The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) (10 page)

He threw the back of his finished hand to his forehead. “Say it isn’t so.” Stig’s voice, as smooth emerging from his carmine-painted lips as a world-class vintage, was her only tether. Without him, she suspected she’d either twitch all over from a coffee overdose or collapse on the floor, sleeping until Armageddon.

“You were a kid too.”

“It was yesterday for me. Remember—” his eyes crinkled at the corners, “—I’m immortal.”

He was trying very hard to distract her from the fact that at noon a new man had relieved the unwanted watcher on the street, or to cheer her—she didn’t know. But he was sweet. Or maybe she was deliriously loopy. Maybe anyone short of Jack the Ripper would seem sweet in her state.

“We’ll make it.” He sounded more confident than he had before he’d put on a dress and stockings. “We’ll drive out of London like thousands of other cars. It’ll be an easy haul to the Folkestone vehicle train terminal and a short ride to France.”

She bent her head to concentrate on gluing the next-to-last nail, which allowed her to avoid both scrutiny and answers.

“We won’t have any problems getting on the vehicle train.” Stig’s voice was a little higher, the words blending faster but still with precise diction that pushed his red lips into exaggerated shapes. “It’s dead easy. Cars barely stop for the security checks.”

“You have to stop talking with your hands.” Shifting her grip to his thumb, the pads of her fingers trailed across his palm. She felt the hard bumps of calluses, as if the man who seemed equally at ease in evening wear or a dress also labored with his hands.

“I’m embracing my character. Let’s see, thirty-five minutes on the train puts us in France.” He should be letting his nails dry with his hand passively resting while she worked, but suddenly he too was stroking the pads of his fingers across her palm. “At Calais, we’ll drive right off.” His voice rose at the end, a facsimile of female up-talking. “They unload as quickly as possible, which is in our favor.”

His thumb curled underneath her hand to trace the length of each of her fingers. The connection between them was as brief as the amount of time they’d known each other, yet the comfort his touch offered was enough to ease the tension that tightened her shoulders. He hadn’t failed her yet.

“I know a spot for dinner in the center of Calais. We’ll celebrate our successful escape with the 1947 Perlus.”

“Don’t jinx it.” His confidence had the reverse effect on her, draining her coffee-fueled alertness until she couldn’t tell where the chair ended and her immobilized, exhausted legs began.

He spread his arms wide, giving her a complete look at the padded bra, plunging V-front of the wrap dress and smooth-shaven chest. Every golden hair that had made her stop breathing when he’d stripped in the art-filled tunnel room was gone, and nothing softened the sharp cuts of muscle marking the hollow of his throat. “Come on, how could anything go wrong? We’re partners.”

“Let me count the ways.” The prickles stealing over her skin were only a result of the combination of coffee, bacon and nerves—not excitement, not warmth from his words or from the glow of his smooth skin.

Twenty minutes later they had packed clothes, money and an unidentifiable tangle of electronic devices, which reminded her that the phone she’d slipped in the bag with the wine needed a new SIM card.

At the door, Stig stopped and sketched a casual salute. “Goodbye, flat. Nice knowing you.”

“That’s it?” She glanced at the pink-and-black houndstooth-patterned makeup kit and vivid jumble of women’s clothes he carried. “You’re leaving everything else?”

“People like you and me learn to move on.”

She would never be like him. Last night his assertion would have invigorated her anger, but right now she felt too hollow to object that unlike him, she had roots. She had a lifetime of family and friends in Napa, a brother who’d eventually return from the military, and she wanted a vineyard with real roots, roots she could dig with a shovel, no matter what she had to do to get it.

Arms full, he pointed his chin at a complex collage of blue and gray shapes interspersed with finely etched rectangles of various metals. “That’s the only thing I’ll truly miss, but I can do another.”

“You painted that?” The colors and shapes sang of the London skyline on a gray day, a day like this one. Every time her eyes had rested on the six-foot-long canvas hung over the white leather couch, she’d wondered if the real owner missed the artwork. Hearing that it wasn’t stolen pressed a weight of guilty assumptions onto her spine, until she felt smaller.

“Would you believe that I also painted the art you saw in the tunnel?”

She turned to the door, the clog in her throat far too large and spiky to be proportional to his teasing, but challenging him took energy she didn’t have to spare. She had to concentrate on setting one foot in front of the other and moving forward, away from London and this mess.

They descended a stairwell marked Emergency that led to a garage so small it might once have been a hallway, but it was big enough to fit one tiny blue car. She didn’t recognize the make, but then she doubted a car this small would be driven anywhere in America outside downtown San Francisco.

Stig tossed his possessions in the gap between the front seats and the rear window, and then dropped a pair of silver-glitter high heels and a wig box on top. His closet contents, including the deep purple wrap dress and green print scarf that he’d chosen to wear, had made it obvious that dressing in women’s clothing was not a new idea.

The longer she looked at the hairless skin revealed by his crossover neckline, the more she believed his chest had become smoother than her own legs. Best not to stare, of course, but she was a single woman and he was...confident. His appearance and mannerisms had altered, but the underlying magnetism that had brought the rich and connected into his orbit at Bodeby’s hadn’t changed, despite the dress and glitter eye shadow.

“Your ride, Señor Suárez.” He held the left-side door open as if he expected her to drive, and then she remembered that was where passengers sat in England.

“I’ll admit that the passport photo of me looks kind of like a man if you hold it at arm’s length and wave it around.” She settled the bag with the bottle of Perlus in the back and lowered herself into the passenger seat. “But I think I might be insulted if they actually believe I’m a man.”

“That’s the point of my getup.” He raised the garage door in a smooth move that tightened his calves under the sheer hose, and then climbed into the driver’s seat. Even fully adjusted, his knees hit the dashboard and his head brushed the ceiling. “I look so theatrical in these lashes and falsies that no immigration officer will look twice at you. Because you look nondescript compared to me, you must be who you say you are.”

His logic made sense in the backward way everything had since she’d arrived in London; that is to say, it didn’t. But at this point she trusted it would work.

“I suggest you duck into the footwell. The car park alleyway is a dead end, so we’ve got to drive past the gentleman watching my flat. Better if he only sees me. I’ll wait to don my wig once we’re away.”

She crammed herself into the tiny space, facing backward with her torso folded on top of the passenger seat.

The car shot forward, made a noise like a tree-chipper and shuddered to a dead stop.

“No worries,” Stig said as he restarted the engine. “She’s just jealous of my passenger.”

“This isn’t much of a getaway car.” She was too jammed in the bottom for her lower half to move as he gunned the engine around the corner to leave the alley.

“Rule number one—the more expensive a thing is, the bigger the trail it leaves.”

She was too busy surviving a turn sharp enough to bonk her right shoulder into the door to answer with more than a grunt.

“Clear.” He threw one arm across the interior of the car, almost reaching the passenger window. “Left the wanker dashing after us. Do me a favor.”

“Only if I it means I can climb out of here.” She was already pushing the seat with her arms to try to raise and unfold from the worst attempt at a child’s pose she’d ever done. “It’s easier to do yoga on a mat than in a compact car.”

“Stretch over your seat, and you’ll see four red zip ties coming through holes in the boot. If you snap them, the number plate drops off. There’s a spare underneath.”

“You’re serious?”

“As a hippopotamus.”

“You really do plan ahead.”

Chapter Ten

The blowflies came first. When the thin northern sun raised the daytime temperature of Denmark’s bogs past fifty degrees, the previous fall’s pupae emerged as winged creatures. Unerring senses bred over sixty million years led one newly hatched carrion fly to a thawed chunk of flesh and bone caught in the fork of a spindly birch.

The first arriver laid two hundred eggs. One sunset and sunrise later, they hatched.

Within a day, maggots consumed the thawed eye tissue. They reanimated the orbs into a wriggling medusa that spread outward across the host lodged oddly in the tree. The maggots’ breathing mechanisms occupied the opposite end from their mouths, which allowed them to consume continuously without stopping for air.

Inarguably, maggots were efficient. Maggots were effective.

To a raven who circled above the bog, maggots were tasty. Alighting on a branch, he found the writhing mass of spring’s first larvae and recognized their food source as a man-head, one with no body and no arms to wave off an inquisitive bird. Above the raven, competitors croaked greedily, but the lucky bird spiked his throat feathers and expanded to proclaim his conquest. He pecked for the plump maggots, threw his head back and swallowed them whole, then cawed warnings at his brethren.

Perhaps it was the vocal range of the black-feathered
hrafn
that inspired the ancients, for stories told how the chief god of this land had kept two huge ravens as his eyes and ears. Huginn, for thought. Muninn, for memory.

Biologists consider members of the bird family Corvidae, who are able to shape sticks into useful tools and plan multi-step processes to acquire food, to be the most intelligent birds. This one sensed the fastest way to get the protein concealed under the hard skull shell was the same method it used on crabs and bivalves. Lift, drop on rocks, repeat until the shell cracked like a pond turtle, then dive faster than the competition to taste victory.

Instinct pushed the raven to hurry. He didn’t have the gifts that Odin had given his mythological ancestors, but he didn’t need them to predict a fight. The bird’s black claws gripped its meal, and its wings beat hard. Because of the weight of the bone, the thing was heavy, heavier than a small animal, but the reward would be larger when it cracked. More flapping, then the large wings achieved lift and the raven rose from the branches into open air.

Two blue-black birds dove from separate sides, attacking for the prize.

The raven’s wings folded and it plunged, causing the attackers to collide, then opened again and beat furiously, but the bird couldn’t rise. The hanging weight slipped. The fragile connection of skin to skull had sundered and the raven’s meal fell untethered, leaving its claws gripping nothing but a stringy pennant of hair and sinew, no greater than the tail of a rat, and no more palatable.

No rocks blanketed the ground below to crack the prize open. Only a dark bog whose mud could trace its origins as deep as time marked the landscape where the raven’s treasure sank, bubbling into the dark mere.

This bog concealed many things.

The descendant of Odin’s messenger flew on.

Chapter Eleven

A hand squeezing her thigh penetrated Christina’s sleep fog, but it was the road whizzing past her left shoulder, cars close to the glass where her head rested, that jerked her upright and made her foot slam for a nonexistent brake pedal. “Where are we?”

“Coming up on Folkestone and the vehicle train.” Stig’s hand withdrew to the wheel. “You didn’t reply when I said your name.”

The frizzy blond wig with contrasting dark roots seemed to fill his half of the car. His appearance brought the ordeal of the previous twenty-four hours rushing back, but she was so tired she felt glued to the fabric of the passenger seat. If she couldn’t keep her eyes open, her back and shoulders would never recover the energy to support themselves independently.

The car hummed into a lower gear as it changed speed and bumped left to exit. Forcing her eyelids to lift was a process so difficult, she wanted an award. Freight trucks lumbered in the next lane while Stig steered between rows of orange cones, but she didn’t see a visible destination.

The vibrating sides of the car pressed on her like bars of a cage. “Where’s the train?”

“The terminal designers listened a bit too much to ‘Long and Winding Road.’ We’re in the queue, but it’s quite a drive.”

The silent progress might have been thirty seconds, but it rivaled her trans-Atlantic flight.

“I’m nervous.” Tossing the confession into the air didn’t make her feelings abate. If anything, it gave them substance. “They’re going to stop us.”

He shrugged. “The car train’s a gamble, like anything. Which enforcement and inspection areas are ramped up versus which are starved of resources.”

The line of cars inched forward at a pace her heart easily surpassed. “I don’t know whether I want this line to go faster or to never move.”

“Speed’s overrated.” In the small car, they sat close enough that he could easily rest one hand over hers. “I’m a man with a preference for flexibility.”

Distracting her, that was what he was doing. For the past six years she’d attended yoga twice a week and she was proud of her ability to bend and stretch. The weight of his hand and his so-knowing voice made her toes curl and her arches flex with the need to stretch, but they were too cramped for that level of movement outside of her mind.

“Our turn,” he muttered as the car in front of them left the window and the light signaled them to approach the kiosk. “Remember, if someone can hear you, you only speak Spanish.”

He rolled down his window to tap onto the computer screen. She couldn’t see, but almost immediately he received a tag with the letter
R
and hung it from the rearview mirror.

The car eased forward.

“¿Y ya nada mas?”
Her spine curved into the seat, anticipating relief.

He raised the window and answered in English. “Not quite all. That was just the ticket.” His eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. “We still have French immigration.”

She already recognized the flat tone he used for bad news. “What is it?”

“There’s a Vauxhall estate car two behind us that I’m fairly certain was parked a few blocks from my flat.”

She flipped down the windshield visor and pretended to check her hair. The car Stig meant hadn’t reached the pay station yet. It had edged right against the bumper of the one in front of it, as if anxious to proceed. Through the windshield of the other car, she could make out two people in the front, but they were too obscured to identify. “How can you tell?”

“Orange parking sticker in the corner of the windscreen.” He made a fist on the steering wheel. “Who the hell are they?”

His question hung unanswered as they followed the access road. She didn’t see a single turnaround or exit. “How do we get out of here?”

“We don’t.” He gripped the wheel with both hands. “The last thing you do is bail on an immigration or security check. Sends up red flags, gates drop, lights flash, the whole banana.” Even in this situation, his precisely enunciated buh-
nah
-nah didn’t waver, which gave her a momentary calm. Then he added, “Nothing for us to do except drive onto the train.”

“But...” Her chest heaved and half her brain started to count—
one, two, exhale
—to try to control her breathing. Like before a competition. “They will too.”

“I suspect the ride will be a rather tense thirty-five minutes.”

The red-and-white swing arm gates they encountered as they followed signs toward passport and security control notched her heart rate higher. She left the mirror down to scan vehicles in the lanes behind them. Her mind seesawed between the rearview and the looming checkpoint, unable to settle on a greater fear. When she looked for the car, she worried whether her passport would pass inspection, and when she tried to spot the roof of the immigration booth, she wondered how many cars behind them their shadows lurked.

La frontera.
The word rose from the spot inside her soul where she never went, the place where she was seven and riding in the back of a van with six men and two women she didn’t know, all of them smelling like sweat and old greasy food. Stuck next to a lady who spent the night whispering about
dios,
la frontera
and
la virgen,
when all she wanted was a hug and to reach her mother.

“Which one?” Stig’s muttered question yanked her back to the present, where their lane divided into multiple checkpoints. “Man or woman, which officer should we pick?”

Her thumb pressed the tiny band of silver deep into her skin, but it didn’t yield guidance.

The car stuttered for a moment, not quite stalling, as his speed dipped too low for third gear. “Well?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice sounded reedy and high, not at all like a young man, and she fought the urge to get out of the car. Now she understood why people tried to run away in full view of guard posts, which had always made no sense to her, but her instincts screamed
don’t keep going.
The primitive need to hide was strong.

“Too late to switch lanes now.” The car advanced between the orange cones to be next at the station with a man at the window. “Let’s hope this guy isn’t a bigot.”

She needed to occupy her hands without exposing how she trembled, so she traced one of the rips in the leggings.

“Passports?” He held his hand out the window but his eyes were fixed to the monitor in front of him.

“Here you are, Officer.” Stig’s voice wasn’t fake, feminine or simpering, merely cheerful and slightly faster than his normal speech as he extended both folders through the window.

At the moment of exchange, the guard actually looked at Stig and absorbed the false eyelashes and violet shadow teamed with the plunging wrap dress and enormous hair. He blinked, twice, but nothing else shifted in his expression as he examined the burgundy-colored British passport. “Andrew Henry DePlant.” He waved the page with the gold crest of the lion and unicorn over a plastic box in the kiosk and ignored the immediate buzz the box emitted to ask Stig, “Why are you traveling to France, monsieur?”

“We have an act, a stage act, and we’re in a competition in Paris,” Stig answered.

Christina leaned her shoulder against the door and tried to look young, bored and tired, like a kid who’d been clubbing too late and woke just in time for a car trip. With one elbow propped on the door’s arm rest, she covered the left side of her forehead with her fingers.
Don’t touch the ring.
She let her right hand fall open on her thigh.
No nervous tell.

Stig tossed strands of his wig away from his chandelier earrings. “We’ll be at Chez Manelle tomorrow.”

“José Felipe Suárez.” This was the moment that had her armpits sweating. The immigration officer glanced from the red-and-gold Spanish passport to Christina, but his eyes flitted back to Stig before he waved the second passport over the reader box. When it made the same irritating buzz, he gave it a disgusted look.
“Pourquoi ce truc de merde ne fonctionne jamais?
Eh, pourquoi?”
He shook his head and closed her passport.

It was going to work. She didn’t know how Stig could be so nonchalant, but he fiddled with the stick shift as if he didn’t care about retrieving the passports, and then casually reached through the window.

“Have a nice trip.” The man handed both folders to Stig.

“Merci beaucoup
.
”
Stig’s voice was perky, as if he’d forgotten their other problems.

“Bonne chance.”
The officer winked.

As they rolled away, she started to giggle.
“Merci beaucoup!”
She tried to imitate Stig’s rising inflection, but her words emerged like a bad Julia Child imitation. “I
cannot
believe that worked. We were so
bus
-ted when the reader beeped.” She couldn’t suppress her laughter, which gave all her words extra syllables. “Twi-
ice.
It beeped
twice,
and he didn’t give a crap!”

“Because his machine’s a
truc de merde,
didn’t you know?” Stig leaned toward the steering wheel, laughing and driving at the same time, and she had to wrap her arms around herself when the hiccups started. “A piece of shit. Oh, my mascara’s running.” He touched under one eye while laughing and driving. “This is perfect, perfect.”

They rolled down a ramp and turned into an opening that resembled a garage door. It led to an interconnected series of train compartments, like an infinite parking ramp one space wide. The white interior was well-lit, with square windows high on the sides, yellow railings and reflective stripes, too clean and bright for any threat to seem real.

“We made it,” she breathed as Stig turned off the ignition and set the parking brake. Her chest heaved with what she hoped was her last hiccup. “I hate hiccups.”

His smile gave her less than a second’s warning, and then his mouth was pressing hers. This kiss was a celebration. She grabbed his shoulders as soon as she felt his hand at the back of her own head, delving into her hair to pull her close, and they ground their lips together hard and fast, but then the stick shift was in the way of more.

It was quick, the kiss, as if they were both aware they weren’t even halfway through this giant mess. They pulled apart, but there wasn’t space to retreat that wasn’t almost as close as an embrace.

“Did I scare them out of you?”

“I think so.” Refraining from touching her lips to see if they felt as changed as the rest of her life did was an act of supreme willpower. “Thanks for the help.”

“Think nothing of it.” He reached for her face. “My shade of red is too cool for your skin tone. Let me rub it off.”

There was nothing innocent or helpful in the way he touched her lips. Remaining still while his thumb traced the corner of her mouth was harder than playing her part at the immigration booth. Each stroke caused her breasts to grow until she was desperate for more oxygen than she could get from the shallow breaths permitted by her chest bindings. He was sin, and from the signals his body was sending hers, he knew it.

“Done.” His hand dropped even though his eyes beckoned her closer. “Now we have to move.”

She gravitated toward him, seeking to restore the connection, before the jolt of the train starting penetrated her fog and she twisted in her seat. A line of cars filled the ramp behind them. She must have given sound to the fear that burst full-blown in her chest.

“Let’s look at the bright side, shall we? There are worse things that can happen to us in the next half hour than two men in Mackintoshes.”

Immediately she pictured the blood-crusted knife in Skafe’s hand. The last of her euphoria wilted. “Like what?”

“We’re about to travel thirty-one miles through a tunnel two hundred and fifty feet below the English Channel, whose water reaches the balmy temperature of nine degrees Celsius in spring.” Although his blue eyes turned up at the corners with seeming mockery, the pressure thinning his lips revealed his nerves.

She could return the favor of teasing him, perhaps enough to chase those shadows away. “Thank you, Madam Sunshine.”

“That’s
Señora Sunshine
to you.” He snagged his makeup case from behind the seat. “Grab your wine and anything else you can’t live without. We won’t be back.” He patted the dashboard gently. “Cheerio, little car.”

When he opened the door, cooler air and exhaust smells rushed in to replace the overpowering feeling of being enclosed with a man. Standing in the moving train was easier than she’d expected, but the ka-kunk of the wheels was louder outside the car.

Despite his high heels and the downward slope of the ramp, Stig marched toward the rear of the linked compartments like a purple-camouflaged battleship. The sweatshirt she wore came to mid-thigh over her stretchy leggings, which left her anonymously dull in his wake. In the oversized flats she’d borrowed at his apartment, she struggled to approximate a man walking like a woman. Every time she tried to exaggerate the length of her stride, she left a shoe behind.

He stopped next to three men in turbans drinking bottled water outside a van. Perhaps twelve cars along the train, she glimpsed a man in a tan coat stooping to talk to a driver inside a parked car. Her muscles knew who he was before her brain processed the scene, and she started to pivot-turn to escape, but Stig grabbed her.

“Wait,” he muttered in Spanish.

“We need to get out of here,” she whispered back, pulling against his grip.

Instead of turning to run, he passed something to the men—money, she thought—and pushed her toward the van. “Get in.”

She scrambled through the gap in the door even before he had it wide enough for himself and bear-crawled to the back. The men were musicians, ethnic music she guessed from the rope-decorated drum sets lined behind the seats.

Stig unzipped an oversized black duffel and pulled out a spectacularly tasseled wooden drum. “In the bag.”

As soon as she curled on her side, knees to her chest, he was zipping it closed. This sucked. She fit, but her knees, elbows, hips and shoulders pressed into the nylon, and the drum case was already as warm as a parked car in August. The bag smelled like a combination of citrus and cooking oil that must have been used on the drum. The only sound she could identify was the pounding of her pulse where her left ear pressed to the bottom of the bag, but she could feel the rhythmic train vibrations transmitted through the van floor.