Her ankle adjustment screwdriver slit the packing tape as neatly as Wulf’s knife had once done. Inside, glossy black covers decorated with Iron Age relics competed with manga and academic texts. The books were a connection to Wulf, his history, his people. The smooth paper under her fingers wasn’t a substitute for him, but he was coming, and she could be ready. She’d start with children’s picture books for basic familiarity with the epic and work through young adult en route to the Seamus Heaney translation and the stack of life sciences.
Twenty minutes ago her future could have been summarized as go-to-therapy-rinse-repeat. Now she had a goal. Even if her research wasn’t the same as a real job, she had a plan.
She liked her plan more than going down to lunch. The fight scenes with Grendel and his mother were freaking suspenseful, so she ignored her mother until the door opened.
“What are you doing?” Jeanne assessed the books in a glance. “Beowulf? Isn’t that some English monster or whatever?” She said it with the tones someone might use about a really hairy tarantula. “And starfish? Squid? What are you reading about those for?”
“Self-improvement?” Theresa finished highlighting a passage about Grendel’s bog.
“A haircut is self-improvement. This—” she gestured at the room, “—this is a library!”
“I tend to like those.”
“I know, I know. But did you have to start one here?”
“You could buy me a new bookshelf. I’ve heard Newport Centre mall sells them.”
Her mother’s eyebrows arched with glee before they lowered at her again. “Ha. You thought you could trick me into leaving. Not unless you come down to eat.”
“Later.” She flipped pages to reach a description of Grendel’s mother.
“Now. I made lasagna.”
“Ivar?” Wulf called his brother’s name from the stairs to the underground garage. His brother hadn’t deleted his biometric data from the Manhattan house’s security system. So either Ivar was becoming lazy or he didn’t want to completely cut off Wulf. “Ivar?”
If he didn’t have to face those judgmental gray eyes to retrieve his spare identity documents, so much the better. Across the river in New Jersey, close enough that if he stretched, he could almost hold her, Theresa waited. As soon as he showered off the grime he’d picked up in the five airports between Tajikistan and New York City, he’d blow out of here. By dinner, he’d be with Theresa. Or at least trying to convince her to talk to him, given that the last words they’d exchanged before the explosion hadn’t been fond adieus.
He shouted a third time before stepping into the kitchen. “Ivar?”
With his brother out doing whatever international money managers did, he had time to grab a snack. As soon as he opened the fridge, a stench worse than Kahananui’s socks rolled out from a gallon of yellowish milk, sludgy as yogurt. Shoving the back of his hand over his nose, he read the purple-inked date: August 4. Seven weeks ago, right after he and Ivar had argued on the phone. While the team had been waiting for the right opportunity to raid the opium facility, Ivar’s milk had been fermenting.
Burying his mouth and nose deeper in the bend of his elbow, he used one finger of his other hand to pull out the meat drawer. Its contents were an unidentifiable slick of putrefied protein, and the nauseating reek engulfed him like a tsunami. Gagging, he slammed the door. He took the stairs two at a time to the second and third floors, yelling his brother’s name, but the pit in his stomach told him he wouldn’t hear an answer. Echoes chased him until finally, heaving for breath in his brother’s study, where dust had settled thickly enough that his palms left sweat prints on the desk, he accepted the truth.
Ivar was gone.
Ivar hadn’t been here for weeks.
Centered in front of his brother’s chair, a padded postal mailer seemed to be waiting for someone to sit and open it. The exterior was completely blank, without postage or a cancelation mark, as if it had been hand-delivered. His brother never left clutter, or anything except a writing blotter and one antique fountain pen, on his desk. The foreboding that swept Wulf as he picked up the envelope was completely inverse to its almost weightlessness.
The sound of pull tape ripping across the flap raised his neck hairs. Whatever this envelope contained, the twisting in his gut told him it too would be his fault.
Inside were two photos and a scrap of cloth, simple items that spun the room under him until he had to cling to the desktop. The first picture showed a man’s back, arms manacled overhead to a stone wall. Among the oozing round sores that covered his skin, randomly placed unmarked areas made his body resemble a half-played checkerboard.
Buzzing filled Wulf’s head as he absorbed the second image. On a reflective stainless-steel background, a triquetra tattoo marked a chunk of skin that lay between a man’s wrist and the hand that had been removed from it. A glossy, wet-looking triangle on the inner forearm showed where the piece of flesh had been excised. Wulf knew that tattoo. Fifteen hundred years ago, when those three dark-blue interlocking circles had been inked on his still-mortal brother, Wulf had stood next to him and sung with drunken enthusiasm.
The photo of Ivar’s amputated hand—he suddenly understood how Unferth had bypassed the house security to leave this package—was revolting, but even it was surpassed by the depravity of the third item. Decorated with the triquetra’s infinitely looping lines, the scrap in Wulf’s hand was as flexible as suede.
It was his brother’s skin.
Struggling against a need to vomit, to purge himself in the most visceral way, he swept the skin and photos to the floor and pounded the desk. The wood held as he pounded again and again. It wouldn’t break. His fist wouldn’t break either.
It should have been him.
A drawer front cracked from his kicks, then the chair toppled, but the destruction didn’t stop his fury.
It should have been his arm. Not Ivar’s. His fault.
Somehow he found a thread of control, grabbed the edge of the desk and forced himself to be still. His knuckles looked more like a goat carcass after a buzkashi tournament than like human anatomy, but the pain didn’t change the facts. Theresa was in New Jersey, but his brother was in hell, and he’d caused it, so he’d have to fix it.
On the far wall, a flat television screen showed his dark reflection, chest heaving as he rubbed his face. The streaks of blood his hands left on his cheekbones resembled the war markings of the Papuan tribe. Staring at his own ghostly image, he recalled the anonymous letter sent to Deavers. Tell Wardsen to begin hunting for a lab in Morocco.
He had a destination.
Theresa would have to wait.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Wulf didn’t stop scanning out the taxi’s rear window even when the X-shaped concrete terminals of Marrakesh’s international airport came into view through the windshield. After four months of solo vigilance, he’d need serious distance from Morocco before he stopped looking over his shoulder. Too much could still go wrong, and all the responsibility fell to him.
Ivar was useless. His head bounced off Wulf’s shoulder and rolled across the seat back as the car jarred through another pothole. What had Unferth’s scientists pumped into his brother? It was stronger and longer-lasting than the ketamine used in Rome. Even stuffing Ivar with squares of chocolate roused him only temporarily before he reverted to the near-vegetable Wulf had found in the hidden facility.
“Quel terminal, m’sieur?” Entering the airport zone, the taxi driver slowed from the pace Wulf had urged for the ride from the cloth-dying district.