Deavers and Kahananui vanished into the immense grayness where snow clouds merged with snow-covered hills, but she couldn’t waste cells wondering where they’d gone. All she did was trudge behind Wulf, lifting each foot in rhythm with a silent litany of profanity that marched two-by-two like ants in a chant in her head, until finally she reached the crest.
The haphazard cluster of a half dozen structures, their windowless walls topped with white roof humps, disoriented her. She caught up to Wulf on the porch of a barn-size building as he stuck wires into goop he’d pressed along the door frame.
“Stand back,” he said.
An instant later low clouds absorbed the echoes from the mini-explosion. Where the door had once had hinges, now it was attached to its frame only by a dead bolt. A noisy break-in should have started an alarm or alerted a guard, but nothing moved. She’d grown up too close to Newark Airport to be comfortable in this blanketing silence.
Inside, Wulf flicked on his flashlight and illuminated rows of display cases and random furniture, all of which probably spent the summer months spread throughout the site.
She stared around the echoing warehouse while she fumbled with her snowshoe buckles. Her relief over finishing the hike was surpassed by the creepy sensation of being watched, and the second set of straps tangled under her heel.
Wulf made a sound, probably disgust, and reached for her hand. “Here.” One slice to the palm of her right mitten let her fingers escape. “Get out your weapon. I’ll take the second row.”
“Guess I’ll take the first then,” she muttered.
Pistol in her right hand, flashlight in the left, she searched each display case for a large gold cross and checked the contents of each box for references to St. Ansgar or a krusifiks. The room was cold enough that her lungs hurt if she didn’t remember to breathe through her neck gaiter. Somewhere to her left, Wulf searched a parallel path.
“Anything?”
Asked in a normal voice, his question startled her into a small yelp. Thank goodness the pistol required a double-action pull on the first shot. “Not yet.”
She played her light beam over the mannequin at the end of her row, trying to determine why the chain mail-wearing figure made her neck shrink into her shoulders. It’s just an oversized doll, a helmet plopped on a—
“Aiiiiy!” Her scream shattered the icy quiet. The helmet’s eye sockets weren’t blank. It wasn’t an empty suit of armor. It moved, and then so did she. She raised her weapon to firing position, an automatic motion that she’d drilled for years, but she’d dropped the flashlight and it rolled under her foot. Before she could squeeze the trigger to the end of the pull, she went down. Hard. On her butt.
“Theresa!” Wulf burst around the cabinets as the thing stepped off its plinth.
“It’s alive!” She scooted into a gap between boxes.
“Get out!” Wulf’s submachine gun exploded with sound.
The armored warrior dove behind a stack of crates.
“Go!”
He didn’t have to tell her a third time. As she crawled through a gap toward the next aisle, her hood caught on the underside of a table, but it released after a hard tug. She kept moving.
Then a howl erupted up and down the sound spectrum, a howl so otherworldly that even encased in fleece and goose down, she froze. She wanted to curl up and cover her head, hide, but that motion was more than she could force from her muscles.
“Unferth!” Wulf’s shout told her the last thing she wanted to know. Another immortal was here.
The floor of a museum warehouse was shitty place to die.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Despite two centuries, Wulf recognized the skald’s battle cry and emptied his magazine at the other immortal’s hiding place. “Scared of a real fight?” Taunting his opponent in the old tongue felt like it carried a greater sting. “Come out and face me, you teat-sucking bag of pig shit.” He tossed aside his useless weapon and slammed his shoulder against the stacked crates, relishing the chance to directly confront the traitor even while fearing the threat of another immortal to Theresa and his teammates. The best way to give them a head start was to offer himself as a target. He rammed the crates again.
The Viking leaped out. Gleams reflected from his sword helped Wulf maintain his distance as he lured his opponent farther from Theresa. Deavers and Kahananui would’ve heard the gunfire. They’d be here—already were, he was sure—and they’d whisk her to safety. All he had to do was occupy Unferth. “Nice costume, fish belly. Almost makes you a warrior.”
Crack. A round winged his upper arm, but the problem wasn’t the shot. The problem was the shooter, who had to be a left-hander because he’d screwed himself with the Chinese assault rifle’s righties-only configuration and decided to rush Wulf.
Wrong choice.
He grabbed the cheap-ass Chinese rifle, shoved it skyward and went hand over hand down the barrel to the stock while wild shots crisscrossed the ceiling. With the magazine emptied, he couldn’t waste time struggling for a worthless metal stick. He shoved the rifle butt at the man’s chest and spotted an emergency fire axe on the wall, then smashed the glass panel and grabbed the force multiplier. The alarm and flashing strobe kicked on, momentarily freezing his opponent, but not him. Axe, meet neck.
Start to finish, the fight didn’t take enough time to tie a shoe. But it was long enough for Unferth to abandon his sword and disappear.
Ing-ng-ng-ng. Under the table, Theresa had heard Wulf yell Unferth’s name, then a close barrage of shots. Then the shrieking alarm had surpassed all other noise. Her mission to find the cross was replaced by a need to stay sane. Holy Mary, the siren and lights spiked her brain and limited coherent thought to the bursts of silence, which were too short to form a new plan. Get out, Wulf had ordered. So she’d go.
Before she ditched her concealment, she checked the aisle. To her left, two men crouched, one pointing an effective-looking automatic rifle her way, the other behind. Deavers and Kahananui. The surge of relief raised her to her elbows and almost drew her from under the table.
Her mistake. Deavers pointed his weapon, and she smushed herself to the floor as more gunfire doubled the chaos. In the strobe, she spotted two figures to her right. Unferth, still armored, had replaced his sword with a rifle. The other man crouched behind a two-wheel cart replica. Muzzle flashes provided the only color in the alarm light’s on-and-off flicker. She was stuck between the shooting groups.
If she was reinvented as one of her stepbrother’s game characters, she would have known how to save everyone in the room, but she was no action star. She was a crippled nobody, scared to emerge from her hole.
Time slowed enough for her to understand that Deavers and Kahananui didn’t have a shot at the second attacker. She had the only clear field of fire to the guy concealed by the cart.
Wulf’s order had been unambiguous: get out of danger. In the van she’d promised to obey him, but her reflexes didn’t seem to care what the rest of her had agreed to. They listened to the single word that carried the argument. Raymond.
Her stepbrother wouldn’t have hidden under a table if she’d been murdered, not even if he had the world’s hottest game console. Deliberately, she shifted her elbows into a sturdy support triangle. Raymond would’ve charged out and whacked anyone in his reach. He’d been a regular North Jersey guy that way. His memory deserved no less honor from her. While her left hand cradled her shooting hand, her trigger finger found the hard metal curve. Strobe flashes confused her sense of timing, but the slight recoil in her grip was real enough, until the pistol stopped moving when she squeezed the trigger.