He’d searched Rabat and Casablanca, until finally in Marrakesh’s walled center he’d noticed a half dozen Asian and Caucasian men who came every morning and left every night, as if they had jobs among the tourist traps and cloth dyers. They didn’t look like they sold beaten brass bowls, so he’d tracked their patterns. They’d tried to use different routes, but they were too conspicuous, and they’d led him to an underground lab that stretched under blocks of the old souk.
“Quel terminal?” the driver repeated.
“Cargo,” he answered in French. No rushing SUVs or darkened sedans behind them, and he doubted Unferth would give chase with a rickety Moroccan cab, so maybe he’d have time to load his brother onto the jet without a problem. The scientists and guards were probably still busy repairing generators to pump out the flood from the underground cistern Wulf had breached into their facility. They might not even realize he’d used the diversion to snatch Ivar.
“I am sorry, sir, but that area is off-limits. Security—”
Wulf stuffed a handful of euros and dirhams over the seat. “Get us through.”
Fear and greed warred in the driver’s expression. Thankfully, economic need won and he took the exit labeled Cargo Only and bumped through several more potholes.
“Sit up.” Wulf shoved another piece of candy in his brother’s mouth and straightened the black leather jacket every Moroccan male seemed to wear in winter months. If security peered at the backseat, Ivar needed to seem as normal as possible despite blond hair, sun-deprived skin and a wrist that ended with a raw wound covered by odoriferous gauze and surgical tape. It wasn’t easy to keep the concealing glove from falling out of his brother’s jacket sleeve.
His confrontation with Unferth had caused this as surely as it had caused Theresa’s injury, and he had no idea how to square accounts with either of them. It might require a thousand years before the image of his brother’s wrecked and naked body faded to a hazy nightmare, like the girl burned by dragon fire had become, but he would have time to atone.
The wad of money created its own green lights as they drove to the Embraer 650 jet. A red-haired man, larger than Wulf by six inches and fifty pounds, trotted out of the hangar before the taxi driver had cut his engine. He’d been Beowulf’s navigator, and he could sail, fly or drive everything that moved.
“Bjorn’s here to fly us out.” The other immortal had dropped his boat-recovery service when Wulf called him to bring Ivar’s Bombardier jet for their escape. “You’re safe, brother.”
“Ba—ba—” Ivar’s tongue was missing, and his humiliation at being unable to speak was obvious from his squinted eyes and dipped head. Wulf didn’t want to think about how long it had been since someone had carved it out. Ivar’s healing process was really and truly fucked.
The stairs to the cabin were too narrow to haul Ivar in tandem, so he transferred his brother’s arm to Bjorn’s shoulder. The other Viking hefted Ivar around the waist until only his toes touched the steps. As Wulf followed, the clank of boots on the metal treads beat like a countdown, but until the jet left the Atlas Mountains in its exhaust stream, he wouldn’t calculate the number of days—months—that had passed since he’d seen Theresa. Too many soldiers screwed up by thinking about home when they needed to have their minds in the game, so he’d never allowed the sight of a dark-haired tourist wandering the old city to conjure memories of her. The complete annihilation of distraction had been a brutal price to pay, but a man on a solitary op didn’t have downtime.
Soon he’d have infinite time for Theresa.
Theresa preferred staring out her bedroom window at piles of brown street snow to loafing in the media room with her stepbrother and his cousin, whose jobs for Carl apparently involved dating the couch or being official food tasters. Although they claimed to be incognito game testers for Resident Criminal version whatever, the closest she saw them come to real work was washing road salt off the Caddie after driving her to physical therapy.
The emotion journal on her lap reminded her it was time to create insights for tomorrow’s VA counseling group. She hadn’t touched the notebook in two weeks. With her pen poised on the first page, she tried to remember her psych rotation. What she needed was an opening sentence that found the small space between crazy and fake.
“Theresa!”
Her mother’s surprise appearance in the doorway startled her into bumping into her headboard, and she shoved the journal under her pillow to hide the ink-edged hole she’d driven through the paper.
“What do you do up here all day?” Her mother sank to the bed next to her and hugged her as if she was a kid. “You should come downstairs.”
Theresa’s heart plummeted. Not because she wanted to stay shut in her room, but because she had no idea what else to do. Four months ago she’d expected Wulf to arrive, but he hadn’t. She’d spent weeks notating books that explained his origins and developing models of starfish replication without anyone to answer her questions. Now she didn’t want to see him, but without confronting him she had no idea how to achieve closure and progress forward, a phrase her counselor liked to use at group sessions.
As if anyone wanted to progress backward.
Her mother was staring, waiting for her to answer or do something. She opened her mouth.
“I made so many mistakes.” Where had that come from?
“Shhh, don’t say that.” Squeezing tighter, Theresa’s mother propped her chin on top of Theresa’s head. “I’m proud of everything you’ve done, my little girl. You’re strong.” The movement of her mother’s chin against her hair, talking, always talking, was one of Theresa’s earliest memories. “You never let Carl’s business take you down the easy path. You always have such clear goals.” Her mother stopped, and Theresa heard her swallow before she continued in a thicker voice. “Did something bad happen? Before your leg? Something else?”
Please don’t let my mother cry. She couldn’t possibly bear that.
“When you phoned me and said you left Italy early, you sounded terrible, but I thought you had enough to worry about so I didn’t push...”
“I’m okay, Mom.” She’d used the line so often, sometimes she believed it.
“No, you’re not. You barely leave this room. You don’t see any of the girls from Holy Names or college—”
“Ma, they all have kids—”
“And you haven’t laughed in six months.”
“You’re exaggerating.” She’d had to relearn how to walk, run, even how to stand up from a toilet without tipping, and her mother expected a sense of humor?
“I don’t count rolling your eyes at me or making fun of Raymond as laughing.” Cupping Theresa’s shoulders in her hands, her mother leaned away to look in her daughter’s eyes. “The man I met in your hospital room—was he someone special?”
So special, her last words to him had called him sneaky for spying on her.
“Was he hurt?” Her mother stumbled over the question but pushed on. “Or something?”
“He’s not hurt.”
“Dead?”
“No.” She couldn’t tell her mother that he was in fact the opposite.
“Married?” Her mother sounded unable to believe that any living, single man in his right mind wouldn’t be courting her daughter.
She shook her head.
“Then we’ll forget about him. He didn’t look Italian anyway. You’ll meet someone new.”
If that was as easy to do as it was for her mother to say, stand up and grab a hairbrush, she would’ve been at the movies every night. Instead she was scooting toward the middle of the bed and trying to dodge a pink-handled implement of pain.