“Do you believe she would temper their rule?”
“You truly have no idea.” He gazed at Dainn’s averted face with bitter satisfaction. “Do you never wonder why Freya has failed to bring even a single one of the Aesir or Einherjar warriors to Midgard, in spite of Danny’s ‘assistance’ with the bridges?”
Dainn didn’t look up, but Loki knew he was listening intently to every word.
“Can it be that her access to Asgard’s Shadow-Realm is still restricted, or could there be a more sinister reason?” He chuckled. “The Sow never told you the truth about our Hnefatafl game for Midgard, did she?”
“She told me everything,” Dainn said, his body as rigid as if he were bracing himself against a physical attack.
“Oh, not everything, I think,” Loki said. “You see, our agreement wasn’t made with the approval of Odin or the other Aesir.”
Dainn looked up. “What?”
“Freya desired to rule as much as I did, but not as only one among the gods. The one thing Freya and I always had in common—besides you, of course—was our opinion of the All-father as a blustering oaf. An oaf with power and a certain cunning, yes, but an oaf nonetheless.”
“You’re mad.”
“To the contrary. Odin was always the mad one, even if I was the only one to see it. When Freya and I met after the Dispersal, we agreed that she would use her magic to keep the other gods in a suspended state until we could determine which of us had the right to this world.”
“Now you are lying. Freya hasn’t that much power.”
“Oh, I know you’d prefer to believe in my lack of honesty rather than accept that you took part in yet another betrayal of the Aesir and your own people.”
Dainn released his breath and rested his hands on the arms of the chair. “If you made such a bargain, it was not while you were in Ginnungagap. Freya intended to take your part at the Last Battle, did she not?”
“I should have known better than to try to deceive you,” Loki said with a mocking twist of his lips.
“And Odin sent his Treasures to Midgard before the end. He knew—”
“That Ragnarok, the Last Battle, would fail to bring the end of all things. You knew that when you came to Midgard. He intended to secure the Treasures for whatever future lay in store for the Aesir, and he knew that future would lie in this world. But he never suspected that others had access to the alternate prophecy that provoked him to take such actions in the first place.”
“Alternate—”
“Freya hates Odin, but you know very well that she is not above employing her sensual talents to obtain what she desires. She heard of the second prophecy given to Odin, and determined to learn the truth of the rumor.”
“She seduced him.”
“Odd that it never happened before, in my opinion. It isn’t as if Odin was ever faithful to Frigga, or any of his other wives.”
“What else did this prophecy claim?” Dainn asked.
“If there was more to it, Freya wasn’t able to find out. Or so she claimed.” He shrugged. “Be that as it may, she was occupied with the All-father when we recognized how useful you would be to us, and I was more than willing to take her place in gaining your … ‘cooperation.’”
Dainn was so rigid and pale that he seemed only another of Loki’s flawless marble reproductions of exquisite Greek sculpture. “You have destroyed the Aesir,” he whispered.
“Oh, they’re still alive, if currently incapacitated. Sleeping, you might say. Though I believe Freya’s work has cost her more than she expected.”
Rising quickly, Dainn forced Loki to move away from the chair and paced aimlessly across the room. “So the gods cannot interfere with your plans, or Freya’s,” he said, “and Mist’s hope of their coming—”
“Indeed,” Loki said. “Mist is fighting for this world with no conception of the true odds she faces. And Freya is very unlikely to have to have told her, n’est-ce pas? It would certainly seem a worse betrayal than you ever committed.” He paused dramatically. “Or would it? You never did inform Mist of the danger her mother presents to her, did you?”
The faint twitch of a muscle in Dainn’s jaw was enough to tell Loki that he’d made a palpable hit. “But of course,” Loki continued, “I distinctly remember your saying some time ago that Mist was too strong for Freya’s possession, and that she’d cast the Lady out during the battle of Lefty O’Doul Bridge. I’m sure that must give you quite a sense of relief.”
Dainn stopped abruptly and swung around to face Loki. “Why are you so certain that Freya will not decide that calling on the gods to defeat you is more important than ruling Midgard alone?”
“Because she’d rather die than submit to Odin again. But you must know what an evil fate that is.”
The antique grandfather clock chimed, and Dainn flinched. “Do the Alfar know how Freya intended to betray the Aesir?” he asked.
“I doubt they would serve her if they did.”
“And the Vanir?”
“She is, of course, much more favorably disposed toward her own kin. It was agreed that they might be brought over if I summoned my Children, which of course I always intended to do in any case.”
“And you also intend to use Danny to—”
A flash of light from the monitor silenced Dainn, and Loki followed his gaze to the screen. Danny was standing on his bed, hands lifted and held wide apart. Between them, a formless, dark cloud spun slowly, the shifting gray mass pierced with tiny points of light. Connecting all of them was an enormous tree, its roots and branches extending to the ragged margin where the cloud ended.
Loki forgot to breathe. He recognized what Danny had summoned, though he had seen it in its pure form only a few times in his life: once, when he and Freya had stolen it from Dainn, and again when Dainn had come to kill him just before the Dispersal, calling upon lingering fragments of ancient magic—reawakened, perhaps, by the curse Odin had placed upon him.
Such magic was the only kind that could truly control the Eitr: life-giving, poisonous, extraordinarily dangerous in the wrong hands … or in ignorant ones. Now Danny displayed it for his parents to see, balancing the stuff in his palms as if it were a ball. A toy that could destroy the universe.
Glancing warily at Dainn, Loki tried to read the elf’s expression. He had never been entirely sure how much Eitr had remained within Dainn after the theft. It was not the slightest comfort to him that Dainn had shown no sign of regaining control of the Eitr in Midgard.
Had Danny inherited the ability to hold it within himself in the way only Dainn had been able to do? Was this the true source of the boy’s extraordinary ability, the ability Loki had never been able to clearly define?
Dainn made a sound in his throat, and Loki focused on the screen again. The tree within the cloud of magic had flung branches in every direction, stretching beyond the border of the amorphous cloud to every side and corner of the room. Wherever the branches touched, the walls and ceiling seemed to become liquid, fluid margins expanding around dark centers.
With a soft oath in a language spoken and abandoned millennia ago, Dainn started for the door. Loki was prepared to stop him and go to Danny himself when the energy between the boy’s hands began to collapse, the branches withdrawing, the walls of his room becoming solid again. The cloud became transparent as the lights within it winked out one by one.
Then it simply vanished. Loki and Dainn stared at the monitor in shock. Danny dropped his hands and sat quietly on the bed, as if nothing unusual had happened. Vali stepped into the study, filling the entire door frame with his Jotunn-sized bulk.
“What is it?” Loki snapped.
Vali glanced at Dainn with a slight frown. “There’s trouble in Civic Plaza, where you and the mayor held your press conference,” he said.
“What trouble?”
“Some kind of protest, according to Hymir.”
Loki hesitated. It was doubtful that Danny would be able to articulate what he’d done, but ther
e was a risk in exposing Dainn to the Eitr if Danny chose to summon it again. If Dainn’s lost memory was triggered in any way …
“Vali,” he said, pulling the man aside, “inform Danny’s guards that Dainn is not to enter his room under any circumstances.”
Odin’s son cast Dainn another uneasy glance. “Yes, sir.”
Without addressing Dainn again, Loki strode from the room.
* * *
Dainn realized that Loki knew exactly what they had just witnessed, just as he recognized that something extraordinary had happened in Danny’s room. From the moment his son had summoned up that peculiar energy and balanced it so lightly between his hands, Dainn understood that the boy had found a new source of magic … or reawakened a hidden one that had been there all along.
Power, uncannily familiar. So familiar that Dainn had almost felt it move in his own body.
During Loki’s revelation of his scheming with Freya in Asgard and Freya’s purposeful betrayal of the other Aesir—and of Mist’s vain hope of aid that would never come—Dainn had been numb with despair and self-contempt. Now he felt as if he had been sleepwalking and suddenly found himself on the edge of a cliff: a single step forward would either send him plunging to his destruction, or reveal hidden wings that would lift him toward the invisible sun. He felt more alive in this moment than he had in months.
Alive, and angry, as if he had just discovered that something even more precious than his elven magic had been taken from him by forces beyond his control.
He left the room ten minutes later, well aware that he would meet resistance from the Jotunar who guarded Danny’s room. He found no one on the stairs. But when he faced the Jotunar outside the hall that contained Danny’s room, they folded their arms across their chests and glared or smirked at him, contemptuous or resentful of his place as Loki’s favorite.
“Let me by,” Dainn said.
The smallest of the guards, all wiry muscle and sneers, snorted derisively. “We’ll let you by when Loki tells us to. Go back to his bed like a good little she-elf.”
Dainn didn’t argue. The impulse came naturally to him, without thought or strategy behind it. He envisioned the energy Danny had summoned, closed his eyes, and reached out with his mind. He felt the swirling gray mist before he opened his eyes again, hovering before him just within his reach.
He plunged his hands into it, felt it coalesce around his fingers and seep into his skin. The shock was a physical sensation of brutal pain followed by sudden numbness. Through the fog he could see the Jotunar’s eyes widen, their faces waxen like those of unpainted dolls.
“Let me by,” Dainn repeated.
Moving like automatons, the guards stepped to the side. They stared at Dainn in confusion as he pushed past them and grasped the doorknob of Danny’s room. Then the energy faded, and at once the Jotunar were behind him, reaching out to detain him with iron grips.
But not quickly enough. Light engulfed Dainn as soon as he entered Danny’s room, striking him full in the face and streaking past him to blast the Jotunar behind him.
Literally blinded, Dainn heard a chorus of yelps and curses as the Jotunar retreated. He slammed the door shut, leaned his weight against it, and lifted his arm to protect his eyes.
The area of the bed was the source of the light, but Dainn could barely make out the shape of the furniture, let alone find his son. He took a step away from the door, the radiance beating against him like the aftershock of a nuclear explosion.
“Danny!” he called.
“Dainn?”
The voice was so faint that Dainn could barely hear the word, let alone who spoke it. He pushed forward, calling Danny again.
But when the blinding radiance contracted to a tiny pinpoint and vanished, leaving the room cast in ordinary light and shadow, it was not Danny he saw first.
6
Mist sat on the bed beside the boy, her hands resting on her thighs, her grave gray eyes fixed on Dainn’s. Danny’s knees were drawn up to his chest, his gaze turned inward as if he were not even aware that Mist was in the room.
“He’s all right,” Mist said.
Dainn braced himself against the nurse’s chair and stared at the Valkyrie. In every way, she looked as he had last seen her. In spite of the many battles she must have fought and all the responsibility she carried upon her shoulders, she was as beautiful as she had always been. Her hair was arranged in its usual thick braid, her jaw was set in stubborn determination, and her eyes saw through him as if he were made of glass.
In every way, she was real.
“Mist?” he whispered.
She rose from the bed. “I have a question for you,” she said, as if they were in the middle of a discussion. “You know Freya as well as anyone. What does she really want of me?”
Struggling to find his tongue, Dainn glanced again at Danny. “I don’t … understand,” he said. “How did you—”
“You must know,” Mist said. She took a step toward him. “She keeps insisting that I use my abilities. All of them.”
Dainn’s thoughts spun around each other too quickly for him to grasp. “No,” he said. “You must go.”
“Are you listening to me, Dainn?” Mist asked. She took another step, and Dainn felt his body go hot and hard, his pulse pounding in his throat as she came nearer. “My mother wants to join our powers somehow,” Mist said. “But something doesn’t seem—”
Suddenly she glanced over her shoulder—not at Danny, but at something only she was able to see. Dainn closed the distance between them and reached for her.
“Mist,” he said.
She turned to look at him, a remote pity in her eyes. Her body caught fire, and her hair uncoiled from its braid, rising around her head like golden flame. Somehow, the strange energy was in her, too, taking a different but just as potent form. Dainn stumbled back, feeling his own flesh begin to burn.
And then she was gone. Danny was still sitting on the bed with his back against the headboard, but his eyes were wide open—not with fear, but with surprise.
“Papa?” he said.
Dainn forced his muscles to unlock and knelt on the bed. “Are you all right?” he asked.
The boy looked into his father’s eyes with perfect comprehension … awake and alert, as he so often was not.
“Yes, Papa,” he said. “I’m all right.”
Dainn glanced up at the burned-out cameras over the bed. “Did you see her, Danny?” he asked.
“You mean Mist?”
Dainn released his breath, reminding himself to control his emotions. “Yes. Did you bring her here?”
“There was so much light,” Danny murmured.
“Is that where she came from? Out of the light?” He dropped his hands to Danny’s thin shoulders. “Did you open a portal?”
Danny blinked. “No,” he said. He raised his hands and stared at them as if they belonged to someone else. “She came from here.”
A manifestation. Dainn laughed silently at his own foolish hopes. He had been too dazzled to realize how bizarre her appearance had been. His heart had blinded him even more than the light.
Mist could not have penetrated Loki’s lair easily, and if she had, she never would have come merely to question Dainn.
But now he knew that Danny did remember Mist. Or it might be that he had merely plucked the image, perfect as it was, out of Dainn’s thoughts. As he could have done a thousand times in the past days and weeks and months, if he had wished to do so.
But he had chosen this time, just after he had revealed his new magic. And he had not merely re-created Mist; he had taken Dainn’s own fears about Freya’s intentions and given them voice and form.
But it wouldn’t be necessary for Danny to share his father’s emotions to do what he had done; he might simply have “replayed” Dainn’s conversation with Loki, taking the words from Dainn’s memory, guilelessly reinforcing the doubts Loki meant to sow in Dainn’s mind. Merely an echo of something Danny himself might not underst
and.
“Danny…” Dainn began, hardly knowing how to begin.
Danny stared up at him, his lower lip trembling, his eyes welling with tears. “Do you hate me?” he asked.
“Hate you?” Dainn took Danny’s face in his hands. “Why?”
“I made you sad.”
“No,” Dainn said, his heart making a concerted effort to pull itself apart. “No more than I could hate—”
He had almost said “myself.” But he had hated himself all too many times since he had learned how Loki had used him in Asgard.
He took Danny’s small hand and pressed it against his chest. “Danny, can you feel what I feel?”
The boy’s brows drew down. “You aren’t angry.”
“What else?”
“You love me.”
“Yes.”
Danny sighed deeply. “You love her, too.”
Utterly unprepared for Danny’s words, Dainn found no answer.
“Do you love her more than me?”
“You are my son,” Dainn said, gathering Danny close. “I could love no one more.”
“But you don’t love him.”
Dainn stiffened. For all Loki’s accusations, Dainn had never encouraged Danny to hate Loki, though he had on occasion tried to convince Danny to teleport both of them out of their prison. But he had guessed that Danny held no particular affection for his “mother,” especially after he had turned a manifestation of Dainn’s beast against Loki.
But there was still so much Dainn didn’t know about Danny’s true feelings. He had learned more in this single brief conversation than he had done in months of painstaking interaction.
“No,” Dainn said, releasing Danny gently. “Do you?”
“He took care of me, in the other place. The Void.”
“I know he did,” Dainn said. “But he has—”
He broke off, realizing that he might finally have a chance to show Danny through his own thoughts and emotions what Loki truly was, what he had done, what he would do to Mist and all of Midgard if he won the battle. He might make Danny see, in a matter of moments, what this world was … make it real to his son as it had never been before. Make him understand that it must be protected, and that Danny had the power to help.
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