The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) (4 page)

Skafe’s nose and cheeks purpled before he spoke. “My luck’s fine. Except for cheaters like you. You shouldn’t have taken Nora.”

“She asked to come with me.”

“That’s a lie! I gave her everything.” Anger seemed to increase the barrel-chested man’s size. “She wouldn’t have left me.”

“She saw you hit her son.” Stig’s half smile almost dared the older man to continue arguing, as if he was picking a fight. He flicked his cuff, and Christina’s eyes followed the direction of his finger. Toward a streetlight that marked an intersection with a better-lit street.

Three blocks away, a slow-moving car crossed, and it dawned on her that he was deliberately antagonizing the tightly wound man in order to give her an opening to run, and even a direction.

The knife reflected the light into a blur, gray in the dark pool, gray like the fin of a shark cutting through night. Her stomach twisted in fear, and she didn’t think about her words, knowing only that Stig shouldn’t take the risk. “Don’t—”

“He’s trying to get to you.” From beside her, Wend cautioned his partner.

“Bastard’s succeeding.” Skafe’s shoulders had shifted forward and his feet spread. “He’s needed a beating for a long time. A very long time.”

“Give it a try. I’m not as small as Robbie.” Stig widened his own stance. The sick feeling in her gut confirmed what their posture announced. They were going to fight.

“Nooo.” She raised her free hand to cover her mouth.

“She babied him. Weakling wouldn’t shoot a rabbit until I made him.” One side of Skafe’s mouth shifted up as he sneered. “He needed to become a man.”

“He was the bravest boy I’d ever met.” Stig nearly vibrated on his toes. “Hitting a child indicates a lack of manliness to me.”

Skafe’s hand shot out in a chopping move, and Stig ducked.

This must be the opening he wanted her to take, so she brought her heel down as hard as she could on Wend’s foot, cradled her forearm in the opposite hand and slammed her elbow back into Wend’s gut. His hand loosened enough for her to pull away. She ran between the cars into the middle of the street, hoping to be spotted by police responding to the Bodeby’s alarm or anyone in a store, driving or looking out a window. A woman running like hell in the street, a man chasing her, in a huge city—people should see.

Breathing behind her, the slam-slam of shoes coming faster than her own high heels, and she gave her all, swinging her arms, stretching her legs and tucking her head and shoulders forward into her dash. Why was she so short and slow? Why couldn’t she have been a runner instead of a gymnast?

The impact took her down. Asphalt burned her cheek, hands and knees but it was the compression in her chest—she couldn’t breathe—that terrified her. Then the world spun as someone yanked her up until she barely touched the ground.

She still couldn’t get air. This must be a heart attack, and anyone who said life flashed past was a liar. Each breath she tried, and failed, to get into her lungs must have taken a week. Since the dark man, Wend, was pulling Stig to his feet, the one gripping her neck and hustling her forward was Skafe. From bad to worse.

Worse definitely described Stig. Fresh blood saturated the front of his shirt.

She strained against Skafe’s arm. “Stig!”

“Merely a nosebleed. Looks quite a clanger.” His hands were cupping his nose, muffling his voice. “But I must assure you, I’ll be fine.”

“But that’s a lot—”

“I’m a bleeder. Even the merest scratch and it’s like a dyke burst in Holland
.
Don’t worry about me.”

Skafe pushed her forward. “Worry about yourself.”

* * *

The only benefit to Skafe marching Christina in front of him was that she couldn’t see Wend hand him a pair of gloves. “A glove? I thought we left dueling challenges behind two hundred years ago.”

“I don’t carry handkerchiefs anymore. Thought you might want to cover those.” The man who’d once been a friend nodded at Stig’s hands. A musician cared about hands as much as a thief, although not, perhaps, with the same past threats of loss, so he’d noticed Stig’s wound. In trying to get Skafe’s knife, Stig had grabbed for his opponent’s wrist and instead had connected with the blade across his palm. The slice went diagonally from the base of his first finger to his wrist, deep enough to expose the bone. If Christina noticed the wound, and then saw it vanish, he couldn’t be sure Skafe would let her go. Ignorance was her best protection.

Stig spoke loud enough for Skafe in front to hear. “I’ll come with you, no arguments, if you let her go now.”

Christina gasped, a short breath cut off by either fear or hope.

“Let her walk away,” he tried again.

“At the airport, not before.” Skate didn’t bother to turn around. “When’s the train?”

Next to him, Wend pulled out a cell phone. “First Heathrow Express leaves Paddington Station at five-ten. Two and a half hours.”

Stig’s neck itched where he’d been sliced the first time, but the desire to scratch the healing skin emphasized how much the palm wound still hurt. Healing from multiple fights had drained his strength until his walk resembled a stagger more than a jaunty march. He needed calories to replenish the energy burned when his body repaired itself, but he knew Skafe would prefer to leave him weak. However, at this point, the wet paving was beginning to look as inviting as his bed. “Gentlemen, I’m feeling a bit lightheaded.”

“Keep walking,” Skafe ordered.

“I don’t think he’s faking,” Wend said.

Discovering that an iota of brotherhood remained in the other Viking was slim consolation to a man this hollow. The crumpled energy bar Wend pulled from his jacket, however, was a gesture of fellowship worthy of knighthood. It was one of those chewy energy-dense compounds that was useful, but repulsive.

He must have grunted while trying to find the correct perforation on the plastic wrapper while wearing gloves, because Skafe stopped and turned, forcing Christina to do the same. She looked as dazed and drained as he knew he was.

From her skinned cheek to her lopsided broken heels, his game had thrust her into danger. As soon as he’d heard Skafe’s and Wend’s names, he should have left by the service stairs, abandoned the auction to Christina and disappeared like a hundred other times. If he’d exited Bodeby’s at the first hint of their presence, these two would have followed him. Only him. Perhaps curiosity over the unexpected visit or perhaps the quixotic wish to see his own kind, but he’d thought he could...No, juggling was for mimes. Trying to manage both situations had created a first-class cock-up.

He broke the energy bar in half and closed his eyes for a second rather than follow the crumbs lost to the ground. “Here.”

It took her several seconds to process his offer.

“Touching,” Skafe sneered, but at least he stepped close enough for Christina to take the piece from Stig’s hand. “Now you can keep walking. I didn’t let you shirk on our first hike, and you’re not ghosting now.”

Fifteen centuries, scores of times he’d stood with one or the other of the crew, had saved them from Ottoman oubliettes or worse, but Skafe never let go of what he thought had happened in Grendel’s bog. “You’ve carried that march a long time.”

“Ivar wants you. Good enough for me. Move.”

The sleepiest hours of London in the twenty-first century had nothing in common with the dark time they’d spent in the marsh of the monster. Even when Londinium had been a marsh, or when the later city had flooded with sewage and dead rats and tannery offal, it had never stunk like his memories of the bog at Heorot.

The wet squish of his shoes on the sidewalk was only the slightest echo of the squelch of his leather foot wraps sucking up and down in the ancient muck, but with these companions beside him, the sound wrapped him tightly in the veils of the dream-goddess Niorun. The visions she offered to seekers were sometimes a gift, sometimes a lure to walk with her in the shadows, but always difficult to refuse.

* * *

The cold was the strongest feeling, stronger than his fear of death, stronger than regret. The cold cut through him easier than wind through winter trees. If he could skitter like leaves before the tread of the Njord wind-god, he would not be home in the land of the Spear-Danes with the stench of rot and vile mud rising from each step. He would not hear the challenge and clang of the warriors who demanded the chance to die.

He did not want to die. He had abandoned the mead-benches of Heorot when the beast’s visits began, but the three Norns spin long webs to bind those who seek to escape fate.

The feast hall of Valhalla would not await him, not without a feat of bravery, and he had not notched such a deed either of the preceding nights in Heorot’s great hall. Handscio had won first honor in death by rushing the Grendel when Stigr had been frozen across the table. Ulf had thrown his own body at the many-armed monster and been tossed across the room to land bloodied in the mead-benches. Ivar had broken his sword on the monster’s hide, as brave as his brother.

But ’twas their liege Beowulf who had won the first victory and presented the bloody arm to King Hrothgar.

Stigr had won nothing. The sight of the scaly arms, multiplied into more claws, reaching for men’s bodies even while its fanged mouth boiled with Handscio’s hot blood, had frozen him in the ice-waste of dishonor.

And the second night, when the beast’s hell-dam had sought revenge for her son, had doubled his shame.

Today he stumbled through the fen as the least, and the last, of the company. The gap between himself and Jurik was the length of three men’s treads.

Jurik pushed aside a branch that sprang back into place before Stigr reached the spot. Even the crew’s healer hurried, the lure of the warrior in his sinews.

Only he, the thief, slowed his footsteps. His sword arm trembled with the unfamiliar weight of his blade, a lifetime of the light finger and the quick story weak preparation for carrying a warrior’s iron.

Dark splashes blazed the trail of the she-hag who had come on the second night to avenge her monstrous son. Even a man who preferred thiefcraft to woodcraft could decipher the blood-sign. He paused at the warning. To track the mark with his foot would demean the sacrifice of Hrothgar’s man who had been carried, dying, on this trail.

A clout to his skull sent him stumbling almost to his knees and the blood churned into mud.

“Thief-dog.” Skaife One-Eye prodded Stigr in the back. “You’re not running away.”

Stigr let the branch spring back, but Skaife was quick with his iron. The slender wood fell between them, the message of the sliced branch clear.

“Keep walking.”

Chapter Four

Christina’s broken shoe slowed the group. Although her back ached from the uneven gait caused by a three-inch difference in leg height, the tottering pace gave her a satisfaction directly proportional to the amount it irritated the two kidnappers.

The damp had passed from drizzle to light rain, which she assumed contributed to keeping the city quiet and empty. If it had been Wend gripping her arm, she would have tried for the notice of one of the cabbies who occasionally drove slowly past, or dashed in front of a late-night bus, but she’d be a fool to test Skafe’s knife. So she tried to ignore the wet hair plastered to her neck and the ankle-scarring agony of her blisters and keep moving.

“Paddington at last, gentlemen,” Stig announced from behind her.

The open metal arch at the end of a sloping ramp from the street didn’t impress her. Both the stone building on the left and the orange brick one on the right seemed more like famous landmarks. The arch in front of them looked like it led to a parking garage, but it said Paddington Station in black letters.

“She needs to rest.” Stig shook his foot until a damp piece of litter fell back in the gutter. It was a candy wrapper, a British brand she didn’t recognize but still shiny gold-and-orange crumpled plastic. Her stomach rumbled with the thought of chocolate.

“Go in.” Skafe indicated the door with a jerk of his chin.

“Like this?” Stig gestured at the front of his shirt. The black gloves on his hands looked odd without a coat. “I’d love the attention.”

“He needs a jacket,” Wend said.

All three men stared at her.

“He has one.” Skafe lifted his chin again, this time in her direction, and she clutched the lapels across her chest. The gun was in its holster, hanging limply on her body but concealed by the folds of the tuxedo. Her upper arm pressed hard on the metal shape, making it squash against the underwire of her bra. If she tried to pull it out, Wend or Skafe would tackle her before she had it clear, and if they took the jacket, they’d see the holster and take the gun too.

The knife was bad enough.

“Gentlemen, manners, please.” Stig slid between her and the others. “Your guest is as chilled as I am filthy. She should keep the jacket. Since you are inconveniencing us, perhaps one of you could lend me a coat?”

Skafe blew air out one side of his mouth. In the yellowish streetlight, his gray stubble made him look like a drunk, but she supposed at four in the morning everyone in a train station looked rocky.

“I prefer Wend’s tailor.” Stig’s sneer made Skafe turn purple, but she had no energy left to process whatever plan he was concocting. Not until she rested, ate and warmed her frozen feet.

“Mine won’t fit.” Wend lifted his shoulders at Skafe. “He’s too tall.”

Skafe’s eyes narrowed to slits before he shrugged out of his coat and thrust it at Stig with a punch. His fist connected hard enough into Stig’s chest to make him grunt. Or maybe he faked the noise, but it still looked painful. “Suit up, fancy boy.”

Stig removed the leather gloves and handed them to Wend before he donned the coat. With the lapels buttoned and the collar turned up, most of the mess on his shirt was hidden.

Like a baseball stadium in November, the station was empty, or nearly so. A turbaned man in blue coveralls wiped at the sides of an escalator. Another man, squeegee in hand, stopped cleaning the window of a darkened store to stare at them.

“Closed till five,” he said, and turned his back. “No sleeping in chairs.”

She opened her mouth and the air crossing her teeth left a dry, sour taste after the damp outside, reminding her that she was thirsty as well as hungry and exhausted.

“Shut it.” Skafe’s thumb dug into the inside of her elbow, sending pain stabbing straight up to her shoulder like a thousand needles. The pain was so strong it seemed to leave numbness, or perhaps muscle death, in its wake. The only response she could produce was a moan, but he must have assumed her acquiescence.

Deeper in the station, its size and the reason why it wasn’t noticeably warmer than outside became more obvious. Huge glass ceiling vaults arched overhead, stretching along train platforms that opened to the dark morning at the far end. Air rushed past, as if the station was a wind tunnel. A glass enclosure to their left separated several small shops from the empty chill of the train area, but nothing was open or lit.

At least it was dry, even if she wasn’t. At least there were two other people, even if neither was looking at their group. At least she wasn’t dead, even if that circumstance was probably temporary. She didn’t believe these two men would let her go when they boarded the train to Heathrow Airport. While they might leave her behind in a bathroom, she wasn’t naïve enough to believe it would be in a condition that would let her describe them to the authorities.

Maybe fear was like the tide, coming and going in waves of different heights, because all she could think about as they marched her and Stig past a closed deli was the sandwich pictured on the sign. The brownish-pink slab under the orange cheese and green lettuce must represent meat. Doing the math to figure out how many hours it had been since she’d had real food wasn’t possible. She couldn’t count past fourteen or twenty or whatever until she had something to eat, and she didn’t care what type of meat was on that picture, she wanted it.

“They’re open.” Wend pointed to a blue-signed pharmacist. “Stig’s not the only one who’s hungry. I’ve had a long night too.”

“You two buy food,” Skafe ordered Wend and Stig as he shoved a shopping basket in her hand and frog-marched her in and to the back of the pharmacy where no one could see her. It was a struggle to breathe naturally as he pointed at cough medicine. “Grab three of those.”

He didn’t have a cough. Her hands trembled, but she followed his instructions.

“Two stretch wraps.”

She had a picture of herself, drugged and tied, and she froze.
Pick them up,
she told her hand,
or he’ll do that squeeze.

Slowly she dropped one, then another, into the basket.

His orders went on. Each item—surgical tape, nail scissors, ear plugs—made her temperature drop until she wondered if she would become an immobilized block of ice here in the store.

They turned at the end of the row, Skafe keeping himself between her and the cashier, and started up the next aisle past magazines, sticky notes and pens. At the end of the office supplies section, a pregnant woman focused on restocking shelves from a rolling cart.

“Get a roll of that.” Stig pointed to packing tape.

Suddenly the memory of the nerve pinch didn’t matter, because she couldn’t let him wrap her in tape. “I won’t.” The glittering darkness in his eyes was as impossible to decipher as a stone. “If you’re going to kill me, do it here, because I’m not touching that tape.”

“Listen up, little girl.” He crowded her backward until the metal edges of the shelf unit pressed against her spine and the back of her thighs. “I don’t kill women. Not unless they try to kill me first. But I have a job. Shut up and let me do it, and I’ll leave you tied up in a bathroom on the Heathrow train. It’s that simple.”

“I don’t believe you.” Her right arm twitched as if to remind her that she could slip a hand under her jacket and find a gun.

The sour smell coming from him grew stronger as he leaned closer. Even through Stig’s jacket and her dress she could feel the pressure of his knife low between her ribs and her hip. She’d be filleted on the floor before she had the weapon clear of the leather straps.

“Look past me,” he said.

The pregnant lady put a hand to the small of her back, making her belly look huge.

“Have you ever seen a cesarean birth?”

Time stopped. She’d seen him nick Stig’s throat hours ago when the tension hadn’t been as high. Her eyes rested on the other woman. No. Not a baby.

Making the right decision was her total defeat, and she slumped under the weight of her silence.

“Put the tape in the basket and everybody’s happy.” He eased a step away from her, letting her breathe but also showing her the knife in his palm. Its blade had dark stains around the edge. Stig’s blood, she assumed.

That brown crust confused her. Skafe had wiped his knife at Bodeby’s. She’d watched him gleefully mark Stig’s tuxedo shirt. In the street, he’d given Stig a nosebleed, not a cut. Or had Stig concealed his real injury to shield her?

“Tape,” her captor prodded.

Her hand shook so hard the first roll tumbled to the floor.

“Leave it.”

She took another from the shelf. The sound of plastic packaging dropping into the metal basket roared in her ears, but it wasn’t loud enough to cause the clerk to glance up from the cover of the paperback she’d paused to read while restocking the book rack.

Skafe handed the basket to Wend and told him to buy everything. “The girl and I will get a table for four.”

When the man cleaning the glass-enclosed seating area started to tell them to move, Skafe’s glare silenced him. The chairs and table were out of the wind, making the space slightly warmer than the platform, but Christina’s skin recoiled at waiting alone with Skafe. He’d released her arm, but he loomed next to her chair, his barrel-chest and gut violating her personal space until Stig and Wend arrived, carrying plastic shopping bags.

Stig set a wrapped sandwich and bag of chips in front of her. “Yesterday’s, sorry to report.”

“That was the last time I ate, so they’re about the right age.” Her lips shifted, trying to let him know she was grateful, but she doubted the result qualified as a smile. “Thanks.”

He sat next to her and folded one of several newspapers to the crossword puzzle.

The sandwich was crummy bread and unidentifiable processed meat concealed under industrial cheese, but she choked it down while Stig filled letters into the squares.

The other two settled in chairs opposite and silently ate similar sandwiches, until Wend reached across the table to a section of newspaper.

Stig smacked his hand on the top and drew the pile toward himself. “Buy your own.”

“Come on.”

“Oddly enough, I’m feeling petty.”

Again, the silence stretched except for the sounds of chewing, rustling plastic wrap and Stig’s pen scratching on the puzzle. Skafe’s eyes constantly shifted from her to Stig. She never saw him blink, but he must have. Watching to try to catch him blink made her feel like a rabbit, so she dropped her gaze to the table.

Stig shifted position and stretched, then continued methodically filling in words and checking off the matching clue numbers. She hadn’t done a crossword since the nights she’d sat beside her mother’s hospice bed, doing her homework and reading out loud while Frank took her little brother home to sleep. Her mother had liked to think her American-educated daughter could do the things she herself hadn’t been able to do, including English-language puzzles, so Christina had blindly filled in squares.

Stig’s answers didn’t make any more sense than her tear-stained eighth grade ones had. One across, “held beside the golden door” was L-A-M-P, not P-R-E-P. And five across, he’d written A-R-A-T-E, not a word, and then he had A-G-R-I-T—
Holy shit
.

The letters weren’t answers, they were a message written in Spanish. She scanned that line and the others in capitals, ignored the random letters going down and saw it.

Preparate a gritar Officer Down. Asiente tu cabeza.

Be ready to shout Officer Down. Nod your head.

She coughed into her hand and nodded twice.

He turned the paper over and began to work on a Sudoku.

Her hands trembled in her lap at his knowledge that she spoke Spanish as much as at the thought that he had another plan. He knew too much about her, this man she’d never met before tonight, this embodiment of her imagination, but he was the far lesser of two evils. If they escaped the others, she might work out a deal with him to save her business and her reputation.

“What’s that? A numbers crossword?” Wend was reading the puzzle upside down.

Fear that he’d read the message tightened her butt cheeks on the metal chair, but she fought to seem unconcerned by Wend’s question.

“Keeps the brain young.” Stig looked at Wend. “Might not be too late for
you.
”

“Funny.” Skafe’s low, uninflected voice made the hair stand up on her neck. “Ha. Fucking. Ha.”

Stig ignored him in order to fiddle with his cuff links, sleek silver-colored squares with a diamond on one side and a black stone on the other. When he held them out to her, his French cuffs dangled like dirty, tattered surrender flags. “Could you put these in your handbag?”

Her fingers brushed his palm as she picked up the masculine jewelry. For an instant he curled his fingers back and squeezed hers, and the contact infused her with as much strength as the sandwich had. Maybe they would escape.

The confidence was, like hope, a crest quickly undercut by aches and exhaustion. Above the far left platform, an ornate black-and-white wall clock ticked to 4:40. Her brain took several beats to calculate that almost five a.m. in London was almost nine p.m. the night before in California. She gave up without determining how many hours had passed since she’d left her apartment with a carry-on and a doomed idea.

A worker rolled a rack of pastries to the shop by the ticket turnstiles. With thirty minutes until the first express train for the airport, employees began to arrive for a handful more stores, preparing for a morning rush. Absorbed in their routines, no one looked at her or Stig. Sitting at a table with newspapers and food wrappers, her broken shoes and skinned knees were invisible. Their foursome looked like any other group of waiting passengers.

At 4:45, Stig folded the front section of the paper around the rest of the stack, tucked them all under his arm and stood. “I suppose you’ll have to escort me to the gents’.”

Wend stood, and she too started to push out her chair, but Skafe was next to her before she could finish rising. “I—” Her voice sounded like she hadn’t spoken in days, not merely an hour. “I’d like to use the bathroom too.” Maybe that was his plan. A breakout from the bathroom.