And none of it touched on the dark Eitr. Mist would not risk it, nor would Dainn use his beast again. They were still afraid.
Laughing in the face of the storm, his single eye watering from the constant assault of debris and his mouth filled with grit, Odin sang the dark Eitr. One by one the globules of Void began to split open. Those encased by Mist’s magic leaked only a little; those she had missed began to disgorge their contents in a steady stream, the miasma drifting upward to join the greasy haze that already floated over the park.
“You must work more quickly, Mist,” Odin taunted. “The wind from the ocean is refreshing, is it not? How long will it take to carry the poison over the entire city?”
Clenching her fists, Mist raised her voice. She conjured more cages, but she could not keep pace with Odin’s work, and the raw materials she had used became scarce. Dainn touched her arm. Her face screwed up in defiance, but the tone of her song changed, and suddenly the oozing drifts of Eitr turned against the force of the wind and curved back toward Odin.
Now Mist was using the dark Eitr, but she was not losing herself. Dainn was beside her, chanting spells not even Odin understood. They steadied Mist, and Odin witnessed the precise moment when she understood, when she accepted all she had become and could be. It was in the calmness of her expression, the way she held her body, the glance she gave Dainn as he rested his hand on her shoulder.
There was a force here that Odin had discounted, an emotion he had abandoned long ago and had no means to fight. As the Eitr drew nearer, he knew he would not be able to hinder Mist’s determination or cripple her power with his own.
But as she threw all her concentration into guiding the Eitr precisely where she wished it to go, she was vulnerable. He shifted his grip on Gungnir, preparing to throw.
Another hand seized it from his grip, and a ragged voice whispered close to his ear.
“She is mine,” Vidarr said. And with a move as swift as it was deadly, Odin’s son hurled Gungnir directly at Mist’s heart.
35
Mist’s legs gave way as the Spear’s head pierced her chest and emerged from her back, just missing her heart.
But it was close enough. Dainn caught her and eased her down, his hands coated in blood, his breath seizing in his lungs.
“Mist!” he choked, holding her just off the ground. “Loki, get the others!”
But Loki had vanished, and so had Vidarr, Odin, and his followers. Mist’s breath frothed on her lips. She tried to smile.
“Vidarr,” she whispered. “Who would have thought—”
“Hush,” he said, as much for himself as for her. His heart seethed with panic, but his mind still functioned.
Cradling her body in one arm, he curled his hand around the shaft of the Spear with the other. The healing Eitr was already within him; he sang the ancient magic, his voice grinding with fear, and visualized the metal and wood of the weapon dissolving inside her, the blood vessels mending, the bleeding stopped.
Mist gasped and arched upward. Gouts of fresh blood, bubbling with lost air, welled up around the shaft.
Dainn knew he was failing. Mist was only alive now because of her own will.
“Don’t worry, Dainn,” she said, blood gurgling in her throat. She touched his face. “If I … wind up with Hel, I’ll … lead the rebellion my—”
Her eyes closed. Dainn raised his voice in a howl that shook the trees, and the others came: Rota, Konur and half the Alfar, Taylor and the surviving mortals, Gabi and her curanderas.
“Gabriella,” Dainn rasped. “Help me.”
The girl knelt beside him, her brown skin pale with shock, and laid her hand on Mist’s chest. Opening his mind, Dainn tried to reach Gabi with the Eitr, to let her feel it and draw it into herself. She blinked rapidly, but Dainn knew that his attempt was failing.
“The wound’s too bad for me,” Gabi said, turning her head to wipe her face on her sleeve. She called to the curanderas, and they gathered close, chanting their prayers to the White Christ and their God.
But the life was leaving Mist, her heartbeat slowing, her breaths shallow and rattling. With a sudden twist of her body, Gabi pressed her palm to Dainn’s chest.
“You’re still not whole,” she murmured. “You are still fighting it.”
Hel drifted up behind her, casting a deeper shadow in the poisonous twilight. Two other shapes emerged from the gloom she wore like a cloak. One of them was Ryan, and he was dead.
“Ry!” Gabi cried.
He ignored her, fixing his blank stare on Dainn. “Accept,” he said in a ghost’s wasted voice. “You grieve for Danny, but he was never meant to live apart from you. The beast was always there, but you refused to…” He rolled his eyes at Hel. “There can be no life without death. Set the beast free.”
Fury built in Dainn’s chest, a feral rage he knew all too well. He reached deep into his soul to pull it out, held the beast at arm’s length as it snapped and snarled and laughed at his weakness.
You will always fight me, it growled. You will never admit that there is darkness in the first and the wisest. Give in. Let me—
Dainn pulled the beast close. Its teeth sank into his neck as its claws raked at his belly, disemboweling him, shredding his organs and piercing his heart. Eating him alive.
But suddenly Danny was there, within him. He opened his arms, and the beast fell into him, both boy and beast dissolving into Dainn’s blood and bone.
Whole for the first time in centuries, Dainn took Gungnir’s shaft in both hands and sang the healing again. The wood began to disintegrate, the honed steel to crumble. Blood rushed from the gaping wound in Mist’s chest, and just as suddenly stopped. He continued to sing until he was hoarse, mending each blood vessel, the torn lung, every severed muscle and tendon.
With a fit of violent coughing, Mist sat up. Dainn continued to hold her until her breathing was steady again. She felt her chest.
“Did I dream it,” she asked, “or did someone just impale me?”
Dainn tried to laugh, without success. Gabi sobbed. There were other sounds, but Dainn could make no sense of them. He knew that Danny was gone, and that he was no longer afraid of the beast. He knew that somehow Ryan was dead, that Odin was still free, and that the dark Eitr continued to leak its poison into the air above the city.
But Mist was alive.
“Gabi?” Mist said, pushing herself up on her elbows. “You’re all right?”
Dainn met the girl’s gaze, and she looked away. He sensed that she knew what had happened to Ryan, but Mist clearly didn’t realize that the young mortal was in Hel’s possession, and Dainn wouldn’t let her take on that burden now.
There was still hope. More than Dainn had felt in a very long time.
“Where’s Odin?” Mist said, struggling and failing to stand until Dainn lifted her and held her up.
Something hard, white, and cold landed with a thump at her feet. Dainn recognized it as Vidarr’s severed head, frozen through and close to shattering.
Loki arrived just afterward.
“Odin’s taken off,” he said, “literally.” He kicked Vidarr’s head, and a sizeable chunk of his jaw broke off. “He found Sleipnir and forced him to fly.”
Mist met Loki’s gaze. “The Einherjar?”
“Scattered. But we have a bigger problem. When that fog of Eitr descends onto the city…” Loki shrugged. “There will certainly be chaos, but not of my making. I would prefer to start over than let Odin steal my thunder.”
“Then you start thinking up a way for us to follow him.” She leaned heavily on Dainn and looked at Gabi again. “I’ve never been properly introduced to your healer friends. Are they prepared to deal with our casualties?”
“They’ve been helping people all along,” Gabi said, her lower lip trembling. “Anything we can do, we will.”
“Gracias,” Mist said, inclining her head to the women. “Taylor, send people to find any survivors and make sure the curanderas get to them.”
&n
bsp; Taylor hesitated, as if he were reluctant to leave Mist again. Konur consulted with his elves.
“Would you have us join the hunt for Odin, or seek the remaining Einherjar?” he asked.
“Bring the bastards back, by any means necessary, and use whatever spells you have to keep them immobile.” Mist glanced from Dainn to Loki. “Odin is our problem.”
“Tell me,” Loki said, “have you ever used the Eitr to fly?”
“I have the means to teleport,” Dainn said softly, “but that is of no use to us if we do not know our destination.”
“Mimir’s eyeteeth,” Mist said, “we can’t do this from the ground.” She sucked in a breath. “Can you smell it? The Eitr’s getting thicker. Am I going to have to forge wings, or—”
A boom shook the park, as if a jet had just broken the sound barrier. Spurting gaseous ooze from its nostrils, a very large silver dragon landed a few yards away and uncoiled its serpentine body. Mist recognized it as one of Japan’s supposedly mythical beasts, made to swim in rivers and oceans.
Or, on occasion, to fly.
“Jesus,” Taylor whispered.
“Koji,” Mist said.
“Koji?” Dainn repeated. He prepared a defensive spell in his mind as the long, almost canine head swung toward them, revealing a flickering tongue and serrated teeth.
I am going to regret this, the dragon said.
* * *
Once they were aloft, Mist realized that Odin would have to wait. The Eitr had spread to cover the entire city, scattered by the storm, hanging above the streets and buildings like a shroud and dimming the lights of every building to fading embers. Wherever they flew, mortals sprawled on the streets and sidewalks, gasping and retching; cars had stalled in tangles of rubber and steel, and corrosion had already begun to eat away metal and plastic and concrete alike.
The dark Eitr was unmaking the city, and there was little time to stop it.
Mist knew what she had to do. She wasn’t afraid anymore; Dainn was at her back, his arms around her waist, while Loki gave a Japanese dragon the illusory shape of a low-flying plane.
Again, she called up her own dark Eitr—as much a part of her now as her blond hair and gray eyes—inhaled deeply, and accepted the poison into herself, sucking it up as Koji flew, coiling and uncoiling, over the city. There was no limit to what she could absorb, and with every breath she set the Eitr to devouring itself, eating away at its own substance.
There was pain. That was inevitable. But Dainn held her steady against his chest as he healed her burns, and when the sky began to clear, showing the stars again, her relief smothered the pain completely. People began to move again as sirens wailed on the streets below, and the storm faded to a light snowfall.
They found Odin alive on Ocean Beach, his face blackened and his body wasted by his own poisons. Sleipnir stood with all eight legs in the surf, snorting and trembling, but when Dainn went to him he calmed and rubbed his head against Dainn’s hair.
They returned to the park by the most direct route, Dainn on Sleipnir with Odin’s unconscious body and Mist with Loki on the dragon’s back. When they set down in the park, all was quiet. Torn tree trunks and branches lay scattered like twigs over the Polo Fields and dead leaves and pine duff covered almost every surface, but the ice had melted and the earth, with the help of the Alfar, had begun to absorb the blood into itself.
The scars would remain, Mist thought as she dismounted. But a little more work would clear the worst of it, and in the end the mortals of San Francisco would remember a horror they could not explain. A horror that would never return.
“Remind me never to ride a dragon again,” Loki griped as he slid off Koji’s back. With great eloquence, Koji snorted into Loki’s face and swung his head toward Mist.
Now I must face the wrath of my elders, he said with a familiar sparkle in his eye.
“Wait,” Dainn said. “Why did you pose as a lawyer to seek Ryan last winter? Why did you help him find Mother Skye? What is your connection to her?”
There are alliances you know nothing of, Koji said. Such alliances will always be necessary whenever this world is in danger. He tipped his head toward Mist. I go.
Thank you, Koji, she said, resting her hand on the bewhiskered muzzle. “Good-bye.”
He dipped his head, crouched, and hurled himself skyward. In a matter of moments he was only a flicker of silver lit by the moon. And then he was gone.
“Remarkable,” Dainn said. “Did you never guess, in all the time he was your lover?”
“Dainn, that was only a—”
“I tease you,” Dainn said. His eyes were quiet … a little sad, but no longer dark with horror and self-contempt. “I could have brought you no comfort then. I am grateful to him.”
Sleipnir butted his head against Dainn’s chest, and Dainn rubbed the horse’s cheek. “The others are coming,” he said.
Taylor and Konur, Rota and Hrolf, Vixen and Roadkill and the rest gathered around Mist, staring up at the sky or down at Odin’s comatose body. “Orders?” Taylor asked.
“Gather the Treasures,” she said. “Take Thor’s weapons and Gungnir. The rest should still be at the camp.”
“I’ll retrieve Thor’s,” Loki said.
“And bring them right back here,” Mist said, in a voice even Laufeyson couldn’t ignore.
“What will you do?” Dainn asked Mist when Loki was gone.
“Capture Odin’s soul with this,” she said, pulling the raven pendant from beneath her torn shirt, “and divide it among the Treasures. He’ll be back where he started, and we’re not going to let him out again.”
“Loki will not be pleased to lose his revenge.”
“I’m not in the business of pleasing Loki, no matter how cooperative he’s been.” She touched Dainn’s cheek. “Not after what he did to this city, and to you.”
“What he did to me will be forgotten,” Dainn said, taking her hand in his.
Will be, Mist thought. Eventually. “All I can say is that we’d better get those Treasures,” she said. “If we don’t act quickly—”
“You will need this.” A dark-haired woman approached Mist, a curved horn in her hands.
“The Gjallarhorn,” Dainn said, peering into the woman’s face. “You are Kara. The one Valkyrie we could not find.”
“Yes,” the woman said. “It was difficult to evade all of you so long. But I could not allow any to possess the Horn before its time.”
“But you blew it, didn’t you?” Mist said, feeling cross. “Who gave you the right to choose the time?” She peered into the Valkyrie’s face. “You don’t look like the Kara I used to know.”
“No,” Dainn said. “She has another name.”
The slender young woman began to change, to broaden, her hair turning gray and her garments transforming from Kara’s jeans and jacket to a full, layered skirt hung with ribbons, bric-a-brac, pouches, and other things Mist couldn’t begin to identify.
“My name is Mother Skye,” she said, her voice deeper and rough with age. “I was once the Norn called Skuld, and the Valkyrie who carried this Horn once carried my name, though not my burden.” She smiled sadly. “Skuld or Kara, she was my daughter. She died, and I could not save her, for I have long since lost the gift of altering Fate.”
“But when you blew the Horn—” Mist began.
“A last hurrah, you might say.”
“Ryan,” Dainn said. “Mist, Ryan is—”
“Dead?” Mother Skye said. “I know. When his young friend was near death, he offered his own life to Hel in her place.”
“Gods,” Mist breathed. “I wondered why Gabi was still alive.”
“He sacrificed himself,” Mother Skye said with deep sadness. “But it was his choice. As it was yours, Dainn, to acknowledge your most potent magic, good and bad. And yours, Mist, to accept your power in all its forms.”
“I won’t accept Ryan’s death,” Mist said. “If Hel thinks she can hold him…”
“A challe
nge?” Hel said, floating up behind her. She was herself again, coldly beautiful and bitterly ugly. “Would you speak to my new acquisition?”
She gestured, and Ryan came forward, hollow-eyed but not yet transparent. “Mother Skye,” he whispered.
The old woman smiled. “I did not know if we would meet again. You have done well.”
“Is this what you call ‘well’?” Mist snapped. “All his visions, coming to this?”
“Perhaps I sent him back too soon,” Mother Skye said. “But I had no choice. I was the last of the Norns, and I had lost my power. Ryan came to me at the right time to take that duty from me.”
“You were wrong,” Ryan said. “Everything was wrong.”
“But Fate has been reset,” Mother Skye said. “The Second Prophecy, the one I gave Freya and Odin so long ago, has been fulfilled. Many as one have saved this last Homeworld. Mortal and elf, Jotunn and the child of gods. The battle is over.”
“Not quite,” Mist said. She turned on Hel. “I want you to give him back.”
“And what,” Hel asked, “shall I receive in return?”
“Some small place to make your own new Niflheim,” Mist said, “somewhere no one is going to stumble across you … after you’ve freed every mortal you took since this fight began.”
Hel’s dark half turned almost as pale as the light side. “You dare—”
“They aren’t ancient Northmen, so you never had any right to them in the first place.” Mist leaned companionably against Dainn, relishing the steady beat of his heart and the warmth of his hands on her shoulders. “And you’re not to take any more of the dying unless they follow the Northmen’s faith. The rest can have their own afterworlds without your interference.”
“I’d take the deal, if I were you,” Loki said. He strolled up to them, Fenrir panting at his heels. “I’m not having you and your skulking minions lodging with me. This one is enough.” He tossed Thor’s Treasures at Mist’s feet. “Can she keep the dead Einherjar?”
“Be my guest,” Mist said.
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