“No kidding,” Mist said. A hard gust of wind, unhindered by any obstacle on the nearly featureless plain, knocked her against one of the overaffectionate horses, and she took a moment to sort her questions into some reasonable order. “If Loki wasn’t ready to provoke another fight when he met you at the loft, why was he so intent on showing the kid to you? Wouldn’t that be a huge disadvantage to him, if you guessed how powerful the boy—Danny—really is?”
“He could honestly claim that he had not used Jormungandr to attack us, because that was the literal truth. I have no doubt that he enjoyed the game.”
“And why would he send a manifestation of Freya?”
“Perhaps to sow distrust between us, or to make us believe Freya has returned with some malign purpose.”
“And this could be a trap. The boy could summon another monster and try to kill us right here.”
The beast flared in Dainn’s eyes. “Danny is an innocent, free of Loki’s taint.”
“Like Jormungandr? Like Fenris?” She held Dainn’s gaze, wondering why he had reacted so strongly to her suggestion. “If Danny did send the Serpent, or whatever it was, at Loki’s behest, it doesn’t matter if he knows what he’s doing or not. Loki is using him to attack us, and it’s working all too well.”
“I can only assure you that this boy is bereft of the evil qualities to be found in Loki’s surviving offspring,” Dainn said, the threat in his eyes replaced by entreaty. Mist didn’t know which was worse.
“Loki claimed the boy was born in the Void,” Dainn went on. “Time in Ginnungagap is not measured as it is here, so It is difficult to determine Danny’s true age. But he is, in every way, still very much a child.”
“Loki didn’t happen to mention the mother, did he?”
“He avoided the subject entirely.”
“But you’re not related to the kid. Why is he so interested in you? Why rescue you from his own father and make this portal to help you escape?”
“I do not understand his apparent affection for me,” Dainn murmured, pausing to watch the boy wander fearlessly among the horses as they drifted away. “When I found him outside Loki’s headquarters, he came to me without hesitation, as if he sought my help. Perhaps a part of him realizes that Loki’s actions are wrong.” “And it never occurred to you that Loki set it up that way?”
“It had.”
He closed his eyes. “But I now believe that Danny was the boy that Svardkell meant for us to protect. To save.”
It was difficult for Mist to hear her father’s name without grief. “From Loki?”
“Yes. Not only for our sake or his, but for a much greater purpose.”
“To keep Loki from using him as a weapon?”
“Svardkell never had a chance to make his meaning clear, or explain how he knew these things. I can only tell you what I believe to be true.”
Dainn turned, walked toward the horses, and, stopping very close to Danny, reached out as if to touch the boy’s soft ginger hair. There was real affection in the gesture, a kind of tenderness that almost took Mist’s breath away.
Mist watched them, wondering what she was missing. There obviously was some kind of bond between them, a bond that superseded the boy’s connection to his lying bastard of a father. And if was powerful enough to sense the beast under Dainn’s skin, he clearly wasn’t afraid. Quite the opposite.
As she jogged to catch up with Dainn, the horses turned about as one, facing away from their two-legged guests. The moonlight glistened on something behind the horses, a shape moving more swiftly than the fastest thoroughbred. Its coat bore a metallic sheen halfway between gold and silver, and its mane and tail were so long they nearly brushed the earth.
Like courtiers in the presence of their king, the horses bowed their heads. The stallion slowed to a prance, his muscles rippling under glossy skin, his proud neck arched like a swan’s.
And he danced on eight hooves, as graceful as a spider spinning its web.
“Sleipnir,” Mist whispered.
26
The house was very old, very grand, and very ugly. And probably haunted.
“This is it?” Ryan asked Tashiro.
They stood on a hill in Benicia overlooking the Carquinez Strait, with San Francisco out of sight behind brown hills that should have been green from mild winter rains. There were large, dead-looking brown shrubs all around the house, a couple of tall bare trees, a wide porch with a swinging chair, and multi-paned windows under a gabled roof. The door looked as if it hadn’t been opened in twenty years.
He hadn’t seen this coming. Not even a little of it. When he’d unexpectedly met Koji on Third Street, he hadn’t been prepared.
But he’d come anyway, though he still didn’t know why Tashiro had kept all this from Mist.
“Shit,” he muttered. “I thought my aunt was rich.”
“She is,” Tashiro said, not even bothering to look at him. “Just not in the way you expected.”
“You mean you lied to me and Gabi,” Ryan said, wondering how he could ditch Tashiro once and for all.
“I agreed to bring you here,” Tashiro said. “Now my work is done.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Ryan asked, his fingers aching around the handle of his duffel. “I bet that place doesn’t even have running water. You think I’m going to stay here?”
“You’ll be taken care of,” Tashiro said, no warmth in his voice at all. He set off at a fast walk toward the rickety garden gate—if you could call it a garden—and on to the curved driveway beyond.
“Hey!” Ryan shouted, beginning to follow. “You can’t just—”
He froze. The door to the haunted house was starting to open, creaking and groaning on ancient hinges.
A woman walked out onto the porch. She looked like a bag lady to Ryan, all dressed in layers and layers of clothes that didn’t match, shirts on top of shirts and layers of skirts that fell almost to her ankles. She wore about a dozen necklaces and jangly bracelets hanging from her wrists, and a scarf wound around her head.
No, not a bag lady, Ryan thought. A gypsy, like the fortune-tellers he’d seen in old movies. She had all kinds of pouches attached to her colorful woven belt, and other stuff Ryan couldn’t identify stuck in her clothes.
“I am no ghost,” the woman said, stepping with surprising agility down from the porch. “Nor am I precisely your aunt. I had expected Mr. Tashiro”—she nodded in the direction the lawyer had gone—“to do a better job of arranging matters, but it appears he was not able to perform his work to my expectations. That, alas, is only further indication of my waning abilities.” She smiled warmly. “Fortunately, you are where you are meant to be.”
“Who are you?” Ryan asked, noticing for the first time that her eyes were such a pale blue as to look almost white. “What do you want?”
“You have nothing to fear from me,” the gypsy woman said. “My ability to act upon this world is scanty indeed. That is one reason I need you, Ryan Starling.” She spread her hands to indicate the property. “Your inheritance is so much more than this. More than can become clear to you until you begin to learn what I will teach you.”
“What are you talking about?” Ryan asked, backing away.
“My name is Mother Skye,” she said. “And I will teach you how to become all you are meant to be.”
Crying out with joy, Danny ran straight into Sleipnir’s chest and embraced the broad neck. Odin’s mount snorted into Danny’s hair, blowing it every which way. The animal’s startling blue eyes examined Dainn over the boy’s shoulder.
“This is my brother!” Danny said, beaming as he turned to Dainn. “Can I play with him now?”
Mist found herself gaping in astonishment. Dainn sat on the short grass, looking as dazed as she felt.
“He spoke of his brother on the other side,” he said. “He wanted my help. But I did not realize…”
“Sleipnir,” Mist repeated, joining him on the ground. “The Slipper. The only dece
nt child Loki ever had.”
“And one of Odin’s Treasures,” Dainn said. “Danny has led us to him.”
“I still don’t understand what in Hel’s going on. Why would he do that?”
slowly. “I have no idea.”.”
They both looked back at the portal while Sleipnir bounced around Danny like a rowdy puppy, his eight legs working in perfect unison.
“Okay,” Mist said, expelling her breath. “Let’s say this is some kind of—gift—from Danny to you, for some incomprehensible reason. We both know that Loki’s waiting on the other side, ready to grab whoever goes back. We have to get the kid and Sleipnir to San Francisco without returning the way we came.”
“If we are where I believe we may be, it will be difficult to transport the horse by conventional means. But Danny—”
The boy looked around as if he’d heard his name.
“Danny,” Dainn said, beckoning as he got to his feet. Leading the eight-legged steed with a hand on the stallion’s shoulder, Danny ran to the elf and grinned up at him expectantly. Sleipnir nudged Danny gently out of the way and paced up to Dainn, his ears telegraphing a certain ambivalence that only a fool could mistake. Dainn bowed.
“Well met, Bearer of Odin,” he said in the Old Tongue.
Sleipnir snorted and backed away until he was beside Danny again. Dainn dropped to his knees and extended his arms. Danny ran into them as if he’d known Dainn all his life.
“Danny,” Dainn said, “Has Sleipnir spoken to you?”
“How do you know he—” Mist began.
“I could hear them,” Dainn said, impatience in his voice. “Danny?”
The boy nodded gravely. “He doesn’t like Loki.”
“Does he know why he was sent here?”
“Yes. He wants to come with us.” “Good. Can you take us back the same way you brought us here, but maybe in a different place where Loki can’t find us?”
Grasping Dainn’s hand, Danny held on until the elf got to his feet. The lead mare of the watching herd trotted back to the elf and bumped his chest with the full force of her considerable weight.
Dainn’s expression changed. Without hesitation, he leaped nimbly onto her back. All at once Danny was atop Sleipnir, and Dainn was holding his uninjured hand down to Mist. She grabbed it and settled on the mare’s bare back behind him.
She’d spent plenty of time on horseback over the centuries in Midgard, and even longer before the Last Battle as a Valkyrie in Asgard. But Dainn was an elf, who could become one with the natural world.
This was not a cold city of steel and concrete. Here his feet touched the grass, and the air he breathed was almost clean. He was part of the mare, not a trace of the beast left in him. The taut muscles of his waist flexed under Mist’s arms, and his hair whipped behind his head like the horse’s flaxen mane.
Mist spat a few black strands out of her mouth, her throat tight with sudden emotion. She pressed her face into the warm skin of Dainn’s back, smelling him, hearing the steady rush of the breath in his lungs, feeling the rhythmic bunch and release of muscle under her cheek. For one terrifying moment she wished it would never end.
The mare jumped, knocking Mist out of her dream. She straightened, pulling her hands away from Dainn’s waist and balancing herself with her legs gripping the mare’s loins. A woman on a fine white gelding was riding bareback to meet them, her hands resting loosely on her mount’s withers. Her hair was as white as her horse’s—not merely blond, but silver—wrapped around her head in two thick braids. Her face was strong, what mortals had once called “handsome,” and the body under her rough winter clothing was wiry and lean.
She lifted one hand in greeting as Sleipnir pranced up beside Dainn’s mare, lifting one leg after another in a fine display any Lipizzaner would envy.
“Show-off,” the woman said in the Old Tongue. She studied Mist with watchful eyes. “It’s about time you came,” she said in accented English. “Spider hasn’t given me a moment’s peace with all his dancing and bugling.”
Mist slid off the mare’s back. “Hild,” she said, hardly surprised at all. “You expected us?”
“We expected someone. Sleipnir didn’t see fit to share his secrets.”
Odin’s balls, Mist thought. Now horses were predicting the future.
“I have a lot to tell you,” she said.
Hild nodded. She looked toward Dainn, who had dismounted as the other horses milled around them. “Alfr,” she said. “That I didn’t expect.”
“Lady Hild,” Dainn said, inclining his head.
“Do I look like a lady?” Hild asked with a touch of sarcasm. “I was just a mortal once, like Mist.”
Mist glanced away, far from prepared to tell her Sister that she wasn’t some mortal lord’s daughter after all.
“Is there a place we can talk?” she asked.
“My cottage.” Hild looked at Danny, and then at Dainn and Mist again. “This is no ordinary lad,” she said with a lift of one silver brow. “Yours?”
Dainn flushed, and Mist bit her lip. It occurred to her that Hild might be assuming that Danny was their son.
“No,” Mist said. “It’s … complicated.”
“Danny, can you tell us if anyone tries to come through the portal?” Dainn asked.
Teasing at Sleipnir’s large ears, Danny nodded. “They can’t get in,” he said.
“It seems you do, indeed, have much to tell me,” Hild said. “Come into the house for a hot drink and fresh bread. I must become used to the idea that the quiet years I’ve spent here are coming to an end.”
The child had deceived him, and Loki could only count himself a fool. A fool for believing Danny might help him bring Dainn back peacefully. A fool for allowing himself to hope that the boy was finally and consciously acting upon his parent’s desires.
He’d been a fool too often of late. But then he’d had no idea that Danny could teleport, let alone carry Dainn with him such a distance. He had never guessed that Danny would even have thought to do so.
It seemed quite appropriate, however, that Danny had chosen the physical bridge where Loki had failed to open the metaphysical one—even though the portal was not truly a bridge at all, and led only to some other location in Midgard.
A location the boy had accessed from his own room.
Banking his rage, Loki strengthened his spell to ward off local traffic and approached the portal again, his Jotunar bumbling along behind him in an overly eager attempt to placate their master. He could see a sliver of light on the other side of the glassy surface, but it was as if he were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Every attempt he had made to widen the portal had failed.
But he had been able to determine that Danny had found Sleipnir, and that he was evidently in no hurry to return. He seemed to have focused all his loyalty on the elf for the time being … a circumstance Loki would have used to his advantage if he’d had both Dainn and the child in his hands.
He hadn’t expected Mist to find them first and pass through the portal herself.
Loki rubbed his hands together vigorously and took a deep breath. It was time to try the spell he had been withholding until all others had failed.
Closing his eyes, he called up the Runes and Merkstaves. He didn’t require the use of his own blood, the most powerful basis for any spell. He had something better.
Dainn’s blood, soaked into the portion of the bandage Loki had torn from the elf’s hand just before he’d escaped Loki held the scrap of stained cloth between his hands, pressing his own scar into the fabric and drawing Dainn’s blood out of it, letting the very atoms pass into his skin. The absorption brought on a kind of ecstasy that set Loki’s heart to racing and filled his skull with brilliant light.
When his own hands were painted red, he dropped the cloth and walked onto the bridge, just short of the portal. He had already frozen the tiny aperture open with a remora’s mouth of jagged ice, and the glazed surface reflected his distorted image as he dr
ew the Rune-staves with Dainn’s blood. He chanted a summoning spell as each stave flowed into the next, melting ice and blood comingled. He pulled, and the Runes stretched from the portal’s perimeter to his palms, gripping his scar as he became the puppet master. He tugged again, and blood began to run along the length of the strands.
He knew when he almost had it. He felt Dainn, and the boy, beginning to respond. But then the threads snapped, and something appeared almost directly over his head, a whirling cloud, a ragged tear in the air that opened onto an impenetrable darkness.
The sheer power of it revealed its nature instantly, and Loki laughed. He didn’t know if the bridge to Ginnungagap was entirely the result of his own spell, or if Danny had unwittingly weakened the barriers between Midgard and the Void when he had created the portal.
It didn’t matter now. Loki had what he’d been searching for since the bridges had closed.
“Grer,” he said.
The Jotunn joined him immediately, snapping to attention.
“You will set all your men to guarding me, and give ground to no one. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Lord Loki.”
As the Jotunar gathered into a protective cordon around him, Loki chanted the spells that effectively severed his awareness of his own body so that all his attention would be focused on the rift above him. He left only his autonomic nervous system functioning at full strength and locked his muscles so he would remain in place when he lost all sense of the mortal world. A heavy, snow-laced fog settled around him, so dense that he could see nothing beyond his hand before his face.
Every particle of his being, his magic, his mind fixed on the bridge to the Void. All the gray fog disappeared as if sucked into a vacuum, and Loki could see what lay beyond the rift: glittering walls, crystal furnishings, an immense hearth where flames crackled without melting even a drop of the icy hearth that cradled it. All was white, frigid familiarity.
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