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16

The words stopped, and Dainn’s hands flew to his throat. Konur wore a look of intense concentration, and Mist knew that he had silenced Dainn, though she didn’t know how. Or why.

“Let him finish, Konur,” she said. “He said something to me during the party, when he thought I was Freya. I want to know what he meant.”

“What he
says
does not matter,” Konur said, his expression grim. “I know my own kind. Dainn is quite mad. His perception of the world has been warped through the eyes of the beast. He can destroy us with his lies.”

Without warning, Dainn lunged at Konur. Fur sprouted from his body, covering and absorbing suit and elven flesh. Konur released Edvard and flung up his hands.

Mist propelled herself after Dainn, jumped onto his back, and locked her arms around his neck. No matter how hard she squeezed, his pelt protected him. He bucked like a bronco, trying to throw her off.

Her tattoo burned, and she remembered the bracelet. She tugged it off and, using forge-magic to enlarge it and reinforce the metal with Rune-staves of steel, created a collar large enough to fit around the beast’s neck. She snapped the collar into place, welded it shut with another forge spell, and pulled it tight … tight enough to impair his ability to breathe without actually strangling him.

“Stop fighting,” she said, digging her fingers into the dense fur on the sides of his jaw. “Give it up. You’re not—”

Dainn reared and spun in one motion. Her hands lost their grip on the beast’s fur, and she plummeted to the ground. Her sight dimmed, and she felt hot breath on her face.

By the time she could see again, Dainn the elf was lying on the floor, the collar still around his neck, his cheek pressed to the concrete. His eyes were closed. She fell beside him and put her fingers to his throat.

Alive. Breathing. He opened his eyes.

“Are you hurt?” she asked, quickly withdrawing.

His lips parted, but no sound emerged. He closed his eyes again, showing no inclination to move, let alone try to escape.

Konur joined her, along with a half-dozen Alfar who had arrived sometime during the last struggle.

“We must go,” Konur said.

“Edvard?” Mist asked, getting to her feet.

“Escaped. But that is of no importance now. Loki is gone, and though I erected a ward to discourage mortals from entering here, it will not last much longer. Considering the damage—”

Mist scanned the garage, unable to hide a wince. She’d only destroyed two cars, but quite a few others had rolled away from their spaces and crashed into other vehicles.

The greater problem was that the entire structure had probably been weakened, and she was going to have to find a way to report the problem to the proper authorities without becoming directly involved.

“You cannot protect the mortals from such losses,” Konur said. “If Loki wins, they will lose everything.”

How many times had Mist heard some variation on those words? How many times had she told
herself
?

“Whatever Loki hoped to achieve by all this,” she said grimly, “he must have been happy with the result.”

One of Konur’s Alfar spoke quietly to him in the Elvish tongue. “I am told that Freya has awakened,” Konur said to Mist, “and that she has gone to the place where Sleipnir is hidden.”

Mist felt a strange combination of relief and unease. If Freya had left the loft, she must have regained not only her consciousness but control of her magic.

“Do you know why she went there?” she asked. “She’s never shown any interest in Sleipnir before.”

“It is not clear,” Konur said, after consulting with his aide again. “But apparently she was insistent that you should join her as soon as possible.”

“Let me have your cell phone,” Mist said. “I’ll call her.”

“I have tried,” Konur said. “I cannot reach her.”

Mist blew out her breath. “Can you and the others handle Dainn?”

“Is it safe to take him with us?” Konur asked, staring down at Dainn with icy hostility.

“We’ve got no choice. Get him back to the loft in one piece, but do it quietly. The fewer who know about his return to camp, the better.”

“As you wish,” Konur said, accepting her decision without any sign of reluctance. “Do we have your leave to do whatever is necessary to control him?”

“As long as you don’t maim or kill him.”

The anger in her own words shocked her, but she had felt herself slipping closer and closer to forgetting that Dainn was a traitor, both during the party and after the fight. Anger was the one sure way of fighting that kind of weakness.

“Do whatever you have to do,” she said.

“We will see that he is confined in such a way that he cannot escape or harm anyone.”

Suddenly Dainn pushed himself up and got to his knees, the muscles of his face bunched with effort. His mouth and throat worked.

“Are you keeping him silent?” she asked Konur.

The elf-lord shrugged. “Perhaps the beast has stolen his tongue.”

Or it’s the collar,
Mist thought. It was snug around his neck, but it didn’t look tight enough to cut off his voice.

Dainn reached for her, and a raw sound pushed out of his throat. Two of the Alfar grabbed him under the arms and pulled him to his feet, not gently. The others closed in around him.

Mist didn’t look at him again. “I’m going to find a bike,” she said. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I find out what’s going on with Freya.”

Konur nodded to his men, and they half-dragged, half-carried Dainn toward the exit. Mist began looking for a bike she could “borrow” to get her to Sleipnir’s hidden stable.

Halfway along the aisle, she saw movement and instinctively dropped behind the nearest vehicle. The figure was barely visible, but she recognized the clean-shaven man as none other than Vidarr Odin’s-son.

The minute she saw him, he vanished again.

I
did
see him at the protest,
she thought.

He couldn’t be working for Loki now, but he had to factor into this somewhere. And chasing him down simply wasn’t an option.

As she continued along the aisle, she could hear voices coming from the stairwell … mortals finally arriving to investigate the shaking and noise that must have carried over the entire block.

To be on the safe side, Mist followed the ramp to the lower level. She could see no obvious signs of damage. In a few minutes she’d found a Kawasaki Vulcan, thrown her bare legs over the seat, and started it with a Bind-Rune shaped to fit in the lock.

She used just a touch of the glamour to get past the toll booth and pulled into the street. At this hour, traffic was light, but the streets were clogged with the usual tourists, many of them returning to their hotels after visiting the junk-filled shops that had become fronts for underground clubs. The drug dealers were also out in force, along with young prostitutes whose heavy makeup couldn’t hide their despair.

Mist forced herself to drive past them without stopping. Once she was on the freeway, she accelerated southbound toward Milpitas.

Timing,
Mist thought.
Everything that’s happened tonight has hung on things occurring at exactly the right moment. For Loki.

Leaning over the handlebars, Mist gripped the accelerator until her hands ached. The fifty-mile ride seemed more like five hundred, even at a speed well above the limit. She coaxed every bit of power out of the Vulcan, wishing her mechanical mount could fly like Sleipnir.

*   *   *

The Jotunar fell.

A quick seeking spell had told Orn that Loki had left nearly two dozen frost giants to defend his mansion, most of them doubtless charged with guarding the boy. None of them, however, was prepared to face Orn’s magic, or his warriors.

They had spent centuries in Midgard training for battle, keeping themselves fit and ready for Odin’s call, just as Mist and the Valkyrie had waited out the long years guarding the Treasures. Both warriors and women had hidden themselves among the mortals of Midgard, but the Valkyrie had never known they shared their adopted world with those whom they had once carried from the battlefields of Earth to the realm of the Aesir.

The foremost of Orn’s Einherjar, Hrothgar, split his warriors into four groups, three to take on the rallying Jotunar and the fourth to look for the Treasures. Orn blackened the eyes of all the screens that watched the halls and chanted seeking spells. Loki’s mortal servants were discovered in various parts of the house, and Hrothgar compelled one of them to turn off all the other electronic devices while the rest were quickly confined in a large closet. Soon one of the other teams returned with several Jotunar, and it took Orn very little time to learn where the Hammer and Belt were hidden.

While his other warriors continued to sweep the building and the air echoed with cries of shock, pain, and triumph, Orn flew ahead of Hrothgar to the stairs and glided up to the second floor. Ten frost giants stood fast in front of a heavy steel door, teeth bared and ready to fight.

They were clearly the most skilled and competent of Loki’s resident Jotunar, for they quickly filled the room with a violent storm of ice-like chips of jagged glass, temporarily blinding the Einherjar. But the warriors forged ahead, shields raised, swords and axes swinging.

Orn found a perch, allowed his men to herd the Jotunar away from the door, and plucked a few black feathers from his breast. He held them suspended in the frigid air, blasted them into minute particles, and blew the ensuing cloud at the door.

Loki’s Runes—the invisible staves he had used to ward the door against anyone but himself—sprang to life, outlined by the black powder. Orn struggled to speak the Runes aloud; the spell was complex, and not meant for a bird’s throat to reproduce.

Still, in the end, the door gave way. It opened half an inch, groaning like the dying Jotunar. Of the ten giants, only two were still on their feet, and only three Einherjar remained, one too badly injured to fight.

“Hrothgar!” Orn said.

The warrior stepped away from the Jotunn he had just dispatched, put his shoulder to the door, and pushed it open wide enough for Orn to fly through.

There was a short corridor with several other doors just beyond. Orn settled on Hrothgar’s shoulder and directed him to each of the doors in turn, feeling for the spell that would safeguard Loki’s stolen prize.

Only the third door responded to his seeking. The inside of the room was neat and spare, equipped with a bed, chest, chairs, toys, and other items suitable to a young child. The child himself was not there.

But there were drawings pinned to the walls: crude images of Loki, Dainn, a dark-skinned woman, and Loki’s children Jormungandr, Fenrir, and Sleipnir.

And of Odin himself.

“He must be hidden elsewhere,” Hrothgar said, circling the room. “Would you have us search?”

“There is something else,” Orn said. He half-hopped, half-flew from the rocking chair to the chest of drawers to the headboard of the bed, knowing he was close. Very close.

“Here,” he said, pecking at the mattress. “Move the bed.”

Hrothgar obeyed, pushing the bed against one of the walls. Beneath was a section of the carpet that covered most of the concrete floor. Hrothgar flipped it aside to reveal a cool, seemingly unbroken surface.

Orn knew it was not as it appeared. There was more than merely a Rune-ward here. He felt a flutter in his chest, as if his body had grown but his heart had remained the size of a bird’s.

“Touch it,” Orn commanded.

Hrothgar laid his palms on the floor. Orn hopped back at the smell of burning flesh, and Hrothgar cursed as he snapped his hands away from the concrete.

Fire-magic. Orn paced around the telltale spot. He did not have to see the Runes to know that the spell was powerful, and must have drained much of Loki’s strength to cast.

Orn knew he could counter the magic at some cost to himself, and rely on the power he would gain from touching the Treasures to replenish what he had expended.

But there was another danger: if he had put so much effort into guarding the objects, Loki might have added a trigger to the spell, one that would alert him to any attempt to take the Treasures.

Tapping his beak gently on the concrete, Orn felt a jolt of pain at the base of his rump. He’d lost three tail feathers to one of Loki’s frost giants when Loki had attempted to kidnap Anna and he had gone to her aid. At the time, he had lacked sufficient awareness to understand the significance of what Laufeyson had done.

The feathers had grown back, but if Loki had kept the originals and devised a way to use them …

Hrothgar’s cell phone vibrated. “Our men at the Fairmont have intercepted Jotunar with the Valkyrie Regin and Skuld,” he said to Orn when the communication was finished. “They were returning here. There’s also been fighting between Loki’s people and Freya’s. We couldn’t get many details without revealing ourselves.”

“Who won the fight?” Orn asked.

“Unclear. The Jotunn we caught could tell us little, but we do not believe anyone was killed.”

Then, Orn thought, it was possible that Loki would return to his mansion rather than seek out Sleipnir as he had planned.

“Leave me,” he said to Hrothgar. “Let no one enter.”

The Einherji hesitated, but a hard look from Orn sent him out the door. Orn shivered, shaking his feathers from crest to the tips of his tail feathers.

He had not used the Seidr for soul-travel since he had awakened; it was the most difficult work of all, save for shape-shifting, and he had not been prepared to leave himself so vulnerable before he had attained the greater part of his power. He was not complete, his soul not yet what it would become.

But he couldn’t risk attempting to open the hidden cache by physical means. Preparing his mind as best he could, he began to pace around the warded place, turning his body in an awkward dance as he traced out Rune-staves with his feet. He let his thoughts grow dim, his senses become dulled to the world around him.

When his soul began to detach from his body, he sank down where he was and felt his muscles relax, wings and legs and neck going limp as if he had flung himself against some immovable barrier.