Black Ice Read online

  Shouting a battle cry, Bryn ran at the Jotunn with the sword she’d “sung” to full size from the knife on her belt and hacked up at his chest. He slapped her away again. Mist desperately searched her mind for a different approach.

  And she recalled the inconvenient fact she’d managed to shove aside whenever she was in danger of remembering.

  She was half-giant herself. She could raise the cold and ice without relying on the ancient magic. She could accept what she was and call on her full Jotunn strength, as she had done so unwittingly in her first battle against Loki Laufeyson’s minions.

  Bryn fell back against her, her jaw bloodied and her nose apparently broken. “Any ideas?” she gasped.

  “Yes,” Mist said. “Stand out of the way.”

  Watching the Jotunn, Bryn moved aside while Mist closed her eyes and reached within.

  It was difficult. It went against everything she believed in. But she let it flow into her, felt her unknown father’s heritage swell her muscles and transform her heart into a piston. Her blood ran like an Arctic river through her veins. When the Jotunn came at her again, she drew on the frigid core of her body and built a hammer out of ice, its handle her arm and its head shaped around her hand.

  As if he felt the change in her, the Jotunn faltered. She swung the hammer at his head. He staggered, losing his balance.

  Mist had just begun to call up another Jotunn weapon when Dainn arrived at a run, breathing harshly, and charged right at Mist’s adversary.

  The Jotunn swung around, his fist connecting with Dainn’s jaw. Dainn recovered instantly, tearing into the giant’s flesh with fingers shaped into claws, drawing azure blood. The Jotunn answered in kind, striking Dainn in the chest with razor-sharp blades of ice. Very red blood stained Dainn’s T-shirt, and he coughed sharply.

  There was no question in Mist’s mind what he would do. He’d go at the Jotunn until he’d killed the giant or was too badly injured to fight. In spite of all his bestial strength, he was facing an enemy as mad as he was. And clearly stronger.

  Mist snatched at the cold around her as if it were a solid thing and drew it through skin and muscle, right down to the bone. Her very core turned to ice. She flung a blizzard of crystals toward the Jotunn, each one a tiny needle capable of piercing the skin and puncturing muscle. The white cloud swallowed him up, and he fell, his arms wheeling and thrashing as if he were trying to fend off a swarm of angry bees.

  Then he crashed to the ground and lay still, his entire body sheathed in an inch-thick layer of frost. Dainn was on him an instant later, straddling him with the intent to kill in every line of his body.

  Mist grabbed his shoulders and pulled him off. He met her gaze, jumped up, and circled her and the Jotunn like a jackal waiting for the lioness to abandon her slaughtered prey. It was a measure of the power of the predator within him that he managed to look deadly in a T-shirt and shorts, his hair mussed from recent sleep. His eyes were hollow, and he was still very close to the edge. If she pushed him too hard …

  “Why haven’t you killed him?” he demanded, his voice as rough as sandpaper.

  Letting go of the cold, Mist felt her body return to its normal state, her flesh warming, her skin flushing with honest red blood. The tattoo was once again no more than a lifeless marking on her wrist.

  She still didn’t know why the bloody thing chose the times it did to act up. She hadn’t even had time to think about it.

  Or she hadn’t wanted to.

  “I don’t kill helpless enemies,” she answered Dainn, “unless I have no other choice.”

  Dainn made a sound halfway between a growl and a laugh. “Helpless?”

  “How did you know what was going on?”

  “I—” Dainn broke off, and it seemed to Mist that some of the violent energy went out of his body.

  “You were supposed to be asleep,” she reminded him.

  “I was … dreaming,” he said, his face stricken with some ugly memory.

  It must have been one Hel of a dream, Mist thought. “So you woke up and rushed out and immediately decided I needed help.”

  “I could see the Jotunn was—”

  “You can’t keep trying to protect me every time you think I’m in trouble. And as I recall, the last time we were in a fight I was protecting you.”

  “You have no need to remind me,” he said, looking away.

  Fehode, Mist cursed herself. Dainn didn’t need even more shame and guilt dumped on his head.

  “If you’d been paying attention,” she said more gently, “you would have seen that I was winning.”

  “Hel, yes,” Bryn said, coming up behind Mist. “I don’t know what you did, but it was impressive.” She eyed Dainn as she might a rabid mongrel. “I’ve never seen one of your kind fight the way you do. No elf, anyway.”

  Dainn stared back at her, his upper lip twitching.

  “Save it,” Mist said, nudging the Jotunn’s body with the toe of her boot. “Right now we have to figure out what to do with this.”

  “And what will you do, if not kill him?” Dainn asked.

  “Look,” she said, “there has to be a good reason he just attacked us out in the open like this.” She glanced around, abruptly aware that her ward was dissolving. She was amazed it had stayed up so well when she was fighting for her life. “We need to find out what that reason is. And that means we have to bind and confine him and leave him able to speak, so he can tell us why he did it.”

  “If he’ll tell you,” Bryn said, wiping a smear of blood from her nose.

  “You leave that problem to us,” Mist said. “All your questions will be answered. I need you to take care of your injuries and make sure there’s nothing else going on that we have to worry about.”

  To her profound relief, Bryn nodded and walked away … though not without a final, probing glance at Dainn. “Where will you hold the Jotunn?” Dainn asked when Bryn was gone.

  Mist rubbed clotted blood from her cheek with the sleeve of her shirt. “There’s a large storage closet off the gym,” she said. “Let’s put him in there for now.”

  Together they lifted the giant and carried him into the narrow alley off Twentieth Street and through the kitchen door. The storage closet was the size of a small room, cluttered with equipment Mist no longer used, stacks of worn towels and junk Mist had never found a permanent place for.

  They laid the giant down on the concrete floor. Dainn stepped back. Mist bent over the Jotunn, looking for signs of consciousness.

  Like a sudden eruption from a seemingly long-dead volcano, the Jotunn bolted up and locked his hands around Mist’s arms. Her blood literally turned cold, and her skin crackled with a thin film of ice that almost immediately began to penetrate her flesh.

  Acting purely on instinct, Mist blasted the Jotunn with Rune-staves pulsing black and red like coals in an old-fashioned forge. They struck the Jotunn full in the chest, and with no sound other than a grunt he fell back, clutching the blistering, smoking wound.

  Dainn leaped toward him. Mist intercepted the elf and half threw him against the wall, setting one of the metal shelves to rattling. Her tattoo pinched her wrist.

  “Curse it!” she swore. “I told you not to interfere!” She noticed the blood on his shirt and groaned silently. “Loki’s piss, will you just keep quiet?”

  He rose into a crouch, his eyes mostly pupil. “Will you destroy him now?”

  “No,” she said. “And you’re going to stay right there while I see how badly he’s injured.”

  “He tried to kill you. Again.”

  “You don’t say.” She looked back at the Jotunn. He was quiet now, his eyes closed, breathing more or less normally. But the wound was serious. She couldn’t think of anyone she could ask to deal with it.

  And she had fallen back on a terrible kind of magic. Magic she feared might reveal the same darkness in herself that Dainn carried along with his beast.

  He’d told her that there was no wickedness in her. She knew he was w
rong.

  “Now is the time to question him,” Dainn said, “before he dies.”

  “Giants are as tough as Aesir when it comes to healing themselves,” she said, more to convince herself than Dainn. She stood and searched another of the metal shelves for the stack of towels. “These are clean,” she said. “I’ll give him a field dressing, and we’ll—”

  “Loki will notice his absence soon.”

  “That’s assuming Loki didn’t send him. If he just went crazy for some reason…”

  “Loki will fear what he might tell us.”

  “And if he did send the giant to attack, he must have had a pretty significant motive.”

  “A distraction, perhaps?”

  “I haven’t been aware of any other magic. Have you?”

  Dainn shook his head.

  “Someone would have alerted us by now if there’d been an attack on the loft or camp.”

  The Jotunn groaned and began to stir again. Mist bent over him.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  He stared her out of his ice-blue eyes. “Send the elf away,” he said in a deep, rumbling voice.

  “It would be better for you if you just cooperate,” she said, cutting the towels into strips with her knife.

  “The Lady Mist may have scruples,” Dainn said, “but I do not.”

  “He almost killed you once already,” Mist said to the Jotunn, playing along. “But I can protect you. Did Loki send you to attack us?”

  The Jotunar rolled his head to one side and closed his eyes. Mist’s fingertips ached with cold as she began to bind the wound.

  “Dainn,” she said, “go outside and make sure everything’s okay.”

  “I will not leave you alone with him.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you—” She drew a quick breath and pressed her fingers to his neck. “He’s unconscious again. We’ll have to tie him up and leave him for now..”

  Her hands beginning to shake with exhaustion, Mist concocted a binding spell, twining Rune-staves of steel into a fine rope to tie the Jotunn’s hands and feet.

  “Gleipnir it’s not,” she said, rocking back on her heels. “But he’d have to be in very good condition to break it.” She could feel Dainn gathering another argument and raised her hand. “Trust me, Dainn.”

  After a moment he nodded, and they walked back into the gym together. Dainn was very warm, perhaps in contrast to the chill that still hadn’t left her bones. Strangely enough, his presence calmed her, quieted her horror at how badly she’d injured the Jotunn. She was aware of the danger lurking inside him, but the smell of him, the sound of his breathing, the—

  She didn’t get the chance to complete the thought. The ground beneath her knees heaved and shuddered, and she and Dainn instinctively reached for each other. The gym floor undulated like a gentle swell on the ocean, setting the sword rack to rattling and the walls to swaying. There was no nearby structure sturdy enough to shelter beneath.

  Mist held her breath until the earth settled again and the waves receded. She released Dainn hastily and ran for the door facing the street. Dainn caught up and flung the door open just as she reached it.

  Absurdly, the old tale flashed through her mind … how the Aesir had bound Loki under the serpent, condemning him to eternal torment as the snake’s venom dripped into his face. Loki’s thrashing was said to have caused earthquakes. Like this one.

  Once she and Dainn reached the street, they nearly collided with Rick and three of the Einherjar she had yet to meet.

  “Did you feel that?” Rick asked breathlessly, with only the briefest glance at Dainn.

  Mist didn’t bother to answer. She looked past Rick to Bryn, who had arrived right on her Einherjar’s heels.

  “Is everything all right at the camp?” Mist asked.

  “We were just on the way back to the factory when the quake hit,” Bryn said. “Where’s the Jotunn?”

  “Confined. He won’t—”

  “Mist,” Dainn said, drawing her attention. “The young mortals are alone.”

  “When’s the last time you saw them?”

  “When Ryan made me aware that something was wrong with you.”

  “Odin’s balls.” She turned back to Bryn. “Do whatever you have to, but be prepared for aftershocks.” She spun and sprinted back to the loft, Dainn a step behind her.

  The building seemed relatively untouched save for a mug lying in pieces on the kitchen floor and a bit of loose paint and plaster scattered across the carpet runner in the hall. There might be more damage they couldn’t see, but Mist wouldn’t have cared if all the paint had flaked off every wall in the place. Not as long as the kids were safe.

  They found Ryan lying on the living-room couch, his arm over his eyes. He rolled onto his side as soon as they came in.

  “Are you okay?” Mist asked, kneeling beside the couch.

  Ryan’s skin was flushed, and he wouldn’t meet Dainn’s eyes. “Gabi and me know what to do in an earthquake,” he said.

  “Where is she now?”

  “She came down for a minute when the earthquake started, and went back upstairs when it was over..” He sat up. “You’re all right?”

  “It’s you we’re worried about,” Mist said, looking him over carefully. “There was that thing with Freya this morning, when you said you saw something dangerous. And Dainn said you told him I was in trouble. Did you know the earthquake was coming?”

  “No.” Ryan bit his lip. “I don’t understand why I’m seeing things when they happen instead of in the future, but I didn’t see the earthquake.”

  “What happened when you told Dainn that I needed help?” Ryan ducked his head, as if he’d been accused of a heinous crime. “I only knew you were in some kind of danger.”

  “Well, it’s been dealt with,” Mist said, willing her heartbeat to slow. “But you know what could have happened once Dainn got involved.”

  “I knew he’d be okay.”

  “He didn’t completely lose control, if that’s what you mean,” Mist said. “It might have turned out differently.”

  “No,” Ryan said. He met Mist’s gaze defiantly. “Will you believe me if I tell you what else I saw just before the earthquake?”

  “Unless it’s something dangerous to us, it can wait. For now—”

  “It was about you.”

  Something about the way he said the words convinced Mist that the coming revelation wasn’t going to be pleasant. Dainn, his expression stuck in typical robot mode—a cursed sight safer than his other guise—retreated through the door to the hall. Obviously he shared her inexplicable sense of dread. “Go on,” she said to Ryan, masking her unease.

  He glanced toward the door as if he wished he could call Dainn back. “What do you call those stars when they explode?” he asked. “Novas, right?”

  A nova. Like the bright light she’d experience when faux-Freya had confronted Dainn in the kitchen.

  “Ryan,” she said, “when you came down to the kitchen this morning, did you—”

  Male voices in the kitchen brought her to her feet. One of them belonged to Koji Tashiro. The other was Dainn’s, and it didn’t sound very friendly.

  5

  Mist strode into the kitchen. The two men stood about six feet apart. Dainn’s expression was stony, Tashiro’s wary and puzzled as it had been very early that morning when the Einherjar had arrived to interrupt his discussion with Mist. He still hadn’t recognized Dainn as the savage fighter in the gym, where Mist and the elf had taken out a trio of Loki’s Jotunar, but his brain was obviously working hard to resolve his faulty memory and overcome the blocks Mist had placed there. “Ms. Bjorgsen,” Tashiro said, his dark eyes meeting hers as she approached. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” she said, keeping an eye on Dainn. “No one’s been hurt.”

  Tashiro glanced from Dainn’s blood-stained t-shirt to Mist’s scraped face and took her hand in a firm grip. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “You happ
ened to show up at an odd time,” she said, pulling her hand from his and leaning one hip against the edge of the counter.

  “I was concerned about you and Ryan,” he said. “It’s pretty crazy out there.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “I saw a few buildings with some structural damage, car accidents, that kind of thing, but it doesn’t look as if too many people were badly hurt. The ambulances and emergency personnel are out in force.” He noticed the broken mug on the linoleum. “I hope the earthquake hasn’t done any significant damage to your property.”

  “None that I’ve found so far. I guess we were lucky.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry I had to ask you to leave earlier this morning. I just didn’t expect my friend’s arrival with a whole biker club, and that was about all I could handle at the moment.”

  “I understand completely,” Tashiro said. He laid a fine leather briefcase on the table. “Under the circumstances, I think we can hold off discussing Ryan a little longer.”.”

  Mist glanced at Dainn, who was very quiet. And very watchful. Tashiro had threatened him during the battle of the gym, judging him to be psychotic or on drugs. And though Mist had told Dainn what she’d done to erase Tashiro’s memory of the events, he was still on a hair trigger where the lawyer was concerned. “I don’t think we should wait,” she said. “If you’ll excuse us for a minute…”

  She took Dainn’s arm. It was all steel cables and clenched muscle, hot under her hand. She pulled him into the hall and stood between him and the kitchen door.

  “Listen to me, Dainn,” she said. “I don’t have time for a pissing contest right now. We have a missing goddess, closed bridges, a Jotunn in the closet, ten Valkyrie to locate, no idea of when more allies will show up, and a very unpredictable beast to control. Of course, that’s not counting trying to figure out what Loki’s going to do next.”

  The elf met her gaze. “The greatest danger sometimes hides itself in the least obvious forms,” he said.

  “Then you aren’t talking about yourself.”

  “My … other half is not known for its subtlety.”

  If he was cracking a joke, Mist thought, he was in better shape than she’d thought. “Look,” she said, “Tashiro obviously doesn’t remember—““You cannot expect him to remain ignorant if he continues to see you. Are you prepared to tell him the truth if he discovers your deception?”