Mist finished her work well after ten that night. Eric hadn’t returned or left a message on the cell phone he had insisted she buy several months ago. She found herself strangely restless in spite of her hard work at the forge. She fed the cats, put on her leather jacket, and left the house.
Dogpatch was far from quiet even at this time of night; it was becoming fashionable with young professionals who frequented the growing number of clubs, restaurants, and galleries tucked between warehouses and ancient Victorian cottages. It seemed even more crowded now that Christmas was coming; colored lights festooned the old houses and shops, and someone had set a decorated tree on the roof of the recording studio across the street. Mist bypassed the busier streets, heading north and west toward Potrero Hill and the Mission District.
It was a long walk to Golden Gate Park on the opposite side of the city. Mist reached it before midnight and entered the park from Arguello Boulevard. Unlike Dogpatch, the park was deserted except for the homeless and vagrants who spent their nights wrapped in tattered blankets under bushes, huddled against the damp winter chill. There would be no Christmas for them.
Christmas. Yule, as it had been known before the coming of the White Christ. The time when the barriers between the planes of gods and men were thinnest.
Mist shivered and laughed at herself. There were no barriers, and no one to cross them. The solstice was nothing but an excuse for celebration, an end to the darkness and the coming of a new year.
She crossed Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and headed toward the Arboretum. Fog began to settle over the nearest trees, turning the park into a ghostly realm of indistinct shapes and ominous silence.
The fog . Mist stopped, lifting her head to test the air. Fog like this came in the summer, when warm Pacific wind blew over the colder waters along the coast. A sudden, bitter chill nipped at Mist’s hands and face. There was nothing natural about this cold, or the icy vapor that stretched frigid fingers along the ground at her feet, slithering and hissing like the World Serpent bent on devouring everything in its path.
Disbelief shook Mist with jaws of iron. She knew the smell of the vapor and what it portended. But the j?tunar , the frost giants, were as extinct as the great sloths or woolly mammoths that had walked the North American plains.
It wasn’t possible. She must be going mad. Too many years alone. Empty years, centuries, millennia, protecting a weapon that would never be used again.
A low, screeching howl pulled Mist out of her bitter reverie. A face emerged from the vapor, rising two heads above Mist’s generous height. Broad, heavy, filled with anger and fell purpose.
The cold eyes fixed on hers. The mouth, with its rows of teeth filed to points like daggers, gaped in a grin.
“ Heil , Odhinn’s girl,” the j?tunn said, his voice deep enough to shake the very ground under Mist’s feet. “Or can it be that I am mistaken? Is this what the valkyrjur have become, mountless and dressed as thralls?”
Recovering her senses, Mist reached slowly inside her jacket for the knife she carried against her hip. It was too late now to draw the runes and burn them, and she had no song prepared that would work against a j?tunn . She had never imagined she would need it.
“How are you called, giant?” she asked in the Old Tongue.
“I am Hrimgrimir,” the j?tunn said. “I know you, Mist, once Chooser of the Dead.”
Mist shook her head, trying to dislodge the nightmare that had seized her mind and senses. Hrimgrimir was the frost giant who guarded the mouth of Niflheimr. His mistress, Hel herself, had perished at Ragnar?k. Like the others, he should no longer exist.
“From whence have you come, Frost-Shrouded?” she asked. “From what dream of venom and darkness?”