First to Burn (37 page)

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.

Empty.

The man behind the cart had fallen to the ground in a lifeless sprawl, but Unferth stood boldly in the aisle returning fire to Deavers and Kahananui. This battle wouldn’t end as easily as the fights in Italy.

The armored monster turned in her direction.

She should’ve run.

* * *

Wulf reached the aisle, where Unferth stood near a sprawled body. Besides the immortal, there had been only the two others, as if without Black and Swan, Unferth was reduced to his last man. Thirty feet away Theresa was on the floor in a credible prone firing position. Past her, Kahananui crouched over Deavers, who had the dark mark of blood on his light gray pants. His best friend’s grimace corroded Wulf’s soul. He’d invited them to this fight. He’d damn well better get them out.

He leaped and slammed the fire axe between Unferth’s shoulders, but the tool rebounded off the layered metal rings. The armor was too strong. He dropped the weapon and hooked his arm around the immortal’s neck as the other man turned. They toppled into a display, and quills of glass and wood punctured Wulf’s parka. The chain mail loops were a slippery alloy, woven too tightly to penetrate but too thick to bunch in his fist. He kneed his writhing opponent’s back but couldn’t pin him.

Kahananui rushed toward Theresa’s hiding spot.

“Get out!” Wulf yelled.

As soon as the big guy lifted Theresa and thrust her at Deavers, he turned to Wulf.

“No! Go!” In case his friend couldn’t hear, he chanced making the Ranger hand signal to disperse. “Save them!” He’d be fine, but they had to go, and go now.

Thank Thor, Kahananui obeyed orders.

Unferth jabbed a hunk of splintered wood at his face, and he jerked to the side, the addictive adrenaline of a dirty fight revving him like the big Detroit engine in Cruz’s classic car. As Wulf plunged a glass shard from his sleeve through the helmet’s eye hole, he had no time to think about how clipped Deavers must have been if they were willing to leave. While Unferth’s scream blended with the alarm, Wulf dug through debris until his hand closed around a metal chunk with a heft similar to a claw hammer. He raised it like a club.

At the top of his swing, a gem above his fist caught the light, and like a dog blessed with color vision he saw red in the next flash. He had the hilt.

The surge of mission accomplishment propelled Wulf to head butt the other Viking deeper into the stack of furniture. As he scrambled out of the wreckage clutching the crucifix, pain erupted from the back of one calf and he fell. The bastard bard had cut his Achilles tendon. From the floor he could see Theresa’s face—nothing more than a circle of mouth and giant fearful eyes as she stretched one hand toward him, the other to Kahananui, who had Deavers slung over his shoulders. He wouldn’t make it to them.

“Take it!” Wulf flung the gold cross along the floor.

She dropped to her knee and made a perfect save, catching the relic a moment before Kahananui’s fist hauled on the back of her coat.

“Go, dammit!” Wulf’s arm extended toward the door, pointing palm down, willing them to follow his command and move out even as he struggled to raise his body.

Thumbs-up, Kahananui acknowledged, and then he hauled the other two away.

Wulf rolled, the fastest way to move without using his leg. Behind him, Unferth had the fire axe in one hand and the bloody glass shard in the other. Until his tendon healed, Wulf would have to keep the other Viking busy. The nearest missile was a piece of pottery, which the other immortal didn’t bother to dodge. Nor did he flinch at the horseshoe that bounced off his chain mail. Wulf would have traded both nuts to find a loaded assault rifle in this mess, but the longer they played cat and mouse, him throwing and rolling, Unferth batting almost blindly, the farther the others could escape.

As he slithered toward a broken oar, a hard object in his pocket dug into his pelvis, reminding him that he did have a bigger bang. Along with the rifles, Guleed had supplied a Soviet grenade. It was probably forty years old and useless as wet toilet paper, but what the fuck.

* * *

One or the other of Theresa’s legs sunk in snow with every step, up to her calf if she floundered into one of Kahananui’s footprints, or all the way to her knee when she broke her own craters. She’d fled without the snowshoes, and already she’d tumbled to all fours half a dozen times crossing a hundred feet. Guaranteed the only way she could have been forced to appreciate snowshoes was to try maneuvering without them, which made her previous hike seem like cruising the mall.

“Cruz, you up?” Carrying the added weight of his commander, Kahananui sank twice as deeply as she did, but he maintained calm into his walkie-talkie. “Boss is leg shot. Exit time.”

Chris was muttering—maybe orders, maybe profanity—as he hovered at the edge of consciousness. A tourniquet had worked enough magic that the splotches in the snow fell farther apart, but the clock was ticking on the golden hour. Even without knowing his vitals, she assumed that he required a transfusion.

She didn’t hear Cruz’s response to Kahananui, but it must have been good, because he whooped and shouted something that sounded like,
I
love your mama.
“Come on, Doc,” he yelled as he slogged around the next building.

Icy air sliced her lungs and stung worse than the stitch burning low on her left side, but she pistoned through the drifts to catch up. No quitting, not now.

Around the corner, Kahananui had halted at an open-sided shed.

She braced on the log wall, gasping. Three snowmobiles, a dusting of white on their seats and wind guards, sat under the shed. Unferth and his fighters must have arrived on them.

“My lawn mower’s bigger.” Kahananui kicked the side of the machine on which he’d propped Deavers, whose skin was almost the color of the fresh powder at their feet. “No fucking way this Euro scooter will carry the boss and me.”

The captain looked down at his injured leg and moaned. His eyes rolled up to pure white at the same time his head and shoulders started a slow tumble to the side. “Catch him!”

Despite his size, Kahananui was quick to grab the other man. “You’ll have to drive with him.”

“Tell me how it works.” She stuffed her hands in her armpits, regretting her lost gloves, and hoped her frozen fingers could grip the handlebars. Thankfully Raymond had familiarized her with motorcycles.

“Starter is the red button.” Kahananui talked while he boosted her in front of Chris’s slumped form. “Right lever’s the throttle.”

“Brakes?” The seat was wider than a motorcycle, and as cold between her thighs as a morgue cart. The metal cups would be foot stirrups. She easily inserted her left boot, but stuffing her prosthetic into the other cup was like threading a needle with rubber tubing.

“Left lever.” Kahananui’s massive glove shoved her foot into place. “But go easy. Better to stop by letting up on the throttle.” Judging by the way he looked over his shoulder at their footprints while he cinched the captain to her body, he didn’t think they had time to waste. The two-sentence tutorial would have to suffice. He ordered the man behind her to wake up.

“Owww, thasss my ha-ir.” Slurred words. Another sign he was fading.

“Hold on, or else I’ll pull out more, haole boy.”

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.