“Carl?” Jeanne covered her mouth and sagged onto her daughter. “Where’s Carl?”
Theresa turned her mother’s face to her shoulder.
“He’s fine.” Wulf jabbed off the lights. They had to leave before they saw more, but he couldn’t touch them with his bloody hands and he couldn’t send them into the darkness alone. So he deliberately stalked them, using his otherness to back them toward the door.
“What are you doing here?” Even with one ear, he knew his question was too loud.
“We waited, but I figured whatever happened was over. I told my mother you’d—” the hesitation in her whisper made him angrier, “—win.”
“Assumptions will get you killed.” If he didn’t unclench his fists, he’d scare them worse than he intended. “These men could have been like me.”
Theresa covered her mouth and nose, as if to block the odor of bodies, gunpowder and fear. That was the smell of his livelihood. His life stunk. He knew she’d never want any part of it, or him, again, but he’d die over and over to keep her safe. “Take your mother to the car.”
Outside, she helped Jeanne into the second row of the sport utility vehicle and then closed the door. Bracing herself on the dark metal, she turned to him. “Ray?” she whispered.
“Carl’s with him and your cousin now.” Her face lifted for a moment, a moth of hope that he regretted crushing with his next words. “They’re dead.”
She rested her forehead on the tinted window.
The arm’s length between them loomed wider than the Atlantic he’d flown over the night before, but comforting her would have to take a backseat to ensuring her safety. “What do you need to get out of here?” He didn’t expect an answer. She’d gone somewhere he couldn’t follow with his bloody hands and filthy deeds, so he said, “I’ll figure it out,” and hurried inside.
“You—” He pointed at a man carrying a propane canister into the dining room. “Guard the women outside in the car.”
In the pink bedroom he added a handful of clothes from each drawer to a gym bag and yanked what looked like a charger off the bedside table. Everywhere he saw books, lots of books, and he remembered Jeanne teasing her daughter about them at dinner. A lifetime ago.
He shoved a stack of science and nature volumes in the bag. The top cover on the second stack showed an iron dagger like he hadn’t seen in fifteen hundred years. Paper tabs stuck out from its pages. Beowulf. The title leaped at him. He threw it in, and an empty-eyed, gold death mask stared from the next. There was an engraving of a dragon’s hoard on the third, a mail-clad warrior on the fourth. Beowulf, all of them, as if Theresa had thought to understand his story.
Fear nipped his hamstrings like the hellhound Garmr as he swept the trove into the bag and fled down the stairs with its unzippable weight banging his thigh. Monsters were out tonight, not least him, and no one could stay here.
In the dining room, the men had finished stacking flammables under Ray and his cousin and propped the shattered Last Supper at the head of the table. As a group, they filed out of the house, Carl in the rear so he could leave the pungent trail of gasoline. It was his home to burn, after all.
“Wait.” Wulf’s command stopped Carl’s hand on the matches while he finished spray-painting words on the front sidewalk.
“Empty house,” Carl read aloud. “Good. I don’t need no dead firemen added to my balance sheet.”
Wulf saluted as the burning gasoline raced from the front door down the hall. Then it was time. Time for Theresa and the remnants of her family to leave, and time for him to abandon his idea of playing house. When everything he touched or wanted became as charred and ruined as the shell in the rearview mirror soon would be, he had to stop wanting.
Wulf drove. Maybe it was Theresa’s books that invoked the old language, but the words matched the rhythm of the tires. Úre aéghwylc sceal ende gebídan worolde lífes. Each of us must wait for the end of our life in this world. If only that was true.
While they circled highways, while Carl boosted a replacement ride and even while they ditched the unlocked SUV in Newark, Wulf couldn’t stop phrases from surging like the bloodshot water of Grendel’s bog. Hé þá fág gewát morþre gemearcod. He’d started life as a man, but now he too was a branded monster, marked by murder.
By the time Carl directed him to a twenty-four-hour mail shop, Jeanne had dropped into the fog that passes for sleep after shock. Sorh is geníwod. Theresa’s eyes were closed, but he suspected her awareness lingered as Carl retrieved a stored duffel bag. Sorrow comes again.
He needed something new to think about.
“Here.” Carl slipped a folder onto the cracked dashboard. “Passport and license for my little girl. They’re clean.” His voice hadn’t risen from a monotone since they’d left the house. “Drop me and Jeanne near Port Authority.”
“You set for money?” Wulf followed signs for the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan.
“Yeah.” Carl pulled a marker out of his bag and humped around in his seat. “You got a number? So Jeanne can call to Theresa?”
After a sideways glance, Wulf glued his eyes to the red taillights in front of their car and recited a secure number.
“Nobody likes to check a fat man’s cojones.” Carl coughed, and Wulf heard the rustle of slick-fabric pants being readjusted. “I could write Federal Reserve codes down there.”
“You’re sure about leaving Theresa with me?” He kept his voice low.
“I don’t know how you’re still walking, after what I saw at the house.” Carl stared at the side of Wulf’s head. “And I’m not asking.”
Wulf gripped the steering wheel to prevent himself from touching his ear. His shoulder and face itched like a fire ant parade, so he knew he must have been nearly healed.
“I gotta keep my wife safe.” The engine rattle almost drowned Carl’s tired voice. “I can’t do that with Theresa riding shotgun. She’s...”
“Beautiful.” Wulf supplied.
“True, but I was thinking easy to make.”
Grimy tile flashed past in the tunnel’s blurred lights. A mother and daughter as vivid as Jeanne and Theresa drew attention. When one had a prosthetic leg, they drew more.
“If we’d gone to Switzerland like you offered—”
“Don’t. You can’t change your choices.” After fifteen hundred years of grappling with consequences, he still struggled with his own advice. “Don’t waste energy on what-ifs.”
“You neither, son.”
Perhaps due to the impossibility of following that guidance, the occupants of the car were silent until they emerged in Manhattan, where Carl directed Wulf to an alley between anonymous motels and Thai takeouts west of Broadway. “By the stack of cardboard. This city has too damn many street cameras, but last I checked, wasn’t no surveillance here.” Carl got out of the idling car, then went to Jeanne’s door.
In the rearview mirror, Wulf saw Theresa’s head loll to the side. During the drive she’d fallen into real sleep, the type the mind embraced to heal or escape.
“Watch your back,” he told Carl.
“You too.” Carl slung his bag over his shoulder and maneuvered his groggy wife down the alley.
Wulf hoped they’d meet again.
Driving uptown, weariness crushed him until he was too drained to plan beyond the next stoplight. He’d rest at Ivar’s. His brother would help protect Theresa.
A retina scan and shifting numeric codes had replaced the failed thumbprint security system. When the first row of car barricades lowered, Wulf eased twenty feet forward into the hot box and read randomly generated words out loud until the voice scan reconfirmed his identity. Finally admitted, he let his shoulders slump as the car rolled down the ramp to where his brother waited.