Don’t open your eyes.
Her captor had shoved her into a not-quite-empty room on the top level of the stack of generic building blocks. She vaguely remembered him snipping her first set of zip ties and redoing her wrists behind the back of the brushed-steel chair. The room wasn’t heated, only lit, and her feet had lost sensation a long time before she’d stopped struggling.
Don’t look.
He’d left the lights on. She didn’t have to open her eyes to visualize the room. The light green walls were constructed of poorly hung drywall panels. Two electrical outlets were metal boxes stuck on top of the walls. Plastic tubes that must contain wiring connected them to overhead lights. It was all temporary or cheap, no ductwork, no heat, no window, no way out other than the door. All this she’d dutifully cataloged and recataloged in an effort to keep her gaze away from the only furnishings other than her chair.
They haven’t changed.
She refused to look at the steel shelf unit on the short wall. After Leif had departed, she’d tipped her chair and rotated it with her knees and body, but not far enough to put the shelf unit behind her back. Even without opening her eyes, she could see the twelve multi-gallon glass jars, the type used for storing church-sized quantities of pasta or industrial amounts of pickles. Five of the jars held a man’s forearm and hand immersed in a clear liquid. She thought she knew whose arms they might be. Five other jars contained variously sized pinkish or pinkish-brown blobs.
Don’t count the empties.
Before her mother had married Frank, they’d eaten a lot of cheap meat cuts. She recognized organs. Dead was dead, she’d always glibly assumed, and the how didn’t much matter, but that opinion changed when she faced rows of human body parts on a shelf and wondered if the previous occupant of her chair had counted more than two empty jars.
Her thumb wiggled the metal band of her ring, prompting a weak little inner voice to offer hope. Stig knows they took you.
The cold, exhausted woman aching on the floor didn’t listen. Sure, he’d seen her claw at the car’s rear window, but that didn’t mean he’d find her. He might try, but what could he do to find a dot in the middle of the sea?
Manny would be nineteen and alone, since Uncle Robert barely acknowledged his only brother’s son. At least she’d been twenty-three and out of college when Frank died, and she’d had Manny to help her confront their uncle’s threats to call immigration. At thirteen years old, her brother had already been obsessed with following Frank’s footsteps into the Corps, and he’d challenged Uncle Robert’s intimidation with a Marine’s determination. He’d been in junior high, but her tactically clever brother had threatened to sell his inherited half of Mancini Brothers to a giant conglomerate—and he would have—if their uncle had so much as said adios to Christina. Manny had kept her safe while she’d finished raising him, but he’d never know what had happened to her.
Dying sucked, no doubt, but she knew how years of uncertainty over her biological father’s fate had darkened her mother’s faith. Even falling in love with Frank and marrying him hadn’t filled all the voids in her mother’s heart. Her fingers curled into a fist, driving the thin band against the tip of her thumb until it hurt. If she couldn’t get out of this room and off the oil rig, her brother would carry the burden of a perpetual question too.
The rattle of the door highlighted her first, last and only need: survival.
With her eyes closed, she heard hinges grind open. Listening without looking was a skill she’d developed over years of visiting Uncle Robert. When Manny was a baby, Christina had realized her stepfather’s brother never spoke directly to her mother, not even to say thank you for a coffee. Sensing that Uncle Robert hated to be ignored, she’d mastered not looking when he walked past. Now, as then, small victories might be all she achieved.
Footsteps crossed the metal floor. Picturing Uncle Robert, fake tan making his skin darker than the Mexican immigrants he hired, despite his prejudices, helped keep her eyelids closed.
The hair on her neck must have recognized the tread, because fear shriveled her skin until she knew what a grape dropped in the field must feel like after a week of sun had baked every drop of liquid from its body. She was too desiccated to swallow or cry. Her captor had returned.
“Miss Alvarez Mancini.” The voice was Leif’s.
She refused to give him the satisfaction of opening her eyes or responding.
His footsteps sounded hollow in the nearly empty room. When he kicked the seat of the chair, the impact jarred her body from ankles to teeth and drove her several inches across the floor. Skidding pinched her knee between the chair leg and the linoleum and twisted her sore shoulder, but she clamped her lips together so hard they flipped inward. Not even a whimper passed that seal.
“I expect an answer when I say your name. Good morning, Miss Alvarez Mancini.”
The singsong greeting made her neck and shoulders feel as if he’d touched her, but she repressed her shiver and stayed silent. Answering would turn her into a weakling.
The second kick was harder, skidding her farther and more painfully, but she didn’t yelp.
“Good morning,” he said.
This time she sensed that if she didn’t answer, he’d kick her instead of the chair. So far she hadn’t had any broken bones. Any hope of escape needed that to remain true, so she had to reply.
“Fuck off,” she choked. Weak, Christina, weak, but her brain was the only tool she had access to, and it told her that this man had liked her defiance on the helicopter. He’d punished her, but he’d smiled with excitement when she fought. Stig had mentioned the boredom of immortality, so maybe if she kept Leif off-guard and amused, if she did or said the unexpected, he’d let her live long enough for Stig to make a plan.
“May I call you Christina?”
The brush of air on her face told her that he’d bent close to her, but she listened to the little voice that chanted don’t open your eyes. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of looking.
“Perhaps you prefer Tina?”
“Only if I can call you...” She had nothing but false bravado and a blank mind. “Porkchop.”
She heard a huff of air and pictured his lips pulled back from those horrible teeth. His clothes made the sound of starched fabric gliding across other starched fabric before something warm and dry touched her cheek. His fingertips. “You made quite an impression on my friend Stig.”
Her shoulder bones shrank inside her skin, leaving her feeling hollow enough to rattle.
“And on me.” The touch moved slowly to her jaw, and she clenched her molars to repress a shudder. Speech disappeared, replaced by images of arms waving in jars of liquid when wind rocked the container. She was one word away from screaming.
Focus. Find anger. This man was toying with her, but she was nobody’s toy. She controlled her life, not him, and he couldn’t make her afraid unless she let him. She found a tiny bit of fire in her stomach, enough to ask, “What do you want?”
Hearing her voice echo as loudly as his gave her a surge of strength.
Then fingers reached into her hair and yanked her head back so that her cheek dragged along the floor and her earring snagged, until thankfully the catch released. With her hair pulled this tightly, her eyes popped open.
“I want your lover.”
She squeezed her cheeks and forehead at each other hard enough to force tears out of the corners of her eyelids, needing to close her eyes to avoid the yellow pointed canines inches from her face.
“I could be very nice. I have that power.”
Instinct begged her to promise she’d do whatever he wanted, but her brain told her to challenge him. “I don’t think you have power. I think you’re chicken shit.” Years of a double-life as both Geoffrey Morrison and Christina Mancini let her lie with a tiny bit of confidence. “If yo
u had any balls, you wouldn’t have kidnapped me. You’d have faced Stig like a man instead of—”
He twisted her hair into a rope through his fist, cutting off her words. “You smell like sweat and fear. Did you know that?”
“How can you smell me after whatever you ate?” Having a person in the room, even her captor, gave her a voice. “Last week’s garlic fries?”
He laughed. “You could be an attractive woman.”
“And you could learn how to talk to a woman. But I guess it’s too late for that.”
“I don’t need to. You’ll agree to whatever I want.”
Even though he let go of her hair, her senses screamed to high alert because his voice had too much satisfaction, too much anticipation, for him to be leaving. “No, I won’t.”
He lifted the whole chair, including her, in one motion. A little ill from the sudden reorientation of her head into position above the rest of her body, she slumped.
“None of that despair, Christina. It’s not flattering.”
Her arms fell forward. He’d cut the zip ties but she was too numb to notice the change until the tension holding her hands behind the chair had disappeared. Before she could think of what to do next, he’d crouched, snipped the ties on each leg and stood.
“If you can get up and walk, I might keep you.”
“If you try to keep me, I hope you don’t ever need to sleep.” She’d trade her business for a knife like Skafe’s. The immortals apparently needed a few minutes to heal, so she imagined how she’d roll to the floor and go for Leif’s Achilles. Immobilize him and then lock him in the room, that was all she needed to do.
Except she didn’t have a knife and her legs didn’t function yet.
“That’s the spirit.” He laughed, those feral teeth incongruous against his fancy striped shirt and tailored pants. “Let’s go where it’s a bit warmer, shall we?”
Until that moment she hadn’t thought there could be somewhere worse than the room with the jars full of human parts, but suddenly she wondered about the reason for locating on an offshore platform. Horrible as the jars were, they could be concealed anywhere. A massive oil rig wasn’t required for a row of arms and livers. Leif’s hands wrapped around her upper arms and lifted her. She had nothing more than painful pins and needles in her limbs, no control, no way to struggle.
She was about to learn what required complete inaccessibility.
* * *
On his hands and knees at the edge of the bog, gloriously functioning hands and knees, Unferth averted his eyes from the muck-coated viscera in front of him. What his urges had thrust upon him was the one deed even the oldest gods punished, but his primitive hunger abolished all rules and left him a bare animal, a creature of the mud. This deed was territory he’d never entered, not on the plains of Kursk where he’d eaten grass and drunk from puddles while the Eastern Front burned, not when he’d crawled through stacks of plague-dead in Milan nor when he’d marched the walls at the Siege of Scutari. Never.
He flexed his fingers and touched the supple skin across his cheekbones. The nose he’d had for fifteen centuries brought him the scent of spring-thaw mixed with blood. His ear cartilage had re-formed, so he could hear the calls of ravens too far away to see. Whatever micro-organism in his system caused his eternal repairs had performed its duty; the gifts of blood and protein had blessed him. He was whole.
If he wanted to return seamlessly to the human world, his flesh needed clothing and shoes. He looked at the yellow parka and boots on the ground. The unfortunate man who had put him together again would have to donate more of himself.
* * *
Stig had wished for many things in his long life. Most had been luxuries like hotel suites, some necessities like an armoire large enough for hiding himself in a married duchess’s bedroom, but never had he wished to switch places with a dog. Watching Porkchop press his damp nose to the window of the rental car parked on the refuge of terra firma while Stig tried his damnedest to ignore the trawler moored at the dock, he considered offering Loki his bollocks to change spots with the dachshund.
The sky grumbled low and far away, Thor chuckling at his creature’s misery. The old gods had spent centuries expressing amusement when reminded of his existence. No other reason explained how a Titanic survivor also booked passage on the Lusitania’s last voyage. If Loki granted his wish to become a dog, it would be a bloody retriever expected to enjoy jumping out of boats to fetch mangled ducks.
His stomach lurched as he watched Wulf and his wife cuddle in each other’s arms next to the car. Marital happiness affected him like hairy spiders affected some women, the reason he’d never painted couples, only groups or solo portraits. Forging The Raft of the Medusa had been a picnic in comparison to the skin-crawling paean to complacency, a painting of a married couple.
However, Wulf and Theresa’s sentimental haggis was a better view than the rubber inflatable lashed to the deck of the trawler. Wulf intended them to make a silent final approach to the rig, rowing undetected. On the fucking North Sea in a rubber dinghy. Even if it was the type American SEALs used, it was a raft, and the North Sea was not the Serpentine in Hyde Park.
The other Viking had laughed, thumped Stig’s back and reminded him that he’d rowed across the strait to Heorot more than once. That had been fifteen centuries ago. He’d been sick then too, and he’d had a few incidents on ships since then. So fuck Wulf and his jokes.
“Stig!” Draycott called from beside Luc on HMS Doomed. The meaning of his circling hand was obvious. Get on with it.
Right. He was standing out in the rain when he could at least be inside the cabin of the trawler. He could take the first step to join the men he’d sucked into this rescue operation, or he could keep staring as Wulf tilted Theresa’s face and breathed a kiss onto her cheekbone.
“Stig!” The second call gave him the momentum to move.
The dock didn’t rise and fall this close to land, less even than the seventy-second floor of the London Shard in a high wind, which made his second and third steps easier. Three yards farther, he stepped over a black rubber coupling that linked his platform with the rest of the wood planks.
A sudden pitch sent him lurching for a handhold. The shoreside boards were fixed to solid footings, but the wood past the rubber linkage bobbed freely, using the pilings for guides, not anchors. The slap of each wave was amplified by the motion under his feet. Arms out, he stumbled toward the tallest, thickest post. The wood was sticky with tar paint and rough where splinters protruded, but unlike the boards, the pole didn’t move.
* * *
Beneath his wool coat and silk scarf, sweat drenched his evening clothes. He’d pushed to find Nora and Robbie a lifeboat, then fought against the desperate press to return to these passages. He could take the place of a mortal at the boilers, help keep the power for the wireless and the lights operating and give one more soul a chance.
His own soul, if the brethren’s eternal burden had left them any, could use a positive balance.
He shook his arms from his coat and left it where it fell. He wouldn’t need it in the boiler room and it would weigh him down when he ended, as they all must, in the water.
In the corner of his vision, he caught a flash of color at the stairs and whirled. “Who’s there? You must abandon ship!”
A boy in a navy peacoat, red scarf looped from his neck, stepped out of the stairwell.
“Robbie!” Lights flickered off, then on again, a sign the boilers were failing and the great ship’s power would soon be gone, hope of radio assistance ended, but Stig recognized the small figure. The ticking fear that had filled his chest since he’d felt the lurch over an hour ago exploded with the sight of the brown hair, identical to his mother’s. His white nightshirt collar was visible under his dark coat lapels, a sign of youth and vulnerability that cut deeper than any kn
ife. “Robbie.” This time the name sounded like a plea.
“I want to help you.” The thirteen-year-old’s voice cracked. “I’m a man too.”
Six years ago Robbie’s mother had asked Stig for help, and then become his partner, bringing him a son he’d never have known on his own.
“I put you on a lifeboat.” Centuries ago he’d understood that the ability to father a child had been stolen along with the ability to die, but looking at the son of his heart, the boy he’d raised with Nora, he died for the first time.
“I— I—” Robbie’s face was ghostly under the swinging light bulb, and he looked afraid. “I gave my seat to a woman with a baby.”
This boy was nobler than he had ever been.
“You are a fine man, Robbie.” His throat closed after the words, but his heart continued to yell at the heavens, no, no and no.
* * *
“Stig.” Fingers dug into his shoulder, the pressure yanking him a century forward to a heaving dock. “No boat down there,” Wulf said.
Around him was all of the cold, but none of the glassy smooth water of the first time he’d lost his heart to the sea. His mind still saw the pale face, more perfect than carved marble. His own true son’s ice-coated lashes had glittered like diamonds. While he’d waited for the lights of the Carpathia to arrive, he’d promised himself Robbie slept. Robbie breathed. Robbie was only exhausted, not frozen in his arms. “He’s dead. Because of me.”
“Christina’s not dead yet.” Wulf slapped a plastic box of white candies at his chest. “Take these.”
He clutched the box without releasing his other hand from the piling. The small container rattled, sounding almost chipper. “What for?”
“My wife lives off those mints. If I’m the one who has to sit with you, I’d rather not revisit Thai eggplant for the next three hours.”
The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) Page 26