Behind her, Kahananui ignored the explosion and fired up his snowmobile. “Go!”
She obeyed, even though each bump of the snowmobile warred with her instinct to turn the machine around and find Wulf, the way he’d found her in that burning vehicle months ago. But she’d promised to leave him, and the man behind her needed more help than they could provide during a firefight.
Following Wulf’s last order was the hardest commitment she’d ever made.
* * *
Exit. Wulf’s life shrank to one word as the floor scorched his bare palms and the treasures around him ignited. Dragging himself forward was the only route to salvation. Behind him planks popped into flame as fire fingers chased his useless leg. He hadn’t unleashed an ordinary fragmentation grenade. Guleed’s treasure had been thermite, molten droplets guaranteed to sear. Rolling under a displayed boat had spared him from instant incineration, but escape meant crawling through hell one handhold at a time.
Burning roof timbers collapsed, feeding the fire with fresh oxygen. Accumulated snow dropped through the roof hole and vaporized in the inferno, and for a fraction of a second it seemed as if Loki’s chilled hand brushed Wulf’s cheek and tantalized him with the outside cold.
The green running-man sign beckoned, and he heaved and scrabbled onto the porch. A second later he rolled down the steps into snow—blissfully, brilliantly, killingly cold snow. The seared soft places of his lips and tongue needed moisture. He struggled to lift a handful to his mouth, but the white fluff melted on his black glove.
Glove?
He’d removed his gloves with his snowshoes. The black coating, dark and glistening like a wet suit, was layers of his skin. Where the snow sizzled on his hands, sheets of blackened tissue shed to show red muscle and white bone beneath. Decades ago, he and Jurik had speculated about how much fire it would take to end their type of life. Burning at the stake wasn’t enough—Jurik had experienced it—but they’d assumed charcoal and ash couldn’t heal without living cells.
Today was not the day he would discover an answer for Jurik.
As he buried his open mouth in the snow, the heel on his damaged leg finally swiveled and pushed him an inch. He’d walk soon, even if his hands were stubs.
Unferth staggered off the porch, armor glowing. Snow hissed in his steps.
“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 dis
tance 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 b
e 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!”
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