Black Ice

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Black Ice Page 17

by Susan Krinard


  “You’re the one who wants to prove something now,” Ryan said, hugging himself. “Don’t you understand, Gab? I just wanted to belong somewhere. I thought they needed me. I was stupid. If we—”

  The seizure struck without warning, as they always did. Ryan went blind first, and then deaf, and he felt the jarring pain as he fell to the floor.

  Then he was lost. And he saw himself with a woman whose form flickered from young to old and back again, leading him to the very brink of a crucible of flame, like the worst description of Hell, asking him to choose whether or not to let himself fall into the blazing pit. Terrible cries and howls of pain rose from the chasm. Gabi was reaching toward him, trying to hold him back, but he knew if he took her hand she would fall with him. Dainn and Mist stood on the other side of the pit, waiting for him to decide.

  He could barely see Dainn’s eyes, but he knew the elf’s fate was in his hands. Dainn would die if he didn’t figure out what it meant—the crucible and the fire and the threat to Gabi and those he had come to love.

  “Ryan.”

  The male voice was familiar, gentle and firm but not Dainn’s. Ryan felt hands lifting his shoulders, and Gabi’s voice high and afraid.

  “Help him!”

  “Don’t worry, Gabi. I think he’s okay.”

  Ryan blinked, and his vision began to clear. Tashiro crouched over him, holding Ryan’s head between his hands. The tormented howling in his ears went silent, and the smell of burning faded.

  “You’re all right now,” Tashiro said. “Are you able to sit up?”

  Trying hard to make sense of words that buzzed inside his head like crazy flies, Ryan let Gabi and Ryan help him into a sitting position. He squeezed his eyes shut, but he knew all too well that the terrible images were branded on his mind forever.

  “Easy there,” Tashiro said, holding Ryan upright.

  “What are you doing here?” Gabi demanded. “Where’s Mist?”

  “Very busy,” the lawyer said. “You know we’ve been working on getting Ryan his inheritance.” He smiled at Ryan. “We’re almost ready.”

  Gabi gave Ryan a hard stare, reminding him of their recent discussion. “When is he going?” she asked.

  “Soon,” Tashiro said. “I really tried to let you stay together, but it just didn’t work out.”

  Ryan opened his mouth to speak, but Gabi was there first. “It’s only for now, right?”

  “Yes. There’s more paperwork involved, and some legal issues to straighten out, but it shouldn’t take me too much longer to take care of it.”

  “Then I can stay here with Mist while Ryan’s away?”

  “I’m sure we can arrange that,” Tashiro said, looking at Gab with approval in his brown eyes.

  Ryan shivered, overwhelmed again by the vision—Gabi reaching for him from the edge of the fiery pit, trying to save him, and how he knew that if she touched him she would fall, too.

  He could never let that happen. God, if he could only go to Dainn and tell him, ask him to explain what it all meant.

  But he couldn’t, and he knew now that Gabi was right. If she stayed with him, something terrible might happen to her.

  “You should rest,” Tashiro said. “Gabi, will you help him?”

  Ryan dodged her offered hand as he pushed himself to his feet. “I should go get ready,” he mumbled.

  “All you have is the stuff Mist gave us,” Gabi said. “How long do you think it’ll take you to pack?” She looked at Tashiro again. “You ain’t leaving now, are you?”

  “It could be any time,” Tashiro said. “It wouldn’t hurt to be ready. But you also need rest, Ryan. You can’t risk another seizure.” He rose. “Gabi, I’m going to see what I can do about letting you stay with Mist. Don’t trouble her about any of this—she left it all in my hands, and she already has more problems than she can handle.”

  “You know?” Ryan asked, catching himself against the wall.

  “About the gods and giants and monsters?” Tashiro said. “Mist told me some time ago, but we wanted to keep it between us for now.”

  “Dainn doesn’t know she told you?”

  “Not yet.” He smiled wryly. “Dainn probably wouldn’t like it. And it’s better if we don’t talk about it outside this room.”

  “Okay,” Gabi said. “Ry, you’re going to bed. I’ll help you get ready later.”

  This time, Ryan let her help him into the room. She closed the door, and he sat down hard on the bed. Gabi sat beside him.

  “Okay,” she said, “what was it this time? What did you see?”

  Her voice held an uncharacteristic note of fear, and he knew he couldn’t let her wonder all the time she was alone. “I always knew this would be hard,” he said. “I knew the big battle with Loki was going to … some people weren’t going to make it.”

  “You saw me dying?” she whispered.

  “Shit, no! But so much will depend…” He couldn’t finish the sentence. “I just know it’s right for us to stay apart for now.”

  “You’re scaring me, Ry.” She put her arm around his shoulder. “Maybe we should stay together. I’ve always taken care of us, haven’t I?”

  “You’re braver than I ever could be, Gab.”

  “Not really,” she said softly. “I wish I was.”

  It never did much good to argue with Gabriella, but now Ryan was more certain of his course than ever. “We’ll follow your plan, Gab,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  “Yeah,” Gabi said, scrunching up her face. “But one thing bugs me … why did Mist tell Tashiro what’s really going on? I mean, she barely knows him, right?”

  “I don’t know,” Ryan said, slumping over his folded arms. “I guess it would have happened sooner or later.”

  “Whatever,” Gabi said, losing interest in the subject. “Just remember, if something big happens while you’re gone, you’ll tell me. Right?”

  “I always do, don’t I?” He fell back on the bed. Gabi rolled him onto his side and pulled the blankets over him, and he closed his eyes.

  Let Gabi be safe, he prayed as he drifted into sleep. Let them all be safe, and I’ll do anything you want.

  The kids were sleeping when Mist went upstairs, both so dead to the world that they didn’t move a muscle when she opened the bedroom door.

  Of course, Mist thought, you could never really figure out what was going on in a teenager’s head. Especially when you could barely remember being one yourself.

  She went on to Anna’s room, where she found the young woman sprawled across the bed in her borrowed clothes, also asleep. Mist was perfectly content to let her grab any peace she could get.

  Orn, perched on the headboard in parrot shape, caught Mist’s eye with a piercing stare and suddenly took wing, swooping down to hover before Mist like a hummingbird. His beak darted toward her belt, briefly touching Gungnir in its knife guise. Then he flew back to his perch and began to preen his glossy feathers.

  Was he checking to see if she safely carried Odin’s Treasure? If so, he seemed to be satisfied, and not in the least interest in engaging Mist further.

  Shrugging off his peculiar behavior, Mist joined Dainn in the driveway. Silfr stood proudly where Mist had left her, dusted with snow but still bright as a copper kettle. The elf was looking the bike over with a kind of remote curiosity.

  He climbed onto the seat behind her, his arms clasped around her waist. The last time they’d done this, they were heading home from the battle with Loki at his former digs, Gungnir once again in their possession.

  Now she and Dainn had something other than fighting in mind. Given the earthquakes, bad weather, and time of night—and in spite of the rapidly approaching holiday—traffic was light. The damage to the local streets and buildings didn’t seem to have become much worse during the most recent quakes, including the one that had happened during Anna’s rescue.

  She and Dainn made good time north on Third. Dainn, his head lifted to scent the air, indicated that Mist sho
uld stop just as they reached Lefty O’Doul Bridge.

  “He was here,” Dainn said, dismounting and approaching the bridge. “He worked some powerful magic, but it was … interrupted.”

  “By Anna and Orn?”

  “Very likely.”

  Mist joined him. ““Trying to open a bridge to Ginnungagap in this spot makes sense, since they’re supposed to be anchored to real physical structures in the city.”

  “Structures or elements that connect one thing with another,” Dainn murmured. He walked halfway across the short span and stared down into the water below. The narrow inlet running beneath the bridge was black and cold and still, though the bay directly to the east was choppy.

  Mist examined the bridge’s girders. There was something unusual in their appearance, almost as if they had been covered with cobwebs of ice that had melted and left only a ghostly pattern behind them, crisscrossing the steel.

  She touched the nearest girder. It was so cold that her hand nearly stuck to it, though she experienced no discomfort. She imagined that if she struck the steel hard enough, it might actually shatter.

  “You guessed correctly,” Dainn said as he returned to Mist. “He was attempting to open a bridge here.”

  “And he left so quickly that he didn’t have time to clean up his mess,” Mist said. “But he must have thought he had a good shot in this particular place. Why?”

  “There is a certain energy here. Can you not feel it?”

  “Yes. And Loki obviously considered it worth the risk to expend so much magic where we might discover him. Fortunately for us—”

  A truck approached, honked briefly in warning, and rattled over the bridge as Dainn took Mist’s arm and pulled her aside.

  “Fortunately,” Dainn continued for her, quickly releasing her arm, “he has also unwittingly done some of our work for us.”

  “You mean we could try to finish what he began?” Mist asked with a frown. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. I’m not sure I’m up to it yet, and if we’re testing your magic against the beast, this is a pretty big leap for you.”

  “My magic appears to be functioning well enough, and I may be able to discover how far Loki progressed.” His jaw set as he looked up at the top of the bridge. “There are no others here to be harmed if I should fail. If you will, watch for vehicles and ward them away before they approach the bridge.”

  “I still don’t think it’s a good idea,” she said, searching his face.

  His expression remained impassive, but as always his eyes gave him away. “Perhaps it would be better if you return to the loft,” he said.

  “Forget it. If the beast does show up, I can probably calm it down.”

  He sighed, acknowledging his defeat, and stepped onto the bridge. Then, hesitantly at first, he began to chant the Elvish Galdr with his remarkable voice, singing Rune-spells that spiraled down from his spread hands to penetrate the earth. Mist felt the hair rise up all over her body, beginning to respond like the roots and seeds and dormant life under steel and concrete.

  Then, without warning, the nascent spell collapsed. Dainn fell to his knees, his face bloodless in the moonlight.

  Mist ran to his side. “Odin’s balls. What just happened?”

  “It failed,” he said in a voice thick with shock.

  “The spell failed?” she asked, kneeling beside him. “It felt like it was working to me.”

  “No.” He struggled to his feet. “There was nothing behind it. A façade, no more.”

  He stumbled to the side of the bridge and gripped the railing until the bones in his hands seemed ready to burst through the skin. Mist was grateful that his rigid back discouraged her from touching him.

  “So what went wrong?” she asked softly.

  “I have no explanation.”

  “Maybe Loki set some kind of trap,” she said, studying the bridge again as if she might identify some physical evidence of Laufeyson’s usual treachery.

  “I felt no such trap,” Dainn said. “No wards of any kind.”

  Mist searched her mind, looking for a cause that didn’t suggest some catastrophic turn of events.

  “Is this some kind of … subconscious way of not tempting the beast?” she asked, snatching at a very human but perfectly logical explanation. “Maybe you’re afraid you don’t really have control after all. You’re doing this to yourself.”

  Suddenly his hands let go their furious hold on the railing, and his shoulders relaxed. “Yes,” he said, looking at her with embarrassing gratitude. “You must be right. I do not yet trust myself.”

  His relief was so palpable that Mist almost hugged him. She stopped herself just in time.

  “Even Alfar need shrinks sometimes, I guess,” she said with a witless attempt at humor. “But I don’t think we have any mortal psychologists who know how to treat elvish psychoses.” She glanced at her watch. “Let me try.”

  “No,” Dainn said sharply, the color returning to his face. “You but recently fought Loki, and—”

  “Let me give it one shot,” she said. “There won’t be a better opportunity. I won’t touch the hard stuff, just basic Galdr. And maybe I can work on the Jotunn magic as well.”

  It was a lot of hot air on her part. She knew she wasn’t at her best, and she was still dealing with the emotional fallout from Orn’s appearance and her father’s death at her own hands. Now she couldn’t help but associate Jotunn magic with Svardkell’s death.

  But she’d always tried not to let her fear constrain her. She had to know if Loki had been on to something.

  “I’m doing it,” she said. She worked her fingers, numb not from the cold but with sheer terror. “If you think I’m getting in too deep, stop me.”

  She stared at the traceries of ice on the deck of the bridge and once again called upon winter’s magic, constructing mental Runes, giving them form and shape by drawing on the cold in the air and from deep within her own body. She sang an unfamiliar song that came out of that same coldness inside her, made up of the whine of frigid wind and the crack of icicles.

  The song shattered the Runes and sent the fragments flying across the bridge, where they clung to the remnants of Loki’s magic. The sleet she had created flew straight between the bridge’s supporting girders and splashed against some invisible barrier, like pebbles tossed on a piece of glass. She concentrated, altered her song and sent a hail of ice arrows, each trailing a rope made of fused beads of ice, straight at the center of the barrier.

  She wrapped the ends of the bead ropes around her wrists and skidded on the deck of the bridge as some force dragged her toward the barrier. Dainn caught her around the waist and held her steady.

  “What is it?” he asked, his arms tightening hard enough to rob her of breath.

  “Something’s … on the other side,” she gasped, hanging on to the spell as it reared and bucked in her grip like a stallion on the scent of a mare.

  “Something, or someone?” Dainn asked. “Does it feel as if you have reached a bridge to Ginnungagap?”

  She tried to ignore her intense and unwanted physical reaction to his touch. “Someone,” she said between gritted teeth. “It’s like I’ve caught a shark on the other end, and if I pull a little harder—”

  “Stop!” he shouted. “Let it go!”

  Mist relaxed her hold on the ropes. It was exactly like letting go of a fishing line, feeling the thing she’d caught plunge back into the ocean and beyond her reach.

  Dizzy with the sudden release, Mist began to fall. Dainn eased her down to the deck.

  “What was that?” she asked, wiping the chilled sweat from her forehead with her sleeve.

  “Evidently Loki did achieve some measure of success,” Dainn said, staring toward the center of the span with a grim set to his mouth. “And if he did, what you felt on the other side might very well have been his allies, attempting to cross over with the help of your magic.”

  “You mean if I’d pulled a little harder,” she said, “the shark wou
ld have leaped right over the side of the boat.”

  “But they, unlike a shark out of water, would have a dangerous advantage,” Dainn said. He rose and offered his hand to Mist. She grabbed it and clambered to her feet as a hard blast of bitter wind off the bay slammed into her. Dainn moved just enough to take the worst of it onto himself, though he knew as well as she did how unnecessary the gesture was.

  She was too exhausted to protest his misplaced gallantry. “So now we know that reopening the bridges is possible without Freya,” she said.

  “And Loki will surely make another attempt as soon as he is capable of it,” Dainn said. His hair came loose from its queue and flew around his face like raven’s wings. “Unless he returns here, which is unlikely, we cannot hope to anticipate where he will try again.”

  “Then the bird had better give us something we can use,” she said. “Loki’s piss, sometimes I feel as if I’m on some über-god’s giant chessboard, and I don’t know if I’m a knight or a pawn.”

  15

  The color drained from Dainn’s face again. He looked away, at his feet, out toward the block waters of the Bay.

  “You are not far wrong,” he said, very quietly. “It was a game, when it began. A Hnefatafl game with rules that no longer apply.”

  She stared at him. “What in Hel are you talking about?”

  “I told you before that Freya alone among the Aesir was able to reach Midgard with her mind, making use of her Seidr.”

  “I remember,” she said. “You said that Odin and the other Aesir had to maintain the Asgardian Shadow-Realm while Freya dealt with Midgard. But that’s changed, hasn’t it? With Freya gone, and the raven—“

  “Yes, much has changed,” Dainn said, moving to the railing. “But when it began, in the Void, Freya and Loki struck a bargain. Loki had found the first bridge to Midgard, a physical means of reaching this world. He had also devised a corporeal body for himself, a feat not even the Aesir had managed to achieve. He was prepared to use this bridge well before the Aesir discovered his trick, but Freya caught him.”

  “I suppose,” Mist said coldly, “that this is where I ask how she met him when the various Shadow-Realms were all separated from each other in the Void.”

 

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