The others spread through the house, cursing and searching. They left Carl and Wulf alone. Carl out of respect for his loss, but Wulf had seen the crew’s expressions when they glimpsed him. Respect didn’t cause the blood to drain from their faces and the whites of their eyes to show as they backed up, some with hands over their mouths. No, it wasn’t respect that kept them from Wulf’s presence. It was horror.
“We can’t stay.” With the men loose in the house, there were too many variables. Someone would call a buddy. News would spread; law enforcement would converge. They had to clear out, fast.
“He needs a priest.” Carl spoke without looking away from his son.
“If we call one...” Spreading his hands to indicate the room and the other bodies, he left Theresa’s stepfather to draw his own conclusions. Faith was faith, but this was a giant mess.
“I know.” The old man sank to the floor next to his son. “He won’t get a priest then, either. Just the feds.”
“Your son fought well.” Wulf didn’t have to exaggerate. “But we need to protect the living. Jeanne. Theresa.” With no idea what Carl would wish, he forged ahead. “My family has a custom. I would be honored to send your son to the next life with the respect due a warrior.” Maybe building a pyre would cleanse him too.
Carl seemed to nod, so Wulf tried to keep him focused on the future. He could mourn after the women were safe. “You prepared to disappear?”
“I got a backup plan.” His eyes had returned to Raymond.
“Use it now. These guys—” Wulf nudged the impaled body with his boot. “Their boss doesn’t give up. Your family has to disappear, deeper and further than you can imagine.”
Carl tried to brush aside his son’s hair, but blood gummed it to his forehead.
“Get the things your son loved.” After helping Carl stand, Wulf guided him into the hall. “I’ll move the boys to the dining room.”
By the time Wulf and one of the others had arranged Carl’s nephew alongside Raymond on the oak table, Carl had returned with a video game console, its plastic casing shattered by bullets, and a blue-and-white football jersey.
“We had season tickets to the Giants, me and Ray. Since he was nine and his mom and I divorced. Eighteen years.” Carl’s grief was the largest presence in the room, dwarfing even the bulkiest of his crew. “We never missed—never—” His shoulders shook too violently to continue.
Standing alone holding a wet dish towel, Wulf felt a startling amount of envy fill his chest. Grief like Carl’s came from love, a father’s love for his child, accumulated moment by moment over shared time. Even if it brought this kind of pain—and it always would because those he loved always aged and died—the yearning to feel what Carl had known devoured him. He’d tried. There’d been children he’d cared for when he had a place to stop, others like a boy from Mogadishu whom he’d helped because they needed it, but too many times he’d been forced to leave. Fate never allowed him to share anyone’s life for long. Fifteen centuries, but his life had nothing worth wanting nearly so much as Carl’s did.
He handed the father the towel to clean his son’s face, then left.
In the garage, the lawn mower’s grass-and-oil smells were like a sea wind after the house’s blood stench. He located a gasoline container, then stacked magazines, broken chairs and picture frames under the table to build a tribute for the warriors Ray and his cousin had been. Keeping busy was better than thinking.
The creak of the front door hit his good ear, and Wulf erupted into the entry with his knife low and ready. His blood pounded a snare beat in his head. Not again, it said. Not Carl too.
“Wulf?” Theresa and her mother stood frozen in the brightly lit foyer, Jeanne’s hand at the light switch, as they stared into the destroyed living room. “Carl?”
A second before body-slamming the women, Wulf checked his rush by hitting the wall. The crash jerked Theresa and Jeanne from their trances, and they turned, mouths open in identical horrified circles. The shattered hall mirror reflected eight, ten, twelve versions of him, all with his stubby ear like a chunk of baitfish and fresh red muscle glistening through his shredded shirt like basted ham.
“Carl?” Jeanne covered her mouth and sagged onto her daughter. “Where’s Carl?”
Theresa turned her mother’s face to her shoulder.
“He’s fine.” Wulf jabbed off the lights. They had to leave before they saw more, but he couldn’t touch them with his bloody hands and he couldn’t send them into the darkness alone. So he deliberately stalked them, using his otherness to back them toward the door.
“What are you doing here?” Even with one ear, he knew his question was too loud.
“We waited, but I figured whatever happened was over. I told my mother you’d—” the hesitation in her whisper made him angrier, “—win.”
“Assumptions will get you killed.” If he didn’t unclench his fists, he’d scare them worse than he intended. “These men could have been like me.”
Theresa covered her mouth and nose, as if to block the odor of bodies, gunpowder and fear. That was the smell of his livelihood. His life stunk. He knew she’d never want any part of it, or him, again, but he’d die over and over to keep her safe. “Take your mother to the car.”
Outside, she helped Jeanne into the second row of the sport utility vehicle and then closed the door. Bracing herself on the dark metal, she turned to him. “Ray?” she whispered.
“Carl’s with him and your cousin now.” Her face lifted for a moment, a moth of hope that he regretted crushing with his next words. “They’re dead.”
She rested her forehead on the tinted window.
The arm’s length between them loomed wider than the Atlantic he’d flown over the night before, but comforting her would have to take a backseat to ensuring her safety. “What do you need to get out of here?” He didn’t expect an answer. She’d gone somewhere he couldn’t follow with his bloody hands and filthy deeds, so he said, “I’ll figure it out,” and hurried inside.
“You—” He pointed at a man carrying a propane canister into the dining room. “Guard the women outside in the car.”
In the pink bedroom he added a handful of clothes from each drawer to a gym bag and yanked what looked like a charger off the bedside table. Everywhere he saw books, lots of books, and he remembered Jeanne teasing her daughter about them at dinner. A lifetime ago.
He shoved a stack of science and nature volumes in the bag. The top cover on the second stack showed an iron dagger like he hadn’t seen in fifteen hundred years. Paper tabs stuck out from its pages. Beowulf. The title leaped at him. He threw it in, and an empty-eyed, gold death mask stared from the next. There was an engraving of a dragon’s hoard on the third, a mail-clad warrior on the fourth. Beowulf, all of them, as if Theresa had thought to understand his story.
Fear nipped his hamstrings like the hellhound Garmr as he swept the trove into the bag and fled down the stairs with its unzippable weight banging his thigh. Monsters were out tonight, not least him, and no one could stay here.
In the dining room, the men had finished stacking flammables under Ray and his cousin and propped the shattered Last Supper at the head of the table. As a group, they filed out of the house, Carl in the rear so he could leave the pungent trail of gasoline. It was his home to burn, after all.
“Wait.” Wulf’s command stopped Carl’s hand on the matches while he finished spray-painting words on the front sidewalk.
“Empty house,” Carl read aloud. “Good. I don’t need no dead firemen added to my balance sheet.”
Wulf saluted as the burning gasoline raced from the front door down the hall. Then it was time. Time for Theresa and the remnants of her family to leave, and time for him to abandon his idea of playing house. When everything he touched or wanted became as charred and ruined as the shell in the rearview mirror
soon would be, he had to stop wanting.
* * *
Wulf drove. Maybe it was Theresa’s books that invoked the old language, but the words matched the rhythm of the tires. Úre aéghwylc sceal ende gebídan worolde lífes. Each of us must wait for the end of our life in this world. If only that was true.
While they circled highways, while Carl boosted a replacement ride and even while they ditched the unlocked SUV in Newark, Wulf couldn’t stop phrases from surging like the bloodshot water of Grendel’s bog. Hé þá fág gewát morþre gemearcod. He’d started life as a man, but now he too was a branded monster, marked by murder.
By the time Carl directed him to a twenty-four-hour mail shop, Jeanne had dropped into the fog that passes for sleep after shock. Sorh is geníwod. Theresa’s eyes were closed, but he suspected her awareness lingered as Carl retrieved a stored duffel bag. Sorrow comes again.
He needed something new to think about.
“Here.” Carl slipped a folder onto the cracked dashboard. “Passport and license for my little girl. They’re clean.” His voice hadn’t risen from a monotone since they’d left the house. “Drop me and Jeanne near Port Authority.”
“You set for money?” Wulf followed signs for the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan.
“Yeah.” Carl pulled a marker out of his bag and humped around in his seat. “You got a number? So Jeanne can call to Theresa?”
After a sideways glance, Wulf glued his eyes to the red taillights in front of their car and recited a secure number.
“Nobody likes to check a fat man’s cojones.” Carl coughed, and Wulf heard the rustle of slick-fabric pants being readjusted. “I could write Federal Reserve codes down there.”
“You’re sure about leaving Theresa with me?” He kept his voice low.
“I don’t know how you’re still walking, after what I saw at the house.” Carl stared at the side of Wulf’s head. “And I’m not asking.”
Wulf gripped the steering wheel to prevent himself from touching his ear. His shoulder and face itched like a fire ant parade, so he knew he must have been nearly healed.
“I gotta keep my wife safe.” The engine rattle almost drowned Carl’s tired voice. “I can’t do that with Theresa riding shotgun. She’s...”
“Beautiful.” Wulf supplied.
“True, but I was thinking easy to make.”
Grimy tile flashed past in the tunnel’s blurred lights. A mother and daughter as vivid as Jeanne and Theresa drew attention. When one had a prosthetic leg, they drew more.
“If we’d gone to Switzerland like you offered—”
“Don’t. You can’t change your choices.” After fifteen hundred years of grappling with consequences, he still struggled with his own advice. “Don’t waste energy on what-ifs.”
“You neither, son.”
Perhaps due to the impossibility of following that guidance, the occupants of the car were silent until they emerged in Manhattan, where Carl directed Wulf to an alley between anonymous motels and Thai takeouts west of Broadway. “By the stack of cardboard. This city has too damn many street cameras, but last I checked, wasn’t no surveillance here.” Carl got out of the idling car, then went to Jeanne’s door.
In the rearview mirror, Wulf saw Theresa’s head loll to the side. During the drive she’d fallen into real sleep, the type the mind embraced to heal or escape.
“Watch your back,” he told Carl.
“You too.” Carl slung his bag over his shoulder and maneuvered his groggy wife down the alley.
Wulf hoped they’d meet again.
Driving uptown, weariness crushed him until he was too drained to plan beyond the next stoplight. He’d rest at Ivar’s. His brother would help protect Theresa.
A retina scan and shifting numeric codes had replaced the failed thumbprint security system. When the first row of car barricades lowered, Wulf eased twenty feet forward into the hot box and read randomly generated words out loud until the voice scan reconfirmed his identity. Finally admitted, he let his shoulders slump as the car rolled down the ramp to where his brother waited.
Food and sleep had restored Ivar’s speech and mental faculties, but his hand remained stunted, and no well-tailored suit could hide the way he hunched when he saw Wulf’s ripped clothing and blood-crusted hair. Awkwardly clippered blond hair stubbled his scalp, reminding Wulf that his fastidious brother had endured lice as well in Unferth’s prison. “I gather the reunion did not go as planned.”
“No.” Wulf paused with his hand on the car’s rear door. He and his brother had used to be near mirrors of each other, only Ivar’s eye color a truer blue and Wulf’s smile wider, but now Ivar seemed slighter. “Jeanne and Carl are alive. Theresa’s stepbrother and several others aren’t.”
“The security team?”
“They lost the coin toss.” Wulf hadn’t met them. Hadn’t dined with them and listened to bad jokes like he had with Raymond, but someone had known each of those men. Either he or Ivar would have to tell someone, several someones, that those men weren’t coming back.
He carried Theresa upstairs, her face pressed into his shoulder. She slept so deeply, he assumed she’d taken a pill from one of the bottles he’d shoved in her bag. On his bed, her dark hair spread across the white pillow, reminding him that a few hours ago he’d done nearly the same thing. The comforter had been pink, and he’d been filled with hope and laughter. Gone now, those dreams—as gone as the future he’d dared to imagine.
After he showered, he found his brother in the study. The replacement desk was a jarringly modern hunk of dark steel and walnut that slashed through the traditionally decorated room like a double-headed axe.
“Drink.” Ivar gestured to a tray of brown bottles.
By the time Wulf had finished the beer and wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand, the hops and malted grain had revived him enough to speak. “One of the men I killed had this.” He tossed the barrel of the crushed syringe on the desk. Too misshapen to roll, it slid several inches on the polished surface.
His brother stumbled into a stand holding a small Rodin bronze.
Regret soured the beer in Wulf’s mouth. The old Ivar wouldn’t have twitched for a guillotine, let alone backed away from a simple plastic tube. But the man Wulf had released from the torture chamber in Marrakesh wasn’t the old Ivar, so he brushed the drug container into the garbage and changed the subject. “We burned one house, but left the other and all the victims.” He started on his second bottle of brewed health. “It could get complicated.”
“Various government agencies will lie for some time to conceal the dead men’s identities.” Ivar stood behind his desk, not touching the chair, and didn’t rest his gaze on any single spot. “We should warn the others. They may be at risk.”
That possibility stopped Wulf’s beer halfway to his mouth. “You think Unferth’s after more than you and me?”
“I doubt his desire for research subjects—” Ivar’s good hand touched the fingertips protruding from his sling, “—has ended.”
“Can you find them? Bjorn went back to his boats, and Dunstan’s probably teaching somewhere, but Stig? Jurik?” Centuries hadn’t forged the misfits of Beowulf’s crew into a reliable team, only exacerbated their differences. He wouldn’t underestimate the effort it would take to reach the others, let alone try to assemble a force to oppose Unferth.
“My list.” With a jerk of his chin, Ivar indicated a paper with twelve names. Nine in one column, Unferth and his sycophants in the other. “We shall take this fight to Unferth. This time, we shall go on to the end.”
“No shit.” Wulf opened his third beer, the replenishing calories reestablishing whatever he might call normal about his relationship with Ivar. “Going to recite the ‘we shall fight on the beaches and never surrender’ part too? Been done, you know.”
“Your eloquence increases with each year you spend as a common grunt.”
“And your ego expands with the membership of the United Nations, but I’m too polite to comment.” Like old times, he toasted with his fresh bottle.
Ivar’s cheek spasmed, as if one muscle wanted to smile and the others agonized at the close call. Before he could reply, a woman screamed.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Mom?” Theresa’s fake foot, unexpectedly attached in bed, caught in the sheets, and she flopped, half wrapped in covers, to the floor. “Mom!” Where was she? Had she sleepwalked after her medication?
Then memories flooded her—Wulf’s injuries, Carl’s devastation and Ray.
Ray. She bit her fist to contain the hot acid feeling in her throat.
Across the room, a gray rectangle signaled access to a lighter space, perhaps a hall. Two dark shapes charged low through the door and split to opposite walls.
In the corner between the bed and wall, Theresa touched a metal wastebasket. Silently, she raised it to her chest, prepared to defend herself.
One man rounded the foot of the bed, close enough he must have seen her outline, so she threw the can with both hands, like she was passing a basketball. It clunked into his body.
“Skīta!”
“Should’ve warned you. She has good reactions.” That voice was familiar.
“Wulf?” The fear left her, but she still felt fuzzy and thick. “Where’s my mother? And Carl?” She wasn’t sure what parts of the night she’d dreamed and what had really happened.
“Theresa—” Wulf’s heavy tone sat on her chest like a radiologist’s lead apron.
“They’re dead, aren’t they?” No matter how hard she tried to breathe, the dark pressed the air out of her until she could barely squeak. “They’re all dead.”
A lamp flickered, but the light didn’t change the facts, didn’t change reality, didn’t bring her family back.
First to Burn Page 30
