She couldn’t read Ivar’s expression, but Wulf’s was dubious.

“With Unferth hunting us, being mortal again doesn’t sound as good as it once did,” he said. “And that’s the point of a cure, right?”

“You’ve missed the point, brother.” Ivar’s voice scratched over the table. “What if Unferth were mortal?” His good hand made a fist next to his dinner plate as he leaned toward her, the most engaged she’d seen him since meeting him. “I will give you anything you need to achieve that. Money, a lab, assistants—they’re yours. What will it take?”

“I don’t know.” Her heart pounded as she realized how far beyond her expertise pursuing this idea would lead. “For starters, I’ll need to compare your DNA to a sample of Grendel’s. The commonality should be the infectious organism.”

Both men stared at her without comprehension.

“I need DNA from Grendel’s bones or blood.”

Whatever language they used had the unmistakable rhythm of profanity.

“It only requires a tiny amount of bone or tissue. Like what would be in the hilt of a sword.” Every version of the epic referred to Beowulf bringing the damaged sword hilt back from his journey to the deep where he’d confronted Grendel’s mother.

“After fifteen hundred years?” Wulf asked.

“A research institute in Germany sequenced a mastodon’s mitochondrial DNA from a fifty-thousand-year-old tooth.” She cocked her head to one side. “Surely those giant beasts had finished walking the planet when you all began your fateful trip?”

Wulf began to hum a familiar television theme until his brother glared him into silence.

“Or I could use Grendel’s arm or skull.” She’d flagged those references in the story as well, because if the bones could be located, they might be helpful to the puzzle. “They could have extractable genetic material.”

“The skull was lost in 1945 between the Nazis and the Soviet Red Army. The arm is too secure.” Ivar ticked off his objections. “It will have to be the hilt.”

“Stig could steal the arm.” Wulf mentioned someone she assumed was another immortal.

“I’ll inquire when I reach him. You realize Unferth may already have the skull? He commanded a Nazi
Kunstschutz
unit to loot on the Eastern front.”

How long would it take before references to their past didn’t make the hair on her arms stand up?

“Reason to secure the other artifacts quickly.” Underneath Wulf’s measured and rational speech, she detected a hint of excitement, as if he’d been assigned a new mission.

“I have much to think about.” Ivar stood, as if dismissing them from dinner. “Good evening.”

As he left the room, Theresa noticed he’d left his whiskey next to his plate.

Wulf lifted her hand from his thigh. She’d forgotten it was still there. Instead of letting go like she’d expected, he lifted it to his lips. Pressed a kiss to her palm. His strength, so long held away from her, flooded her from that connection. They’d get better, all of them, together. She’d taken the first steps down that road, and she planned to take another. Tonight Wulf wasn’t going to sleep in the chair across the room. He’d spend the night where he belonged: beside her.

* * *

Although Fort Campbell, Kentucky, was an hour behind Eastern time, Wulf doubted calling at 10:00 p.m. would interrupt dinner. The team would’ve redeployed home in late November, the same time he was searching Rabat and Marrakesh for Ivar, and Deavers and Kahananui and the others would’ve shared the holidays with their families. Last year he’d eaten turkey with Deavers and Kristin. She’d been pregnant with a second child. This year’s Christmas would’ve included the new baby.

He had at least an hour before he could slip upstairs without finding Theresa awake, so he’d started to pack. The air was stuffy in Ivar’s basement storage room, but the shelves were so well organized that Wulf could lay his hands immediately on what he needed for his trip. That left him free to stare at the phone. If redeployment went true to form, by this point the team would be restless. He could picture Kahananui working in his yard, cursing the cold, and Cruz closing down one too many bunny bars despite his claims to be reformed, because over the years he’d helped both with their preferred pastimes. Deavers would be throwing himself into All-American fatherhood as hard as he tackled mission planning, but since his wife didn’t need a movement order, a rally point or an extraction plan, he’d feel a little unappreciated about now. That’s the way two and a half months home usually panned out, with loose ends and lots of trying to build a routine. After three months, they usually hit their stride and found a rhythm preparing for the next deployment.

He missed the team. Ivar had shut him out, and even though she hadn’t rejected his touch at the dinner table, Theresa couldn’t possibly want more from him. The team would want him. And, because he didn’t trust himself to succeed without someone guarding his back, a job Ivar wasn’t ready to undertake, he punched a number in from memory.

“Deavers here.” His friend’s voice was brusque and quiet, the way he always answered a nighttime call in a house with sleeping kids.

“Chris.” Wulf greeted him back with his own name, that word enough to identify himself.

“Man, oh man,” He could hear his former commander’s grin in the way he stretched his words, almost laughing. “I hoped you’d call someday...”

“Yeah, me too.” His throat felt tight.

“How’s it going? Wait, let me go in my office.”

Wulf closed his eyes to picture the space Deavers called an office in his one-story rambler near the post. Kid-size plastic three-wheelers, a washer and dryer and in the corner, two leather rolling chairs mended with duct tape set around his father’s old footlocker for a table. It was the only place in the house his wife allowed him to chew.

“Kristin gave me an office upgrade for Christmas, by the way.” As Deavers settled in, a chair creaked loudly enough to be heard over their connection. “You’ll wish you were here.”

“Not a new chair? You’re not a good enough husband to deserve that.”

“Hoo-ah, this bad boy’s better than a chair. A top-of-the-line mini-fridge.”

Wulf heard the suction of an opening door.

“She thinks I don’t know it’s her way of snagging more space by exiling my beer. Got one handy? I recall a promise to share a drink when we hit civilization.”

“I’m ahead of you.” Wulf looked at the empty bottles sitting on the shelf next to a box of European cellular phone SIM cards.

His friend’s noncommittal
ah
conveyed a world of understanding. “So, the doc. How’s that’s going? How is she?”

At the question, the tiny screwdriver he was using to open the back of a burner cell phone jumped out of its groove. Going upstairs after dinner, Theresa had looked over her shoulder and half smiled with her eyes lowered and her head tilted
just so.
It might have been an invitation, but what if he was wrong?

“If you give me some self-sacrificing bullshit, the team will hunt you down and kick your ass until we make it hurt, no matter how long that takes. Copy?”

“Roger that.” The problem with having friends who knew you this well was that they knew you this well.