“Not a language I speak, Doc.” Wulf grinned. “Can you translate to plain English? Could that counteract what Unferth did to my brother?”
“I don’t know. Honestly, it could make it worse.” This part had scared her yesterday. “Something similar resulted in a flatworm regrowing a tail where it should’ve had a head.”
“I am not interested in having an appendage other than a hand at the end of my arm.”
“He’s already a big enough dick,” Wulf muttered. “Doesn’t need a spare.”
“Beg your pardon?” His brother stared back with one raised eyebrow.
“I was saying that near the prison in Marrakesh, I saw a five-legged dog.”
“Are you certain that wasn’t your brain between its rear legs?” The insult seemed to revive Ivar enough that he ate a bite of steak. “No one removed my ears.”
Concealing her laughter by coughing into her napkin, Theresa felt a bubbling desire to share more of her research. “I’ve been reading a lot.” She’d spent days immersed in the office Wulf had created for her. Interesting and intriguing days, fascinating days, but lonely days. Maybe since her theories were about their condition, they’d want to know. “Symbiotic microbes can enhance their hosts, like a glowing bacteria that helps squid improve their camouflage. I know you think you have a virus, but I’m more inclined to believe you have a parasite or bacterial infection, because their genomes are so much bigger and they’re more likely to need an intermediate host like Grendel before they can become infectious. Like malaria needs mosquitoes.”
From the corner of her eye she saw Wulf’s grin, the one that meant she was babbling. For the first time in days, instead of grooves leading down from his mouth, he had tiny crinkles around his eyes, as if he wanted to laugh, so she took a deep breath and offered her latest, craziest idea. “If we started our own research lab, we could isolate and perhaps treat the immortality.” She couldn’t read Ivar’s expression, but Wulf’s was dubious.
“With Unferth hunting us, being mortal again doesn’t sound as good as it once did,” he said. “And that’s the point of a cure, right?”
“You’ve missed the point, brother.” Ivar’s voice scratched over the table. “What if Unferth were mortal?” His good hand made a fist next to his dinner plate as he leaned toward her, the most engaged she’d seen him since meeting him. “I will give you anything you need to achieve that. Money, a lab, assistants—they’re yours. What will it take?”
“I don’t know.” Her heart pounded as she realized how far beyond her expertise pursuing this idea would lead. “For starters, I’ll need to compare your DNA to a sample of Grendel’s. The commonality should be the infectious organism.”
Both men stared at her without comprehension.
“I need DNA from Grendel’s bones or blood.”
Whatever language they used had the unmistakable rhythm of profanity.
“It only requires a tiny amount of bone or tissue. Like what would be in the hilt of a sword.” Every version of the epic referred to Beowulf bringing the damaged sword hilt back from his journey to the deep where he’d confronted Grendel’s mother.
“After fifteen hundred years?” Wulf asked.
“A research institute in Germany sequenced a mastodon’s mitochondrial DNA from a fifty-thousand-year-old tooth.” She cocked her head to one side. “Surely those giant beasts had finished walking the planet when you all began your fateful trip?”
Wulf began to hum a familiar television theme until his brother glared him into silence.
“Or I could use Grendel’s arm or skull.” She’d flagged those references in the story as well, because if the bones could be located, they might be helpful to the puzzle. “They could have extractable genetic material.”
“The skull was lost in 1945 between the Nazis and the Soviet Red Army. The arm is too secure.” Ivar ticked off his objections. “It will have to be the hilt.”
“Stig could steal the arm.” Wulf mentioned someone she assumed was another immortal.
“I’ll inquire when I reach him. You realize Unferth may already have the skull? He commanded a Nazi Kunstschutz unit to loot on the Eastern front.”
How long would it take before references to their past didn’t make the hair on her arms stand up?
“Reason to secure the other artifacts quickly.” Underneath Wulf’s measured and rational speech, she detected a hint of excitement, as if he’d been assigned a new mission.
“I have much to think about.” Ivar stood, as if dismissing them from dinner. “Good evening.”
As he left the room, Theresa noticed he’d left his whiskey next to his plate.
Wulf lifted her hand from his thigh. She’d forgotten it was still there. Instead of letting go like she’d expected, he lifted it to his lips. Pressed a kiss to her palm. His strength, so long held away from her, flooded her from that connection. They’d get better, all of them, together. She’d taken the first steps down that road, and she planned to take another. Tonight Wulf wasn’t going to sleep in the chair across the room. He’d spend the night where he belonged: beside her.
* * *
Although Fort Campbell, Kentucky, was an hour behind Eastern time, Wulf doubted calling at 10:00 p.m. would interrupt dinner. The team would’ve redeployed home in late November, the same time he was searching Rabat and Marrakesh for Ivar, and Deavers and Kahananui and the others would’ve shared the holidays with their families. Last year he’d eaten turkey with Deavers and Kristin. She’d been pregnant with a second child. This year’s Christmas would’ve included the new baby.
He had at least an hour before he could slip upstairs without finding Theresa awake, so he’d started to pack. The air was stuffy in Ivar’s basement storage room, but the shelves were so well organized that Wulf could lay his hands immediately on what he needed for his trip. That left him free to stare at the phone. If redeployment went true to form, by this point the team would be restless. He could picture Kahananui working in his yard, cursing the cold, and Cruz closing down one too many bunny bars despite his claims to be reformed, because over the years he’d helped both with their preferred pastimes. Deavers would be throwing himself into All-American fatherhood as hard as he tackled mission planning, but since his wife didn’t need a movement order, a rally point or an extraction plan, he’d feel a little unappreciated about now. That’s the way two and a half months home usually panned out, with loose ends and lots of trying to build a routine. After three months, they usually hit their stride and found a rhythm preparing for the next deployment.
He missed the team. Ivar had shut him out, and even though she hadn’t rejected his touch at the dinner table, Theresa couldn’t possibly want more from him. The team would want him. And, because he didn’t trust himself to succeed without someone guarding his back, a job Ivar wasn’t ready to undertake, he punched a number in from memory.
“Deavers here.” His friend’s voice was brusque and quiet, the way he always answered a nighttime call in a house with sleeping kids.
“Chris.” Wulf greeted him back with his own name, that word enough to identify himself.
“Man, oh man,” He could hear his former commander’s grin in the way he stretched his words, almost laughing. “I hoped you’d call someday...”
“Yeah, me too.” His throat felt tight.
“How’s it going? Wait, let me go in my office.”
Wulf closed his eyes to picture the space Deavers called an office in his one-story rambler near the post. Kid-size plastic three-wheelers, a washer and dryer and in the corner, two leather rolling chairs mended with duct tape set around his father’s old footlocker for a table. It was the only place in the house his wife allowed him to chew.
“Kristin gave me an office upgrade for Christmas, by the way.” As Deavers settled in, a chair creaked loudly enough to be heard over their connection. “You�
�ll wish you were here.”
“Not a new chair? You’re not a good enough husband to deserve that.”
“Hoo-ah, this bad boy’s better than a chair. A top-of-the-line mini-fridge.”
Wulf heard the suction of an opening door.
“She thinks I don’t know it’s her way of snagging more space by exiling my beer. Got one handy? I recall a promise to share a drink when we hit civilization.”
“I’m ahead of you.” Wulf looked at the empty bottles sitting on the shelf next to a box of European cellular phone SIM cards.
His friend’s noncommittal ah conveyed a world of understanding. “So, the doc. How’s that’s going? How is she?”
At the question, the tiny screwdriver he was using to open the back of a burner cell phone jumped out of its groove. Going upstairs after dinner, Theresa had looked over her shoulder and half smiled with her eyes lowered and her head tilted just so. It might have been an invitation, but what if he was wrong?
“If you give me some self-sacrificing bullshit, the team will hunt you down and kick your ass until we make it hurt, no matter how long that takes. Copy?”
“Roger that.” The problem with having friends who knew you this well was that they knew you this well.
“Did you go after her? That’s what you were supposed to do.”
“I did, but—” He’d have to hide the extra SIM cards in the phone later, when Deavers wasn’t throwing him curveballs. After a deep breath, he took the plunge. “Some Class 1-A problems followed me to Jersey City.”
“Wait—New Jersey? Not the torched house with the six—”
“Yeah. That was her family’s place. Different last name.” He didn’t know how Deavers had missed making the connection. Being home with two kids must have been rougher than Paktia Province, because wall-to-wall coverage had blanketed the media for three days. Cable and internet couldn’t trumpet loudly enough that both the senator’s house and the house of the soldier who’d been in the car with him had burned down on the same day. The FBI wasn’t talking, but reporters had dug up the organized-crime connection, and now the least sensational headlines began Ivy League-Mafia Princess-War Heroine.
“Doc and her parents are fine.” With Deavers he slipped back into his nickname for Theresa. “But her stepbrother and cousin were two of the six.”
Chris breathed a word that summed up the situation in four letters.
Wulf’s hands hovered over a row of airtight containers before he acknowledged that he didn’t have enough focus to pack a belt buckle with explosives. He’d have to leave that for tomorrow. “Six more casualties across the street, guards, but that’s not public. They were all ex-FBI or Special Ops.”
“Guess you’re not calling to ask me to be your best man, then?”
Maybe if Theresa’s idea worked, he’d have the opportunity to become a regular guy who made normal plans like that, but tonight he had a different request. “I need help.”
“We can be wheels up in four hours. Tell us where and what to bring.”
“SAS Flight 926 day after tomorrow, IAD to Copenhagen.” After seeing Ivar’s motivation, he wasn’t going to delay getting started with the antiviral research. Having a goal might help his brother recover. “I need someone to watch my back while I find a Viking relic.”
“We’ll leave a few homebodies to cover the fort, but who do you want?”
“Cruz and Bama Boy. Nobody else.” This was the part he’d known would be hardest.
“Negative on that request. Bama busted his knee waterskiing—”
“In February?”
“Went to Mexico with his sister’s nanny. At least that’s what he says, so you get me.”
“Sir, you’re not invited to this party. Nobody with kids.”
Deavers continued as if Wulf hadn’t spoken. “And if the Big Kahuna finds out you called and I didn’t tell him, he’ll cut off my nuts. Your panty knots aren’t worth impairing my love life, so Kahananui’s in too.”
“Don’t you understand six guys with our training were taken out like factory chickens across the street from Doc’s? This is a bachelor party. Not you, not Big K, no one with—”
“No, you need to understand.” Deavers went into his rarely used pit bull growl. Rarely used because the team generally worked as an egalitarian unit, so he didn’t emphasize rank. “Do the math. I wouldn’t have kids without you, brother, just the dirt bed. Kristin got pregnant after our Fallujah vacation, where you saved my ass at least three times. If you need me, I’m in.”
“Talk about a fucking martyr complex!” Wulf stopped short of pounding the wall, but he couldn’t staunch his regrets over reaching out to his friend. “The people I need backup to watch out for aren’t Scandinavian nannies or piece-of-shit terrorists, or even other Special Ops. There could be three of them just like me. Get that? Like me.”
“Oh. Wow.” On the other end of the line, Chris took a deep breath. His chair creaked back and forth while Wulf hung on to his side of the call. “Well. That’ll make it harder to cover the spread, but it also leaves me with a sling load of unanswered questions.”
Wulf couldn’t, wouldn’t, satisfy his former commander’s curiosity over the telephone, but he had to persuade him to stay in Kentucky. “It’s not a game. It should fucking scare you.”
“Hell yes. It’s a ball shrinker, but you know me. I puke before HALO jumps, and I’ve never missed one yet.”
Deavers wasn’t the only one who found parachuting from above 25,000 feet and free falling at over a hundred miles per hour to be stressful. Wulf had never wanted to test whether his condition could overcome a big splatter. “If you’re trying to distract me, no dice. You’re not invited. Your regular work’s hard enough on Kristin. Don’t go off-roading.”
“All right, already.” Deavers made a disgusted sound.
“Promise you’re not coming, or I won’t be on the flight. I’m not under your command anymore.”
“Promise,” Deavers agreed.
Without looking in his friend’s eyes, Wulf couldn’t tell if he was lying. “Tell Cruz to bring a black work passport. It’s that kind of trip.”
“His favorite kind.”
After the call ended, Wulf assessed his packing. He was close enough to being finished with stowing the cash and gear he planned to smuggle into Denmark that he could go upstairs. At the least, he’d be able to watch Theresa for one more night. But maybe—he remembered that half smile from above him on the stairs—he wouldn’t have to spend it in the chair.
* * *
Other evenings, Theresa had folded her clothes and put them away, but if she wanted to entice Wulf to the bed, she probably had to leave obvious hints. She dropped the pink turtleneck sweater she’d worn to dinner inside the doorway, where it couldn’t be overlooked, and left her long black skirt puddled two steps farther into the room. She aligned the cups and straps of her bra until she’d made an arrow pointing to the bed, but that looked weird, so she nudged it into a pile. She chickened out before removing her panties and instead donned a pair of Wulf’s soft flannel pajamas. The bottom hung low around her waist, and the top button of the matching shirt fell between her breasts.
As ready as she could make herself, she concealed her stump among the blankets and waited. Anticipation, not fear, made her hold her breath when the door opened.
“Hello.” Pitching her voice low was easy with the nerves inside her chest threatening to block her ability to speak. She rose on one elbow and made sure her top gaped.
“Are you sure?” He bent toward her, providing a whiff of yeasty residue.
“You smell.” She pressed her hand against his shirt, as much to hold him away as to feel his body heat through the cotton. “Like beer sweat.”
“That I do.” His voice was slower, with a throaty sound, as if the alcohol had p
ulled him to another era or place where people spoke more slowly. “Shall I wash?”
“That would be nice.” This wasn’t how tonight was supposed to work. And she didn’t have a backup plan.
“Come with me.” Taking the duvet in his hands, he looked to her for permission.
In her imagination, he was supposed to climb into bed beside her in the dark, not smelling like beer, and he wouldn’t need to see any part of her lower torso without clothes. Reality, as usual, was totally different, but she knew this was their chance to find each other again and she had to work with what he offered, so she nodded. “My leg’s next to the bed.” Not as hard to say as she’d expected.
“I’ll carry you.” When he scooped her in his arms, static made the empty pajama leg cling to his elbow. He couldn’t see her stump, not with the long flannel flopping over it.
“But I want—” Before she’d finished her request, he popped the leg and the liner sleeve sitting next to it into her arms, like he knew how much security they gave her. She clung to him as he dipped to reach the doorknob. “Where are we going?”
“Wait and see.”
At the end of the hall a set of stairs continued up to what was probably the roof. Tucking her stump closer to Wulf to avoid bumps as they ascended, she anticipated the cold February night. Instead they entered a warm and earthy-smelling room.
“Ivar’s conservatory.” The exertion of climbing had erased the blurriness of beer from Wulf’s speech, although he wasn’t panting as he carried her past shelves of plants with multi-fingered leaves, some smooth, others with edges like bread knives. Flowers ranging from pale green to purplish-black nodded as they brushed past. “He propagates hellebores.”
She forgot what Wulf had said as soon as they emerged through a heavy plastic curtain. Simultaneously inside and outside, the glass-ceilinged room around her bloomed with azaleas and tightly budded tulips. His breathing remained as even as it had been when he’d first lifted her, until she slipped two fingers between his shirt buttons and touched the hot skin of his chest. That made his breath catch and hold.
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