First to Burn (38 page)

“Not so tough without an army behind you.” His opponent yanked at a porch plank.

“Tough enough to destroy you and your company.” Pushing to his elbows and knees, Wulf prepared to test whether his leg could hold weight.

“Black and Swan was mine.” Board in hand, Unferth lurched toward the edge of the hill.

“Took your secret lab too.” Wulf stood, but his hands couldn’t handle a weapon, and he wasn’t steady enough to kick.

“Did your brother enjoy the accommodations? I’ll offer a better view next time.” Unferth spun a circle with the board, laughing. “Thank him for his contribution to science. He won’t be so quick to treat the rest of us like thrall in the future.” Unferth’s humor hinted at dark knowledge beyond Wulf’s and chilled him more than the snow. “He will show me respect!”

“Why should he? You’re a coward and a sneak.” Every minute he kept Unferth talking was a minute he grew stronger. “You styled yourself Hrothgar’s bard, but it’s not even your story people still read, is it? It’s Galan’s version of the tale.” After fifteen hundred years, the Vikings knew which wounds to jab when they met.

Unferth kicked his board to the edge.

“Running away like always?”

“No honor in fighting you.”

“What do you know about honor? You’re fleeing like a bantling!” Wulf floundered forward, struggling to balance. “You’ve never had honor, not since you tried to trick Beowulf with your useless sword. Like you, it gave up on the first blow.”

“But I haven’t given up.” He was still laughing as he dropped to his makeshift sled. “Ask your brother if he’s found everyone.”

* * *

Don’t wrap around a tree.
Theresa repeated directions in her head because her lips had iced shut, but she failed to follow the biggest one:
don’t think about Wulf.
The wind blew tears out of her eyes and froze them on her lashes, but it also cleared her brain to focus on driving the snowmobile. She’d fooled around with a motorcycle less than a handful of times, but she thought she might have a knack for this machine. Survival skills weren’t taught in the classes she’d taken at Princeton, but maybe she’d absorbed more from Carl than she’d realized.

Or maybe Wulf had been right when he accused her of being an adrenaline junkie.

The van materialized in front of her, its white paint nearly invisible against the snow. Kahananui pulled up behind and untied Deavers. The absence of her passenger’s weight released her tension, and she slumped.

Kahananui crouched beside her, rifle up, and that was when she discerned a speck on their trail, closing quickly. Her chest rose, hope that it was Wulf warring with fear of another attack, but she didn’t have time to settle on a reaction before Kahananui said, “Cruz,” and lowered his rifle.

Not Wulf. He was still on the hilltop, where the museum burned like a reenactment of Beowulf’s pyre. A phrase from Seamus Heaney’s translation came to her:
And flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house
.

“Wulf and a movie-character crazy headed for the woods.” Cruz didn’t dismount from the third snowmobile. “I want to ride after them.”

“Negative. He ordered us out.”

Cruz opened his mouth to argue, but Kahananui cut him off. “I don’t like it either.” He jerked his head at the back of the van, where he’d set Deavers’s limp form. “But the boss is sucking fumes.”

Theresa twitched a silver space blanket from the bench seat and tucked it around Chris’s shoulders. He groaned and rolled his head, as if approaching consciousness. “We need to warm up the van.”

Cruz still didn’t look like he agreed, so the Hawaiian uncrossed his arms and pointed at the hilltop. “That flare is going to draw mega-attention. No way we can be here eating soup when the Five-Os arrive with sirens and lights.”

Cruz stayed on his snowmobile. “Guess I missed your promotion to chief dick in—”

“Knock it off!” Theresa forced them to look at her instead of each other. Without a word being spoken, the dynamic shifted. Maybe because she was a doctor or an officer, or maybe because she was Wulf’s woman—she didn’t know why exactly, but she knew it was her call.

“Chris needs more medical attention than he can get here, so we go. All of us.” She wanted to stay, wanted to find Wulf as much as Cruz did, but that wasn’t what he’d wanted. And she knew the last thing he’d accept was another one of them getting hurt trying to help. “Get in, both of you, and start driving.”

* * *

Wulf watched as Unferth’s board slid several hundred feet and stopped on a flat. He could leave, follow Theresa and the others. As if he floated over his own body, he saw himself collapsing into her arms and burying his face in her hair. The need to join her almost tripped him before he jerked himself back to reality.

Unferth wasn’t conceding. In a day or two he’d recover. More innocents like Dr. Haukssen would cross his path. And whoever he’d stashed in another lab would still be a prisoner if Wulf didn’t find out more. This fight had to end, as permanently as he could manage, even though the pain in his hands had worsened. Burns did that. Dead flesh left craters of agony that defied healing longer than a simple cut. Without his hands, he didn’t have a chance of making or carrying a sled.

A rain barrel stood under an eave. He bucked it with his hip and torso until it tipped, then pushed with his thighs and elbows, aiming for the spot where Unferth’s ride had started.

Below, the other man stood. “Give up yet, Wulf? You’re slower than a three-day shit.” At this distance the shout sounded thin and weak. “Hear your brother’s calling a meeting of the Thing to remind everyone that he’s in charge. Can’t imagine what they’ll think of his hand.”

“Imagine away.” Freezing air sliced deep in his lungs with each panting breath. He’d have to remember to tell Ivar one of the supposedly loyal immortals was double-dealing, although thankfully none had fought alongside Unferth today. “Where are your usual toads? Dumped you too?”

He ducked into the barrel and pushed with his stronger leg until gravity took charge of the roll. His head snapped from his chest and banged against the wood as he thumped down the slope, braced with his knees and elbows while the world churned and he rode his idea to the end.

Krrrakk
. The barrel slammed into an immoveable object and disintegrated. Blood filled his mouth, so much that he had to spit into the snow. As he came to his knees using the strength in his abdomen and legs, his eyes tracked footprints from Unferth’s abandoned board to the edge of the woods. Using his elbows and chest, he maneuvered a broken barrel stave into the pocket between his armpit and his triceps. The primitive weapon and the wind-borne ashes fluttering around him combined to strip him of the soft lures of modern life and drive him to his feet. Warriors went to their destinies upright, not crawling like a worm or kneeling like a supplicant.

The barrel had crashed into a stand of marsh alders, ice rivulets twining between their roots like snares. He hadn’t entered this bog in fifteen hundred years, not since they’d followed the gore trail from Heorot. Logically, he knew they hadn’t walked over this exact spot. That trail would be gone or farther south or drained by generations of farmers, but his gut roiled with fear staring into the wasteland of his nightmares. Armed only with a piece of shattered wood, no sword, no shield, no brother in the lead, he had to proceed. Tonight the fight was his alone.

* * *

The van was too dark inside to see Deavers’s injuries without night vision gear. Why she was surprised when Cruz pulled a set of NVG out of his bag, she didn’t know. He also provided a complete medical pack, so she set to snipping her patient’s pants in order to clean and assess his wounds. His vitals were already improving.

Before she finished, Chris opened his eyes and muttered, “What happened?”

“Don’t move, okay?” She raised one surgically gloved hand to reassure him, but he groaned and his eyes again rolled back and out he went. She looked at her glove. Saw blood.

“How’s the boss?” Cruz knelt beside her while Kahananui drove. He had to raise his voice over the grind of the van’s gears, but he didn’t take his gaze or his rifle scope off the road behind them. “How bad?”

She knew every Special Forces soldier had medical training exceeding that of most EMTs, so Cruz would know in a glance that the nickel-size hole inches below Chris’s buttock was more annoying than dangerous. Hand on the floor, she balanced herself through another fishtailing swerve. “See for yourself.”

“That’s it? Did you check for an exit wound?”

“That is the exit wound.” The entrance wound was an even cleaner circle on his quadriceps. “He stuck his leg out too far.”

“Then what’s wrong—”

“I suspect your fearless leader is having an episode of vasovagal syncope. He’ll recover.”

“Huh?” Cruz looked between them again, then back at the road, but the grooves around his eyes and nose had deepened. “That’s one I don’t know. What do you do for it?”

“Kahananui had the right idea when he pulled his hair. Does your kit have sal volatile?”

“Wulf’s not here to translate that, ma’am.”

No, he wasn’t, and that cut into her, so she kept talking. “Smelling salts. In vasovagal syncope, the patient’s heart rate and blood pressure drop after a trigger, such as anxiety caused by the sight of one’s own blood. All those guys who hit the floor when they see the needle pull out after immunizations? Vasovagal syncope.”

“You’re saying he fainted? That’s all?” As she nodded, Cruz began to grin. “From seeing his own blood?” The last word stretched with disbelief.

“He did lose a fair amount.” Her caveat didn’t stop the other soldier’s laughter. Poor Chris. “But yeah, he’s basically—”

“A pussy.” It must have taken years of training to learn to steady a weapon while laughing that hard, but Cruz managed.

“That’s not quite how I would’ve put it.”

“’Course not, Doc, you’re too polite. But you’ve got more balls than Miss Christy here.”

* * *

Tree trunks closed behind Wulf. He stumbled over a bottle and saw a plastic bag pinned by brambles, but deeper in the woods, signs of modern life disappeared. The crunch of crusted snow, the rattle when he snagged underbrush and the squelch where patches of sulfuric mud hadn’t frozen returned him to his Nordic origins.

He heard a metallic clink behind him and spun with the barrel stave clutched as lancelike as he could manage without useable hands. It slapped Unferth’s chest and knocked him to his knees. Gouging with the splintered plank would’ve been effective, but the other Viking ducked.

When Wulf tried to readjust the angle of his wooden weapon, it fell from his armpit, so instead he kicked the side of the immortal’s helmet.

Unferth’s scream stretched longer than the startled flights of crows from the far trees. He rolled on the ground, clutching the helmet, and jerked it from his head.

Wulf’s first look at the other man’s exposed face repulsed him into backing away from the next kick. In the forge of the burning warehouse, the protective cover had melded with Unferth’s scalp, jaw and cheeks. Charred skin and muscle filled the helmet, and its removal revealed Unferth’s skull. A rectangular patch of skin remained around his eye sockets, where scorching metal hadn’t flayed his face, but the rest of the Viking had become a death’s-head.

“We’re where we started,” he rasped from Wulf’s feet. “Aren’t we?”

Horror bred pity for the man below him, and with it the need to understand. He couldn’t reconcile the swathe of destruction with the broken shell at his feet. “In the name of Balder’s son, why?”

The immortal tried to roll toward a rock, but the bubbling mud at the edge of the dark pond sucked at his chain mail, and Wulf remembered Unferth’s earlier taunt.

“Who else did you capture?” If one of the men he’d known for centuries, someone he’d shared bread and battles with, was being tortured like Ivar had been, he’d kick the information out of Unferth. “Who?”

“Expecting a deathbed confession?” Unferth’s fingers stretched toward the stone. “Find someone who dies.”

Wulf no longer controlled even a stick, but with hands, the most deadly weapon, Unferth could still threaten.

Beowulf had killed Grendel with his hands.

If Wulf waited for Unferth’s answers, he’d have another fight. Rotted logs dotted the waterline, and Wulf slammed his burnt arm stubs deep into a soft chunk of wood. He shrieked with the agony the impact shot through him, but the log stuck on his forearms as he raised it.

If he closed his eyes while he crushed Unferth, he could miss. So he had to witness each blow. Witness the skull, eyes now glazed, break off the neck.

And then he threw up.

But he couldn’t leave the body. That would be too temporary.

On his knees at the edge of the mere, he watched until no bubbles broke the black surface of the water. Maybe the chain mail would keep the torso down, and maybe kicking the skull into a tree had doomed the other Viking. Maybe without a companion to put his head back, as Ivar had done for Wulf on the plains of Mongolia, the immortal couldn’t forge himself into a man again. Maybe there was an end.

Cold gelled the blood in Wulf’s veins. Slowed him, now that he didn’t have to fight. Theresa and his friends and his brother would be safe. He could lay in the leaf mold, rest.

His fight had finished.

Chapter Thirty

Theresa’s needle went smoothly through Deavers’s thigh, bringing the skin together as neatly as stitches performed in a clinic. Guleed’s dining room table was a fine substitute, so long as she didn’t let the sweaty, armed bodies stalking from door to window and back to table distract her.

“What can I do?” Cruz loomed at her elbow like an expectant father.

“Don’t block my light.” She tied off the thread. A steady saline drip had brought Chris back to grumpy coherence. Besides stitching, her task was to keep him from seeing his own blood. “If you can’t cough up an X-ray, I’d settle for a shot of lidocaine.”

“Vodka?”

“I was referring to him, not me.” She pushed on her patient’s side, indicating he should roll to his stomach so she could tackle the exit wound.

“So was I, ma’am.”

“You wouldn’t.” She looked up. “Alcohol depresses breathing function.”

Chris’s throat vibrated with the sound of a man trying to transfer a load of pain. No way around it—stitches without anesthetic hurt. “Vodka. With hot sauce.”

“Not a chance.” She slipped the curved needle through his skin. “Only a few more.”

Cruz looked at his captain. “Reindeer?”

Focused on her handiwork, she hadn’t noticed the captain’s goofy underwear until now.

“Married dudes go extreme for attention, don’t you?”

Chris unfisted an appropriate middle finger in response, but before Cruz could reply, a double ding drove the men into ready stances. As his men bounded across the room, Chris automatically tried to roll off the table, but she braced him with both hands. Eyes and weapons swiveled to the door, which Kahananui pantomimed opening.

Guleed reached for the knob with the speed of VA paperwork.

No one breathed as the door swung a foot into the room.

Theresa recognized Ivar in the apartment hall and stretched a hand toward Cruz, who stood behind the door holding a business-size blade. “It’s okay! It’s Wulf’s brother!”

The Americans froze. Guleed was the first to grasp that the man in the hall was a friend, and partly responsible for his successful life in Denmark, so he extended both arms in welcome.

“What’s on your gl—uhhh.” Chris’s eyes weren’t seeing her messy surgical gloves anymore, dammit, and after she’d been so careful to keep them out of his sight.

Unsurprisingly, introductions were curt, given the personalities and weapons stuffing the room. As she whipped through her final stitches with Deavers enjoying his eyelids, she filled the silence. “Glad to see you, Ivar.” She was. He was out in public, moving among strangers, a good sign of recovery. “How’d you know where to find us?”

“I left New York within the hour upon learning of Dr. Haukssen’s murder,” he answered. “We have a long association with Mr. Abdirahman, so I began here at his home.”

“Must be how a chick feels when her boyfriend’s married,” Cruz muttered. “Lone Wolf forgot to mention his freaking pack.”

“My brother and I are not, and never have been, furry.” Ivar stared at Cruz.

Theresa wasn’t certain whether he’d intended to be funny or issue a clarification, but the stink of unused adrenaline rolled through the room. “Guys, we’re all on the same side.”

“Where is my brother?”

Her face must have conveyed the
not-here
part of the answer, because his good hand wrapped around the black-gloved fingers protruding from his sling.

“He ordered us to leave him at Lejre.” Her voice was low, but carried through the silent room. “It was Unferth, by himself against Wulf, and he made us promise to get out.”

“I see.” He swallowed, and stared at each person in the room.

She was too exhausted to decipher his expression. Maybe it was worry, maybe disgust or anger, or maybe nothing and she was extrapolating her own feelings.

“My jet is being refueled. By the time we reach Kastrup, it will be cleared to depart.” He pivoted to the door. She couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders hunched enough to shift his coat.

He wasn’t going to do anything? Although his inaction was nominally for their protection and part of Wulf’s wishes, Ivar was abandoning his brother. She’d do well to remember that he could walk away that easily.

No one else moved or spoke, so a response, like the explanation, fell to her. Sour as her words were, she knew what Wulf expected. “After I tape this gauze, we can go.”

* * *

“We land at Teterboro in forty-five minutes.” Ivar placed a mug of tea in front of her. He wasn’t the warmest guy, but he’d decisively removed them from Denmark before they could be connected to the chaos at Lejre. When the jet refueled in Burlington, Vermont, Kahananui’s Fort Drum friends had had a truck waiting. They were the type of buddies who didn’t ask questions, and by now Wulf’s teammates were in the shelter of the army. Deavers would be running laps in a week, although she imagined it would be far longer before the team stopped rolling their eyes and swooning in front of him.

“We didn’t clear immigration in Burlington, merely refueled. Here’s your passport.” He handed her a dark blue pamphlet that miraculously held her photo and several stamps, as if the person inside was well traveled.

“Where’d you get this? It looks real.”

“You are my assistant.” He ignored her question. “We’ve been in Venice for a long weekend and we had a fuel stop in Copenhagen, then Vermont, that’s all.”

“I’ve never been to Venice.”

“If the immigration officer asks, blush. Imply you didn’t leave the hotel.”

“Oh.” She squinted at him, but she couldn’t imagine Ivar in the clutch of passion.

“Think of my brother if it helps.” The iceman raised one eyebrow.

“Oh.” Warmth crept from her neck to her ears.

Personal immigration service for executive-jet passengers was as customer-oriented as ordering at a café. To Wulf, she would have whispered,
May I have a regular skinny with my suitcase
,
please
, and he would have snorted and bought her one at the first coffee drive-through. His brother would have pinned her to the spot with a glare if she’d opened her mouth during the process.

Of course Ivar had a limo waiting. They were on the road to Manhattan within fifteen minutes of landing. “Where are we going?”

He ignored her to thumb through data on his phone. “He has not contacted me.”

“Would he?” The glow from his small screen illuminated Ivar’s frozen face, and she wondered whether he worried more or less than she did. She loved Wulf, but Ivar was the one who’d been imprisoned. “Normally?”

“I regret this waste of resources,” Ivar said.

“What?” They hadn’t hit traffic into the city, so she didn’t understand what had been wasted.

“The additional losses without gain.” His voice sounded as dark and faraway as the water below the bridge.

He didn’t know. Neither she nor the others had told him, not at Guleed’s, and not on the long flight when they’d all slept. “But we found the hilt.” She fumbled in the overnight bag Ivar had handed her. “Here.” She held out the crucifix.

He held it like a new baby, with both hands, and stared, but the plastic bag she’d wrapped around the relic obscured the red gem.

Her fingers hovered over his shoulder, but she wasn’t sure he’d like to be touched.

“I have leased laboratory space. Equipment is ordered. And I’ve sent for someone who can acquire the arm bone for you.” Headlights reflected on the sheen of his eyes. “Wait for Wulf at my home. He will come there for you.”

She refused to consider other endings.

Through the windshield, the bright lights and right angles of Manhattan posed a direct contrast to the snowy hills of Lejre. The city was where she wanted to hide, where she felt safest, and where she had ideas to test and promises to fulfill. Ivar might believe Wulf would appear soon, but she couldn’t forget the inferno they’d left in Denmark. And she knew from experience that immortal Vikings had a very different sense of time.

* * *

A clipboard and questions helped Theresa control her anxiety. If she focused on the patient in the opposite chair, she might forget for a moment that Wulf hadn’t returned or phoned for over a week. The woman, a refugee from Africa, had a yellow pocket of pus on the back of her hand that would have to be lanced and drained by a doctor at this women’s clinic fifty blocks north of Ivar’s town house.

“Dr. Chiesa, she doesn’t speak Amharic or Arabic.” The college student who helped as an interpreter flipped through a phone roster. “Maybe it’s Tigrinya, from the north of Ethiopia or Eritrea? Our interpreter list doesn’t include an Eritrean.” Her wide brown eyes sought guidance.

“Try a calendar. Maybe she’ll point to the day she was injured.” Until New York verified her board certification and issued her a license to practice, her volunteer work was limited to patient-intake interviews.

“There’s one in the next cube.” The student jumped to her feet. She hoped to attend medical school.

Theresa acknowledged a different goal. She hoped helping the flow of women, twenty an hour through five exam rooms, would fulfill the promise she’d made to Meena and herself back in Afghanistan. She wanted to make a difference, and she had to balance the isolated world of Ivar’s research lab and mansion with the hum of human contact.

While she waited, Theresa stared at the women’s health posters covering the tan walls of the cubicle she used.
Hope is not a method.
Please let Wulf be free, not locked under stone like Ivar had been.
Are you pregnant?
¿Estás embarazada?
She’d trade the chance to look like that big-bellied woman to hold Wulf in her arms.
Chlamydia is not a flower.
That one was mind-blowingly awful, and not the calendar she needed.

The door jingled. Unseen women in the waiting area burst into giggles.
Must be a baby.

Her interpreter returned to the cubicle, smiling. “Here’s the calendar.”

“Thanks.” She turned to the patient in the dark skirt. “This is today.” She pointed to the date. Ten days since she and Ivar had returned. Ten days without a word from Wulf. “Your sore?” She pointed to the patient’s arm and ran her pencil over the week before. “What day?” While the woman answered with a burst of language and pointed to three different squares on the calendar, the waiting room giggles grew.
This should be easier
,
but how?

“Last Tuesday I was cooking injera when the hot clay plate slipped from the stove burner and hit my hand.” The voice she heard in her dreams washed over her from the other side of the cubicle partition. An interpreter had arrived, one called by her heart. Wulf was here.

She started to rise from her chair but couldn’t depend on her knees, couldn’t even breathe.

“The next day a neighbor gave me a paste to cover the burn.” The thunder of her heart almost eclipsed his smooth cadences. “By Friday my hand was much worse, so now I am here to see the doctor.” Wulf paused. “I was stuck in an air-cargo crate for a week.”

Clearly the last sentence had nothing to do with the patient. “You could have phoned.” She rested her clipboard on her knee so neither the patient nor the volunteer saw her hands shake. “Please tell my patient that coming to the clinic was very wise. We can’t risk a staph infection.” Remembering Wulf’s instructions from Afghanistan, she addressed the woman directly. “Can you tell me what was in the paste your neighbor gave you?”

While Wulf and the patient exchanged words, she concentrated on breathing in and out.

“Avocado and boiled plantain leaves and honey. Also butter.” Wulf recited the ingredients in the home remedy as fast as she could copy them to the intake form. “Sorry, but my freight pallet didn’t have cell service and I didn’t think I should show my face at an airport.”

Realizing the man she loved was a few feet away and they were on the verge of arguing instead of kissing, she stood and smoothed her hands down her new cargo pants. If she’d known he was coming, she would have dressed...but no, these were clothes she’d bought for herself. They represented the real her. She touched her hair, but didn’t have a mirror.

“My Puerto Rican neighbor says honey and plantain heal anything.” Wulf’s voice vibrated, as if he too was unsteady. “But I’m not so sure now. Maybe the doctor has something better.” The space dividers were thin enough that she heard him clear his throat. “Maybe the doctor will marry me?”

Ohmigod.
She reached for the wall. Could she stagger around it without falling?

The openmouthed student nodded like a bobblehead, and even her patient understood something larger was happening.

Theresa realized that she had her other palm over her mouth and the waiting room had dropped into complete silence. Ohmigod again. She wobbled out the door and met him in the narrow space between intake rooms.

The gray carpet and beige walls disappeared at her first sight of him in two weeks. When he smiled, it was different from the cocky grin he’d first given her in the mess hall, different from the smolder when he zipped the boots on her feet or the sexy flirting grin in her mother’s kitchen. This smile made her hands damp. It made her want to cry and hug him and laugh all at the same time. He lifted her to her toes, and his kiss traveled from her lips to her heart. She flew, or felt as if she did, and opened in flight for him. Arms wrapped around her, he spun her through the hall. Every cell sang to touch him. His hair was as soft and dense as she remembered, his shoulders as strong, his mouth made for hers.

Most important, he was here, with her, and he was safe.

He set her on her feet and withdrew to look at her face. “You haven’t answered my question.”

The collectively indrawn breath from all the women in the waiting room must have taken the oxygen away, because she felt dizzy, but she knew what to say. “Yes, of course, yes.” She threw her arms back around him, because any distance was too far. “I love you.”

Her prosthetic, a stray folding chair, a miscalculation and they staggered. Wulf’s legs tangled with hers, but his arms didn’t let go to find balance, and his lips never released hers. She heard the thunk as he hit the wall and they stopped moving.