Black Ice

by Susan Krinard

  The boy smiled with an almost mischievous delight. Loki’s smile, when he had decided to be charming.

  “My brother,” he said, turning to point at the bridge.

  That was when Dainn fully realized that the boy was in no way the seemingly helpless, mentally challenged child Loki had presented before. Loki clearly hadn’t expected his son to help Dainn escape. And Dainn had no explanation.

  But he did know that Danny had more than one brother, as well as a half-sister. One of those brothers in ghostly form had attacked the loft and provided the means for Vali to take Anna and Orn.

  “Is he here?” Dainn asked urgently, remembering how Loki had denied being responsible for the phantom serpent’s appearance.

  Was it possible …

  “You have to help,” Danny insisted.

  “Help how?” Dainn asked, instinctively putting his arms around Danny to protect him from the cold he apparently didn’t feel.

  Protect him. Svardkell’s final words. “Protect the boy.”

  The blood drained out of Dainn’s face. He had assumed that boy to be Ryan. But now he knew he had been wrong.

  Danny squirmed out of Dainn’s arms and pulled hard on his hand. The boy was remarkably strong, and Dainn took an involuntary step forward. He scooped Danny up into his arms and broke into a jog, heading south toward the loft.

  “Dainn!”

  Loki’s voice, the tingling sensation of magic at Dainn’s back, magic ready to strike. He found himself coming to a sudden halt, compelled to return to the bridge.

  “Put him down,” Loki said, “and bring him to me.”

  Dainn searched for his enemy. Loki stood several yards away from the bridge, apparently bereft of his usual Jotunn escort. But Dainn knew they were there, as surely as he knew the boy was in danger.

  “Bring him to me,” Loki repeated, ice and fire crackling in the air around him.

  Danny clung to Dainn’s hand with that surprising, tenacious strength and shook his head. “No,” said.

  “What do you want with him?” Dainn shouted against the wind.

  “He is my son,” Loki said, his red hair whipping across his face, green eyes dancing with satisfaction. “I don’t want him running about all over a dangerous city. Of course you are welcome to join us.”

  Dainn felt a blast of heat on his face and pushed Danny behind him again just as the middle of the bridge caught fire.

  It was clearly none of Loki’s doing. Laufeyson leaped back, as startled as Dainn. The fire expanded into a ring and suddenly cooled to a golden green, the center framing a tinted, semi-transparent surface like a stained-glass window.

  Through the glass Dainn could make out a flat plain rolling ahead of them where the rest of the bridge should be—a dry, moonlit steppe scattered with thin patches of snow and broken only by low shrubs and the occasional scrubby tree. Hills rose in the distance, and shapes moved closer to the portal—long-legged horses cropping at winter grasses.

  It was not a bridge to Ginnungagap, but it was very real. Danny squirmed loose of Dainn’s hold, ran pell-mell at the opening and vanished through it. Jotunar lumbered after him while Loki lifted his hands and began to chant.

  The giants never made it through. They struck the “glass” through which the boy had passed, pain and astonishment on their faces. Loki dropped his hands and ran toward the portal.

  Dainn hesitated. A part of him believed that Danny would want him to follow, would have left the way open for him. But if he had guessed incorrectly …

  The motorcycle leaped toward Dainn like a snow leopard, the woman astride it as fierce and bright as one of the White Christ’s avenging angels.

  “Get on!” Mist yelled just as Loki spun around to face them. Dainn swung up behind her as she gunned the engine, clutched the accelerator, twisted it hard, and barreled through the portal.

  Silfr’s wheels skidded on mud slick with recent snow. Mist braked both front and back, spinning in a circle as she tried to avoid the boy who had run ahead of them.

  “The portal is closing,” Dainn said behind her, his arms still tight around her waist.

  Mist looked back, her vision quickly adjusting to the surrounding darkness. The portal, previously a ring of pulsing green and gold, was now a strange, glassy distortion in the air, seemingly opaque but with the unfamiliar landscape visible around it as if it were suspended just above the ground.

  “Do you think Loki can get through that thing?” she asked.

  “I do not know who or what controls it,” Dainn said, uncertainty in his voice, “but I do not believe so.”

  And how many times has Dainn been wrong? Mist asked herself. She waited for Dainn to dismount and then did so herself. A chill gust of wind sweeping across the plain caught her loose hair, flinging it across her face and into her mouth.

  “Are you all right?” she asked Dainn, pulling strands away from her lips.

  “Yes,” he said. His bare feet slid on brittle grass, and Mist thought he was focusing just little too much attention on catching his balance. The ragged ends of a loose, blood-soaked bandage fluttered around his right hand. When he looked up, he saw her staring and attempted to hide the injured hand behind his back.

  Mist moved to grab it, unwound what remained of the bandage—soaked through with Loki’s magic as well as Dainn’s blood—and held his hand palm up between her own. The scar she’d noticed before was red and angry, tracing a swollen path across his skin.

  She didn’t have to ask if it hurt.

  “What happened?” she demanded. “I came back to the loft and found blood everywhere.”

  “I apologize for any damage,” Dainn said, pulling his hand free of hers.

  She was much too angry to laugh at his ridiculous sense of priorities. “How did you get free of Gleipnir?” she asked.

  “That is how I reinjured my hand,” he said in a perfectly calm and reasonable voice, as if he snapped unbreakable magic chains every day. “The Chain could not hold me.”

  “So this puts us back at square one,” she said wearily

  “Then did you return, when you might have been rid of me?”

  “Rid of you? Because Vidarr might have killed you?” she asked, looking up at the incredible display of stars. “I think he would be the one pushing up the daisies.”

  “I thought you meant to save Anna and Orn.”

  “That was my intention,” she said. “I was pretty pissed off when I found you’d left the loft. I just about gave up on you. But the idea of leaving you with Loki…” She hunched her shoulders. “The idea of letting you run loose where I couldn’t keep an eye on you just seemed too dangerous.”

  Dainn looked away quickly. “So you returned to Asbrew, and I was no longer there.”

  “I thought Loki had taken you back to his headquarters, but once I tried out a couple of basic tracking spells I realized Laufeyson had left Asbrew without you. I went looking, figuring you’d escaped, and there seemed to be some kind of blockage every time I got near this area.” She rubbed a smudge of muddy slush from her chin. “I’d never run across anything like it before. I don’t think I would have found you if not for this.” She jerked up her wrist to display the tattoo. “It nearly burned my hand right off again.”

  “But it aided you this time.”

  “Yes. And at that point, it suddenly became a game of hot-warm-cold. It still took me hours to find you.” She looked for the child, who was walking toward a herd of horses, eight or nine of them watching his approach with pricked ears. “Who is he, and why is he with you?”

  “The boy … transported me from Asbrew,” Dainn said. “We only just arrived.”

  “Six hours after you left?” She did a double take, staring at the boy again as if she’d only just seen him. “Wait. You mean he teleported you or something? Who in Hel is this kid?”

  Dainn flinched, a small muscle jumping under the skin of his cheek. He tucked his injured hand behind his back. “It is complicated,” he said. “He—”


  Before he could finish, the boy, chortling with laughter, led the horses toward her and Dainn, the animals flaring their nostrils and twitching their elegant ears forward and back. The mare in the lead bobbed her head in a friendly gesture, and the gelding right behind her nickered a greeting.

  They encircled Dainn and Mist, bumping and prodding at their heads, necks, shoulders, and arms, lipping at loose hair. Dainn stroked their powerful necks, whispering endearments in the tongue of the Alfar.

  One of the horses poked its head over Dainn’s and thrust its muzzle right into Mist’s face. She jerked her head aside, not because she didn’t like horses but because she wasn’t in the mood to get a mouth- and nose-full of slobber in her face.

  “This sure as Hel isn’t Ginnungagap,” she said. “Where are we?”

  “Somewhere else in Midgard, I believe,” Dainn said.

  “I’d never have guessed.” She examined Danny more carefully. “Did he also—““I can confirm that Vali is a traitor,” Dainn said suddenly, cutting her off. “He promised to help me retrieve Anna and return her to you. Of course I realized it might be a trap, and so it was.”

  “Anna told us. Vidarr was in on it, just as we suspected.”

  “Yes. He was clearly working with Loki in spite of his former protestations to the contrary, but it was his intent to kill me rather than turn me over to Laufeyson. Loki, however, was alerted by Vali, who apparently knows which wolf not to tease.”

  Did you happen to find out why Vid and Vali went over to Loki in the first place?”

  “I believe Vali is acting more out of fear than any desire for power, which is surely what Vidarr hoped to gain by working with the Slanderer.”

  “Then he’s as stupid as I always thought he was. But Vali … why would he tell us where to find Sigrun and Eir if he was going to betray us and give Loki the same information?”

  “Perhaps,” Dainn said slowly, “he is not yet sure where his true loyalties lie.”

  Mist refused to hope that Vali was playing some kind of deeper game against Loki. That kind of subtlety wasn’t in his nature. “Vidarr won’t have that problem,” she said. “Where is he now?”

  “I doubt Loki killed him, which can only mean that Laufeyson still has use for him.”

  “Good luck to him,” Mist said. “At least now Anna’s safe. But Orn—”

  “Loki claimed that he had flown away with the pendant,” Dainn said.

  “When he was pretending to look like me.”

  “You saw?”

  “Anna told me. That was a nice trick. How long did you believe it?”

  “Not long.”

  “But long enough.” She locked her fists behind her back, remembering that the nasty desire to taunt Dainn over his inability to see through Loki’s illusions was only a result of her own frustration. And maybe something even more shameful. “Do you think he was telling the truth?”Dainn hesitated. “I do not believe he has Orn. And if Orn is free, surely he will return to Anna.”

  “Will he?” Mist grunted as the affectionate horse bumped her chin, nearly breaking one of her teeth. “I still don’t know why the Hel he came to me in the first place. She stared hard into Dainn’s eyes. “Again, who is this kid? Why did he transport you, and how did this … portal appear right in the middle of Lefty O’Doul?”

  “As you said, this”—he gestured toward the small distortion hanging in the air—is not a bridge between worlds. “It is clearly meant to connect one part of Midgard to another.”

  “So how did it happen to appear?”

  He looked at the laughing boy with an odd tenderness in his expression. “I believe that Danny was responsible.” “Danny?”

  He explained Loki’s “visit” in a few terse sentences. Mist knew he was doing his usual job of concealing something important, something he didn’t want her to know. Mist hadn’t thought she could get much angrier.

  She’d been mistaken.

  “Loki came to the loft,” she said, “and you didn’t bother telling me?”

  “Calling your attention to Loki’s visit would have resulted in a battle you could ill afford so soon after the last, and you know what might happen if I felt compelled to attack him. He seemed quite intent on claiming he had nothing to do with Jormungandr’s actions.”

  “And you actually believed him?”

  “I—” He broke off, and then rushed ahead. “I am certain that it is this child, not Loki, who sent Jormungandr, and perhaps the manifestation of Freya at the loft. Not because he wished to cause harm to us, but because he was led to these acts without understanding what he did.”

  “This kid?” “Even so.”

  “Led to them? By Loki?”

  “Yes. Because Danny is Loki’s son.”

  “I have to find Orn,” Anna said, feeling as if the factory walls were closing in around her.

  Bryn and Rota, who had been watching her for the past couple of hours as if she were a piece of crystal a stray breeze might shatter, shook their heads in near unison.

  “You have to sit tight,” Rota said soothingly, primping her endless tumble of red locks . “We don’t know where to look for him yet, but you can be sure Mist’ll put everything into it.”

  “Loki made himself look like Mist so he could get to Dainn,” Anna said, nearly running into a defunct and mysterious piece of old equipment, “but he didn’t seem worried about Orn at all. What if he already knows where Orn is?”

  “Maybe he just wasn’t interested,” Rota said. “It’s not as if Orn has told Mist anything useful, if you’ll forgive my frankness.”

  “He might have decided the raven’s no threat to him,” Bryn added.

  “No threat to him?” Anna said, trying to think with her head instead of her heart. “Orn’s tied up in everything that’s happened. I told you that Vidarr made some kind of bargain with Loki so he could get Orn and Loki could have Dainn. But once Loki had Dainn, he’d never just let Vidarr keep Odin’s messenger.”

  “Sit down and drink your coffee,” Bryn said. “This isn’t helping.”

  Anna sat at one of the card tables the Jotunar had set up, taking the cooling mug between her hands and gripping it until her fingers ached. “Maybe Orn escaped while Vidarr was with Dainn and me, or he was already gone, and Vidarr was bluffing all along.”

  “Just so he could kill Dainn?” Bryn said with a snort. “What in Hel was he thinking?”

  “I don’t know,” Anna said. “We don’t even know if he’s alive or dead.”

  “Or if Dainn is, for that matter,” Rota said.

  Anna almost spit out her coffee. “Why has Mist been gone so long? If she thinks Loki has Dainn, she—”

  “Might do something stupid,” Rota said, her full lips pursed. “In fact, we think she already has.”

  “So why aren’t you trying to help her?”

  “We would, if we knew where to look,” Bryn said, folding her arms tightly across her chest. “After we brought you home, Mist went back to Asbrew. She told us not to follow her, but we did anyway. We tried getting into the bar, but the door was warded. If we hadn’t found Vali outside—”

  “You found Vali?” Anna asked. “He didn’t go with Loki?”

  “We don’t know. He got away before we could grab him, but he told us that Loki didn’t take Dainn.” The elf just … disappeared with some little kid.”

  Anna had learned by now not to be surprised by anything her semi-divine protectors told her. “Did Mist see this happen?”

  “We don’t know that, either. Rota and a couple of my people checked out Loki’s headquarters. If Mist had been around we’d have picked up some magical trace. It’s as if she just disappeared, too—bike and all.”

  “That doesn’t mean we stopped looking,” Rota said. “But I don’t think Mist wanted us to find her. And believe me, she can make sure we don’t.”

  “And what do we do while she’s gone?” Anna demanded. She pushed her chair back. “I’m not just going to sit here and—”
r />   “You can’t fight,” Bryn interrupted. “If Loki gets you, he’ll have a weapon to use against Orn.”

  “If Loki thinks he can get Orn back through me,” Anna said, sinking back into her chair, “then maybe my being here means Orn will return to Mist.”

  “Good reason not to go haring off now,” Rota said. “She knows what she’s—”

  She broke off. There were noises from the direction of Illinois, and Bryn shot to her feet.

  “Stay with her, Rota,” she said. “Some of my people are out there, but it sounds like a pretty big commotion.”

  Anna shifted in her seat and strained to hear. Rota was listening, too, and not paying very much attention to her mortal charge. With a casual sweep of her arm, Anna pushed the mug to the floor, where it proceeded to break into chunks and splash coffee all over the concrete floor.

  Rota jumped up, surprisingly strong curses coming out of her sensuous mouth as she noticed the dark liquid splashed on her red leather spike-heeled boots.

  “I’m sorry!” Anna said. “I’ll get a mop right away.”

  While Rota was using a paper towel to clean her boots, Anna slipped out through the factory’s side door and sprinted toward Illinois.

  And came to a startled halt.

  The reason for the “commotion” was very clear. There were perhaps two dozen people standing in the street … strangers, some clearly bewildered, some curious, others determined. Anna saw uniforms of several kinds, suits, casual clothing on men and women alike, and Anna knew they were all supposed to be here, no matter what they looked like.

  Mist’s mortal allies, finally come at last. And Anna had a feeling that they were going to be plunged into a boiling cauldron before they’d even felt the steam.

  Nothing Dainn had said of the boy’s appearance at Loki’s headquarters, and again at the loft, had prepared Mist for this.

  “You’re telling me that Loki has a kid no one ever knew about?” she demanded. “Or is he one of the others hiding in a human child’s shape?”

  “I have no doubt whatsoever that he is what he appears to be,” Dainn said. “At first, I believed he was subject to what mortals call autism, or some similar condition. He could hardly speak when I first met him, and showed little interest in the world around him. I have since realized that he possesses abilities that may even exceed his father’s.”