“I must not be a very good guide.” He buried his face in her hair and inhaled the lingering echo of her citrus shampoo, a hint of normal.
“Don’t expect—” another hiccup, but weaker this time, “—a tip.”
“I’ll make it up to you with the best dinner of your life tonight.” He remembered his last meal at Cesare’s, the tiny restaurant that guarded an entrance to his secret apartment. “You, me and pappardelle al cinghiale. Pasta and simmered wild boar sauce.” Maybe she’d have a drop on her chin he could rub with his thumb. In the dark he recalled how, when she drank the last sip from a wineglass, she tilted her head until the line of her throat invited him to taste her. Hell yes, he’d take her to Cesare’s, and then to his concealed rooms. The thought of her naked and wet in his private pool threatened to weaken his knees; he couldn’t allow himself to imagine more until they made it out of this. “Ready to drive on?”
“Army ready.”
She could handle anything. Maybe even the truth about who and what he was.
* * *
“My stay was most pleasant.” Deep in his English persona, Draycott spoke to the clerk like an old chum while he signed the charge slip for his room at the Hotel D’Inghilterra. “I regret that an emergency with my elderly aunt—a broken hip, and she’s my late mum’s sister—calls me to Lancashire.” He sighed. The emergency requiring that he vacate the hotel was more dire than a broken hip. “There was one place I intended to see...”
“Yes, sir?”
“I’ve visited the Paris sewers and intended to poke around for a similar tour here in Rome but didn’t have time. By chance, do you know of one?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“I must have been mistaken that Rome had historic sewers. Perhaps I’m thinking of Vienna.” He folded his reading glasses into his tweed jacket. Someone on this amateur team he’d been forced to use had countermanded his directive to observe at a distance, with ugly results. One man was missing, one required arm surgery and one had been rendered faceless when Wardsen and the doctor disappeared like alligators down a sewer.
“We also have such sewers, but in Rome tourists may only view the exit.”
“Where might that be?” Ten minutes ago, the Director had clarified that the men should be removed from the worsening situation. Not pulled out. Not relocated. With the pending arrival of a better team, they’d become loose ends.
“The Cloaca Maxima is opposite the island in the river near the Bocca della Verità.”
“Ahh.” Draycott beamed and nodded like a satisfied elderly tourist. “Quite near.” Close enough for Wardsen to handle the unpleasant parts of Draycott’s next task, if he pointed the remaining men that way.
* * *
Theresa’s leather boots had soaked through, and her feet had passed cold en route to dead numb as they trudged the sewers. She’d stopped counting paces, ceased trying to measure time or distance, and now she merely worked to keep her feet moving on the slightly sloped stones.
Her face registered a breeze and she lifted a hand, but Wulf snatched her backward.
“Our tunnel’s reached the main one. Let’s not fall in.” He gripped her tightly. “The Cloaca Maxima’s deeper and faster, but the catwalk’s on our side, so we don’t have to cross.”
The jacket he’d given her didn’t cover below her hips, but pressing close to his body warmed her butt and thighs as efficiently as leaning against a radiator.
“We’re going downstream,” he continued. “We’ll use noise discipline. If I squeeze your shoulder, it means halt. Two taps means move out.”
Downstream. Closer to the main exit that everyone in Rome knows. “Isn’t that where these men could enter the sewers to find us? Why not the other direction?” She pushed out of his arms, one of her hands on the wall to orient herself away from the open drop. “We could bang on a courtyard entrance until someone lets us out.”
“Not my way.”
“None of this, absolutely none, is my way.” Frustration expanded her chest until her bra started to bind. “It’s not my way to kidnap people, steal cars, fire guns on busy streets.” Maybe that wasn’t fair, because he hadn’t done that, the bad guys had, but the point was basically the same. “I want this to end. If that means running away, then let’s do it!”
“Listen, Captain, you outrank me but you don’t know close-quarters battle.” His face was so near his breath seared her skin, hot like the sun at Ostia. “The sewers are my turf. Up there, explanations are a total bitch. Down here, I have nothing to hide, nothing to clean up, got it? We have the advantage, so I say we take it.”
“You say—”
“Stop telling me how to do my job!”
“You’re right. This isn’t my job.” Stuffing her hands in the jacket pockets was the only way to stop herself from jabbing randomly in the dark until she poked something, preferably him. “My job is saving people. I’ve been too flexible on that today, but I took an oath to do no harm.”
“Count on it, these guys want to put the harm on us.”
“I’ve gathered that. So why are we headed right for them?” She paused for a breath, but this time he didn’t interrupt. “If you want me to go that direction, you’ll have to knock me out and carry me like the guy at Ostia.”
“Fine.” The gritty clack of his teeth gnashing, amplified by the dark and her imagination, sounded as loud as grinding gears. “You stay here, I’ll head downstream and make sure it’s clear, then come back for you. Waste of time, but will that make you happy?”
“I’m not a suitcase. I won’t be here. I’m going upstream.” She hoped he couldn’t tell that the thought of striking out alone almost paralyzed her.
“You are the most frustrating...” He sucked air through his teeth. “Exasperating...”
“Keep digging, Roget,” she said.
“Irritating...woman!”
“Then you shouldn’t have followed me to Rome!” The tension emanating from him was so palpable she could nearly taste it. It drove her darkness-enhanced senses into a matching frenzy and vanquished the cold and fear, replacing them with heat that pulsed through her veins and required deep breaths to slake her need for air.
“I couldn’t help it.” Given his growl, he had to be speaking through a clenched jaw.
“I’m some mythical siren you can’t resist? Forgive me if I don’t buy that.”
“You should.”
The air between them changed as if lightning had struck, shocking her into silence when he found her shoulders and drew her so close that their legs entangled.
“Sometimes you’re so clinical.” His voice, lowered in tone and volume, wrapped around her as deftly as his hands. “You act arrow straight, all by the book with your questions.”
When he brushed her hair from her forehead, her body no longer felt stiff. The heat of his thighs relaxed her frozen muscles. On their own, her hands sought his body and wrapped around his back. He was definitely a weakness of hers.
“When you get fired up about postpartum depression, or the wasteland of women’s health care in Afghanistan, or the symbolism in a Renaissance fresco, or I piss you off—”
His quiet laughter sent riffles of air across her neck and made her smile in the dark. He liked to bait her, but she supposed she made it easy.
“That, my good doctor, is when you speak very fast and your eyes turn the color of exotic spices. Like treasures from the Silk Road, worth a ransom of gold and pearls.”
When he talked about her with the voice of temptation, the one she thought of as his prelude-to-a-kiss voice, and he showed that he listened to everything she said and cared enough to remember...he had her.
“That’s what I can’t resist.”
Even without light she knew his lips were only inches from hers, so she did what she’d wanted to f
or so long that she marveled at the self-control it had taken to wait until this moment, and she kissed him. Her lips found his, and they shared the hunger and intensity of two people who wanted to become part of each other as much as they wanted to live. Her mouth, her heart, her whole being seemed to melt into him as he crushed her body to his.
He must’ve leaned against the wall, because he easily slid her up and down the hard planes of his chest and abs. It wasn’t enough. With her hands locked around his neck, she stretched, her toes barely on the ground, until he squeezed her buttocks and lifted her, raising and lowering her body again and again past the length of his need. Nearly dizzy with greed for his touch, she tried to fit herself against his thrusts, and still they kissed.
And then his mouth was gone and his hands left her standing on her own, between his spread legs, but without his support.
“Ahh.” He shuddered and she thought she heard his head thunk into the stone tunnel wall. “This is...this is the worst possible...”
“I know.” Her body clamored for more of his heat, but intellectually she accepted the ludicrous, crazy absurdity of their position and timing. They had to stop.
“We can’t. We have to go.”
“I know,” she whispered a second time.
Connected as they were, he ought to understand she didn’t want to walk away from him, but she wouldn’t head into a fight they could avoid. “Let’s back off.”
“Okay.” His words vibrated along her skin. “We’ll try it your way.”
His answer didn’t feel like she’d scored a victory. She couldn’t feel triumphant when the thought that drummed in her head was, Please, don’t let my way be a mistake.
* * *
If Wulf had kept his pistol instead of arming Theresa with it when they’d started upstream a quarter-hour ago, maybe its textured grip would have been his lifeline to the twenty-first century. Without that anchor, the watery rush below sucked him back to the beginning, to that Danish swamp, and the day his world changed.
Pushing after his brother Iovor, he told himself ’twas only the swamp’s foul air wet his tunic under his iron-ringed byrnie, but the evil of this fen touched fear to his back until he sweated. He was no boy to believe himself safe from death, nor yet a hero assured of Valhalla.
Ahead Iovor followed their liege Beowulf in the place of honor, and a score of warriors trailed behind. In the Kingdom of the Spear-Danes their leader had become the great man Iovor had foreseen when they cast their lots with this adventure. Now they, the two sons of a drunken lackwit, offspring of a man who had traded his shield and honor for a horn of barley ale, walked as the right and left hands of a hero. When telling of these deeds, every hall’s skald would recite the names Iovor and Wulf alongside the name of their great lord.
Vines dripped from trees like a net to catch the unwary. Water as dark as moss seeped in their tracks, and broken branches, their tips painted with black blood, showed the path. He knew himself to be a tall man compared to most, but these jagged sticks stabbed air above his head. They marked the height of the creature’s shoulder, where Beowulf had split its arm from the sinews and left a gaping death wound.
Two nights ago Grendel had rampaged this route to find doom in their lord’s grasp and returned bloody to die in the fen. Last night the beast’s hell-mother had beaten this way carrying a thane of King Hrothgar. This day Beowulf led his line of Geats-men to seek Grendel’s corpse and make a second death mound from its dam. Or die trying.
Iovor halted. From habit Wulf closed on his brother and turned, back to back, spear and shield held before him to guard his brother as his brother guarded him. Despite seven suns at the oar bench with the others, rowing to reach the Kingdom of the Spear-Danes, he did not know how the men about him fought in a forest. He wouldn’t risk his man-wick on a gamble that this crew of misfits could stand against evil that came in the night.
He had faith only in Lord Beowulf, in his brother and in the spear in his own right hand.
Wulf’s hand flexed with the need to hold something to keep him in the present and far away from the ancient swamp that stalked his memories. His front pockets yielded his compass, a coil of wire and a lighter, which reminded him of the aerosol spray he’d grabbed at the shop and jammed in his back pocket. The cool metal of the can in his palm was completely modern and, paired with the lighter in his other hand, a damn fine weapon.
Minutes later an out-of-place scent, like soap or deodorant, wafted from a side tunnel. Whirling, he brought the aerosol and the lighter together, thumbs on both buttons, at the same time stinging pain punctured his shoulder.
Whoosh. A salvo of flame erupted from his can.
Bang-Bang-Bang. In between the punch of shots—Theresa’s, he prayed—Wulf saw a man beat at a fiery halo and knew he’d fried his target. The pain-filled scream moved with the burning man as he staggered into the catwalk’s railing. Brittle iron gave fast, and the attacker plunged to the rushing water, but a different fire, something that felt cold and hot simultaneously, rippled and spread from Wulf’s shoulder. They’d jabbed something in him.
Before the afterimage faded from Wulf’s corneas, he heard another burst. Bang-Bang-Bang. His pistol had held nine rounds. How many did Theresa still have? He couldn’t add. His left arm hung like a wrung-out dick. Only muscle memory took his right hand to his ankle sheath. His eye twitched and he jerked to dislodge a hairy, leggy thing that had dropped onto his cheek. No—wait—nothing crawled on his face. That was the poison.
Bang-Bang-Bang.
A weight leaped onto his back, but Wulf dipped his shoulder and allowed momentum to carry the attacker forward while slashing his knife into the man’s inner thigh.
More screams. Farther away. Why had he moved so far from the fight? Had to get back.
Cold pressed on his cheek. Hard. Metal?
He was a puny thirteen-summer lad pulling a bench oar for the first time. The weight wouldn’t shift. Over his head red-and-white sails soared. The whale road through the sea welcomed him home. A woman, his mother, her arms whitecaps raised to embrace him.
His mother was dead. Cold.
Salt tears pulled at him. Please. Theresa. Please. Pull me back. Pull.
Chapter Fifteen
Terror and sweat cemented Theresa’s palms to the pebbled grip of Wulf’s pistol. She opened her eyes, or maybe she closed them; in the absolute dark she couldn’t tell.
“Wulf?” After the gunshots in the confined tunnel, she had no idea how loudly she’d spoken, because the only thing she could hear was a roar like an earthmover in her head. “Wulf?”
Temporary hearing loss. If he answered, she wouldn’t know. Shit. She crouched, spine jammed to the wall, butt crushed to her heels, shoulders hunched, curled inward to become the smallest target she could manage. Everything was pulled in except the gun. The gun pointed out.
A hand could grab her. In the dark she wouldn’t see it, only feel it.
New smells mixed with the familiar sewer dank: cordite, singed hair and blood. Without hearing, she’d have to find Wulf by crawling in the direction where he should have been. On hands and knees, she dragged the gun across the catwalk and trailed her empty hand side-to-side like a spider until she brushed...softness. She recoiled, but immediately forced herself back to the obstruction. It was a leg covered in smooth fabric, not Wulf’s denim. It was one of them. Her fingers skimmed past the spot where the fabric changed to shirt cotton. Sticky blood pooled on a chest. She found a neck, but despite pressing, she couldn’t locate a pulse. This was a dead man.
More than likely, she’d shot him.
Willing the hot ball in her throat to dissolve, she vowed not to freak out. Wulf was somewhere on the elevated walkway, perhaps calling her name, perhaps too injured to speak. She had to search. But, oh God, this body blocked the catwalk.
She stretched u
ntil her knuckles grazed the metal grillwork on the far side of the man’s bulk, arching over his torso like a cat to avoid touching him. With both hands across, she started to swing her leg over, but her foot slipped and her knee squished into his abdominal cavity. Then her other foot and the hand holding the gun skidded in opposite directions, leaving her sprawled on the dead man’s gut. Her whole being recoiled from the contact, and she pushed her knee into soft organs, scrambling for traction she couldn’t find. Ugh.
One of his ribs caved in like a crushed milk container, but she couldn’t get away. He was dead, dead, dead, but he wouldn’t let her pass. Her fingers clawed at the metal walk until they latched on to the perforations. With a terrified strength she hadn’t known she possessed, she pulled her whole body slithering across to the far side of the dead man.
Finally, chest heaving, she lay on her back sucking air. A new fear hit.
In the lightless void, unable to hear past the drilling sound between her ears, she’d lost the wall. Was safety at her head or her feet? If she chose incorrectly, she could end up like the flaming man who’d crashed through the railing.
Her hands retreated inside Wulf’s jacket sleeves until the pistol snagged the cuff. Darkness couldn’t hurt her unless she panicked. Cold was the killer. It would sap her will. If she didn’t pick a direction, she’d be sitting here next week, so she forced her arms to uncurl. With the fingers of her left hand locked on the catwalk, she shoved the gun ahead of her until it bumped into something that vibrated her arm from wrist to shoulder. The wall.
She pressed her forehead against brick that smelled of wet and age, vaguely reminding her of the inside of her great-uncle’s garage. Not unfamiliar, and not the odor of blood, so she inhaled deeply and let the wall guide her progress until she touched fur. A rat.
Flattened to the bricks with her fist jammed below her clavicle until it hurt to breathe, she willed her heart to slow. The fur hadn’t moved under her hand, so no, it wasn’t a rat.
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