First to Burn (36 page)

He took her offering, and his tongue twirled and lapped while she melted into him. Between nerve-tingling sucks that drove sensation all the way to toes she didn’t even have, he whispered into her skin. “If I could, I’d rip your panties off and lick until you came in my mouth.” Because he couldn’t, his teeth pulled at her nipple. “I’d watch you this time. I’d watch how big and dark your eyes get.”

Grinding harder against his steel cock, she imagined him inside her, but she didn’t have to settle for fantasy. Tonight everything was in her control. It was a trick to balance on one knee and work her panties off while keeping as much of her skin pressed against him as she could—a good trick, made better by looking only at his body, not her own. The black fabric already smelled like sex from being rubbed between them. She trailed the lace over the hair at his groin and wrapped her panties around his shaft, then slipped the smooth silk up and down between his throbbing cock and her palm until he pumped his hips.

“Ride me now,” he protested when she removed her hand to brush the fabric up his sternum and swirl it around his nipples. “Come on.”

“Fifteen hundred years and you haven’t mastered patience?”

“Nope.” After she moved the fabric under his chin, he inhaled as if seeking her scent. “Will you punish me?” He sounded eager.

She froze, uncertain how to respond.

Sensing her immobility, he also stilled. “You must be angry.” So quietly his chest barely lifted, he continued. “Really angry. About the explosion and—”

“No!” Her denial came out too harshly, so she lowered her voice. But she wouldn’t let him bring the outside world into their cocoon. “I’m not angry. Not anymore.” She’d worked through anger months ago, reached whatever stage this was—probably acceptance.

“It’s safe to let your feelings out with me. Nothing hurts me.”

That was a load of crap. “I think a lot of things hurt you.”

“Not physically,” he said.

“I know that.” Even without fulfillment, the passion of moments ago had shifted into an intimacy deeper than she’d expected.

“Sometimes I’ve come close to nothingness, where all I could do was fight, because nothing else touched me.” Unable to read his eyes, she concentrated on his lips, which drew downward as he searched for words. “But you—you touch inside where I have missing pieces. It’s why I need you. Without you, I’m...” His voice trailed away.

“Empty?” That was a feeling she knew too well.

He nodded.

“Me too.” Right now she could tell him all her corrosive secrets, maybe because he couldn’t see her. “A lot of the time I feel hollow, like I’m missing more than a leg.”

“A shell casing.” His voice was quiet. “Sometimes I pick up dead brass on the range and recognize myself.”

“No.” She pressed a kiss to his chest, then the base of his throat. The salt on his skin tasted like a necessity of life. “You’re not empty.”

“Neither are you.” He paused, as if weighing a decision. “Ray, your leg, your home. I want to give you a chance to get something back, but I need to know you’ll forgive me.”

She pushed back against the flare his list had lit in her stomach and spoke the rational answer she knew she should give. “You didn’t set the bomb.”

“Promise you’ll forgive me when I’m done.”

“I don’t understand.” The last five minutes had veered out of her control, and she had no idea how, or even whether, to return to what they’d been doing. “What are you going to do?”

Instead of answering, he asked a question. “You’re medically discharged, but you’re still a licensed doctor, aren’t you?”

The reminder of the career she’d left hurt her like he’d thumbed down on a bruise.

“You can still practice medicine, right?” This time he was louder. “Your brain’s fine?”

Suddenly chilled, her flesh shrunk from his. “I don’t have a traumatic brain injury.”

“So you’ve been too busy feeling sorry for yourself to work? When did letting other people wait on you become your style?” The sneer in his tone came out of nowhere and whacked her with accusation bordering on condemnation.

“I don’t let anyone wait on me.” As the words popped out, she knew what he would say next and
dammit
, he was telling the truth.

“You’re telling me your mother
didn’t
cook your dinners and do your laundry? I thought you were a go-getter who didn’t give up, but one setback and poof, you quit.”

“This isn’t a setback.” Her nails dug into her palms, and she tried to understand how they’d gone from kisses to insults. What had gone wrong? “This is forever. I lost my leg.”

“Whoop-de-do.” His mouth twisted. “You have a great mind and eyes and hands. That’s more than a lot of other vets.”

“You don’t know what it’s like!” With her fist, she dammed a sob from escaping her mouth. “You’re never injured for more than five minutes!”

“You’re right, I don’t know what it’s like to sit on my ass and whine.”

“So I’ll get a job if you shut up! Shut the fuck up!” Like it didn’t belong to her, wasn’t connected to her arm or her brain, when her fist bounced off his shoulder she couldn’t believe what she’d done. Ohmigod, that wasn’t her. She couldn’t possibly have hit him.

“See—your hands work. Why haven’t you been using them to help people?” One corner of his mouth turned up. “Think losing a leg is your ticket?”

“You don’t know what I’ve lost!” This time she knew the instant
before
she did it, and she listened for the
thwack
of her open palm on the meat of his arm. It even hurt her hand a little, but she felt a shocking stir of satisfaction, as if she’d snatched back a piece of her own strength, until the tide of self-disgust raged through her. “That was wrong! I’m sorry, I—”

“It’s fine, Theresa. I’m consenting. In fact, I’m pushing you. Let all the poison out. Use me to—what’s the medical term?—lance your wound. I want you to.”

His voice kept her eyes focused on his lips as she covered her mouth with both palms, afraid to free the hands which had become so unpredictable.

“The convoy.” He threw out the two words guaranteed to blow up the emotions she tried so hard to lock away. “Tell me about the convoy.”

It felt like he’d pulled her stomach inside out through her throat. “Why? Why’d I go?” She didn’t recognize the sound that burst from her chest, a sound like crows fighting, but it was the sound of the feelings she was finished hiding from herself, from her group therapy sessions, from the whole damn world. If he wanted her to share, then she would. And she had rage enough to spare. Rage at the army that had tossed her out as easily as a pair of latex gloves, rage at the fucking Afghans and their fucking opium, rage at the whole fucking war, and somehow she smacked his shoulder again and it was louder this time. “Why’d I do it? I knew. I knew it wasn’t safe. I knew it before you told me.” Each repetition called up her fury at everyone who still had their same old lives, and that fury mixed with the sobs that were shaking her because she had nothing but her shitty new one in her fucking pink bedroom and even that wasn’t hers anymore, it had burned along with Ray and her whole fucking life. “You were right and I knew it, but I went anyway. Because I’m stupid.” Arms wrapped around herself, she rolled away from his warmth and sobbed out the full truth. “It’s my own fault I lost my leg. All my fault.”

“No! It’s Unferth’s.
You
told me that.” Next to her, he struggled with his bonds. “And you’re not stupid. You got in that vehicle because you cared.”

“Everyone says I’m a hero, but I’m just stupid, stupid. And now Ray’s dead.” She collapsed onto the pillow, drained but still heaving. “Ray’s dead and Mom and Carl are—are—”

“They’re safe. You’ll see them soon.”

His voice sounded strong and reassuring, as if she could invest hope in him, but nothing he promised could change how empty and crushed her chest felt. “I’ve lost everything.”

“Not me,” he said. “You won’t lose me. Not ever.”

He couldn’t mean that, not after what she’d done. She’d become the type of person she’d been required to report when she found bruises in an exam, a nut job who ought to be in jail.

“I love you.”

Despite her violence and tears, instead of telling her off like she deserved, he’d said...
he loved her.
Her next breath wasn’t so loud in the quiet room, not so hot and achy, so she took another while his words ricocheted and expanded in her soul.
He loved her.
What he’d said a little while ago about digging up, not down, when life turned into a pile, wasn’t as useless as she’d thought. If she chose to start over with him, wherever they lived, whatever she decided to do, maybe they could build a future.
Because he loved her.

She wanted to share her discovery, and she knew how to begin. Stretching, she shifted closer and looked into his face. The blindfold was askew enough that he could probably see under the edge as she bent to his lips. This kiss was slow, not rushed. Felt in her soul, not merely in her body, it linked two people who shared everything, and she didn’t think it would ever stop.

“I love you.” His words wrapped her in security. “Untie me so I can hold you.”

“I love you too.” The words felt right, but they sounded too quiet and tiny to mark the decision she’d made. She could turn off the lamp next to the bed, or she could take her chances that his love was strong enough to see everything. “I love you.” This time she said it louder, louder than the tearing sound of the restraint straps as she pulled them apart, louder than her heart pounding in her chest as she ignored the light switch.

Freed, his arms crushed her into his embrace.

She slid two fingers under the towel and lifted. Nothing on her outside could be worse than the inside she’d showed him, and he loved her. “Look at me.”

* * *

The shop around the corner was a type Theresa recognized as universal, one that displayed today’s pastries in front of yesterday’s plastic-wrapped sandwiches and cigarettes. While Wulf ordered breakfast in tourist English, she glanced at a stack of newspapers. A photo above the fold featured the stone facade of the National Museum disrupted by an ambulance and three police cars.

“Buy the paper.” Her stomach churned as if she’d slammed five espressos, even though she hadn’t yet had her first. From the front page an official portrait of Direktøren Olaf Haukssen, 1935—2014, stared at her. His aristocratic white eyebrows were lost in the gray newsprint.

“Here.” She pulled Wulf away from the register, but the shopkeeper and the glass windows made her shoulders creep with anxiety, so she stepped outside and put her back to the stone wall before she pointed at the article. “What’s it say?”

He traded her for the bag of pastries. “I don’t read Danish.”

“What?” She had to remember to close her mouth. “You freaking speak forty languages.”

“Not modern Danish.” With his eyebrows bunched toward his nose, he studied the paper. “Guys in my profession like hot spots, not cold, stable ones.”

“I thought you were pretending with the cashier!” Reaching over his arm, she jabbed at the image of the museum. Snowflakes melted on its surface, leaving splotches like pockmarks. “Police can’t be a good thing. And two dates by Dr. Haukssen.”

“
Død.
” His finger paused under one word. “I’m sure that means dead.”

When a dark, forgotten thought flooded out of her stomach, she had to grab his arm to steady herself. The contact didn’t halt her spreading fear. “We overlooked something yesterday.”

“I think
stikke
means stab.”

“Dr. Haukssen said he’d heard Geatish twice before. Once when his father was killed.”

“Uh-huh.” He frowned at the page.

“The second time.”

Wulf raised his eyes from the paper, and she saw comprehension. A passing cross-country skier who had to step sideways said something rude to them, but she didn’t care.

She spoke the thought they must have shared. “We forgot to ask when he heard it again.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Theresa’s head bobbed as the taxi van, its defroster maxed to counter the body heat produced by four men and her, slogged west from Copenhagen. After she and Wulf had explained the news of Dr. Haukssen’s murder, the interior had fallen into silence. Jammed between Wulf and Chris Deavers, she fought to remain alert despite the hypnotic effects of continuous white-on-white swirling snow.

“Rest.” Settling his arm around her shoulders, Wulf tucked her as near as their lap belts allowed. “It’s probably another half hour.” On the map the Lejre exit was twenty-five miles from the outskirts of Copenhagen, but blizzard conditions tripled the driving time.

If she didn’t talk, she’d fall asleep, likely with her mouth open, which wasn’t her ideal pose. “So how’d you know the guy who gave you the weapons?”

Cruz half turned from the front passenger seat. “Yeah, before I go
loco
from all this damn snow, what’s the story with your friend Guleed?”

Wulf shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

“Dude, this van is not in a hurry.” Even Kahananui sounded tense. He’d kept both hands on the steering wheel for the last hour, counter to his normal laid-back attitude.

As if to delay, Wulf lifted a paper coffee cup that she knew was already empty.

“Well?” Theresa prodded.

“Fine. Guleed impressed me when he was a kid, and I felt like doing a good deed, so I helped him get an education. After the shit hit the fan in Somalia, I put him in touch with someone who arranged a refugee visa.” His shrug brushed her shoulder. “That’s all.”

“Last night he made it sound like more.” Cruz kept pushing.

“Gave him some money to buy his first grocery. Wasn’t much.”

“Well, now he has four,” Cruz said.

“And apparently a crate of guns under his bed,” Theresa added. Judging from what she’d seen the team load in the back, Guleed had probably handed over all the assault rifles in Denmark.

When Cruz snickered, Wulf knuckled the back of his head.

“What?” Reaching past Wulf, she cracked the window to blast away her fogginess, but she couldn’t endure the wind for longer than five seconds. “What’d I say that was funny?”

“He’s laughing at your word choice,” Deavers said from her left.

“Guns? Oh,
that.
” She rolled her eyes, replaying the ditty sergeants liked to drill into lieutenants who misspoke.
This is my weapon
,
this is my gun
,
this one’s for shooting
,
this one’s for fun.
“Glad you enjoy twelve-year-old humor.”

“Too sophisticated. He’s more like eight. Isn’t that the age when kids love fart jokes?” Wulf looked across her to Deavers.

“Don’t look at me. My oldest’s still perfecting knock-knock-banana.”

“Yo, backseat comedians, here’s your banana.” Cruz flipped them the bird.

“I’m still curious. What’d Guleed do that impressed you?” She pictured a scrawny boy rescuing Wulf from a crashed helicopter or breaking him out of jail.

“Bill me for a drink.”

“That’s all?” Three pairs of eyes—only Kahananui managed to keep looking forward—stared at the man to her right.

“It was a messy drink.” He crushed the paper cup, then stuffed it in a bag. “The tab included a coffin. Took nerve for a slum kid to chase me.”

While the earlier silence had seemed to result from confirmation of the dangers they faced, this time Theresa imagined they were considering how the former child had aged into a prosperous middle-aged man and Wulf hadn’t.

Finally Cruz cleared his throat. “Well, he turned out well. Nice daughter too.”

“You met his family?” she asked, intrigued by a link to Wulf’s past.

“Oldest girl’s an accountant. She was checking the books when we arrived.” Kahananui didn’t pull his eyes off the road as he answered. “I thought Cruz was MIA when he got a look at the Somali-Swede combo platter.”

“Guleed married a Swedish biology professor,” Wulf muttered next to her ear. “His wife’s tall and rather, ah, impressive.”

“As in brilliant researcher?”

“Uhh—”

“Refined my lady plan.” She recognized Cruz’s tone as the one he used to provoke his teammates. “Not just brainy. Number-cruncher chicks appreciate a man of action, and I could use some investment advice, so I thought—”

“No thinking.” This time Wulf rapped twice on the back of Cruz’s skull. “Not about any woman I’ve ever introduced you to, got that? I spent too many nights listening to you bitch and moan in bars on six of the seven fucking continents to want you near—”

Theresa didn’t know enough Spanish to understand Cruz’s interruption, but she could guess at its content from Wulf’s scowl and the other men’s laughter.

“Here we are.” Kahananui turned right, but half the vehicle wanted to make a U back to Copenhagen. He steered into the skid, and they straightened out pointing the correct direction, if the lower strip of snow between high drifts indicated a road.

As the van inched forward, an entirely different quiet descended. Each man went somewhere in his head. She could sense them planning with an almost physical quality, as if mental readiness was actual gear they donned before a mission. Their focus rubbed off on her, because she absorbed much more than plain white hills from the scene outside. There were shapes under the snow, and it seemed like she could identify them. Fences. Shrubs. Depressions that had to be ditches. Then they stopped.

“End of the line, chimichangas.” Cruz zipped his one-piece snowsuit to his neck and jumped out of the front, rifle up as he scanned the hills. Within seconds he’d put on snowshoes, goggles and a pack. “Talkie channel six, right-o? Scout out.” And like that, he was gone.

After reaching behind the bench seat, Wulf dumped snow pants and a parka into her lap. “Dress.” All intimacy had disappeared as quickly as Cruz.

“I’m not a dog. You don’t need to bark.” She struggled to disentangle fabric and suspenders while feverishly hoping that the ankle zippers opened wide enough for the pants to slip over her C-Leg. No getting around that she was slower and weaker, but she didn’t want to end up floundering from the beginning.

“I’m in charge of keeping you alive.”

Thankfully the pants fit over her prosthetic. But she had to hump up and down on the seat to pull them over her thighs and butt. Deavers had left the side door open for air, a godsend because she was already panting and sweating.

Wulf must’ve thought she was ignoring him. “For this op, do as I say, immediately,
no arguments
, or I swear on a burning longboat, I’ll flex-cuff you inside the van, got it?” His face hardened, as if the word cuff didn’t bring back memories of the night before.

She stared at her trembling hands. How much help could she offer?

“Hang ten, Wulfie.” Kahananui slapped him on the back, but he didn’t relax.

“Remember how to use one of these?” Stepping between her and Wulf, Deavers handed her a nine-millimeter Beretta pistol.

Automatically her wrist rotated and her thumb slipped over the cold metal so she could both feel and observe the safety lever. On. She must have performed that check twenty times a day in Afghanistan, every time she put her weapon on, took it off or cleared it at a barrel outside a building. For months that movement had been as natural as signing a prescription, and doing it again switched something inside her to the ready position. The pistol was a hunk of metal, inert and black, but in her hand it became so much more.

“Cruz!” Deavers spoke into one of the walkie-talkies Guleed had provided. “Ready to report, or you too busy jacking off? Over.”

“All clear. No movement, no lights. Should I recon the targets? Over.”

“Negative. Stay hidden. K and I will do close recon after we prep for departure. Over.”

“Got it, Great Leader. Out.”

Prepping for departure turned out to mean turning the van. She shifted gears and steered while the men pushed until the vehicle pointed toward the highway.

Flushed with cold and exertion, Wulf rested his arms on the window frame and lowered his face to be level with hers. “Ma’am, do you know how fast you were driving?”

“That depends.” Looking into his eyes crystallized the urge to kiss him, as if they could sneak one of those you’re-here-and-so-am-I-so-let’s-kiss moments, even in the middle of robbing a historic site. “Are you the good cop or the bad one?”

“I’m the very bad—” A massive ball of white hit him in the back of the head, knocking his shoulders through the opening and making her giggle.

“Think that’s funny?” He mock-growled before he kissed her, cool lips and mint candy and man, but the moment she softened, he pulled away. “Sorry I was hard on you earlier. I’m not used to...” He trailed off with a shrug.

“I promise I’ll listen to you and the others. I’ll leave if you say it. No arguments.” He didn’t have to say that she was a distraction or not up to speed. She knew. “Believe me, all I want to do is find the cross and go.”

The next snowball thunked into the windshield so hard she jerked and slammed her elbow into the steering wheel. Luckily she missed the horn.

“Got the message!” Wulf called over his shoulder. “Unless you want to stay in the van, time to get out and join us.”

How she didn’t fumble the door handle, she didn’t know, but somehow she climbed out of the van and stood and her knees didn’t shake, at least not visibly.

Within ten minutes of starting the uphill trek, her thighs were shaking and she’d revised any initial enthusiasm for getting intimate with the crunch of snow. Ardently, vigorously, adamantly and vehemently revised. Even with her smart C-Leg auto-adjusted for uneven terrain, snowshoes sucked. The metal teeth on the bottoms of these traylike contraptions didn’t prevent her from sliding backward on the incline, so she walked ducklike with the fronts of the shoes pointed out. Unlike the men, she used two lightweight poles as outriggers to keep from tilting left or right, but her thighs still burned worse than a bad bikini wax, worse than a shot of cheap tequila, worse than physical therapy exercises. Chicks from New Jersey did not do shit like this. If they were jocks, they played soccer or skied in the Poconos or even joined the army, but they did not snowshoe. This was hell. That freaking cold day had indeed arrived.

Deavers and Kahananui vanished into the immense grayness where snow clouds merged with snow-covered hills, but she couldn’t waste cells wondering where they’d gone. All she did was trudge behind Wulf, lifting each foot in rhythm with a silent litany of profanity that marched two-by-two like ants in a chant in her head, until finally she reached the crest.

The haphazard cluster of a half dozen structures, their windowless walls topped with white roof humps, disoriented her. She caught up to Wulf on the porch of a barn-size building as he stuck wires into goop he’d pressed along the door frame.

“Stand back,” he said.

An instant later low clouds absorbed the echoes from the mini-explosion. Where the door had once had hinges, now it was attached to its frame only by a dead bolt. A noisy break-in should have started an alarm or alerted a guard, but nothing moved. She’d grown up too close to Newark Airport to be comfortable in this blanketing silence.

Inside, Wulf flicked on his flashlight and illuminated rows of display cases and random furniture, all of which probably spent the summer months spread throughout the site.

She stared around the echoing warehouse while she fumbled with her snowshoe buckles. Her relief over finishing the hike was surpassed by the creepy sensation of being watched, and the second set of straps tangled under her heel.

Wulf made a sound, probably disgust, and reached for her hand. “Here.” One slice to the palm of her right mitten let her fingers escape. “Get out your weapon. I’ll take the second row.”

“Guess I’ll take the first then,” she muttered.

Pistol in her right hand, flashlight in the left, she searched each display case for a large gold cross and checked the contents of each box for references to St. Ansgar or a
krusifiks.
The room was cold enough that her lungs hurt if she didn’t remember to breathe through her neck gaiter. Somewhere to her left, Wulf searched a parallel path.

“Anything?”

Asked in a normal voice, his question startled her into a small yelp. Thank goodness the pistol required a double-action pull on the first shot. “Not yet.”

She played her light beam over the mannequin at the end of her row, trying to determine why the chain mail-wearing figure made her neck shrink into her shoulders.
It’s just an oversized doll
,
a
helmet plopped on a
—

“
Aiiiiy!
” Her scream shattered the icy quiet. The helmet’s eye sockets weren’t blank. It wasn’t an empty suit of armor. It moved, and then so did she. She raised her weapon to firing position, an automatic motion that she’d drilled for years, but she’d dropped the flashlight and it rolled under her foot. Before she could squeeze the trigger to the end of the pull, she went down. Hard. On her butt.

“Theresa!” Wulf burst around the cabinets as the thing stepped off its plinth.

“It’s alive!” She scooted into a gap between boxes.

“Get out!” Wulf’s submachine gun exploded with sound.

The armored warrior dove behind a stack of crates.

“Go!”

He didn’t have to tell her a third time. As she crawled through a gap toward the next aisle, her hood caught on the underside of a table, but it released after a hard tug. She kept moving.

Then a howl erupted up and down the sound spectrum, a howl so otherworldly that even encased in fleece and goose down, she froze. She wanted to curl up and cover her head, hide, but that motion was more than she could force from her muscles.

“Unferth!” Wulf’s shout told her the last thing she wanted to know. Another immortal was here.

The floor of a museum warehouse was shitty place to die.