Chicks Kick Butt

thousand.

The knife shuddered in her fist. Then it began to grow, the blade widening, the grip lengthening inch by inch until it was as long as her arm, long enough to touch the floor and reach above her head.

Gungnir. The Swaying One, the spear that could not miss its mark. The magic weapon Odhinn had entrusted to her in the final moments of his life, as he and the Aesir had entrusted the other treasures to her sisters.

But Gungnir was hers to guard with her life. The rune-spells that protected it from enemy hands also hid its true shape, and would continue to do so until …

Mist closed her eyes. There was no “until.” The evil ones were no more than dust and ash. The old heroism was only a dream. Never again would she ride Gyllir on the battlefield and carry the bravest warriors to Valhöll. She was only an ordinary woman now, a forger of fine weapons, a teacher of lost arts.

It’s time. Time to bury the dead and begin to forget.

Realizing that she was gripping Gungnir’s shaft far too tightly for her own good, Mist relaxed her fingers, sang the spell, and watched the spear shrink to its former size. She hung it carefully back in the case, locked and warded the door, and went in search of Eric.

He was gone. A scribbled note lay on the kitchen table; he’d been called in to work and didn’t know when he’d be back. Sorry, the note read. See you tonight .

Shaking off her disappointment, Mist took a solitary shower, threw on a sweater, and went out to the garage. The sky was flawlessly blue, crisp and lovely, and Mist could smell the tart, briny scent of the bay half a mile to the east. Ordinarily she would take Muni into the city, but this time she had errands to run in South San Francisco, home of the only comprehensive ironworking supplier in the entire Bay Area.

Her Volvo was ancient and often unreliable, hardly the kind of transportation she had been accustomed to in her former life. It rumbled and complained like the great hound Garmr, chained at the gates of Gnipahellir until the final days.

But Garmr was gone, like Fenrisúlfr and Loki and the great serpent Jörmangandr, the giants and dwarves who had fought the Aesir and álfar. Not even shadows remained.

Hardly aware of the drive, Mist completed her errands, her trunk and backseat groaning under the weight of the supplies. When she returned to the warehouse, Eric was still gone. She unloaded the car, arranged the supplies neatly in the shop, and set herself to completing the custom sword she had been making for one of San Francisco’s more influential politicians, a man who had never fought a real battle in his entire life.

Mist paused to wipe the sweat from her forehead and stared into the glowing coals in the firepot. Even Eric, strong and skilled as he was, wore tailored suits and went to an office every day, his sphere one of endless documents, dull meetings, and deadening paperwork.

That was the world he lived in, the world she’d chosen for his sake. And hers.

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 jötunar , 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 jötunn 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 jötunn . She had never imagined she would need it.

“How are you called, giant?” she asked in the Old Tongue.

“I am Hrimgrimir,” the jötunn 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 Ragnarök. Like the others, he should no longer exist.

“From whence have you come, Frost-Shrouded?” she asked. “From what dream of venom and darkness?”

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 jötunn 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 jötunn 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