Her fight finished, she slumped and closed her eyes. Her soft leather flats weren’t soccer cleats, and now her foot and ankle hurt so badly that she wanted to moan. But within two breaths she realized the smoke had thickened.
Embrace the suck, her army buds always said. There was still a fire to extinguish.
Next time he wanted Theresa to stay put, Wulf vowed to rely on rope, but first he had to save her and the castle. He pounded the tapestry on the smoldering couch as she fired a second time.
She missed.
A single round from a Lancaster .577 could take down a charging hussar, and she’d missed? The man stopper only had two shots. “Theresa! Run, dammit! Run!”
Another fighter popped over the back of a padded chair, thick-barreled handgun aimed at his chest.
He dove and rolled, but no rounds banged into him or near him. Instead a single long projectile hung quivering from a charred cushion. The orange tail stabilizer couldn’t have been more visible. A tranquilizer dart. He whirled the tapestry, bullfighter style, to intercept more surprises of the syringe kind while rushing his opponent. The woolen length weighed enough that its spinning velocity knocked aside the dart gun, and they were left fighting man-to-man.
The other guy was fast and well trained. Wulf blocked a throat thrust with his forearm, but missed his follow-up kick because his opponent had spun toward a rack of spears.
Springing toward the wall to grab a broadsword, Wulf circled. His adversary’s unfamiliarity with the pike showed in his grip—a mix of a high jumper’s hold on a pole and infantry bayonet training. Wulf loosened his wrist with a test swing, and then the thrill of a fight like he hadn’t faced in three centuries was upon him.
Seconds later, a glint crossed the corner of his vision as his high-speed, low-drag doc kicked a silver bowl at an invader’s head. He parried another pike thrust and glanced back at her in time to see her slide tackle her man in the balls. That Valkyrie was his, by the gods, his.
“No!” he heard her yell. “Let go!”
Pain exploded in his temple and knocked him to his knees. Shouldn’t have taken my eyes off my opponent. Rolling away before his foe impaled him, Wulf popped to one knee and swung his blade upward to flip the pike out of the other man’s grasp.
At the same moment, the attacker stepped forward to stab with the barbed end, his arm moving on a collision course with Wulf’s sword edge.
The severed arm landed two feet away from its owner, whose momentum carried him to Wulf’s feet. The answers Wulf needed spread across the floor with the man’s lifeblood.
“Doc!” he yelled, and he grabbed a table runner, stuffing cloth on the arm stump as fast as blood soaked through. “Need some help here.”
“Me...too.” Her answer sounded like two croaks.
“Medical help.” He kept pressure on the wad of cloth while he unbuckled his belt one-handed. “Got one dying.”
“I...do not...care...” Her voice trailed off as she crawled into his sight line. “Damn.” She scrambled to shove her hands alongside his. “Your belt—tourniquet.”
As soon as he had it out of the loops, she ordered him to call an ambulance.
“Are you serious?”
“Want him to live?” Her face scrunched with concentration. “He needs blood.”
“Too late.” Wulf sat on his heels and stared at the guy’s fixed pupils. He’d never find out how these men had discovered Montebelli. “He’s zipped in.”
Leaving rather than waiting for the mercenaries to return had been about survival, but ninety minutes after Draycott had dropped them at the trail leading to the beach below Wardsen’s hideaway, his phone hadn’t rung with a call for pick up. Nada, nothing, zip. Thanks to Wardsen, the South Africans weren’t looking for the last name on tonight’s kill list. Instead, they’d punched out. The sergeant would never know, but he’d done Draycott a big favor.
This wasn’t the moment to celebrate. Jane wasn’t answering, and the one person he could trust to pass the signal that she had to run hadn’t called back. If Em couldn’t reach her mother first, if, God forbid, Em was gone, then evading the Director was time-wasting futility, not worth even as much as the bald tires on his crappy van.
Jane and Em. Mother and daughter. Smiles so alike they could be mistaken for each other in photos.
He pushed the minibus to its tottering top speed, which had already brought him one hundred and twenty miles closer to the French-Italian border. Either he still had far to go tonight, or he had nothing at all. Except payback.
Despite showering after he’d tucked Theresa and an ice pack for her foot into the most secure tower room, Wulf couldn’t eradicate the smell of smoke from his skin. Whiffs clung as tenaciously as the cold fear in his gut. They’d stay at Montebelli until morning, when he could have more confidence that the roads were safe for them to move on. Until then, the papal tower where Ivar had once retreated from an eleven-week siege would have to shelter Theresa too.
One task remained before he joined Lorenzo to restore the Great Room: calling his brother. New York City was six hours earlier, so Ivar would be awake. Although he and his brother had spent centuries fighting back-to-back from Denmark to Samarkand, they’d drifted so far apart that Wulf had to calculate how long had passed since they’d been in the same place at the same time. Maybe three years. He liked to stop in Manhattan when his sibling was in Italy or at his island, and he visited Italy when Ivar was in New York. Keeping an ocean between them had become a habit during the Cold War, one that hadn’t fallen with the Berlin Wall.
No matter how long he rubbed a towel across his chest, the phone squatted conveniently on a hall table near the bathroom door. Its taupe handset and curled cord were twenty-five years out-of-date, but change came slowly at the fortezza.
Ivar picked up in the middle of the second ring.
“I’m at Montebelli.” No point in gilding the conversation. “The shit’s hit the fire. Literally.”
“How did you not understand the message I gave Lorenzo? Have you never met a woman who didn’t take you for everything?”
With one question, Ivar had pissed him off. Two questions took him back a thousand years to that morning in Chang’an when he’d had to explain to his big brother why he’d lent a prostitute their Silk Road profit. Ivar never had appreciated that the girl wanted to buy her sister a respectable position as a Buddhist nun, or that their earnings were only money, something they had time to acquire again. Helping others was a connection. Ivar couldn’t understand how much Wulf needed to be around normal people. His brother preferred to bond with money.
Tonight he wouldn’t feel guilty about defying his big brother. He’d spit it out and not argue. “The good news is, all the men who invaded are dead and the damage to the Great Hall isn’t structural. The bad news is, one of your French chairs has gone to meet its maker.”
“You joke as if you don’t know what you’ve unleashed.” Deliberately precise, Ivar’s voice conveyed more than disapproval. “You don’t, do you? Because you’ve always led with your fists or your prick, not your head. Nothing changes.”
No, nothing ever did, certainly not his brother’s ability to send him to the flash point with a handful of sentences. “Tell me, if you’re playing Odin Allfather, what have I unleashed?”
“You would know that answer if you’d researched Black and Swan.”
“Why should I? You’re dying to share.” Wulf felt the hammer poised above his head.