At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(43)

Evan considered offering him his middle finger but then decided that the canvas bag slung over the man’s shoulder probably held an ax. Or perhaps two. Discretion, as he so often reminded himself, was the better part of valor.

“What’s happening over there?” Patrick pointed.

Off to the right, buried deep inside the complex of lanes, a hallway with a sign for the bathrooms, and a series of what looked like whetting stones, a knot of people had begun chanting.

“Go, go, go!” the mob shouted.

The crowd swirled and broke open long enough for Evan to spot a giantess of a woman, her height crowned with copper-colored hair loosely braided. Beneath her sleeveless T-shirt, her arms rippled with muscled, tawny skin. She balanced an immense ax on her shoulder, a two-bladed monstrosity almost as long as Evan was tall, and that Evan was confident could cleave a man like him into two pieces if given the chance.

Patrick gaped. “Holy shit. Look at ’er.”

“Diana,” Evan said and grinned.

Now Patrick gaped at him. “You know her?”

“She’s my postdoc. Come on.”

Evan plowed into the crowd, using elbows and the forward thrust of his chest to muscle past legs and torsos. Patrick plunged in after him. They emerged near the front of the group, which had taken over the alleys on either side of the double-wide lane where Diana stood, and had also packed the space behind her.

It was a competition, Evan saw. Diana and another man stood side by side facing separate wooden bull’s-eyes. Above the targets, a digital readout showed Diana ahead by three points, seventeen to fourteen.

Diana, Evan had to admit, looked gloriously in her element. As did her competitor, a large, well-muscled man with a shaved head and flame-red beard, who would make a perfect member of the Viking ?sir. He looked like a youthful Odin to Diana’s Freya.

Ah, to have such fantastic reach. To be of such glorious height.

The man lifted his own ax over his head and transferred his weight to his back foot. He swung the ax in a high arc, shifted his weight forward, and released the blade. The ax rotated once and landed to the left of center.

The crowd roared. The man’s score jumped up to nineteen. Diana nodded her acknowledgment of his throw before she lifted her own weapon.

Evan found himself jostled by the sweating, cheering, beer-raising horde of mostly young people. For an instant, among the roaring masses, Evan had the feeling he’d dropped back through the centuries, landing in the days of the gladiators.

He felt a sharp pain as someone’s elbow connected with his temple and the world went briefly dark before it turned scarlet, as if everyone around him was bathed in blood.

Then a hand clamped down on his shoulder, and his vision cleared.

God’s wounds, he thought.

“Watch it,” Patrick’s voice growled out of the darkness.

Patrick had Evan in his grip and was glaring at someone in the crowd, a man in a Chicago Bears T-shirt who barely spared them a glance before looking back at the competition.

“Little shit,” Patrick muttered.

“Excuse me?” Evan said.

Patrick turned scarlet. “Not you. Mr. Chicago Bears. He almost knocked you out.”

Evan raised a hand to his temple. He certainly gave me a headache.

With her ax raised, Diana turned, as if with a sixth sense. She spotted Evan and beamed at him. As one, the crowd swiveled to see who had earned Diana’s smile. Heat rose in Evan’s face.

“In my next life,” Patrick said, releasing Evan to clasp his hands to his heart, “I’m going to be a professor.”

“Sorry, man,” said the man in the Bears T-shirt, looking down at Evan. “Didn’t see you.”

He moved over, leaving a more comfortable gap for Evan and Patrick.

It helped to have friends in high places.

Diana’s brilliant smile faded as she spotted something beyond Evan. When he looked over his shoulder, all he saw were hairy chests and some spectacular cleavage. He returned his attention to the competition. Diana was facing the bull’s-eye. She shifted her weight to her front foot, raised the ax, and released it, leaning forward into the throw.

The ax thunked into the red center of the bull’s-eye and stayed there. The crowd cheered. The digital readout on her side went up by seven more points.

Her competitor grinned ruefully and turned to Diana with his hand extended. But she enveloped him in a hug that caused Patrick to again smack his hands to his chest.

The redheaded man emerged from the hug, beaming.

“One of these days, Diana,” he said.

“Just not this day, Sten,” she answered.

Evan presumed this man must be Sten Elger, the owner of the club.

Diana and Sten retrieved their axes; then Diana curled her fingers around Sten’s. “Come on, I want you to meet my friend.”



Ten minutes later, settled at one of the tables with four pints of frothy dark-ruby-red Guinness stout and a platter of fries, Diana and the three men raised their glasses.

“Diana and I have been competing for a year now,” Sten said. “Early on, I could take her every time.”

“That lasted maybe a week,” Diana said, laughing. “Here’s to a good rivalry.”

They clinked glasses and drank.

“I feel like I’ve wandered into the old country,” Patrick said. “Diana, are you sure you aren’t descended from Celtic chieftains?”