Hrimgrimir laughed. “No dream, Sow’s bitch.” He blew out a foul, gusty breath. “A pity that you chose her side. You might have lived to see the new age.” He reared out of the vapor, huge hands curled, his power and giant-magic swirling round about him like the sleet he wore like ice-forged armor. “You will tell me where it is before you die.”
Mist felt his assault in body and soul, and her fingers slipped on the grip of her knife. She staggered back, pulled it out, and rubbed the runes engraved with such painstaking care by Odhinn himself. Like Gungnir, the knife began to stretch, to broaden, to become what it was meant to be.
“My kitten will silence your boasts,” she said into the howling wind that beat against her. She lifted Kettlingr and took a step forward, body bent, legs tensed to leap. A great ice-rimed hand swung toward her like a mallet meant to crush and shatter.
She struck in turn, swinging Kettlingr upward as the hand descended. The j?tunn howled. Hot black blood splattered over her as her rune-kissed blade sank into flesh.
Mist jumped back, ready for another attack. It never came. The vapor fell like a curtain in front of her, a writhing wall of white maggots sheathed in ice. She swung again, but her sword whistled through empty air. The vapor began to recede as quickly as it had come, crackling angrily and leaving a crystalline film on the grass.
Shaken, Mist let the battle-fever drain from muscle and nerve and bone. A cold sweat bathed her forehead and glued her shirt to her back.
This was no nightmare. A j?tunn had returned from the dead, bringing with him an evil no child of Mist’s adopted city could imagine.
Wiping her moist hand on the leg of her jeans, Mist sang Kettlingr back to its former size and sheathed the knife. The shock was nearly gone, yet the sense of unreality remained. Where had Hrimgrimir come from? No j?tunn could walk the earth unnoticed for long. If there was no J?tunheimr, where could such a creature have found refuge from the final battle? Had she been drawn to the park tonight because she had felt his presence? Why had he tried to kill her?
Because no giant can meet a servant of the Aesir without enmity . But it was more than that. He’d known who she was. He’d been waiting for her .
“You will tell me where it is before you die.”
Mist stared blindly at the trail of blackened grass Hrimgrimir had left in the wake of his retreat. All the assumptions she had made that morning crumbled like bones scoured by the relentless assault of time and nature. Odhinn had been right. The ancient evil had come for the Swaying One.
She fought off a wave of panic and forced herself to concentrate. Hrimgrimir had threatened her, but he’d given up and fled in the middle of the duel. And what use would a lone survivor, evil or not, have for Gungnir when there were no battles left to fight?
“You might have lived to see the new age.”
Whatever he’d meant, a “new age” didn’t sound like something one j?tunn could create on his own.
Moving quickly, Mist followed the giant’s trail, her boots crunching on the frozen grass. The park was still silent save for the wind in the treetops and the distant roar of a motorcycle on Lincoln Way. The fine hairs on the back of her neck stood as rigid as a newly forged blade. She had gone only a few hundred feet when the track disappeared completely. No trace of the j?tunn remained.
And yet, as she stood still and opened her senses to the unseen, the feeling of something out of place began to grow again. Something different this time. Something that froze her blood as surely as the j?tunn’s cruel wind.
From her jacket pocket she withdrew the small piece of driftwood she always carried, though she had never thought to use it for such a purpose. She was a valkyrja, not a sorceress . The magic might fail, or even turn against her.
Still, she had to try. She unsheathed the knife, held the driftwood against the trunk of the nearest tree, and began to carve. The runes sizzled as she cut them into the wood: ūruz, Thurisaz, Ansuz. As she completed the last, the wood twitched in her hand as if it were alive and seeking freedom.