Battlestorm Page 19

  Ryan still wouldn’t believe it. And Freya certainly didn’t seem worried.

  “I’ll go right away, take a dozen of my best fighters,” Bryn said, moving away from the bed. “We’ll keep watch until—”

  “Until Mist returns?” Freya said. “Do you think she can stop this? She failed in her attempts to halt the protest before I intervened. She lacks control, and her magic remains unpredictable.”

  Ryan cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but there was one other thing. I saw someone besides the elves fighting for Sleipnir. I thought it was Mist. But now I think it was you.”

  “And?”

  He braced himself. “Lady, can I touch your hand?”

  Staring at him through narrowed eyes, Freya extended her fingers toward him. He brushed them with his, gasped, and pulled away.

  “You were winning,” he whispered.

  “Lady,” Bryn said, “you can’t get involved. You were in a coma, and you’ve barely come out of it.”

  There was a long silence, and Ryan could almost feel Freya thinking. She didn’t have to take the bait. She didn’t know him; she didn’t know if his visions were true. She’d tried to work some kind of magic on him, and it hadn’t succeeded.

  Was it enough that Bryn believed?

  “Look at me,” Freya said, holding out her arms to the Valkyrie. “Have I changed? Do I look weak? Whatever happened during the squabble was a mere mishap, a fluke.”

  “We weren’t sure you’d ever wake up,” Bryn said.

  “But I am awake, and there is nothing wrong with me. Sleipnir is important, and I can hardly permit my Alfar to die, or Loki to win without a fight.”

  “You don’t have to,” Bryn said. “Let me call Mist. At least she might be able to sense if something’s wrong. She can go straight to Sleipnir from the party.”

  Freya sighed. “As always, you are the voice of reason. And Mist should be there, even if she is of little use to us.”

  Ryan thought frantically, wondering how he could convince Freya not to get Mist involved.

  “No,” he said suddenly, covering his eyes with his hand. “There’s something wrong. Mist isn’t supposed to be there.”

  “Why not?” Freya demanded.

  It came to Ryan then that if she believed in his abilities, she might start wondering if he’d seen what she planned to do to Mist.

  “I’m confused,” he whispered. “It’s all gray, now. I think … I must be wrong. About everything.…”

  Freya studied him a moment longer and then climbed out of bed, rejecting Bryn’s offered hand. “Send for Mist and Konur,” she said. “If her intent was to make certain that Loki believes I am well and whole, surely she has accomplished that task by now. She can join us at the stable.”

  Bryn seemed about to speak, but Freya stared her down. “I will hear no arguments,” she said. “Gather your fighters. We will leave within the hour.”

  Ryan closed his eyes. He’d succeeded in putting her at risk twice over: first by making her vulnerable to the consequences of listening to his visions of the future, and second by throwing her straight into the path of danger.

  But now she was bringing Mist. And he couldn’t be sure that anything else would go as he’d planned.

  What if he was, at this very moment, causing the very thing he kept trying to stop?

  15

  Following Danny had almost been too easy.

  Mist paused just outside the stairwell to the third floor of the Fairmont parking garage, listening. Her magic had led her to the lobby of the hotel, where she’d lost him, only to catch him running through the front door and down the street to the garage at the corner of California and Powell. A flash of red hair, a low cry, and he was racing up the stairs just as she reached the stairwell.

  She’d followed him up to the third floor, but she couldn’t see him now. There were no other people here, and hundreds of cars to hide behind if you were a boy afraid for his life.

  But Danny wasn’t an ordinary boy, and something didn’t seem quite right. It didn’t make sense that he’d have come to her twice and then vanished before she could figure out how to help him.

  “Danny?” she called softly, as if she stood in an ancient cathedral rather than an ugly, utilitarian storage facility for motor vehicles. Her voice echoed hollowly. She tried again.

  “That didn’t last long,” Loki said, stepping out from behind a pillar.

  Mist cursed her own gullibility and prepared to defend herself. “What didn’t last long, Slanderer?” she said in her silkiest Freya imitation.

  “Your masquerade,” Loki said. He leaned against the pillar, legs crossed at the ankle. “Freya would never expect Danny to answer her.”

  He wasn’t surprised about Danny, Mist thought. The boy was probably here now, and Loki might have known all along that Danny had come to the hotel. He could easily have set another trap, in spite of Danny’s claim that he’d come himself.

  “Why?” she asked, still channeling Freya in the hope of finding out what in Hel was going on. “The boy came to me, asking for my help.”

  Loki laughed with obvious amusement. “And that statement, my dear Mist, reveals both your identity and your ignorance. The Lady won’t be happy to know that you have failed to deceive me.” He flicked an invisible piece of lint from his lapel. “How is your mother?”

  Knowing the game was up, Mist shed the false front as if she were throwing off suffocating layers of too-tight clothing. “Fine,” she said. “Busy.”

  “Then she has recovered from the incident during the protest?”

  “There was no incident. Do you still claim to have had nothing to do with it?”

  “Naturally.”

  “But you’ve been a busy little Scar-lip lately, haven’t you?” Mist bit back the desire to tell him she’d seen Regin and Skuld, half-afraid that he’d gain some advantage by knowing it. “Did you force Danny to play a part in your sordid little game?”

  “He’s quite the rascal,” Loki said. He began to stroll toward her. “I actually didn’t realize he was here until a brief time ago.”

  Mist was startled by the admission. But, of course, Loki might be lying. That was always the safest assumption to make where he was concerned.

  “Is Danny here with you now?” she asked.

  “Very near. But he isn’t safe. I must get him home.”

  “He’s safe from me,” Mist said, scanning the garage as subtly as she could. “He told me someone was threatening him. I must admit, you hooked me well and good.”

  Loki’s brows drew down over bright green eyes, the outer rim of the irises flaring red. “Who threatened him?” he demanded.

  He doesn’t know, Mist thought in amazement. Maybe that part was real, and Danny didn’t tell him.

  “It’s interesting,” she said, trying to give herself time to think. “At first, Danny seemed worried that I’d hurt you.”

  A flash of real surprise crossed Loki’s face, quickly hidden. He laughed sharply. “Now? And how would you do that?”

  “He thought I would take you away.”

  “How interesting.” He took a step toward her. “What were his exact words?”

  “He said he had to come because his papa was afraid, and—”

  Suddenly Loki began to laugh. When he stopped, his expression was a perfect mingling of scorn and amusement.

  “His papa,” he said.

  Mist lowered her voice. “If Danny really has some affection for you,” she said, “I’ll be very sorry to take you away from him. But he’ll be better off with almost anyone else.”

  “Will he? Who else can protect him?”

  “I don’t know how much you’ve told Danny about this war over Midgard, or whether you sent him here by manipulating or tricking him. But his fear is genuine. He said he didn’t want to die. I think he believes someone really wants to kill him.” She took a deep breath. “Let me talk to him.”

  Loki looked behind him. At first Mist expected
Danny to step out into the light, but within a few seconds she realized that someone else was in the garage with them.

  Jotunar. She couldn’t tell how many, but there were more than a few. They’d been warded from her senses very skillfully.

  “You don’t really want a fight here, do you?” she asked.

  “You tell me. Who is Danny supposed to be afraid of?”

  “I’d say you,” she said, “if he hadn’t been so worried about my taking you away. And I don’t think you’d ever hurt him deliberately. He’s too valuable.”

  “Far too valuable. Who else? Surely someone among your allies would have excellent motive.”

  “Only a few people know about Danny, and they wouldn’t hurt him any more than I would.”

  “Once upon a time, your naïveté held a certain charm. Now it is only one more weakness.” He took another step toward her. “Did you ever discuss Danny with your mother?”

  A spike of fear drove down into her belly. “Freya never mentioned him,” she said.

  “And you never spoke of him to her? Not even about his opening of the portal, and the bridges?” When Mist couldn’t find an immediate answer, he said, “Perhaps you sensed how she might respond to such a potential threat.”

  Mist remembered Danny’s wariness when he’d first asked her who she was. “You taught him to fear Freya,” she said. “The first time he saw me, he assumed I was—”

  “Your mother is far more ruthless than you are. Did it never occur to you that she might have met Danny before?”

  Oh, it had. But Mist wanted to know what Loki knew.

  “When?” she asked.

  “Perhaps on the steppes, when you were otherwise occupied. Or possibly even earlier. She might have been reluctant to tell you, knowing of your sentimentality.”

  Mist ignored the spike of fear in her throat. “Enough of this,” she said. “Danny said that ‘he’ with a capital H will make everything bad. If that’s not you…” She took a deep breath. “We can clear it up in a few seconds if Danny—”

  A car horn honked once, and without any warning at all Loki flung a spell at Mist, a unique combination of his ice and fire magic shaped into a frozen, flaming javelin. Instinctively she defended herself, falling back on the familiar, “safe” magic of the forge, the Rune-language of metal that came so naturally to her.

  But she did it in a way she never had before, bespelling the closest car, lifting it easily off the concrete and suspending it in front of her. The javelin shattered on impact, and by the time Loki was ready to attack again she had dropped the car, torn off a door, and was already reinforcing it with Runes of protection and strength—Ox, Yew, and Elk.

  Loki blasted pure fire at her, the flames transforming into serpents that tried to slither around her shield. She destroyed them with her own Jotunn command of ice and cold. Steam swirled around her, and she used its cover to work another lifting spell and hurl a Fiat at him. By the time she emerged from the cloud of vapor, Danny was standing in Loki’s place.

  * * *

  They stood facing each other, boy and goddess, in the midst of metal fragments, melting ice and half-crushed automobiles. Danny’s face was frozen in terror, and Freya held her hands out before her, ready to fling another spell.

  She was trying to kill him.

  Dainn took in the tableau, the seconds seeming like minutes, time that seemed to expand until nothing seemed to move, not even his own heart.

  But the beast was there. It had clung to the inside of his skull like a hideous parasite as he’d tracked Danny to this place, hoping to save his son, to get him away before Freya found him and finished what she’d started on the steppes.

  He was too late. When this moment of suspended time came to an end, he would move quickly. But not quickly enough. Not as he was now, an elf standing alone against the Lady.

  Now you need me, the beast said.

  Dainn’s heart beat once. Again. He tried to speak, but his throat had been seized by an invisible fist.

  I said I would not harm the child, the beast said.

  Liar, Dainn thought. Murderer.

  Long ago, you let me kill, the beast reminded him. When you could not ignore me, you found bad men for me. For us.

  The memories were unbearable. Dainn had told Mist about those times, in a few brief sentences … about the victories he had won only to lose them again. Now the past had risen up to swallow him, and he recalled the faces: the rapists, the murderers, the beaters of women and children.

  And Freya. She was bad. Evil, like those men he had let the beast destroy long ago when he’d had no other choice.

  Every muscle in Dainn’s body rebelled as he tried to take a single step away from the stairwell. Danny’s face was still frozen, but it seemed to him that something had changed. Freya’s fingers had flickered. The scent of magic rose in the stale air, a hint of what was to come.

  “Papa!”

  The single word was stretched out, as if distorted by a synthesizer. Danny’s head had turned ever so slightly toward him, and his eyes were pleading. Begging.

  Light filled Dainn’s head, his chest, his entire being, and his rage burst like a suppurating wound left untended too long. The creature inside him cringed and whimpered.

  Danny’s fear. It gave him strength he couldn’t remember ever having had before … magical strength to use the beast as a weapon. A weapon over which he had perfect control. He grasped the creature by its powerful neck and squeezed.

  “You will obey me,” he said, “or I will do far worse than kill you.”

  For once, the beast had no response, no threat to offer. It whined, hanging limp in his grip.

  Then time started again, and Dainn let it go.

  * * *

  “Danny!” Mist cried, struggling to find her voice. “What are you—”

  A roar sounded behind her, and she barely turned in time to see the beast charge directly toward her and the boy.

  “The monster!” Danny yelled, just as he had in the hotel hallway. “He’s going to kill me!”

  Acting without further thought, Mist summoned her inner Jotunn again and hurled a spinning disk of ice-spikes at the beast. The disk released its projectiles a few feet before it reached the creature, but they barely penetrated the heavy black coat, and the beast swept them aside with a hand-like forepaw.

  Desperately seeking another spell, Mist put herself between the beast and Danny and stared at its face in horror. It sank its head between its shoulders as it stalked toward her, teeth bared, slitted eyes mad with rage. It was twice her size, and stronger than any Jotunn.

  But she knew it. Better than she knew Loki, could ever know another living soul.

  Dainn. Dainn was there behind those glaring red eyes. Not lost, not buried, but whole and aware.

  And ready to kill.

  “Run, Danny!” she yelled, and lifted her hands. The spell was only half-formed when the beast slammed into her and bore her to the ground, claws slashing at her shoulders.

  “Dainn!” she said, gasping at the shock of searing pain.

  The beast snapped at her face as if he—it—would silence her by ripping her jaw off. Ignoring the pain, she pushed up with all her strength. The beast tried to strike at her again, but she caught its massive wrist and twisted it aside.

  “Dainn!” she gasped. “Stop!”

  It stared into her eyes without recognition and wrenched its foreleg from her grip. In the strangely protracted moment between one second and the next, Mist wondered how it had come to this. How they had at last arrived at the moment when she would have to try to kill Dainn.

  He’s insane.

  Gathering another Rune-spell, Mist wove staves of steel into a fine, flexible mesh and pushed it up against the beast’s face, creating a muzzle to contain the vicious teeth. Then, as it pawed at its nose, she rolled out from under it and scrambled to her feet.

  The beast raked the muzzle from its face and stood on its hind legs, swinging its head right and left
. Searching. Looking for its prey.

  But Danny was gone. Mist released an explosive breath and sorted through possible spells, wishing she’d had an excuse to bring Kettlingr to the party.

  Maybe she could just slow the beast down. Loki had to be around somewhere. He could take Danny to safety while she—

  No, she thought. There was something very wrong here. Dainn had been with Loki nearly the whole time he was at the party. Even if Loki didn’t know that Dainn had tried to kill Danny on the steppes, he would have known the state of Dainn’s mind, and what he was capable of, long before they had arrived at the hotel.

  With a silence that astonished her, the beast charged. She was faster and more nimble, but even so it nearly caught her again.

  If Dainn had truly gone mad, there was nothing she could do. But if there was still some way to reach him, keeping him down and quiet might give her the time she needed.

  How, she thought, when even Gleipnir, the unbreakable Chain, hadn’t been able to hold him? Basic Galdr wouldn’t be enough. The forge-magic wouldn’t be enough, or the glamour.

  If she drew on the ancient magic, she might succeed. But she also might kill Dainn without meaning to, or become …

  “Freya,” the beast said, its deep, grating voice thick with hatred. “Afraid?”

  Mist’s heart jumped. She knew the beast was capable of speech when it was under Dainn’s control, but she hadn’t expected this.

  Had Loki failed to tell Dainn of her attempt to impersonate Freya? If Dainn knew she was Mist, would he listen to her?

  “I’m not Freya, Dainn,” she said, as calmly as she could. “I’m Mist.”

  The beast flashed its teeth in a parody of a grin. “Lie,” it said. Before she could take another breath, it had sprung across the distance between them, bounding on all four legs, and reared up again to snap at her neck. She fell back, stumbled, and snatched at the first defense she could find.

  The concrete trembled beneath her feet as the limestone, clay, gravel, and sand began to come apart at her unspoken command, molecule by molecule. Car alarms began to shriek and wail, and water seeped from the floor.