Battlestorm

by Susan Krinard

  “Gladly, as long as you do not insist that I treat the All-father with mercy when he falls into my hands.”

  “I expect no mercy from you, and I want Odin dead.”

  Loki almost shivered. “I believe you,” he said.

  “Then we are agreed,” Dainn asked. “You will keep complete control of Hel and Fenrir, but there will be no disregard of mortal lives. Mist will have final command until Odin is defeated.”

  Loki offered his hand. His scar was swollen and seeping blood. Dainn raised an equally gory hand. Blood mingled with blood as it had done at the making of the oath. Loki felt the shock of the Eitr pass into him and vanish.

  “A kiss to seal the bargain,” Loki said. Dainn turned his face aside, and Loki’s lips brushed his cheek.

  For now, it was enough.

  “I have one suggestion,” Loki said when Dainn stepped quickly out of reach. “If you and Danny feel up to it.”

  “What is this suggestion?” Dainn asked, deliberately wiping his cheek.

  “Find the missing Treasure. Find the Gjallarhorn. With it, we may be able to control when the great battle begins.”

  * * *

  Traffic had come to a stop, dozens of mortals climbing out of their vehicles to point and stare. Late-afternoon pedestrians had dropped shopping bags, purses, and suitcases, forgetting everything but the astonishing sight of the man on the eight-legged horse and the army that marched behind him.

  Mist walked just behind Sleipnir, trying not to see the onlookers the same way mortal pedestrians pretended they didn’t notice the vagrants begging for money on the sidewalk.

  “You will stand with me,” Odin had said—not in anger, as she had expected, but with the calm confidence she had always expected of him … before. “You will not leave my side, and when I require it, you will summon a storm as you did before.”

  She’d known it wouldn’t do any good to ask him why he didn’t use his powerful Galdr to summon a storm himself, let alone try to explain that her magic could all too easily get out of hand.

  Odin wouldn’t care. Today he would make his first daylight strike at his enemy, without regard to Loki’s defenses or the incredulous mortals around them. He had no patience for the games Freya had played, and during the past two weeks he had made very clear that he wasn’t going to continue with skirmishes and raids and back-alley fights. Nor would he bother with the political machines Loki had built.

  No, Mist thought grimly. He was going to make an impression. He knew he couldn’t destroy Loki with a simple, open assault on his place of residence, but that mattered less to him than the declaration of intent. Loki’s subtlety would be of no help to him now.

  Once, it was what Mist had craved herself: plain, honest combat, without subterfuge or trickery. She’d hated the administrative duties that came with organizing mortals into a fighting force, despised the glamour she’d had to use to acquire those mortals. Give her a sword and a Jotunn to fight, and she was in her element.

  Even when she’d known that kind of fight was no longer possible, she’d clung to the ideal. But reality didn’t match what she’d thought she wanted. Odin had ignored her experts—the men and women who had worked so hard to research Loki’s allies, the weak points in his strategies to control the city, the logistics of raids on his illegal facilities. All Odin’s focus had been on training every mortal in the camp to fight, even if they didn’t have the talent for it and wouldn’t be ready for weeks.

  And though he continued to warn of delays in bringing the other Aesir to Midgard, he managed to open bridges that delivered ever more Einherjar, warriors who nearly burst the camp at the seams, eating the food and confiscating bedrolls, working themselves into an ever-increasing frenzy of battle lust.

  Now about a quarter of the Einherjar were strolling along behind Odin, singing and laughing as if they were going to a feast. With them were Anna and Odin’s Valkyrie: Olrun, Hrist, Regin, and Skuld, all armored like Odin and the Einherjar in mail and leather. A good hundred mortal fighters marched behind them, and it was obvious that many of those mortals were unprepared to face Jotunn warriors, let alone to die for a god they’d barely seen. Odin hadn’t even tried to win their personal loyalty or remind them of what they fought for; he had simply used his implacable authority to command them.

  She’d dragged them into this, Mist thought, gripping Kettlingr’s hilt until her knuckles ached. Their deaths would be on her shoulders. As would those of her friends who had insisted on coming: Captain Taylor, walking between the Valkyrie and his fighters; Rick, Vixen, Roadkill, and the other bikers; Konur and a band of ninety Alfar. She’d lost sight of Rota, who was also among the mortals, and Hild, whom she hadn’t seen since they’d left camp.

  At least Ryan was safe; as far as she knew, he hadn’t been with Odin lately, and she hoped that he’d put himself somewhere out of the All-father’s reach. As much as she might like to protect him, he, like Gabi, was old enough to make his own decisions. He’d be better off staying out of the way.

  A van bearing the logo of a local TV station pulled up on a curb just ahead of the column, drawing Mist’s attention. The reporter and cameramen jumped out and set up without wasting a second. The reporter began a running patter, her eyes wide not only for effect but with genuine astonishment. Sirens approached from every direction, and more media vehicles arrived to cover the bizarre spectacle. The flash of cameras and light reflected from cell phone screens pierced the gloom like falling stars, there and gone in an instant.

  By the time Odin was approaching Loki’s headquarters, a bewildered crowd had fallen into step alongside the column. A few mortals laughed or chattered nervously, but most of them were silent.

  They knew something was about to happen. Many might be remembering reports of the mysterious and horrible deaths in North Beach. Since no actual photos or videos of the incident had ever emerged, and no police or emergency vehicles had been able to get into the area until after the killings, reports of dead men and women fighting an armored man on an eight-legged horse had been put down to some kind of mass hysteria.

  But that didn’t keep the news services from reporting on the “delusions” of the witnesses. And a few of these onlookers might actually realize that this was no unexpected parade or protest march or one of the “special entertainment events” the mayor was so fond of providing.

  Odin ignored them all until a dozen police cruisers and emergency vehicles blocked the street in front of him and twice as many cops took up defensive positions, guns aimed and ready to fire.

  Not Loki’s cops, Mist thought. Loki could still have arranged to send them, but he’d expect them to be no more than a momentary distraction, sacrificed to give him a little more time to prepare for the attack.

  The All-father raised his hand, and the column gradually came to a stop. Twenty Einherjar moved forward to join Odin’s personal bodyguard. Half were armed with spears, the rest with swords and axes.

  “Put your weapons down,” a woman’s voice called through a megaphone. “On the ground. Sir, please dismount.”

  “You have one chance,” Odin’s herald called out to the cops. “Stand aside and remove yourselves, or be prepared to suffer the consequences.”

  Mist grabbed Odin’s stirrup. “No, All-father,” she said. “If you expect mortals to fight for you…”

  He looked down at her without anger or reproach. “I will only show them what it means to defy their god,” he said.

  Their god. He had never used those words before.

  “Weapons on the ground!” the woman’s voice shouted.

  “If you hurt them,” Mist said, “you’ll turn the whole city against you.”

  “Fear will teach them a lesson they will not soon forget.”

  “Please, All-father.” She gripped his boot. “Permit me to try.”

  “Very well.”

  She hadn’t expected him to give permission. She didn’t want to do it. But the alternative was exactly the kind of chaos Loki would
want.

  And Odin seemed blind to how he might be playing right into Laufeyson’s hands.

  Striding forward to stand among the bodyguards, Mist closed her eyes. She smelled ozone, felt the latent electricity catch in her hair and raise goose flesh all over her arms. The clouds were already pregnant with moisture, waiting to be let loose.

  Rain, she thought. Rain would be enough.

  No spell was necessary. The elements came at her call, and suddenly hail burst from the clouds, striking uncovered flesh, pinging off metal, sending mortal spectators scurrying away from the street. The cops tried to hold their positions, but the downpour stung their eyes and beat on their hands with such force that they could no longer hold their weapons.

  Odin gestured for his men to continue. A shot was fired, striking a warrior in the vanguard. He began to fall, and one of the man’s comrades threw his spear into the center of the cluster of police vehicles.

  Mist heard the cry as a mortal fell. She heard angry shouts, the woman’s voice rising again, hoarse with the threat of violence.

  Grabbing handfuls of the lowest clouds, Mist dragged them down to cover the ground. Visibility was reduced to less than three feet. Odin shouted at her.

  Then the first Jotunn attacked, bursting from the fog as if he’d been hurled from a catapult. He impaled the nearest Einherji with an ice-spear, and frost spread in snowflake patterns across the asphalt as more and more giants materialized.

  Mist let go of the fog, and suddenly the fight was all around her. She drew Kettlingr and went for the first Jotunn she saw, forcing him away from the man he had been about to kill.

  The giants were going straight for Odin’s weakest point, his mortal soldiers. And neither Odin nor the Einherjar were doing anything to stop them. Instead, the eternal warriors were attacking the Jotunar as the frost giants killed the mortals, while Odin spun Sleipnir around in circles, brandishing Gungnir and bellowing commands. Anna was fighting as if she’d been born with a sword in her hand, but Rick was trying to defend himself against a Jotunn almost twice his size. As Mist moved toward him, one of Konur’s Alfar struck the giant down.

  Moving into the very eye of the storm, Mist called on the elements once more. Thunder rattled the windows of every nearby building, and she snatched bolts of lightning out of the clouds, shaped them, bent them, diffused their energy so that they would stun but not kill. She flung the attenuated lightning at Einherjar and Jotunar alike.

  “Mist!” Odin shouted. “Kill the Jotunar!”

  She looked at him across the battlefield. He was smiling. There was no fear in his eyes, no concern that her magic might threaten him. Only supreme confidence that now, in the heat of battle, she would obey without question.

  The battle would end and the mortals would be safe if she stopped the frost giants. They were the enemy, not the Einherjar.

  When she next gathered the lightning, she flung each bolt with its full complement of lethal energy. One by one she felled the Jotunar, the rush of battle-fever claiming her again.

  Then something changed. She remembered a voice, or a thought, or an image, and the lightning spun closer, clinging to her body like silver armor.

  Odin killed Danny. The memory was wrong, but the feeling, the emotion, was more real than the broken weapons and Jotunn bodies on every side. She summoned another bolt and turned toward the All-father. Her tattoo blazed with living fire.

  Strong arms grabbed her from either side, and a blade nicked her throat. She turned her own body into a live wire, electrocuting the Einherji who held her. Others reached for her, fearless in their loyalty to Odin, and she sent them flying.

  But there was someone else with her, looking into her face with incomprehension and horror. Rota.

  Her Sister. Her friend.

  She let the energy drain from her body. The tattoo winked out. More hands caught at her, held her, forced her to kneel. Odin rode up to her, hand on his hip, while sirens and mortals screamed.

  “I knew,” he said. “You helped Dainn escape. You did not kill him. You always intended to turn against me.”

  “No,” Mist whispered as a dagger nicked her throat. “Not always. I would have been—”

  “Loyal, like my Anna?” He shook his head. “You are too much your mother’s daughter, with all a woman’s weakness and no man’s will to hold your power.”

  “I wanted to … protect—”

  “Your mortals? What are they to the Aesir, except servants, supplicants, and worshippers?”

  “Worship?” she croaked. “Is that what you … demand?”

  “I demand only what was ours, and to reclaim what is mine by right.”

  “Odin All-father … of the Northlands. This was never yours.”

  “No?” Odin raised Gungnir, leveled it, and swept it in a wide arc over the heads of mortals and Einherjar. Wherever it pointed, mortals fell—men, women, and children alike.

  They died. And rose again—walking dead, but not like Hel’s warriors. These, too, were Einherjar of a kind: free will destroyed, all gazing at Odin with sickening adoration. Prepared to serve him for eternity.

  “Loki … was right,” Mist whispered.

  Odin ignored her. “Enter Loki’s headquarters,” he ordered the Einherjar. “Slaughter all within except any who can be questioned.”

  Releasing her muscles, Mist sagged to the ground. Before the Einherjar could drag her to her knees again, she laid both palms on the asphalt.

  The earth shuddered. Cracks radiated out from the place where her hands touched, opening under Sleipnir’s feet. The horse reared, nearly spilling Odin from the saddle. He lost his grip on Gungnir, which went flying. Horja—Anna—scooped it up and ran back to her master.

  By then the earthquake had taken hold, so localized that not even the few mortals who still watched from the sidewalks were affected. Her guards toppled. Einherjar fell in dozens like wheat under a scythe. So did the mortal recruits, but Mist glimpsed Captain Taylor, Konur, and Vixen directing the others to retreat.

  Concentrating until she was sure the quake would continue for the necessary few minutes, Mist scrambled up and ran toward Loki’s building. The doors stood wide open. She could hear someone banging around inside, and so was ready when a pair of Einherjar emerged half-carrying a young woman between them. The red marks on her face told Mist that she’d been struck more than once, and her blouse was ripped.

  Without hesitation, Mist shaped forge-Runes into iron staves that enclosed her fist like a boxing glove and struck both Einherjar in their midsections. They doubled over, releasing the woman, who fell to her knees.

  “My God,” the woman whispered. “My God, my God. He just left me here.”

  “Loki?” Mist asked, helping the young woman to her feet.

  “Nicholas and all the techs got away. I was—”

  “It’s all right,” Mist said. “Loki is gone?”

  “And all the giants, and … everyone but me.”

  Mist glanced back at the doorway. This young woman must be one of the servants Odin had wanted to hold for questioning.

  “They aren’t going to hurt you again,” Mist said. She led the mortal into the nearest room, a large office with handsome, traditional furniture. “What’s your name?”

  “Scarlet,” she said. “Are you Mist?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I can tell, just by—” She gasped, and Mist followed her stare. Incomprehensible Runes, painted in blood, covered the wall just inside the door. A message, left for someone who had the knowledge to read them.

  “Sit down,” Mist said. She laid her palms against the writing, and slowly the alien and yet beautiful markings resolved into ordinary Rune-staves.

  “What does it say?” Scarlet asked with remarkable composure.

  “It says where Loki has gone,” Mist said, sounding out the words in her mind. “It says I’m to join him there.”

  “You? But he’s your—”

  “Dainn,” Mist said, pressing her
palm to the final word. “He was here.”

  Just as she had feared. But he hadn’t killed Loki for any part he might have had in Danny’s death. This was his blood, written in his hand.

  They had called a truce, elf and godling. They had both predicted what Odin would become.

  “You have to be together,” Ryan had said. But to make common cause with the Slanderer—Dainn’s abuser, corrupter of mortals, slaughterer of innocents—

  Like Odin? Mist thought.

  “Are you going to kill Loki?” Scarlet whispered.

  “Do you want me to?” Mist immediately regretted the harsh question, but Scarlet was already shaking her head.

  “He can be a real son of a bitch,” she said. “But he’s…” She shrugged, but Mist could see that the young woman had fallen deeply under Loki’s spell.

  “I won’t harm him unless he tries to hurt me or anyone I’m protecting,” Mist said.

  And since she was trying to protect almost everyone, Loki was bound to screw up. Dainn couldn’t believe this would really work. Dainn, of all people …

  “I can’t stay with you,” Mist said, “but I’ll keep anyone else from getting in here. Is there a back way you can use?”

  Scarlet nodded. “Where do I go?”

  “Right now, just find somewhere safe to wait.”

  “I’d rather go to him.”

  “Not under these circumstances, you wouldn’t.” She glanced toward the door again. “I can make you do what I tell you. But I really don’t want to.”

  The woman got up. “Please,” she said. “No magic. I’ll be quiet.”

  Mist had no choice but to take Scarlet at her word. She checked on the Einherjar as she left; both were out cold and were going to be in a lot of pain when they finally woke up. They’d gotten off lucky.

  Outside, the quake had ended; so had the rain, but the sun might as well have gone out permanently. Red, blue, and white lights reflected off every surface as emergency personnel and cops scrambled back and forth across the street. Odin and the Einherjar were gone, along with the mortal troops. There was no sign of the humans Odin had murdered and resurrected, nor of the mortal and Einherjar warriors the Jotunar had killed.