The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) (17 page)

“Stig!” Christina must have tried to swing one of the glasses at Mr. Black Overcoat, but that had put her too close to his reach. He had her elbow in a control hold. Pain scrunched her face until her eyes were mere slits.

“Ivar!” he yelled at the other Viking, but his leader’s spine seemed to be glued to the wall. His left arm curled against his chest, and in his right hand he held a fork. “A pissy little fork? That’s all you’ve got?”

Stig smashed the chair once more onto the man at his feet and left it tangled over his head and arms. Then he ran full speed at the edge of the table that blocked him from reaching Christina’s attacker. Palms up, he shoved it as hard as he could, battering the man in the hip. “Pick on someone your own size, why don’t you!”

He flipped the tabletop ninety degrees to the vertical, which let him dart close enough to follow through with an elbow to the guy’s solar plexus. As the other man bent forward gasping, Stig connected that same elbow to the descending nose.

Blood sprayed all over Stig’s shirt. Noses, what a mess. He hated fights.

“Stig!” Christina’s arm supported Ivar as she wove a path to the door. “Let’s get out of here!”

He glanced at his first opponent. The guy was rolling on the floor with a wiener dog latched to his ear. The man who’d carried the dog into the bar was standing nearby, wringing his hands. And not pulling the holstered revolver printing through his sweater at his left armpit.

Who the fuck was he? Belgians, especially ones who took dachshunds to bars, didn’t carry concealed weapons. That was probably how they could drink the same amount of beer per capita as Americans but have only one-fifth the firearm-related deaths.

The bar’s front door led to the unbroken stretch of street along the river, essentially a shooting gallery with pretty buildings forming both sides. Cover and concealment would be easier in the castle of La Roche perched above them. “Back way through the kitchen!”

A last kick at the man grappling the dog, because even a biter as feisty as that tube could use help, a nod to the gent who’d kept his firepower politely out of the way, and then Stig was chasing Christina and Ivar past the shocked bartender and the gaggle of patrons.

Two nights in row he and Christina had exited restaurants via the back door.

He vaulted a steel keg.

Hopefully it would be two nights in a row he played toad-in-the-hole, but first he’d have to save her.

Chapter Sixteen

Christina tugged Ivar to the right, obeying the directions Stig had shouted before he stopped to roll a recycling bin across the bar’s back door. There must be a path to the fortress ruins, or he wouldn’t have told her to run this way.

There they were, narrow stairs cut into the nearly vertical rock, each one perhaps twice as high as a normal step but only barely wider than her hips. Ivar pulled his arm from her grip, finally aware of their surroundings. He had to turn sideways to ascend after her, but he didn’t fall behind. The combined light from the town behind her back and the sliver of moon wasn’t strong enough to show her where to put her feet, so each step onto the next uneven tread was a guess blended with a prayer. Any moment she could stumble.

Ignoring the stitch in her side and the burning in her thighs, she climbed. She didn’t want to find out if the man who’d resorted to a fork in self-defense was steady enough to stop them both if she tripped. If she ever made it home to California, she wouldn’t need to work out, she’d need knee surgery.

She glimpsed Stig’s hair reflecting moonlight below them as the stairs switchbacked on themselves to keep rising. Good. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be alone with Ivar.

The steps must have ascended the equivalent of six or eight stories. Finally at the top, she stumbled into a wide courtyard of windswept stone, deserted picnic tables and orange placards that asked visitors not to climb the rocks. She wouldn’t, not after those stairs.

“There.” Ivar indicated a wooden door at the bottom of a few more stairs.

“I’d rather stay in the open, thanks.” She panted and staggered farther from the way they’d come up. The fortress might be a tourist place in daylight, but it was spooky as hell during the night.

Stig reached them. Hands on his thighs, he bent forward to breathe like her. “Recognize those tossers, Ivar?”

“They’re not working for me.”

“Not reassuring.”

In the pause, they heard stones clatter faintly at the bottom of the cliff.

“Wankers.” Stig ran to a wall and jerked with both hands at a power line. The round metal eyes that had attached it along the wall popped out from the stones, freeing the cord, and he dragged it all to the top of the stairs. With his heel, he crammed the metal eyes into the mortar connecting the stones of the doorposts, about a foot above the level of the plaza, on each side of the door. Then he fed cord through until it hung slack.

“When you see the first man, Christina, run toward that battlement,” he whispered. “Make sure they see you so they won’t see the trip line.”

They were all going to wait here, in the fortress, with her as a decoy. She folded her arms around her chest, regretting that she’d left the heavy sweater on her seat in the pub. At least she’d grabbed her purse.

Ivar faded into the shadows on one side of the top of the stairs.

“Can I count on you?” Stig whispered from the other side.

“Depends,” Ivar replied. “On if you provide a complete set of cutlery. A pissy little fork is somewhat inadequate.”

Christina wasn’t sure that in Stig’s place she would count on him, so she assumed Stig had a backup plan.

“Plan A, we let the first one cross the threshold and I tackle him while you pull the line tight to trip the second guy. I want one of them. I want to know who they are and how they’re tracking us.”

Ivar was silent, so Christina whispered, “What’s plan B?”

“If they both get through, you run like hell while Ivar and I get the shite pounded out of us.”

“Go with A,” Ivar muttered.

“I see it was two for one on jokes at the takeout yesterday,” Stig said.

Christina made a cutting motion with her hand. Stig talked more than she did, and she was a woman who sold expensive wines for a living.

Their followers were breathing as hard as she had been by the time they reached the top. Because of the uneven rocks, her fastest speed resembled bounding more than running, but she took off on cue.

Then she heard a shout, and another, and pain-filled shouts fading down the stairs. She turned to confirm that Plan A had worked.

Stig and one of the men were grappling too close to a window in the wall, a low window. He was fielding wild punches from the desperate man and trying to maneuver them both away from the edge, but it was as if the other guy didn’t realize what was—or what wasn’t—behind him.

She and Ivar rushed forward, but they were seconds too late.

Her stomach wrenched out of her and vanished along with Stig as she saw him, and the last glimpse of his legs, disappear. The great gaping hole in her insides should have left her in two pieces, but she was still able to make her feet take her to the opening and her hands grab the edge where Stig had tumbled.

Two bodies had landed below. It wasn’t the full drop, only fifteen feet or so to a wide ledge, but the moonlight showed Stig flattened under their pursuer.

“Stig!” She looked wildly around for a way to him.

Ivar was yanking at a wooden door. When it opened, she saw it led to a short run of steps built straight through the stone wall, almost a ladder.
Don’t let Stig be dead.
Not like Big Frank, creating outrageous puns for her future wine label while they checked the Mancini vines one minute, lying in the brown dust, eyes open to the sky, the next. No time even to clutch his hand before he left her and Manny without parents.
Please, not like that.

Ivar was next to the other man and Stig was sitting, so when her knees wobbled she could put her hand on the stone wall for a moment. Wet and rough, but solid when nothing else seemed to be.
Breathe,
she had to tell herself,
he’s not gone.

Stig’s head dangled sideways until his ear rested completely on his shoulder. Like a mime, he had one hand on his cheek and one shoved in his hair and he appeared to be trying to reposition his head on top of an uncooperative neck. “Loki’s bollocks, I detest being defenestrated.”

“What are you doing?” She moved to kneel on the stones next to him, but as far from the crumbling edge as she could. “You shouldn’t move. You might have a neck injury.” One that was making her feel nauseated looking at him, because no way could that neck position be right.

“Help me.” The other man gripped his leg and moaned. “Help.”

“Shut up about your leg, for fuck’s sake.” Stig squeezed his eyes closed.

He was completely fine. The tension left her so abruptly that she slumped forward until she was on all fours, head hanging to try to stop her dizziness. His neck trick was weird and scary, not funny, but any injuries must be minor.

Ivar pinned the moaning man’s arm to the ground with a knee and started searching his pockets. “Who are you? Who sent you?”

“Bodeby’s,” he groaned.

As if her wine career wasn’t already tanked beyond rescue, the auction house had hired these men, not Wend, Skafe or any of Stig’s presumably numerous other victims.

“Please, call an ambulance. I’m going to die, I know it.”

“You won’t.” Ivar extracted a business card from the man’s wallet. “Not even a milk-puke insurance fraud investigator like you dies from a broken leg.”

“He could go into shock.” Christina felt required to mention the possibility. Maybe Stig could override the password on the girl’s cell phone. She opened her purse and pulled it out. “Here, I don’t know how to unlock it, but if you can—” She stopped at the open-mouthed look of horror mixed with comprehension on Stig’s face.

“You have a mobile? Where’d you get that?”

“From the girl...in the bathroom...” The mistake was starting to break through to her as well.

“The one I traded my watch to?”

She nodded.

“My watch that was so obviously not that junkie’s that anyone who saw her around St. Mary’s before she pawned it would inquire and find out that her mobile was with you.”

She closed her eyes, unable to see the light shine on her towering mistake, and her head dipped once.

“And then they would track our progress from London to La Roche.” He held out his hand.

Yes, she had screwed up. “I did turn it off.” Her voice barely carried in the night air.

“Rule four, or maybe five—off is never off. They can be turned on remotely. Some ping towers periodically even when supposedly off.”

She set the offending black electronic device in Stig’s palm.

“Call for help, please, I can’t move.”

Stig stood, dusted off his clothes and dropped the phone on the writhing guy’s chest. “Call yourself. Or wait for your friend to crawl back.”

* * *

They climbed the short run of steps to the main fortress courtyard as quickly as three worse for wear and exhausted people could. Stig’s neck vertebrae had firmed enough to support his head, making it possible to use his hands for balance on the ascent. The bone growth required must have been small, because the pain that always reminded him of what a jackhammer operating inside your body must feel like had ended, leaving him with only the gnawing requirement for calories sufficient to replenish.

“I have a car in town.” Ivar glanced over his shoulder at the flight of stairs that went back to the Greek’s. “I think I’ll walk the long way on the road.”

“Be careful,” Christina said before he could.

“Thank you.” Ivar paused to look from her to Stig. “Tell me, how do you always find women of surpassing worth?”

“My love of sequins.” He didn’t have the energy to hit the blend of perkiness that he knew would annoy Ivar the most, so his advice sounded oddly sincere. “Try them instead of black.”

The two men looked at each other. “How soon can you bring the arm to New York?”

The brief camaraderie of a successful fight collapsed under the reminder of their roles. “Fifteen hundred years, Ivar. What do you call a man who keeps another in thrall that long?” Fifteen centuries carried too much baggage for a sentient man, too high a stack of dead, too unscalable a wall of memories. Oblivion had occasionally appealed to him and, he suspected, to all of them. Or at least to the saner members of the immortal crew.

“Please.”

That word wasn’t customary from Ivar, but nothing about their leader was as it should be, daring Stig to ask the other Viking a question he’d contained for a thousand years. He stepped closer, hoping he spoke low enough that Christina wouldn’t overhear. “Are you ever curious? About what Galan termed that undiscovered country?”

In the pause, Ivar studied his face. “I have recently sailed near its dark shore, courtesy of Unferth.” The man who’d led the immortals since the dragon had killed Beowulf appeared only one nudge from shattering like pottery. “That destination holds no personal appeal.” He handed Stig a small card with an American phone number written on it, nothing else. “Call when you have the arm.”

Christina moved to his side, shamelessly eavesdropping. Her presence reminded him that he’d broken her business beyond redemption, a fact as obvious as the man they’d left writhing on the ground.

There was one thing he could do for her. “My cooperation costs more this time.” By some counts, Ivar might have as much money as the Pope, but Stig didn’t need to be greedy, not for himself. “Ten million. The usual bank in Luxembourg.”

He couldn’t see Ivar’s expression in the shadow of the trees, but he guessed it was probably unreadable. “Three million dollars in the morning. The remaining seven when my lab verifies the relic.”

“Did I say dollars?” A euro was worth almost a dollar and a half.

“Don’t push.” Ivar stepped out of the safety of the tree line to become a silhouette on the road shoulder. “And Stig?”

In the faint moonlight he could read the other Viking’s unaccustomed expression, an emotion Stig in all his portraits of the man who’d caused him to endure this living death had never seen or captured with his artist’s eye.

“You almost look as if you’re worried about me.” The silence stretched between them with an intensity that Stig couldn’t remember feeling other than in those first decades of immortality, when they’d all lived shoulder-to-shoulder with their liege Beowulf, before the theft of the chalice had awoken the dragon and he’d lost everything he’d valued.

“I haven’t reached Galan. No one has.” Using his right hand, Ivar raised the other one in its concealing glove. “Unferth wants the relics too. Be careful.”

Five minutes after he and Christina turned their backs on Ivar, Stig realized he should have stuffed extra frites in his trouser pockets before they’d fled the pub. Walking uphill to Luc’s after healing a broken neck was like lifting a block of concrete tied to each ankle. He needed calories.

“Ivar didn’t seem like a master criminal.” Christina didn’t have any trouble matching his pace, but then, she’d had more potatoes and no broken bones.

“For the record, he’s a hedge fund manager.”

“Ah.” She slipped her arm around his waist. “That type.”

“Type who pays his bills. And mine.” He tried not to lean too heavily on her shoulder. She was tiny. “And yours.”

“I’m cheap. All I want is my passport.”

“You imagine I’ll give you the means to leave me when you’re the one holding me up?” His laugh sounded like the kind heard at funerals, not at pubs.

“Car.” She guided him farther onto the shoulder as lights proceeded slowly toward them from the direction of town. Then an unremarkable sedan braked in front of them, and he found enough energy in reserve to step in front of Christina as the passenger window rolled down.

A brown snout poked out to sniff the night air.

“Get in.” The dog’s owner, the man with the concealed weapon from the bar, spoke from behind the wheel. “We’re going to Luc’s too.”

The dachshund yipped as if seconding the invitation.

“What the hell, why not,” he muttered to Christina.

She opened the back door and they both climbed in. The car’s interior was immaculate, only a slight smell of wet dog inevitable in March.

“Thomas Locke,” the driver introduced himself, and continued up the hill. Nondescript brown eyes studied them through the rearview mirror. “You’ve met my partner, Porkchop.”

Although he should probe to confirm if Thomas was the source of the night before’s hot coffee pot and if this car was the reason the barn wasn’t available, the scent of fresh pastries, comfort and life and fulfillment coming from a brown paper bag on the floor drove all other needs out of his mind. Besides, Thomas knew Luc, and Luc was a good judge of men.