The snowmobile’s engine turned over, caught, steadied into a rumble. She exhaled a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. At least she wasn’t doomed to be one of those women stuck sputtering while the bad guys closed in. She jammed the gas lever—
Boom. Her duck reflex took her and Deavers forward, but mercifully they didn’t tip.
Behind her, Kahananui ignored the explosion and fired up his snowmobile. “Go!”
She obeyed, even though each bump of the snowmobile warred with her instinct to turn the machine around and find Wulf, the way he’d found her in that burning vehicle months ago. But she’d promised to leave him, and the man behind her needed more help than they could provide during a firefight.
Following Wulf’s last order was the hardest commitment she’d ever made.
Exit. Wulf’s life shrank to one word as the floor scorched his bare palms and the treasures around him ignited. Dragging himself forward was the only route to salvation. Behind him planks popped into flame as fire fingers chased his useless leg. He hadn’t unleashed an ordinary fragmentation grenade. Guleed’s treasure had been thermite, molten droplets guaranteed to sear. Rolling under a displayed boat had spared him from instant incineration, but escape meant crawling through hell one handhold at a time.
Burning roof timbers collapsed, feeding the fire with fresh oxygen. Accumulated snow dropped through the roof hole and vaporized in the inferno, and for a fraction of a second it seemed as if Loki’s chilled hand brushed Wulf’s cheek and tantalized him with the outside cold.
The green running-man sign beckoned, and he heaved and scrabbled onto the porch. A second later he rolled down the steps into snow—blissfully, brilliantly, killingly cold snow. The seared soft places of his lips and tongue needed moisture. He struggled to lift a handful to his mouth, but the white fluff melted on his black glove.
Glove?
He’d removed his gloves with his snowshoes. The black coating, dark and glistening like a wet suit, was layers of his skin. Where the snow sizzled on his hands, sheets of blackened tissue shed to show red muscle and white bone beneath. Decades ago, he and Jurik had speculated about how much fire it would take to end their type of life. Burning at the stake wasn’t enough—Jurik had experienced it—but they’d assumed charcoal and ash couldn’t heal without living cells.
Today was not the day he would discover an answer for Jurik.
As he buried his open mouth in the snow, the heel on his damaged leg finally swiveled and pushed him an inch. He’d walk soon, even if his hands were stubs.
Unferth staggered off the porch, armor glowing. Snow hissed in his steps.
“Not so tough without an army behind you.” His opponent yanked at a porch plank.
“Tough enough to destroy you and your company.” Pushing to his elbows and knees, Wulf prepared to test whether his leg could hold weight.
“Black and Swan was mine.” Board in hand, Unferth lurched toward the edge of the hill.
“Took your secret lab too.” Wulf stood, but his hands couldn’t handle a weapon, and he wasn’t steady enough to kick.
“Did your brother enjoy the accommodations? I’ll offer a better view next time.” Unferth spun a circle with the board, laughing. “Thank him for his contribution to science. He won’t be so quick to treat the rest of us like thrall in the future.” Unferth’s humor hinted at dark knowledge beyond Wulf’s and chilled him more than the snow. “He will show me respect!”
“Why should he? You’re a coward and a sneak.” Every minute he kept Unferth talking was a minute he grew stronger. “You styled yourself Hrothgar’s bard, but it’s not even your story people still read, is it? It’s Galan’s version of the tale.” After fifteen hundred years, the Vikings knew which wounds to jab when they met.
Unferth kicked his board to the edge.
“Running away like always?”
“No honor in fighting you.”
“What do you know about honor? You’re fleeing like a bantling!” Wulf floundered forward, struggling to balance. “You’ve never had honor, not since you tried to trick Beowulf with your useless sword. Like you, it gave up on the first blow.”
“But I haven’t given up.” He was still laughing as he dropped to his makeshift sled. “Ask your brother if he’s found everyone.”
Don’t wrap around a tree. Theresa repeated directions in her head because her lips had iced shut, but she failed to follow the biggest one: don’t think about Wulf. The wind blew tears out of her eyes and froze them on her lashes, but it also cleared her brain to focus on driving the snowmobile. She’d fooled around with a motorcycle less than a handful of times, but she thought she might have a knack for this machine. Survival skills weren’t taught in the classes she’d taken at Princeton, but maybe she’d absorbed more from Carl than she’d realized.
Or maybe Wulf had been right when he accused her of being an adrenaline junkie.
The van materialized in front of her, its white paint nearly invisible against the snow. Kahananui pulled up behind and untied Deavers. The absence of her passenger’s weight released her tension, and she slumped.
Kahananui crouched beside her, rifle up, and that was when she discerned a speck on their trail, closing quickly. Her chest rose, hope that it was Wulf warring with fear of another attack, but she didn’t have time to settle on a reaction before Kahananui said, “Cruz,” and lowered his rifle.
Not Wulf. He was still on the hilltop, where the museum burned like a reenactment of Beowulf’s pyre. A phrase from Seamus Heaney’s translation came to her: And flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house.
“Wulf and a movie-character crazy headed for the woods.” Cruz didn’t dismount from the third snowmobile. “I want to ride after them.”
“Negative. He ordered us out.”
Cruz opened his mouth to argue, but Kahananui cut him off. “I don’t like it either.” He jerked his head at the back of the van, where he’d set Deavers’s limp form. “But the boss is sucking fumes.”
Theresa twitched a silver space blanket from the bench seat and tucked it around Chris’s shoulders. He groaned and rolled his head, as if approaching consciousness. “We need to warm up the van.”
Cruz still didn’t look like he agreed, so the Hawaiian uncrossed his arms and pointed at the hilltop. “That flare is going to draw mega-attention. No way we can be here eating soup when the Five-Os arrive with sirens and lights.”
Cruz stayed on his snowmobile. “Guess I missed your promotion to chief dick in—”
“Knock it off!” Theresa forced them to look at her instead of each other. Without a word being spoken, the dynamic shifted. Maybe because she was a doctor or an officer, or maybe because she was Wulf’s woman—she didn’t know why exactly, but she knew it was her call.
“Chris needs more medical attention than he can get here, so we go. All of us.” She wanted to stay, wanted to find Wulf as much as Cruz did, but that wasn’t what he’d wanted. And she knew the last thing he’d accept was another one of them getting hurt trying to help. “Get in, both of you, and start driving.”
Wulf watched as Unferth’s board slid several hundred feet and stopped on a flat. He could leave, follow Theresa and the others. As if he floated over his own body, he saw himself collapsing into her arms and burying his face in her hair. The need to join her almost tripped him before he jerked himself back to reality.
Unferth wasn’t conceding. In a day or two he’d recover. More innocents like Dr. Haukssen would cross his path. And whoever he’d stashed in another lab would still be a prisoner if Wulf didn’t find out more. This fight had to end, as permanently as he could manage, even though the pain in his hands had worsened. Burns did that. Dead flesh left craters of agony that defied healing longer than a simple cut. Without his hands, he didn’t have a chance of making or carrying a sled.