The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) (26 page)

Luc was over the rail, his skinny arms and legs moving like a temple monkey in Jaipur as he descended.

Draycott glanced at his watch. Nine minutes until the charges went.

He lowered the outboard into the sea as soon as the Belgian landed in the raft.

“Move to the other side for balance,” he shouted to Luc and Christina as Wulf came over. The man tied to his back was the naked one wrapped in a blanket, not Stig. Compared to Stig, this man had barely looked alive enough to bother saving.

Wulf heaved the body into the bottom. “He’s Galan. Don’t worry about him.”

“Six minutes left.”

“Fuck.” The soldier already had his hands back on the ladder. “Lost track. Have to get Stig.”

Draycott looked up where the other immortal’s slumped form was visible through the open metalwork of the landing. More dead than alive, but not dead.

“Draycott—” Already a dozen rungs above the raft, Wulf shouted to be heard over the wind. “They’re your first priority. Leave us if you have to. We’ll survive.”

That he believed. In the front of the raft, Christina’s dark hair whipped like Medusa’s and her body curled around the handle of an oar, ready to push off. None of them had coats, and it was at least fifteen minutes of open sea to where the trawler stood off, waiting for their return.

“Got it,” he yelled back. As long as he could operate this boat, Christina, Luc and Galan were getting out of here alive.

* * *

The cold reached Stig, cold and wet after the heat. The air in his lungs was good and invigorating. Something had been foul and evil, but this wasn’t.

He opened his eyes to a dark that wasn’t the same as the dark behind his eyelids because he could see the tracery of a metal grid and feel wind and rain. He faced a door and a single emergency light buzzed overhead. Because he had an automatic weapon propped on his lap, it made sense to point it at the door. But it didn’t make sense when only one arm moved.

Two hands, both in his lap, but only the right one made a fist when he wanted. The left one wouldn’t lift or twitch. Without the grinding agony of regrowth or the crazy itch of the aftermath, he didn’t understand why he couldn’t move.

Then he remembered the dragons and Leif, his leg, Wulf’s face, and blood. Blood everywhere.

He could shift his shoulders and upper torso, so he tilted sideways until gravity finished the work for him, and his cheek pressed the open metal grating. Salt spray stung his eyes, but he could see the raft. Christina, Luc and Draycott were aboard. They were safe.

Wulf climbed the ladder toward him.

Quite unnecessary. The sea was his fate. The whale’s road had always been what the Norns had carved next to his name under the ash tree Yggdrasil. His end could not be changed, only delayed.

“Leave me.” The wind took his words.

Wulf swung himself over the rail. His old crewmate crisscrossed a web of nylon straps around their bodies and hoisted Stig in the air. “Can you grip at all?”

He snorted, lifted his right hand and let it flop against Wulf’s arm.

As they went over the rail onto the ladder, he tried his best to balance on Wulf’s back. Even the former soldier panted with each rung they descended.

A clang from above jerked Stig’s gaze upward.

Leif stood on the landing, swinging a fire axe. He crashed it wildly at the railing where the rope ladder attached. Whatever Wulf had done to Leif must not have involved becoming dragon chow, because their opponent looked centuries better than Stig felt.

Another clang. One side of the ladder gave, spinning them above the sea.

Boom!

The blast wave swung them wildly out from the rig as the ninety-minute charges detonated, then sucked them back as the force expanded skyward. Leif’s metal-clad body flew through the air above them in the instant before they slammed into the water. Force drove his and Wulf’s conjoined mass, weighted by gear, deep into the total dark of underwater night. Pressure squeezed Stig’s ears until his head felt ready to pop. His arms flung wide, supported by the water as he and Wulf sank.

Wulf struggled to kick, as if he could reverse their trajectory and change their fate.

Stig couldn’t quit, not while he was tied to the other Viking. The Norns shouldn’t rob Wulf of his future when they took Stig. He flapped his working arm, trying to reach the surface while he kicked his functioning leg with the same rhythm as the man linked to him.

Pressure speared his lungs and prodded him to open his mouth. No, he couldn’t, not underwater. He had to struggle alongside Wulf. Up. Together.

They broke the surface. Air knifed into his lungs, his ears popped and he gulped another breath, a mix of air and seawater that gagged him, but it was life.

Wulf yelled for Draycott, and Stig added his voice, struggling to be heard over the sirens and secondary explosions coming from the platform.

Salt stung his eyes, but he could see. In the seconds they’d been underwater, the night had changed to an orange dawn, except normally dawn happened first along the horizon, not overhead. A wave crashing back off the concrete piling doused them, and he looked up to see the platform in flames. Fire glow picked out debris, lengths of wood and barrels, as it outlined the raft on the swell above them.

“Grab on!” Christina teetered across the side, extending an oar.

Wulf kicked and stretched, and Stig tried to add as much push as he could.

Then a piece of wreckage erupted from the water. A living thing, not a wood beam. Gaping jaws full of teeth crunched the paddle. The surviving Komodo’s tail thrashed into Wulf’s chest, knocking them farther from the raft.

Underwater again, airless and soundless in contrast to the cacophony on the surface. Then they popped to the surface, gasping.

The dragon surfed the swell and soared above them, jaws open. Stig and Wulf sank in the trough of the wave as the Komodo rose. The wall of water blocked his sight of the raft, but eight feet above his head the dragon’s muscled legs paddled furiously toward where the little boat had been.

“Come here, you bloody wyrm!” Stig shouted at the wind, too weak to help Christina by any means other than self-sacrifice, but he’d gladly offer himself if it made the monster turn. If he could save her from the sea, the pain was a fair trade. “Come get me!”

The outboard motor’s roar chopped through the night, closer than the fire sirens. With the next wave, they were on top and the dragon was below, trying to swim uphill toward the raft. In the orange glow he saw his Valkyrie holding the broken oar shaft like a harpoon, her face tiny and yellow in the reflected flames and her mouth a dark circle as she yelled. He thought his name carried across the wind.

“Go!” Wulf yelled, waving from the crest. “Go!”

Stig’s back pounded into a solid object. The support piling.

Then the water was disappearing under them as they both scrambled to grip the barnacles clinging to the concrete.

That reptilian brain must have understood that a fixed point was a better bet than a moving raft, because it swung toward them and its long, narrow body circled as effortlessly as a sea monster. It became a black arrow flying fast, legs like barbs along a shaft.

“Take a breath and hold on,” Wulf yelled before he dove to the side.

Stig tried to get his weakened limbs to do as Wulf did, kick when he kicked, until suddenly their momentum in one direction stopped and they jerked into motion the other way.

They broke the surface moving fast. Wulf’s arms stretched in front of them as they were pulled under the platform and toward the open sea.

This beast was the one wearing the harness. Wulf had grabbed the chain as it swam past and they were wakeboarding behind a swimming Komodo dragon.

Wulf yanked them all the way to the creature’s tail. “Swing your leg over.”

It was a three-way thrash, him still barely functional, but together they straddled its back. The beast kept swimming, lower in the water but buoyant enough to keep them up.

After fifteen centuries, he’d thought there was nothing new under the sun. He’d sunk along with two tea clippers, the Titanic and the Lusitania, discovered Egyptian tombs, had his own paintings in every major world museum and stolen the Mona Lisa not once, but twice.

But if he lived another fifteen hundred years, riding a Komodo dragon through the North Sea would never, could never, happen again. He was indeed Loki’s punch line.

“Any idea where it’s going?” Wulf shouted.

“It wants to be free.” His fight was over. Christina was safe.

The cold settled deeper into his bones. It seeped into his heart and brain. This might be what Robbie had felt in his arms, the slowing, the ending, the slipping.

Not so scary if you weren’t alone.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The usual mixture of solo business travelers, Scandinavians destined for a warmer vacation climate and tired foreigners whose only purpose at Copenhagen’s Kastrup International Airport was to transfer between a North American flight and a European destination lingered in the departures terminal bar. Tourist or businessman, everyone in the bar came for a beer and sausage. Nothing different from yesterday or tomorrow, in Ninna Christensen’s opinion.

In dark clothing and a heavy jacket, the man occupying the far corner of the wood-topped counter looked slightly off. His blank expression could have indicated immersion in an electronic device, but he didn’t have a laptop case or a mobile. No book or newspaper either. Just a half-empty beer on the bar counter. He stared straight ahead, as if the row of vodka and gin bottles behind her was worthy of attention.

A businessman hovered at the next stool but walked away without sitting after an expressionless look from the man with the unmoving lips. Whether this man was traveling for business or pleasure, he wasn’t going to interact with others who were.

From the corner of her vision Ninna saw the television switch from European football league coverage to international news, an aerial view of a smoking mess rising out of the dark, choppy sea and two tugs spraying plumes of water. She recognized the burning structure as an offshore oil platform, an older one, because her cousin was a pipe-fitter on the modern Freki platform.

She headed toward the solitary customer at the end of the bar to inquire about a refill. “Sir, would you...” She stopped.

The fingertips of his left hand pushed on the counter’s edge until his knuckles, straightened and bent at the farthest reverse of the human finger bones, turned as white as his blood-starved fingernails. In his right hand the liquid left in his glass rocked, although the vessel itself rested on the table, as if indicating an internal disquiet below the surface of the man holding it.

When she looked from his hands to his face and met his gaze, her heart started to pound like a snared rabbit’s. Her rational senses told her an airline passenger wasn’t going to reach across the bar and wrap his thick fingers around her throat, but her primitive responses ordered flight. She backed off, her question unfinished.

Once she had more than an arm’s reach between her and the leashed violence emanating from the corner customer, she turned and darted to the far end of her bar. Ten years of slinging drinks meant she could distinguish between casual drunks, only-when-they-fly drunks, belligerent drunks, perpetual drunks and exploring-their-freedom drunks. This customer fell into a category she didn’t have a description for, even though she encountered one or two a year. Too silent to be belligerent, too sober to be drunk, these few were the men she feared.

He flattened three bills on top of each other, his gestures precise clockwork movements, and walked away.

Eventually her heart settled to a normal beat and the foam on the top of her glasses of golden lager returned to the proportions of a woman whose hands weren’t shaking. It wasn’t until two hours later as she lifted stools to the counter to help the cleaning crew that she found the sections of a boarding pass where the man who’d scared her had sat.

She aligned the scraps on the bar. He’d ripped up a same day, one-way ticket to Hull, England. She looked at the television and remembered. The news had mentioned Hull as the city closest to the burning oil platform.

Chapter Twenty-Six

After four days alternating between sitting on it and lying on it, Stig was mind-numbingly familiar with the toile-covered sofa on the main floor of the house Wulf and Theresa had rented in Ipswich. His hands, dangling between his legs, didn’t deserve this much scrutiny, but it was preferable to looking into the wrong dark-haired woman’s eyes and thinking what-if. Christina was safe, she and Galan whisked back to the United States in Ivar’s private jet within hours of rescue so that the trawler captain couldn’t link them to the events on the rig. She was safe, but not with him.

“Your blood coagulation’s acceptable for the second test in a row.” The soothing voice of Doctor to the Immortals Theresa Chiesa-Wardsen continued as she studied a handheld medical monitor. “A prick test isn’t quite as accurate as centrifuging plasma, but it appears you’re closer to the prothrombin time that’s normal for my husband. The Komodo’s anticoagulant factor is working through your system.” She looked up from her device to smile at him. “Happy news. You shouldn’t bleed out from a paper cut.”

“Thank you.” He knew he was healing, in the literal sense, because he could sit without assistance and walk between the loo and the sofa, but that didn’t mean he felt healed. Like seeing and looking, improving and healing were two different dogs.

Draycott’s dachshund circled nose-to-tail under the wing chair in the corner. Even dried pig ears hadn’t interested it. No one doubted that Porkchop missed his master, but Draycott’s disappearance was one of many lingering mysteries. He’d been a leader in their rushed escape. After he’d transferred Christina, Galan and Luc to the fishing trawler, he’d returned to hunt for Stig and Wulf.

He’d never reached them.

Her Majesty’s Coastguard had arrived first. Hard to miss a hundred-meter-high torch that must have prompted emergency distress calls from flights and boats within twenty miles.

Theresa flipped the back of her hand sideways at him, telling him to make space on the couch. Her dark eyes were filled with concern.

“What percent of all this languishing is physical impairment and what part is morbid depression or a narcissistic need for attention?”

His mouth quirked. “That’s your bedside manner?”

“Wulf and I live with Ivar.”

“That would hinder the development of normal compassion.”

“Wither it on the vine.”

Theresa couldn’t know that her reference made him think of vineyards, and Christina’s dream to begin her own winery. She had the passion, and with her share of Ivar’s payment, she had the money. He didn’t have any real wine expertise to offer her. Nothing to bring her that she couldn’t find newer, easier or better for herself.

Theresa touched his shoulder.

“You can call Christina. The technology is so easy to use, I’ve taught my husband.” She seemed lonely too, with Wulf and Luc out all day searching coastal inlets for signs of the inflatable raft or Draycott.

“No. I can’t.”

Her raised eyebrows mirrored his idiocy back at him. “Are you descending into that depressed immortal mode? How does it go, let me think.” She looked at the ceiling, lips twisted. “‘People I love die, and I can’t take it anymore, and I know how to make better choices for everyone else in the world, and I don’t deserve a good woman because I’ve hurt so many people,’ blah blah blah.” This time when she looked at him, her smile showed a blend of compassion and humor. “Did I nail it?”

“You left out the part where I ruined her life, put her in danger and she deserves better.”

“Right, how could I forget classic Viking excuse number fifty-seven? ‘Unferth did something bad, but the woman I care about is so dumb and shallow, she’ll blame me for it, so I won’t even try to explain.’ Yep. That one’s the winner because if there’s one thing mortal women can’t do, it’s figure out who to blame when supernatural shit hits the wall.”

The waving hands epitomized her Italian ancestry so perfectly that Stig felt a smile close to the surface. “And your degree is internal medicine? Or that American-style pop psychology?”

“Oh-ho, the snide Brit returns. Good.” Pushing herself off the couch, she stood, hands on hips. “Now shower and get dressed.” She picked up a shopping bag and dumped it on his lap. “Two Vikings in my life are enough. You’re being evicted.”

An hour later he conceded that Wulf’s wife was spot-on about the benefits of rejoining humanity with a shower, a clean shave and clothing. The sweater she’d given him was decent cashmere, so at least he could depart with a bit more style than the sea-soaked way he’d arrived from the Coastguard.

The stairs to the ground floor lacked a bannister. He didn’t want to disappoint Theresa by telling her he felt lightheaded when he moved too fast, or worse, by falling, so he trailed one hand on the wall to descend. En route to the kitchen, he glanced through the open sitting room door.

And froze.

Ivar had arrived, presumably while he’d been in the shower.

“Stig.” Their leader occupied one of a pair of wing chairs. Porkchop sat at attention on the other. “Sit.”

Today the hot ball of anger he’d felt for centuries when he and Ivar interacted appeared to be as absent as his heart. Without its star to guide his response, he did as ordered and numbly walked into the sitting room. Words finally came after he’d displaced the dog and lowered himself into the chair that matched Ivar’s.

“Feeling every day of fifteen hundred twenty-odd years this morning, believe me. How are you, Ivar?”

“What happened to Grendel’s arm?”

“Why yes, Stig, I’m feeling a tad out of sorts too, thank you. But don’t worry. We’ll all get better.” He shouldn’t have expected a twitch or response to his sarcasm. He sighed. “The bone’s exactly where it’s been for a century.”

“And where is that?” Ivar had his gloved left hand tucked close against his stomach.

“Care to hazard a guess? What if I said it was on a sceptered isle, bound in with the triumphant sea, whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege of watery Neptune? Could you find it?”

Ivar’s lips lengthened side to side, the bottom one quivering longer than the top, and then his head tilted backward to touch the upholstery while his eyes blinked like a bird’s wings. What had Unferth done to him that the effects lasted so long?

Stig braced his hands on the chair arms, prepared to push to his feet if his leader should convulse in a seizure.

When Ivar’s mouth opened, laughter as warm and round as a Titian nude rolled out. “Of course.” His good hand covered his eyes as if he couldn’t bear to witness his own levity. “Of course. It’s here in England.”

“In Southampton, inside the Titanic Engineers’ Memorial.” When he’d been dazed with the pain of losing Nora and Robbie, giving them the bone that had caused his centuries of loneliness had seemed like a fitting tribute. His immortality and theirs, linked forever.

“Why drive to Belgium and then to Germany on a wild goose chase?”

“The result of you sending Skafe to keelhaul me, I should add.”

“Mea culpa.” Ivar sobered after his admission. “But I’ve paid for the arm, and yet—” He offered an empty gloved palm to Stig. “I want it before tomorrow night when my jet leaves.”

“You’ll get what you want.” Stig stood too quickly. His leg buckled before he balanced himself. Ivar wasn’t usually so crass as to be the first to mention money. Cold, yes, but not the type to deliberately remind others of blood money. “Thank Theresa for the hospitality, but it’s time I was about my business. Or should I say your business.”

Ivar looked pointedly at Stig’s hands, held tensely away from his sides as if walking on a moving surface even though the room was fixed on land. “I think it’s our business. All of us are at risk.”

“The ones we care about risk more than we do,” Stig said.

“That’s why I don’t care about anyone.”

He wouldn’t challenge Ivar on that assertion.

“Answer one question.” Ivar’s voice stopped Stig in the doorway. “Did you cast me as Richard or Henry with your little Shakespeare speech a moment ago?”

Stig didn’t have the energy to turn before he answered. “I’ll let you know when I see who wins the throne.”

* * *

The first thought in Billy’s head when he saw the package leaning on the memorial—awful enough to say, but it was a commentary on modern life—was to freeze and wonder if he was far enough away from shrapnel. Immediately on the heels of that thought was the recognition that whatever he was looking at looked vaguely like a person, although distorted, and that birthed an instant of hope that it wasn’t a dead body propped against the marble combined with a moment of creepy hope that it was, because he’d be on the telly for sure if he discovered a corpse at the Titanic Engineers’ Memorial.

Then his brain connected with his eyes and he realized the item at the base of the bronze flying goddess statue was flat, and sized like the oil paintings in the Civic Centre museum that he always noticed when he had to pull a shift buffing the floors. The odd look was because of layers of clear plastic bubbles protecting it. Through the wrapping, he could make out a lady in white, like the Lady Darling portrait or maybe the convalescent lady in the big hat painting. Always thought he’d put on a tie if one of them showed up in real life. Here another lady popped up on his shift in the park because some stupid git wanted to leave an offering at the Titanic memorial.

He took out his mobile and snapped a shot. Then he speed-dialed his boss, because he did feel like this was the type of event about which he should ask for clarification.

Roddy answered before the second ring, loud and out of breath. Yes, this was indeed an odd morning.

“I’ve got a situation here at the Engineers’ Memorial.” He wanted to be clear that things were not normal, and he should be recognized for reporting them first.

“At the Titanic Memorial?” His boss’s voice rose. “What sort of a situation?”

“Someone’s left a painting. A big one.” The only person in sight was a man sleeping rough on a bench twenty feet away. Not a rich gaffer who’d leave this.

“Graffiti?” Now he sounded panicked.

“No, art. Like in the museum.” The sleeping bloke stood and put his pack on one of the little wheeled carts grannies used for shopping, but Billy hadn’t been
that
loud.

“Art? What kind of art do you leave outside?”

“A lady.” He tried to describe the long white dress and red background to his boss, but he couldn’t see details well through the wrappings. And he noticed the sleeper limping toward him.

“Bring it up then. Don’t show it to anyone, and be sharp!” Roddy was talking very quickly, which he usually only did after a Friday lunch pint. “Come in through the museum door. There’s telly crews out front of the council offices.”

“Telly? Over a picture?” It wasn’t a body.

“No, you clod, not over your bloody art. Over the donation.”

“Whaaat?”

The man was close enough now that Billy could see he wasn’t as old as his walk suggested. He was a bit scruffy, but perhaps ten years younger than Billy. Ought to be working, these youngsters, not sleeping out.

“Half a million pounds. Last night. For the memorial restoration fund.”

Billy didn’t have words on that, just a cough that was echoed by a crow perched in the oak at the edge of the plaza. A half million was six zeroes, no, five. Five golden eggs after the number, enough to retire early from emptying park bins.

“See why I was worried about graffiti? The place better look right spotless. So pack that painting and get the walk swept.”

The other man passed him. Billy wanted to jump in between him and the painting, in case he got ideas, but he stopped a respectful distance from the bronze sculpture and bowed toward the lady in white. When he stood, he touched three fingers to his mouth, and then held them briefly toward the sculpture like his old mum blowing a kiss at a railway platform.

Odd. But no odder than gifting a decade of good wages to a statue, so not his place to wonder why. His but to sweep and sigh.