The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2)

by Anna Richland

  “I’ll admit that the passport photo of me looks kind of like a man if you hold it at arm’s length and wave it around.” She settled the bag with the bottle of Perlus in the back and lowered herself into the passenger seat. “But I think I might be insulted if they actually believe I’m a man.”

  “That’s the point of my getup.” He raised the garage door in a smooth move that tightened his calves under the sheer hose, and then climbed into the driver’s seat. Even fully adjusted, his knees hit the dashboard and his head brushed the ceiling. “I look so theatrical in these lashes and falsies that no immigration officer will look twice at you. Because you look nondescript compared to me, you must be who you say you are.”

  His logic made sense in the backward way everything had since she’d arrived in London; that is to say, it didn’t. But at this point she trusted it would work.

  “I suggest you duck into the footwell. The car park alleyway is a dead end, so we’ve got to drive past the gentleman watching my flat. Better if he only sees me. I’ll wait to don my wig once we’re away.”

  She crammed herself into the tiny space, facing backward with her torso folded on top of the passenger seat.

  The car shot forward, made a noise like a tree-chipper and shuddered to a dead stop.

  “No worries,” Stig said as he restarted the engine. “She’s just jealous of my passenger.”

  “This isn’t much of a getaway car.” She was too jammed in the bottom for her lower half to move as he gunned the engine around the corner to leave the alley.

  “Rule number one—the more expensive a thing is, the bigger the trail it leaves.”

  She was too busy surviving a turn sharp enough to bonk her right shoulder into the door to answer with more than a grunt.

  “Clear.” He threw one arm across the interior of the car, almost reaching the passenger window. “Left the wanker dashing after us. Do me a favor.”

  “Only if I it means I can climb out of here.” She was already pushing the seat with her arms to try to raise and unfold from the worst attempt at a child’s pose she’d ever done. “It’s easier to do yoga on a mat than in a compact car.”

  “Stretch over your seat, and you’ll see four red zip ties coming through holes in the boot. If you snap them, the number plate drops off. There’s a spare underneath.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “As a hippopotamus.”

  “You really do plan ahead.”

  Chapter Ten

  The blowflies came first. When the thin northern sun raised the daytime temperature of Denmark’s bogs past fifty degrees, the previous fall’s pupae emerged as winged creatures. Unerring senses bred over sixty million years led one newly hatched carrion fly to a thawed chunk of flesh and bone caught in the fork of a spindly birch.

  The first arriver laid two hundred eggs. One sunset and sunrise later, they hatched.

  Within a day, maggots consumed the thawed eye tissue. They reanimated the orbs into a wriggling medusa that spread outward across the host lodged oddly in the tree. The maggots’ breathing mechanisms occupied the opposite end from their mouths, which allowed them to consume continuously without stopping for air.

  Inarguably, maggots were efficient. Maggots were effective.

  To a raven who circled above the bog, maggots were tasty. Alighting on a branch, he found the writhing mass of spring’s first larvae and recognized their food source as a man-head, one with no body and no arms to wave off an inquisitive bird. Above the raven, competitors croaked greedily, but the lucky bird spiked his throat feathers and expanded to proclaim his conquest. He pecked for the plump maggots, threw his head back and swallowed them whole, then cawed warnings at his brethren.

  Perhaps it was the vocal range of the black-feathered hrafn that inspired the ancients, for stories told how the chief god of this land had kept two huge ravens as his eyes and ears. Huginn, for thought. Muninn, for memory.

  Biologists consider members of the bird family Corvidae, who are able to shape sticks into useful tools and plan multi-step processes to acquire food, to be the most intelligent birds. This one sensed the fastest way to get the protein concealed under the hard skull shell was the same method it used on crabs and bivalves. Lift, drop on rocks, repeat until the shell cracked like a pond turtle, then dive faster than the competition to taste victory.

  Instinct pushed the raven to hurry. He didn’t have the gifts that Odin had given his mythological ancestors, but he didn’t need them to predict a fight. The bird’s black claws gripped its meal, and its wings beat hard. Because of the weight of the bone, the thing was heavy, heavier than a small animal, but the reward would be larger when it cracked. More flapping, then the large wings achieved lift and the raven rose from the branches into open air.

  Two blue-black birds dove from separate sides, attacking for the prize.

  The raven’s wings folded and it plunged, causing the attackers to collide, then opened again and beat furiously, but the bird couldn’t rise. The hanging weight slipped. The fragile connection of skin to skull had sundered and the raven’s meal fell untethered, leaving its claws gripping nothing but a stringy pennant of hair and sinew, no greater than the tail of a rat, and no more palatable.

  No rocks blanketed the ground below to crack the prize open. Only a dark bog whose mud could trace its origins as deep as time marked the landscape where the raven’s treasure sank, bubbling into the dark mere.

  This bog concealed many things.

  The descendant of Odin’s messenger flew on.

  Chapter Eleven

  A hand squeezing her thigh penetrated Christina’s sleep fog, but it was the road whizzing past her left shoulder, cars close to the glass where her head rested, that jerked her upright and made her foot slam for a nonexistent brake pedal. “Where are we?”

  “Coming up on Folkestone and the vehicle train.” Stig’s hand withdrew to the wheel. “You didn’t reply when I said your name.”

  The frizzy blond wig with contrasting dark roots seemed to fill his half of the car. His appearance brought the ordeal of the previous twenty-four hours rushing back, but she was so tired she felt glued to the fabric of the passenger seat. If she couldn’t keep her eyes open, her back and shoulders would never recover the energy to support themselves independently.

  The car hummed into a lower gear as it changed speed and bumped left to exit. Forcing her eyelids to lift was a process so difficult, she wanted an award. Freight trucks lumbered in the next lane while Stig steered between rows of orange cones, but she didn’t see a visible destination.

  The vibrating sides of the car pressed on her like bars of a cage. “Where’s the train?”

  “The terminal designers listened a bit too much to ‘Long and Winding Road.’ We’re in the queue, but it’s quite a drive.”

  The silent progress might have been thirty seconds, but it rivaled her trans-Atlantic flight.

  “I’m nervous.” Tossing the confession into the air didn’t make her feelings abate. If anything, it gave them substance. “They’re going to stop us.”

  He shrugged. “The car train’s a gamble, like anything. Which enforcement and inspection areas are ramped up versus which are starved of resources.”

  The line of cars inched forward at a pace her heart easily surpassed. “I don’t know whether I want this line to go faster or to never move.”

  “Speed’s overrated.” In the small car, they sat close enough that he could easily rest one hand over hers. “I’m a man with a preference for flexibility.”

  Distracting her, that was what he was doing. For the past six years she’d attended yoga twice a week and she was proud of her ability to bend and stretch. The weight of his hand and his so-knowing voice made her toes curl and her arches flex with the need to stretch, but they were too cramped for that level of movement outside of her mind.
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  “Our turn,” he muttered as the car in front of them left the window and the light signaled them to approach the kiosk. “Remember, if someone can hear you, you only speak Spanish.”

  He rolled down his window to tap onto the computer screen. She couldn’t see, but almost immediately he received a tag with the letter R and hung it from the rearview mirror.

  The car eased forward.

  “¿Y ya nada mas?” Her spine curved into the seat, anticipating relief.

  He raised the window and answered in English. “Not quite all. That was just the ticket.” His eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. “We still have French immigration.”

  She already recognized the flat tone he used for bad news. “What is it?”

  “There’s a Vauxhall estate car two behind us that I’m fairly certain was parked a few blocks from my flat.”

  She flipped down the windshield visor and pretended to check her hair. The car Stig meant hadn’t reached the pay station yet. It had edged right against the bumper of the one in front of it, as if anxious to proceed. Through the windshield of the other car, she could make out two people in the front, but they were too obscured to identify. “How can you tell?”

  “Orange parking sticker in the corner of the windscreen.” He made a fist on the steering wheel. “Who the hell are they?”

  His question hung unanswered as they followed the access road. She didn’t see a single turnaround or exit. “How do we get out of here?”

  “We don’t.” He gripped the wheel with both hands. “The last thing you do is bail on an immigration or security check. Sends up red flags, gates drop, lights flash, the whole banana.” Even in this situation, his precisely enunciated buh-nah-nah didn’t waver, which gave her a momentary calm. Then he added, “Nothing for us to do except drive onto the train.”

  “But...” Her chest heaved and half her brain started to count—one, two, exhale—to try to control her breathing. Like before a competition. “They will too.”

  “I suspect the ride will be a rather tense thirty-five minutes.”

  The red-and-white swing arm gates they encountered as they followed signs toward passport and security control notched her heart rate higher. She left the mirror down to scan vehicles in the lanes behind them. Her mind seesawed between the rearview and the looming checkpoint, unable to settle on a greater fear. When she looked for the car, she worried whether her passport would pass inspection, and when she tried to spot the roof of the immigration booth, she wondered how many cars behind them their shadows lurked.

  La frontera. The word rose from the spot inside her soul where she never went, the place where she was seven and riding in the back of a van with six men and two women she didn’t know, all of them smelling like sweat and old greasy food. Stuck next to a lady who spent the night whispering about dios, la frontera and la virgen, when all she wanted was a hug and to reach her mother.

  “Which one?” Stig’s muttered question yanked her back to the present, where their lane divided into multiple checkpoints. “Man or woman, which officer should we pick?”

  Her thumb pressed the tiny band of silver deep into her skin, but it didn’t yield guidance.

  The car stuttered for a moment, not quite stalling, as his speed dipped too low for third gear. “Well?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice sounded reedy and high, not at all like a young man, and she fought the urge to get out of the car. Now she understood why people tried to run away in full view of guard posts, which had always made no sense to her, but her instincts screamed don’t keep going. The primitive need to hide was strong.

  “Too late to switch lanes now.” The car advanced between the orange cones to be next at the station with a man at the window. “Let’s hope this guy isn’t a bigot.”

  She needed to occupy her hands without exposing how she trembled, so she traced one of the rips in the leggings.

  “Passports?” He held his hand out the window but his eyes were fixed to the monitor in front of him.

  “Here you are, Officer.” Stig’s voice wasn’t fake, feminine or simpering, merely cheerful and slightly faster than his normal speech as he extended both folders through the window.

  At the moment of exchange, the guard actually looked at Stig and absorbed the false eyelashes and violet shadow teamed with the plunging wrap dress and enormous hair. He blinked, twice, but nothing else shifted in his expression as he examined the burgundy-colored British passport. “Andrew Henry DePlant.” He waved the page with the gold crest of the lion and unicorn over a plastic box in the kiosk and ignored the immediate buzz the box emitted to ask Stig, “Why are you traveling to France, monsieur?”

  “We have an act, a stage act, and we’re in a competition in Paris,” Stig answered.

  Christina leaned her shoulder against the door and tried to look young, bored and tired, like a kid who’d been clubbing too late and woke just in time for a car trip. With one elbow propped on the door’s arm rest, she covered the left side of her forehead with her fingers. Don’t touch the ring. She let her right hand fall open on her thigh. No nervous tell.

  Stig tossed strands of his wig away from his chandelier earrings. “We’ll be at Chez Manelle tomorrow.”

  “José Felipe Suárez.” This was the moment that had her armpits sweating. The immigration officer glanced from the red-and-gold Spanish passport to Christina, but his eyes flitted back to Stig before he waved the second passport over the reader box. When it made the same irritating buzz, he gave it a disgusted look. “Pourquoi ce truc de merde ne fonctionne jamais? Eh, pourquoi?” He shook his head and closed her passport.

  It was going to work. She didn’t know how Stig could be so nonchalant, but he fiddled with the stick shift as if he didn’t care about retrieving the passports, and then casually reached through the window.

  “Have a nice trip.” The man handed both folders to Stig.

  “Merci beaucoup.” Stig’s voice was perky, as if he’d forgotten their other problems.

  “Bonne chance.” The officer winked.

  As they rolled away, she started to giggle. “Merci beaucoup!” She tried to imitate Stig’s rising inflection, but her words emerged like a bad Julia Child imitation. “I cannot believe that worked. We were so bus-ted when the reader beeped.” She couldn’t suppress her laughter, which gave all her words extra syllables. “Twi-ice. It beeped twice, and he didn’t give a crap!”

  “Because his machine’s a truc de merde, didn’t you know?” Stig leaned toward the steering wheel, laughing and driving at the same time, and she had to wrap her arms around herself when the hiccups started. “A piece of shit. Oh, my mascara’s running.” He touched under one eye while laughing and driving. “This is perfect, perfect.”

  They rolled down a ramp and turned into an opening that resembled a garage door. It led to an interconnected series of train compartments, like an infinite parking ramp one space wide. The white interior was well-lit, with square windows high on the sides, yellow railings and reflective stripes, too clean and bright for any threat to seem real.

  “We made it,” she breathed as Stig turned off the ignition and set the parking brake. Her chest heaved with what she hoped was her last hiccup. “I hate hiccups.”

  His smile gave her less than a second’s warning, and then his mouth was pressing hers. This kiss was a celebration. She grabbed his shoulders as soon as she felt his hand at the back of her own head, delving into her hair to pull her close, and they ground their lips together hard and fast, but then the stick shift was in the way of more.

  It was quick, the kiss, as if they were both aware they weren’t even halfway through this giant mess. They pulled apart, but there wasn’t space to retreat that wasn’t almost as close as an embrace.

  “Did I scare them out of you?”

  “I think so.” Refraining from touching h
er lips to see if they felt as changed as the rest of her life did was an act of supreme willpower. “Thanks for the help.”

  “Think nothing of it.” He reached for her face. “My shade of red is too cool for your skin tone. Let me rub it off.”

  There was nothing innocent or helpful in the way he touched her lips. Remaining still while his thumb traced the corner of her mouth was harder than playing her part at the immigration booth. Each stroke caused her breasts to grow until she was desperate for more oxygen than she could get from the shallow breaths permitted by her chest bindings. He was sin, and from the signals his body was sending hers, he knew it.

  “Done.” His hand dropped even though his eyes beckoned her closer. “Now we have to move.”

  She gravitated toward him, seeking to restore the connection, before the jolt of the train starting penetrated her fog and she twisted in her seat. A line of cars filled the ramp behind them. She must have given sound to the fear that burst full-blown in her chest.

  “Let’s look at the bright side, shall we? There are worse things that can happen to us in the next half hour than two men in Mackintoshes.”

  Immediately she pictured the blood-crusted knife in Skafe’s hand. The last of her euphoria wilted. “Like what?”

  “We’re about to travel thirty-one miles through a tunnel two hundred and fifty feet below the English Channel, whose water reaches the balmy temperature of nine degrees Celsius in spring.” Although his blue eyes turned up at the corners with seeming mockery, the pressure thinning his lips revealed his nerves.

  She could return the favor of teasing him, perhaps enough to chase those shadows away. “Thank you, Madam Sunshine.”

  “That’s Señora Sunshine to you.” He snagged his makeup case from behind the seat. “Grab your wine and anything else you can’t live without. We won’t be back.” He patted the dashboard gently. “Cheerio, little car.”