By late September, maples had reddened outside Theresa’s bedroom windows, as good a sign of passing time as her new-old life offered. Without VA physical-therapy appointments, she might not have remembered the day of the week.
She ignored the ringing house phones. The callers were always her mother’s friends.
“Theresa!” Her mother shouted from downstairs. “Are you upstairs? It’s for you.”
Who the hell called her? “I’m in my room.” That wasn’t loud enough for her mother to hear, so she yelled, “Up here!”
Trotting into Theresa’s room with a portable handset, Jeanne announced, “It’s one of your friends. From...” She floundered over the word, so Theresa knew it must be Afghanistan as she grabbed for the handset.
“Hello? Hello?” She couldn’t catch her breath. After two months, he’d called.
“Theresa? It’s Jennifer.”
Not Wulf. She slumped into her mound of pillows.
“I called as soon as I thought you’d be awake. You haven’t heard, have you?” Her friend’s voice sounded rushed and worried, not like Jen’s usual blend of peppiness and irony.
“Heard what?” Names and faces from the hospital flashed almost strobelike in her mind, and her throat closed. “Who is it? What happened?”
“I’m fine. Everybody at the hospital’s fine. It’s...”
Theresa’s stomach heaved with relief so intense, she wondered if she’d lose the container of yogurt she’d eaten with her morning pain pill.
“The Special Forces sergeant you knew. Wardsen.”
“What about him?” Had he asked for her number or address? Please let Jennifer say she’d given it to him.
“He—” Listening to her former roommate’s indrawn breath, Theresa pictured her pacing in the gravel outside their old B-hut. “Last night on an op, he was shot. He fell in a river wearing heavy gear and they couldn’t grab him. They think—” her friend’s voice broke, “—he drowned.”
“Oh.” Although she knew he wasn’t dead, Theresa also knew Jen expected her to respond with shock and sorrow. “Oh, no, I can’t—” Breathe harder and faster, through your mouth, she reminded herself, as if you’re about to cry— “Oh, no.” Oh, yes. Her fist thumped the mattress. He’d promised to come as soon as he could, and now he’d left the army. Now he’d come to her.
The rest of the conversation was an awkward dance of sympathy that Theresa suspected Jennifer escaped with gratitude after she said she needed to think.
Thinking inadequately described the whirling plans that engulfed her as she scooted to the edge of her mattress and snapped her prosthetic on to the pin sticking out of her silicone stump sleeve. Lottery winners might feel like this, too restless to remain in one spot for more than a few seconds, unable to face other people for fear they’d blurt out their unimaginable fortune, yet too pumped for solitude. When she stood, her hard-won stability on her prosthetic felt almost like flying.
The mirror on the closet door reflected a jittery woman, elbows clenched to her sides, skin pale from lack of sun, with red blotches of excitement on her cheeks and uncontrolled frizzles. Maybe a visit to her mother’s hairdresser wasn’t such a bad idea, but right now her reflection was too wild to consider, so she walked across the room to the door.
Each step worked like her therapists had promised, and she no longer had to juggle backward on crutches when she opened the closet. An unexpected bonus of getting her leg back had been the full freedom to use both hands simultaneously, to open her own doors and even to slam them when she wanted.
In the closet, the corners of three bookstore boxes showed the rigors of their journey roundtrip to and from Afghanistan, then to her old quarters in Texas, then the new Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland before they’d caught up to her in New Jersey. She didn’t remember what she’d ordered, only that it had been an absurdly expensive assortment about Beowulf. Beyond telling Ray to shove them somewhere, she hadn’t cared. Until today.
Her ankle adjustment screwdriver slit the packing tape as neatly as Wulf’s knife had once done. Inside, glossy black covers decorated with Iron Age relics competed with manga and academic texts. The books were a connection to Wulf, his history, his people. The smooth paper under her fingers wasn’t a substitute for him, but he was coming, and she could be ready. She’d start with children’s picture books for basic familiarity with the epic and work through young adult en route to the Seamus Heaney translation and the stack of life sciences.
Twenty minutes ago her future could have been summarized as go-to-therapy-rinse-repeat. Now she had a goal. Even if her research wasn’t the same as a real job, she had a plan.
She liked her plan more than going down to lunch. The fight scenes with Grendel and his mother were freaking suspenseful, so she ignored her mother until the door opened.
“What are you doing?” Jeanne assessed the books in a glance. “Beowulf? Isn’t that some English monster or whatever?” She said it with the tones someone might use about a really hairy tarantula. “And starfish? Squid? What are you reading about those for?”
“Self-improvement?” Theresa finished highlighting a passage about Grendel’s bog.
“A haircut is self-improvement. This—” she gestured at the room, “—this is a library!”
“I tend to like those.”
“I know, I know. But did you have to start one here?”
“You could buy me a new bookshelf. I’ve heard Newport Centre mall sells them.”
Her mother’s eyebrows arched with glee before they lowered at her again. “Ha. You thought you could trick me into leaving. Not unless you come down to eat.”
“Later.” She flipped pages to reach a description of Grendel’s mother.
“Now. I made lasagna.”
* * *
“Ivar?” Wulf called his brother’s name from the stairs to the underground garage. His brother hadn’t deleted his biometric data from the Manhattan house’s security system. So either Ivar was becoming lazy or he didn’t want to completely cut off Wulf. “Ivar?”
If he didn’t have to face those judgmental gray eyes to retrieve his spare identity documents, so much the better. Across the river in New Jersey, close enough that if he stretched, he could almost hold her, Theresa waited. As soon as he showered off the grime he’d picked up in the five airports between Tajikistan and New York City, he’d blow out of here. By dinner, he’d be with Theresa. Or at least trying to convince her to talk to him, given that the last words they’d exchanged before the explosion hadn’t been fond adieus.
He shouted a third time before stepping into the kitchen. “Ivar?”
With his brother out doing whatever international money managers did, he had time to grab a snack. As soon as he opened the fridge, a stench worse than Kahananui’s socks rolled out from a gallon of yellowish milk, sludgy as yogurt. Shoving the back of his hand over his nose, he read the purple-inked date: August 4. Seven weeks ago, right after he and Ivar had argued on the phone. While the team had been waiting for the right opportunity to raid the opium facility, Ivar’s milk had been fermenting.
Burying his mouth and nose deeper in the bend of his elbow, he used one finger of his other hand to pull out the meat drawer. Its contents were an unidentifiable slick of putrefied protein, and the nauseating reek engulfed him like a tsunami. Gagging, he slammed the door. He took the stairs two at a time to the second and third floors, yelling his brother’s name, but the pit in his stomach told him he wouldn’t hear an answer. Echoes chased him until finally, heaving for breath in his brother’s study, where dust had settled thickly enough that his palms left sweat prints on the desk, he accepted the truth.
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 someon
e 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 pe
n 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.
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