Food and sleep had restored Ivar’s speech and mental faculties, but his hand remained stunted, and no well-tailored suit could hide the way he hunched when he saw Wulf’s ripped clothing and blood-crusted hair. Awkwardly clippered blond hair stubbled his scalp, reminding Wulf that his fastidious brother had endured lice as well in Unferth’s prison. “I gather the reunion did not go as planned.”
“No.” Wulf paused with his hand on the car’s rear door. He and his brother had used to be near mirrors of each other, only Ivar’s eye color a truer blue and Wulf’s smile wider, but now Ivar seemed slighter. “Jeanne and Carl are alive. Theresa’s stepbrother and several others aren’t.”
“The security team?”
“They lost the coin toss.” Wulf hadn’t met them. Hadn’t dined with them and listened to bad jokes like he had with Raymond, but someone had known each of those men. Either he or Ivar would have to tell someone, several someones, that those men weren’t coming back.
He carried Theresa upstairs, her face pressed into his shoulder. She slept so deeply, he assumed she’d taken a pill from one of the bottles he’d shoved in her bag. On his bed, her dark hair spread across the white pillow, reminding him that a few hours ago he’d done nearly the same thing. The comforter had been pink, and he’d been filled with hope and laughter. Gone now, those dreams—as gone as the future he’d dared to imagine.
After he showered, he found his brother in the study. The replacement desk was a jarringly modern hunk of dark steel and walnut that slashed through the traditionally decorated room like a double-headed axe.
“Drink.” Ivar gestured to a tray of brown bottles.
By the time Wulf had finished the beer and wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand, the hops and malted grain had revived him enough to speak. “One of the men I killed had this.” He tossed the barrel of the crushed syringe on the desk. Too misshapen to roll, it slid several inches on the polished surface.
His brother stumbled into a stand holding a small Rodin bronze.
Regret soured the beer in Wulf’s mouth. The old Ivar wouldn’t have twitched for a guillotine, let alone backed away from a simple plastic tube. But the man Wulf had released from the torture chamber in Marrakesh wasn’t the old Ivar, so he brushed the drug container into the garbage and changed the subject. “We burned one house, but left the other and all the victims.” He started on his second bottle of brewed health. “It could get complicated.”
“Various government agencies will lie for some time to conceal the dead men’s identities.” Ivar stood behind his desk, not touching the chair, and didn’t rest his gaze on any single spot. “We should warn the others. They may be at risk.”
That possibility stopped Wulf’s beer halfway to his mouth. “You think Unferth’s after more than you and me?”
“I doubt his desire for research subjects—” Ivar’s good hand touched the fingertips protruding from his sling, “—has ended.”
“Can you find them? Bjorn went back to his boats, and Dunstan’s probably teaching somewhere, but Stig? Jurik?” Centuries hadn’t forged the misfits of Beowulf’s crew into a reliable team, only exacerbated their differences. He wouldn’t underestimate the effort it would take to reach the others, let alone try to assemble a force to oppose Unferth.
“My list.” With a jerk of his chin, Ivar indicated a paper with twelve names. Nine in one column, Unferth and his sycophants in the other. “We shall take this fight to Unferth. This time, we shall go on to the end.”
“No shit.” Wulf opened his third beer, the replenishing calories reestablishing whatever he might call normal about his relationship with Ivar. “Going to recite the ‘we shall fight on the beaches and never surrender’ part too? Been done, you know.”
“Your eloquence increases with each year you spend as a common grunt.”
“And your ego expands with the membership of the United Nations, but I’m too polite to comment.” Like old times, he toasted with his fresh bottle.
Ivar’s cheek spasmed, as if one muscle wanted to smile and the others agonized at the close call. Before he could reply, a woman screamed.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Mom?” Theresa’s fake foot, unexpectedly attached in bed, caught in the sheets, and she flopped, half wrapped in covers, to the floor. “Mom!” Where was she? Had she sleepwalked after her medication?
Then memories flooded her—Wulf’s injuries, Carl’s devastation and Ray.
Ray. She bit her fist to contain the hot acid feeling in her throat.
Across the room, a gray rectangle signaled access to a lighter space, perhaps a hall. Two dark shapes charged low through the door and split to opposite walls.
In the corner between the bed and wall, Theresa touched a metal wastebasket. Silently, she raised it to her chest, prepared to defend herself.
One man rounded the foot of the bed, close enough he must have seen her outline, so she threw the can with both hands, like she was passing a basketball. It clunked into his body.
“Skīta!”
“Should’ve warned you. She has good reactions.” That voice was familiar.
“Wulf?” The fear left her, but she still felt fuzzy and thick. “Where’s my mother? And Carl?” She wasn’t sure what parts of the night she’d dreamed and what had really happened.
“Theresa—” Wulf’s heavy tone sat on her chest like a radiologist’s lead apron.
“They’re dead, aren’t they?” No matter how hard she tried to breathe, the dark pressed the air out of her until she could barely squeak. “They’re all dead.”
A lamp flickered, but the light didn’t change the facts, didn’t change reality, didn’t bring her family back.
“Your mother’s fine.” Wulf crouched at her feet, as smoothly modulated as her VA psych. “Carl took her away until it’s safer.”
“She wouldn’t leave me!” Her mother wouldn’t let her move into her own condo; no way she’d disappear. Theresa squeezed deeper into the corner. “You’re lying!”
“Dr. Chiesa.” Arms crossed, a man in a gray suit stood like a steel girder behind Wulf. Illuminated from below by lamplight, his face had eerie shadows and crags. “I apologize—”
“Who are you?”
“Ivar, son of Wonred.”
“My big brother.”
“Your mother and Carl are hiding, not dead. Your stepbrother and cousin are indeed deceased. Wulf brought you here because your condition precludes easy concealment.”
Instead of using euphemisms like condition, he might as well have called her useless to her face. They all knew what she’d become, and it wasn’t strong or tough or heroic. In plain English, she was a burden.
Ivar must’ve mistaken her silence for doubt. “I do not lie.”
Curled with her knees to her chest and her face buried in her arms, she heard Ivar’s footsteps leave the room, but she sensed Wulf waiting. Waiting, like her, until finally the pins and needles shooting through her good leg demanded that she shift positions. Damn my legs, both of them. She didn’t want to eat the carpet, which might happen if she stood too quickly, so she paused like a dancer doing a weird stretch. Damn you and your brother, and damn crazy immortals. And damn everything that had led her to be stuck clinging to an end table.
Silently, Wulf scooped her in his arms and laid her on the bed. Like everyone else, he acted as if she was a doll, as if her ability to take care of herself had been lost with her leg.