Mist

3

Mist spun to the nearest wall and slammed it with her fist. Paint fell in flakes at her feet. Dainn ran into the room.

“Loki’s piss!” she swore, lapsing briefly into the Old Tongue, which was made for insults, even against oneself. “Short-wit, incompetent . . .”

Dainn stopped before the open case, his gaze locked on the empty space where Gungnir had been hanging before she’d left around midnight. All the other weapons were untouched: two dozen swords, axes, daggers, and knives, each lovingly forged by her own hand, displayed in oak and glass cases built into the walls. The opened case had held knives of all shapes and sizes, eight weapons with hand-carved grips and edges sharp enough to rend flesh like tissue. Each knife was unique, but no one of them appeared substantially different from any other except in subtle elements of design and embellishment.

Whoever had taken it had recognized it for what it was with no trouble at all. The simple Rune- spells that had been meant to hide its true shape had been snapped apart like the thinnest of threads.

“It will do no good to curse yourself now,” Dainn said with an almost unnatural calm. “Hrimgrimir has deceived us both.”

“I’m not stupid,” she snapped. But she had been. Very, very stupid to keep Dainn in the park answering questions, believing all the while she’d actually defeated Hrimgrimir, while the frost giant made a run for Dogpatch to steal the Spear.

Dainn paced slowly around the room, touching this case and that as if he could draw vital information out of the wood and glass and steel. Returning to the door, he ducked his head outside and stared up at the fractured Runes.

“I smell nothing of Hrimgrimir here,” he said.

Mist slowed her breathing and closed her eyes. He was right. There was a certain stench about Jotunar, whether fire or frost, that had nothing to do with cleanliness or grooming habits. She’d smelled it in Golden Gate Park just before Hrimgrimir had attacked.

“According to what you told me, Hrimgrimir wasn’t the only Jotunn who came to Midgard,” she said. “Maybe one of the others . . .”

He stared at the wood-paneled floor under his oversized sneakers. “I fear not,” he said.

A surge of adrenaline sent currents of fire racing through Mist’s veins. Without pausing to question the impulse, she ran into the kitchen, calling for Lee and Kirby, her Norwegian forest cats. They weren’t exactly watchdogs, but they were far from ordinary. Maybe Dainn, with his elvish connection to nature and animals, might be able to see something through their eyes.

But the cats, usually afraid of nothing but the rare California thunderstorm, refused to put in an appearance. On the edge of panic, Mist blundered unseeing right into the kitchen table. On the table lay a folded scrap of paper.

Eric. The frantic energy drained from her body, leaving her legs shaking and her heart struggling to work its way out of her stomach. He had been taking a shower when she’d left; he must have gone out and left a her note of explanation.

Her relief lasted all of five seconds. Eric could be foolishly impulsive at times, was generally fearless and always up for a little risky adventure. What if he had glimpsed someone stealing something from the house, naturally assumed the thief was human, and gone after him?

Mist reached for the paper and unfolded the note with shaking hands. The Runic script seemed to pulse on the page like entrails spilling hot from a dying warrior’s belly.

My apologies, sweetheart, the note said. I had hoped to enjoy you one last time, but it was not to be. I will cherish your gift. You may be sure I will use it well.

The final symbol was the figure of a coiling snake. It came alive as she watched, hissing and seeming to laugh with its gaping, serrated jaws. Then it was still again, and Mist dropped the paper onto the table. It burst into flame and disintegrated into black ash.

“Eric,” she whispered.

“Loki was here,” Dainn said. He stalked up behind her, breathing in deeply like a wolf scenting the air. She spun to face him.

“If you’d told me as soon as I found you—”

He backed away, watching her face as if he expected her to attack him with her bare hands. “I made a mistake,” he said.

But so had she. She’d been so much worse than the short-wit and incompetent she had called herself before. Eric was no devoted lover prepared to spend the rest of his mortal life with her. He had deceived her from the moment they’d met.

Of course, she’d had no reason to think he could be anything but what he claimed. He had been affectionate, affable— the very opposite of Loki Laufeyson. But even if she’d suspected the gods were alive, she would never have looked beyond Eric’s smiling blue eyes, his big-hearted nature, his easy confidence.

Hrimgrimir had been no more than a distraction. It had always been Eric. Eric Larsson, also known as Loki Laufeyson.

“How did this happen?” Dainn asked.

Mist stared at the pile of ash, flinching at the question as if the elf had bellowed the words in her ear.

“Why didn’t Freya know Loki was already in Midgard?” she retorted. “Why did she only suspect?”

“So much is . . . still unclear to us.”

“But Eric—” She broke off, unable to find the words.

Dainn ran his fingers through the black powder. “He was your lover.”

“No! It was . . .” She swallowed, remembering all the good times. Every one false, Loki’s joke on one he might have vanquished with a snap of his fingers. Just the previous morning, in the gym, she’d told him he was getting to be almost as good with the sword as she was. Andwhen they’d made love . . .

“I knew him as . . . Eric Larsson,” she said.

“How long was he with you?” Dainn asked.

Mist’s throat tightened until she could hardly breathe. “Six months.”

Dainn frowned, obviously asking himself the same questions she was. If Loki had been in Midgard for months, he had deceived the Aesir more thoroughly than he had ever done in a long life of deception.

Loki Laufeyson. Scar-lip, Slanderer, godling, trickster, purveyor of chaos and conflict, shape-shifter, foremost of Jotunar, father of monsters, mother of Sleipnir, once ally of the gods and now their greatest enemy. Myth called him evil, but he was so much more than any mere word could define. The codes of morality, Aesir and mortal, were not his to live by.

The destruction of the other Homeworlds wouldn’t have quenched his need for revenge—for the slaughter of his son Narfi in punishment for the gentle god Baldr’s death; the binding of his other son, the great Wolf Fenrisulfr; the torment he himself had endured when the Aesir had bound him under the serpent that perpetually dropped venom into his eyes.

He was the one who wanted to use the Treasures against the Aesir. He wanted a second chance at Ragnarok. And he had come to Mist to . . .

That was pretty cursed obvious now. Loki must have known all along that she’d had Gungnir in her possession. That was clearly the reason he had come to her in the first place, introducing himself as someone she could learn to love. In all the time they’d had been “together”—and there was no way of knowing if he’d been in Midgard even longer than the months she had known him—she had been absolutely convinced his feelings for her were real.

I had hoped to enjoy you one last time. Loki had always been notorious for having insatiable sexual appetites, and with Eric—oh, Eric— the sex had always been fantastic. Eric had made her feel comfortable because he wasn’t threatened by her strength and had never considered himself her superior, but she seriously doubted that her sexual skills were enough to make Loki delay his plans.

Why had he waited so long to take Gungnir?

“I didn’t know,” she stammered.

Dainn rubbed the ashes of the note between his thumb and forefinger. After a few moments of reflective silence he glanced around the kitchen, his gaze passing over the stove, the old-style TV, and the cartoon Thor bobblehead until he found something that seized all his attention.

Mist followed his gaze. The little framed photo of her and Eric in Strybing Arboretum—both of them smiling, for all the world looking like the perfect couple— lay on the ugly linoleum Mist had never bothered to replace when she’d bought the loft, the glass cracked into three pieces.

Dainn bent to pick it up. He studied the picture for nearly a minute and then set the frame facedown on the top of the TV.

“He always chooses a fair disguise,” he said, his manner as calm as ever. “You could not have been expected to know who he was.”

And, just like that, Dainn absolved her of any wrongdoing and forgave her rank stupidity. But she couldn’t forgive herself. Or Freya, for not knowing what she was up against.

Dainn’s hand on her arm jerked her out of her bleakest memories. “Do you pity yourself?” he demanded. “Do you think your burdens are greater than those of every man or god who has made mistakes before you?”

She met his gaze, ready with a furious reply, but he cast her a look so dark and savage that she was stunned into speechlessness. For a dozen charged seconds they gazed at one another, and Mist felt her muscles knot as if she were in the presence of Fenrisulfr himself.

And yet Dainn’s long fingers felt warm and strong and almost familiar, like a caress in a dream of dulcet melodies and soft spring breezes and all the good things that never quite materialized in the mortal world.

Abruptly she pulled free, and Dainn let her go. His eyes cleared, and suddenly the darkness, the breezes—and Mist’s contradictory joy—were gone.

“I can understand why Loki wanted to make an issue of fooling me,” she said bitterly. “He’s always enjoyed his nasty little games. But why did he choose today to abandon his disguise? He knows the Aesir can’t get to Midgard, right? Did he know that someone from the other side had shown up to find the Spear?” She swallowed a laugh. “Hrimgrimir obviously wasn’t worried about you, so why would he be?”

She could see she’d gotten to him, but he only stared down at the table. “Some Alfar could cause him considerable inconvenience if they wished to.”

“But not you. No, either he thinks the Aesir will be on his tail any moment, or—” She inhaled sharply, remembering again that dark, smoldering, almost violent look in Dainn’s eyes. “Maybe you’re a lot more dangerous than you look.”

He shot her a hard glance that almost—almost—convinced her she was right. Then his face turned blank again, as if she’d asked him about the weather in Ginnungagap.

Mist paced around the table and came to a stop in front of the calendar of Norwegian landscapes hung on the wall opposite the stove. “So now what?” she asked. “Loki made a body for himself, which even Freya can’t do, and helped the Jotunar get to Midgard. What does that say for the gods’ chances of winning a war with him?”

“It is only the beginning.”

“A very bad beginning.” She turned to face him, fists clenched. “Did it ever occur to you that I might not want to get involved in another Ragnarok?”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “You would not abandon your duty now.”

“But I did,” she said. “I kept Gungnir, but I gave up the old life because I wanted a normal one, with normal relationships and normal concerns.”

“But now that you have lost the thing that was most dear to you?”

“If not for the Spear, I’d never have met Eric. There wouldn’t have been anything to lose.” She bent her head, refusing to let the tears escape. “If I still had Gungnir, I’d give it to you right now. If Loki hadn’t betrayed me personally, I’d turn my back on the whole thing and wish you luck.” She choked on a laugh. “But he did betray me. And I’m not letting him get away with it.”

“Will you attempt to kill him?”

Mist had no good comeback to his mockery. She had no idea what she would do.

“You should not pursue him,” Dainn said. “It is unlikely that he can do much damage with only the Spear before Freya and the others arrive.”

His 180-degree change in attitude convinced Mist that one of them was going insane. “After all you’ve told me, you want Loki to keep a weapon he could use against the Aesir?”

“Pursuing a frost giant is one thing, confronting Loki quite another.” He almost smiled. “ ‘We’re only Valkyrie, ’ ” he quoted. “ ‘It was never part of our job description to hold off a swarm of frost giants. ’ ”

Her own words hit her one at a time, like bullets meant to cripple instead of kill. “Apparently it isn’t yours, either,” she retorted. “You only seem to be willing to use your magic for seeking spells. Can you fight at all?”

“How many times have you met Loki?” he asked, evading her question. “You have no conception—”

“I’ve heard every story ever told about him, and I’ve already had personal experience of his treachery. I know what I’m up against.”

“No. You do not.”

“But Freya does. If we can’t protect our Treasures from Loki, what was the point of your coming here at all?” She shook her head sharply. “You decide what you’re willing to do to fulfill your mission. And for Baldr’s sake, wipe that blood off your face.”

Striding back to the ward room, she crouched before the chest of drawers against the real wall and opened the bottom drawer. Kettlingr, in its plain knife shape, lay in an unadorned wooden box where she’d tucked it away when she’d bought the loft three years ago.

Mist unlocked the box, lifted the lid, and took the knife from the padded interior. It felt solid and familiar in her hand, though she hadn’t worn the sword in over fifty years.

Once, it had been the one friend she could rely on. But a sword was the last thing she needed in her “mortal” life. Only her long connection to the blade had convinced her to keep it at all.

She pulled the blade free of its engraved metal sheath and chanted the spell she’d almost forgotten. The hilt thickened to fill her hand. The knife began to stretch, to broaden, to become what it was meant to be. Not so much as a trace of tarnish sullied the Rune-kissed blade.

All too easily it seemed to become part of her again, and that scared her almost as much as anything else that had happened in the past couple of hours. She chanted it small, set the knife on the chest, and retrieved the sheath from the back of the closet, where the sword’s own magic had kept the leather glossy and the metal bright. She looked for the belt, one that could accommodate either an unprepossessing knife or a spatha with equal facility, and found it in a heap on the floor. She picked it up, put it on, and attached the knife’s sheath at her left hip.

Dainn glanced up as she returned to the kitchen, the photo of Mist and Eric in his hand. He’d managed to clean the blood from his face and the swelling in his nose was going down, but he was still a mess.

His gaze focused immediately on the knife. “It may already be too late to catch him,” he said.

She snatched the picture out of his hands and threw it across the room. The glass seemed to shriek as it cracked in a dozen new pieces.

“I’m going to find him,” she said, “with or without your help.”

“He may have succeeded in reaching one of the bridges and returned to the Jotunar’s Shadow-Realm.”

“And you said there are several bridges in this city.” She gripped the edge of the table, working to control her immediate impulse to run blindly out of the house. “Could Loki have gone out the way Hrimgrimir came in?”

“It is possible.”

“Then help me. If you won’t use your magic for fighting, maybe you can distract Loki so I can get Gungnir away from him without either of us getting killed. Isn’t that to your advantage, elf?”

Suddenly he was very grave, his brows drawing down, his jaw tensing until she could see the muscles clench under his skin. “Not to mine,” he said. “To Midgard’s.”

“Then will you help me find him?”

“Yes. But it would still be better if you remained behind.”

“You mean now you want to go alone?”

His expression tightened again. “You have no chance against him.”

“That’s why we need to work together.”

He gave a heavy sigh. “Very well,” he said.

And just like that, he acquiesced. She didn’t understand him at all.

“So how do we find him?” she asked.

“All the bridges Freya has located seem to appear in the vicinity of physical features that link one place with another.”

Okay, Mist thought. Golden Gate Park was, in a way, a link between the city and the ocean, stretching from Ocean Beach to Stanyan Street, even farther if you counted the Panhandle.

But there were a hundred other potential connections. Overpasses? Street corners? Where were they to start?

“Do you have any idea about how to pin it down?” she asked.

“You were close to Loki. Your . . . relationship may have left a residue of connection between you, mental or physical, that will make it easier to find him. If we can isolate this connection—”

Mist’s instincts rebelled before she understood why. She could feel Dainn assessing her, probing, teasing out the source of her unspoken resistance like a woodpecker plucking an insect from the bark of a tree.

“You will need little skill,” he said. “You are not entirely ignorant of Rune-lore.”

Her bad feelings about all this were growing progressively worse. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“We will temporarily join our thoughts, so I can search for such a residue. When I find it—”

“Wait a minute. You mean you’re going to get inside my head?”

“It is how Freya spoke to me.”

“Alfar have this ability, too?”

“To some extent, yes. It is why most work closely together when we practice magic on a large scale.”

The idea sickened her. No one, not even Odin, had ever done such a thing to Mist, and she realized now just how much she would have hated Freya contacting her instead of Dainn. Her mind had always been her own. Always.

“There is no reason to fear,” Dainn said, as if he were already reading her mind. “I can only touch the surface of your thoughts.”

“I can’t do it.”

He took a step toward her, enveloping her in the warmth radiating from his body. “I know you are no coward, Valkyrie.”

Pride made her want to lash out at him, but she knew the impulse was only a cover for shame. She was afraid—not of Loki, but of letting Dainn see her failure, her stupidity, her weakness.

Gods help her.

Dainn returned to the table, dipped his fingers into the ashes, and lifted them to his forehead. With quick, sure strokes he sketched a Bind-Rune above his dark brows. The ashes caught fire, and Dainn grimaced in pain.

Without another word he turned, walked back into the ward room, and sat cross-legged on the floor. Reluctantly Mist followed him.

“Sit,” he said, “and try to relax.”

Mist sat facing him. “You may have noticed that I’ve got this little problem with going blind into a situation I don’t understand. What exactly are you going to do?”

He stared into her eyes, and she observed again how dark his were, so different from that of most Alfar . . . the deep blue that came at the end of twilight, when the brightest stars had only just begun to appear. Fathomless.

But no longer unreadable. There was a sorrow that caught her off guard, just as his brief moments of anger had done.

“You will draw the Runes-staves in your mind,” he said.

Mist had drawn or carved the staves on wood, on walls, even occasionally on paper and other surfaces, especially those that could be burned. She knew how to chant them. But drawing them “in her mind” was something she’d never even considered. Runes had always been physical things, not constructs of mere thought.

She shifted uneasily. “How?” she asked.

“You must concentrate on the shapes, holding an image of Eric in your thoughts.”

“That easy, huh?”

He inclined his head. “Ordinarily I would ask you to clear your mind of all emotion, but in this case it may aid you to allow your feelings to strengthen your will.”

But only, Mist thought, if she could control them. “What Runes do you want me to concentrate on?” she asked.

“All of them.”

Oh no, not difficult at all. Bracing herself, Mist closed her eyes, called up Eric’s face, and imagined the Runes, each of the two dozen of the Elder Futhark in turn, mentally drawing the simple lines that added up to so much more than the sum of their parts. She assembled each Rune-stave carefully, as if she were rendering it in charcoal on precious handmade paper that could never be replaced.

It didn’t come naturally. Far from it. Her emotion kept getting in the way, and the staves rippled like heat waves on pavement. But after a while she began to get the hang of it, fixing each stave in place while she constructed the next, and the next. She was vaguely aware of time passing without having any idea just how long it took, so intent on the images that she barely noticed when Dainn began to sing.

He started very softly, barely more than a murmur. Slowly his voice rose, and Mist had to struggle to hold onto the shapes in her mind.

She had always been immune to the heroic poetry and song of the skalds of Asgard. Even Bragi, bard of the Aesir, had hardly been capable of moving her. No elf ’s song had ever come close.

That was why she didn’t understand her reaction now. It was impossible for any of the Alfar to sing badly, but Dainn’s voice was extraordinary. It moved through the air in eddies and swirls like water in a stream, ever so gently threatening to carry away whatever it touched. There could be no doubt of the power of its magic.

A prickle of bone- deep awareness washed through Mist as Dainn’s mind brushed hers. Her tattoo flared to the point of agony, and the shock almost made her cry out. When she tried to withdraw, she found that she was caught as surely as Fenrisulfr in the magic rope Gleipnir, lost in the intricate, labyrinthine melody of the song.

Yet nearly as soon as she felt Dainn’s intrusion, he touched the Rune- staves in her mind, plucking them like strings on a harp, gathering them into a sphere of ethereal light. She “saw” him working as if through foggy glass, deftly manipulating five of the staves and weaving them like the channels of a braided river, giving the Runes power they didn’t possess as individual symbols.

And beneath it all, far under the surface, Mist felt him. His essence bled through the mental link between them—vivid, saturated colors that resolved into emotion: Anger. Shame. And that sorrow, profound and unmistakable.

Sorrow for the years of isolation, apart from his own people? Alfar were seldom seen alone. Until she had made the decision to give up the old duties and embrace a “normal” life, the centuries of isolation had gotten to her, too. For an elf it must have been infinitely worse. Dainn might as well be sentenced to solitary confinement in a Third World prison, deprived of light and air and the comfort of even a single elven voice.

That might account for the anger and sorrow, since he didn’t even remember how he had come to Midgard. But the shame . . . was that because of his failure with Hrimgrimir?

Without understanding what drove her, Mist let herself fall deeper into his emotions. In an instant she passed from a fog of tangled sensations into a clamoring jungle of twisted vines, thorny bushes, and broad, waxy leaves in every conceivable color of green, the kind of forest that had never existed in Asgard.

And hiding in the shadows was a thing. It moved within a cage woven of thorny vines—a hideous creature, as mindlessly vicious as the wolves that would swallow the sun at the end of the world. As she swept through the canopy toward the cage, the thing took shape and form, materializing in front of her, a hulking beast with black pits for eyes and razor teeth.

Hatred, living and breathing and ready to devour anything that crossed its path.

Mist didn’t wait to get a better look. She clawed her way out of the vision, leaving the darkness behind her, and found herself alone again in her own mind. One by one the staves dissolved, leaving a stark afterimage like the neon tracings of over-bright lights inside her eyelids.

Shielding her face, Mist jumped to her feet. She staggered toward the door, desperate to shake off Dainn’s mental touch and the thing she had sensed inside him.

Or thought she had sensed. How could one of the Alfar—or any being allied with the Aesir—harbor such a monster in his soul? Or had she created it herself, out of her fear of the profound contact between them, of her own irresistible compulsion to uncover the secrets she sensed he was keeping from her? Had she shaped that fear into a creature she had some hope of fighting with the skills she knew she possessed?

Stumbling into the kitchen, she leaned heavily on the table. Yes. That was all it was. Her imagination. And fear she could learn to overcome . . . if she ever let this kind of thing happen again.

And she didn’t plan on it. Next time Dainn needed this kind of “help” . . .

She heard his nearly silent footsteps on the linoleum and stiffened. He came to a stop few feet behind her.

“Are you well?” he asked.

She couldn’t miss the note of concern in his question, and she didn’t really understand it. She’d walked out on him without a word, probably messing up all his careful work.

Had he sensed how deeply she’d delved into his mind?

Turning slowly, she looked at his face. There was no anger in it, only the same worry she’d heard in his voice. Worry and exhaustion, as if the magic had drained what strength he had left after Hrimgrimir’s attack.

Maybe that had been his problem all along. He couldn’t use magic without weakening himself to the point of—what? Burning himself out somehow?

Mist was just becoming aware of how tired she felt.

“I’m all right,” she said. “You?

“It doesn’t matter.” Dainn touched the ash-Runes on his forehead. “I think I know where Loki has gone.”

“Where?”

“ ‘Gullin’ is its name,” he said.

Golden. As in Golden Gate Park.

“Then he did go back to the Park,” she said, starting into the hall. “There is another place by that name, is there not?”

Gods. How stupid could she be? A golden passage. A bridge between worlds.

The Golden Gate Bridge was nearly eight miles northwest of Dogpatch as the crow flies, farther on surface streets. Dawn was just breaking; traffic would be picking up, but that was the least of her worries. She had to hope the Volvo had one more gallop in her.

“I know where it is,” she said. “Can you tell if Loki has left Midgard?”

“No.”

“I guess we’ll find out when we get there. I think it would be a good idea for you to have a weapon, just in case. I don’t have any firearms, but—”

“No weapons.”

“This isn’t the time to be stubborn,” she said. “If a frost giant could get the better of you, Loki could do a Hel of a lot worse.”

“I will not let Loki harm you.”

“That’s funny,” she said. “I’m more worried that I may not be able to protect you.”

“You will not be required to.”

Further argument was a waste of time. Mist knew she was about to find out the hard way just how magically proficient Dainn really was.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”