The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) (16 page)

The look Ivar gave him should have curdled the beer in his glass. “You display it?”

Tonight his paintings kept provoking conversations he’d rather avoid. “Not exactly.”

The server delivered three fresh beers in distinctive tulip glasses, their foamy heads and golden liquid one of the world’s best sources of fast calories. Nothing in Stig’s body needed to heal, but with Ivar brooding across the table, he’d be wise to put calories in the bank. Interacting with other Vikings was rarely painless.

“Did I get you in trouble?” Christina sipped her beer and turned sideways to smile at Stig with a tiny bit of foam on her lip. “Sorry.”

When she turned back to face Ivar, her smile wilted under the emotionless gaze.

“Stig likes jokes. I don’t.” Hard to believe the joy leech their leader had become over the centuries had once been a warrior as loose and wild as any of them. “He wants you here. I don’t.”

When Christina huddled closer to his shoulder, their knees brushed under the table, but he didn’t want her choosing him out of fear. “Back off, Ivar. Threatening women isn’t your style.”

Ivar remained completely rigid in his chair, both hands out of sight and his shoulders hunched. “My style changed.”

Maybe he should have taken Wend and Skafe’s comments more seriously. “You’re wasting your time. I told you before, the Gardner Museum was the last job. You agreed to leave me alone.” That was what he’d wanted for centuries, all of them to leave him alone. There was nothing worse than being forced to share the company of people who didn’t trust you.

A rush of cold air touched the side of Stig’s face, followed by the slam of a door.

Ivar’s left eye twitched twice, quickly but noticeably, as he swiveled toward the man who’d entered the bar. The newcomer looked to be in his sixties and carried a small dog to the table in the opposite corner.

Suddenly Stig knew what was different about Ivar. He was nervous. As their leader for more than ten centuries, Ivar had insisted they follow the rules their lord Beowulf had first established. Designed to keep their dozen brethren safe wherever they went in the world, the immortals were to avoid notice, move on if discovered and not take actions that injured normal humans. Ivar had always been careful and pushed them to be careful, that was true, but he’d never been nervous. Diligence differed from fear; the latter smelled sour.

Tonight Ivar was afraid of everyone in the room, even of a quiet old man with a dog. The starched collar and cashmere winter coat couldn’t mask the smell of his fear.

The change in the leader he’d followed from the Silk Road to the Black Death, through crusades and world wars, made Stig want to check over his shoulder. Although his brain knew there was nothing but a plain white wall behind his chair, the hair on his arms sensed that danger, a threat so unusual that even their immortal leader’s eyes darted to the corners of the room, was coming.

Stig’s fingers entwined with Christina’s. Ivar hadn’t sought him out to arrange another art heist. “I’ll hold you to your promise. I’m out.”

“Perhaps I can change your mind.” Across the table, Ivar pulled his gloved left hand from his overcoat pocket. Using his other hand, he lifted it to the tabletop as if it wasn’t strong enough to rise on its own. “Did Wend and Skafe tell you Unferth is performing experiments?” Ivar separated the wristband fasteners and tugged each finger of the glove an inch away, loosening the entire skintight covering. “On us.”

Stig liked the sneaky skald even less than Skafe. At least the one-eyed warrior had a short list of loyalties. Unferth’s ended after one name.

“He imprisoned me in a lab for six months.” A superficial study of the color of Ivar’s hair or the shape of his eyes yielded a man identical to the last time Stig had seen his leader, but Ivar’s movements were the key to understanding what had changed. He hesitated a fraction of a second before his gestures and seemed to shrink into his own body, like a person anticipating a blow, not like a man who could ride all day, screw all night and rise in the morning to plot the next raid.

“We think Unferth wants to replicate what happened to us in the bog.” The hand removing the glove obscured from Stig’s view the one being revealed.

The part of his mind that constantly posed questions and cataloged escape routes wanted to see Ivar’s hand, but the little part that told him when to use the escape route urged him not to look.

“We must beat him to the solution.”

Curiosity was Stig’s greatest failing, but even though he and Christina were both watching Ivar from the edge of their seats, in his gut he knew he should run away, far away, taking Christina, before they saw whatever was underneath the leather.

The wristband drew past the back of Ivar’s hand, and then past his fingertips.

Christina gasped and squeezed Stig’s hand, but he was too frozen to return the comfort.

The back of Ivar’s hand was gray and misshapen. Instead of the ridges of veins, shiny hexagons marked his skin. Now Stig was the one leaning into Christina’s shoulder, seeking a person who didn’t understand the madness of seeing the monster’s scales on one of their crew. The normal skin around the edges of the scales was red and scratched, as if it itched fiercely or had been scrubbed with a wire brush. Ivar’s fingers were waxy, thin and curved like claws.

“I lost track after the sixth time they cut my hand off.”

Christina made a small noise and covered her mouth. Whether she believed or not, Ivar had shocked her.

“That’s—” the monstrosity laid on the table wasn’t the hand of an immortal warrior, not even the hand of a man, “—terrible.” Looking at it was its own torture. Ivar’s hand wasn’t the giant scaled arm Beowulf had ripped from Grendel’s shoulder, but it called the echo of that night across millennia and brought it to the table, a fourth presence. “However, it’s nothing to do with me.”

Hands were almost as important to a thief as his brain. Hands to turn keys or punch number pads, pick up earrings or flick a purse catch. As soon as this meeting ended, Stig vowed to steal the first car he found and drive east. He knew the roads all the way to Vladivostok. Whatever had happened to Ivar wasn’t catching him.

“I spoke for you.” Ivar’s eyes finally showed emotion, one Stig had never seen from him and almost couldn’t identify. Hurt.

The leader made of stone, the man who would banish any of them and cut off contact for the safety and secrecy of the rest of the Vikings, could be wounded in his soul by an action as slight as Stig’s refusal. Unfathomable. The world tilted under Stig as much as a ship’s deck. Only Christina’s grip oriented him.

“I saw you shackled and I asked for you.” Ivar’s gaze dropped to where Stig’s whole and perfect right hand clutched a beer glass and his left one gripped Christina’s. Stig’s fingers were as strong and tan from pulling the oars in a longboat as they had been fifteen hundred years ago, but only because Ivar had argued for him.

The Premier League match on the bar’s television faded from his senses. The pounding of his heart took on the sound of ale-horns on oak planks. His feet were frozen, cold and bare on the hard-packed dirt. The cold seeped up his legs to join the icy fear that trickled down his spine.

* * *

Denial clawed in his throat, fast explanations that all would know to be lies. From the scowls and calls for punishment, this crowd wouldn’t swallow a fish, let alone a whale. He hadn’t taken the gold rings, but the truth would get a woman cast out. He had no choice but silence.

At the far table, where the warriors drank from gold cups, an iron-faced man spoke to the war-leader. Through the lamp smoke, he saw both men look at the metal linking his wrists and ankles, and then at his face. He could not hear their words, but the thinnest cord of hope, thin as a strand of maiden’s hair, beckoned. Perhaps the men who had earned seats there could spare a word for a stranger.

When the war-leader stood, the crowd on the benches quieted.

“I am Beowulf, son of Ecgtheow. And you, Stigr, son of Gerlef, from where do you travel?”

“The Kingdom of the Spear-Danes.” The name of his homeland raised the scaled terror he had tried to escape, but a man could not flee the images Niorun sprinkled in dreams. They followed across the waters, faster than swans at summer’s end.

“How come you to wander in the land of the Geats?”

“I wished to travel.” More details of his flight he wouldn’t share, not even if they applied white ashes from the hearth center to his palms.

“There’s no travel as good as a trip home with spoils of battle.” The war-leader roared with laughter, but the man beside him did not change his shield-face.

“No, my lord!” A big man, wide as two barrels, jumped to his feet. “This stranger took three gold rings of my wife’s and can’t pay me, so he must serve my house for three years with his hands or pay once with a hand.”

Stigr knew the farmer’s type. Dogs fled from men like him, fearing a kick to their ribs.

“And I don’t need another mouth at my fire. I choose his hand.”

The warriors erupted in howls until Beowulf raised his fist for silence. “You shall have your debt paid, good freeman, and more besides, with rings from my own hand,” he said. “I shall clear your debt and your honor, Stigr Gerlefson, should you agree to lead my crew whence you came.”

He was no better than a thrall. He could not pay the debt these strangers had cast on him, but at least if he agreed, what he owed the liege Beowulf would not be cut from his body this night. He bowed. “I thank you and offer my loyal service.”

“So you willingly guide our voyage to the Kingdom of the Spear-Danes?”

“Aye.” Voluntary it was not, not if he wished all four limbs and his man-wick intact past the next high sun, but pride pretended he had the choices of a freeman.

“Then Stigr, son of Gerlef of the Spear-Danes, we drink to the journey!”

The room roared as another thrall removed Stigr’s shackles, but it seemed to be as much jest as approval for the nine men who rose to their feet alongside Beowulf and the whisperer.

These were the crew he’d joined? His stomach lurched worse even than at the thought of his original punishment. By the wits of Loki, they’d never survive their first night in Heorot.

* * *

They had survived Heorot, all but Handscio. Survived and survived and survived.

Sunk in the past, he’d abandoned Christina and his beer. His hands, spread palms up on the table, didn’t require a fortune-teller to reveal his future. Life had become predictable long ago. He’d get Ivar whatever it was, use and lose the girl next to him but pray that she’d live, then he’d move on. His gift of sight was based on fifteen centuries of past performance, not psychic ability. “Tell me what you want.”

“I’ve built a lab to isolate the bacteria that causes our condition. I intend to create a treatment.”

“A vaccine?”

Ivar shook his head once. “Too late. My sister-in-law tells me the proper term is antimicrobial agent.”

“That would...” Stig struggled to absorb Ivar’s meaning, but couldn’t jump past the concept of Ivar having a sister-in-law, which meant Wulf had married, ergo there was at least one other woman besides the one sitting silently next to him who knew about the Vikings. Watching Ivar align his glove with the unresponsive fingers of his damaged hand didn’t speed his mental faculties either.

“It would cure us.” Ivar pulled the leather over his motionless fingers, slowly and carefully concealing the scales that changed him from what they’d always been and thought they would always be. “Make those of us who take the treatment—or are given it—mortal.” Ivar’s gaze met Stig’s, and the crystal blue had become a pale fire lit from within. “Vulnerable.”

The declaration constricted Stig’s throat. He understood Ivar’s true goal.

“To defeat Unferth forever, I need the arm. Quickly.”

Five hundred years ago, Ivar had placed Grendel’s bones inside a golden arm reliquary case, telling Louis XI it held the forearm of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne. The relic holder had been designed to conceal an arm that compared in size to a man’s femur, but the hundreds of people a day who toured Charlemagne’s treasury assumed the precious case’s size made a statement about the power of the Church.

“Send your brother to Aachen. Or Skafe. He’s crazy enough to smash and grab.” Sweet justice if Ivar’s bulldog was arrested for a heist Stig had accomplished a century ago. He flicked his beer glass, but it was too thick to ring like crystal. The dull clink fit his conflicted feelings.

“Wulf retrieved Beowulf’s sword hilt near Copenhagen last month. Nearly lost it to Unferth, but medieval gold-plating ruined the DNA.”

“Read about that job.” A museum warehouse had burned, the Danish National Museum had been ransacked and its director murdered. “Bad business. I agree taking the arm requires finesse.” Especially since neither Ivar nor Unferth appeared to know Stig had removed Grendel’s bones from the Charlemagne reliquary prior to the First World War. Ironic that before he’d left London to see Ivar, he’d been only miles from the monument holding the bones Ivar wanted. This could have been easy, if Ivar hadn’t sent Skafe and Wend.

“It’s them!” Christina yanked his arm. “The two men!”

The men from the train, flasher macs belted at their waists, had entered the building. Un-
fucking
-believable.

He and Ivar both surged to their feet, chairs tumbling to the floor as tan overcoat and black overcoat wound separately between tables, spread apart but moving in sync like a bomber formation.

Stig didn’t pause for social niceties, not after he’d rammed them off the road last night. The pub chairs were the solid wood he remembered, no cheap veneer, and as good as jousting lances. With his chair lifted so the four legs pointed frontward like a hedgehog-style tank defense, he ran straight at the closer man, yelling the battle cry he’d tried to avoid using for most of his life.

His target dodged, but then the man looked at the floor for an instant, which gave Stig the chance to catch him under the chin with the chair. The impact flipped the man’s mouth closed and flung his head back. Stig had the fractional second he needed to thrust the chair legs, and this time they hit squarely on the man’s chest, knocking his breath out and driving him to his knees.