Mist

the bottom drawer. Kettlingr, in its plain knife shape, lay in an unadorned wooden box where she’d tucked it away when she’d bought the loft three years ago.

Mist unlocked the box, lifted the lid, and took the knife from the padded interior. It felt solid and familiar in her hand, though she hadn’t worn the sword in over fifty years.

Once, it had been the one friend she could rely on. But a sword was the last thing she needed in her “mortal” life. Only her long connection to the blade had convinced her to keep it at all.

She pulled the blade free of its engraved metal sheath and chanted the spell she’d almost forgotten. The hilt thickened to fill her hand. The knife began to stretch, to broaden, to become what it was meant to be. Not so much as a trace of tarnish sullied the Rune-kissed blade.

All too easily it seemed to become part of her again, and that scared her almost as much as anything else that had happened in the past couple of hours. She chanted it small, set the knife on the chest, and retrieved the sheath from the back of the closet, where the sword’s own magic had kept the leather glossy and the metal bright. She looked for the belt, one that could accommodate either an unprepossessing knife or a spatha with equal facility, and found it in a heap on the floor. She picked it up, put it on, and attached the knife’s sheath at her left hip.

Dainn glanced up as she returned to the kitchen, the photo of Mist and Eric in his hand. He’d managed to clean the blood from his face and the swelling in his nose was going down, but he was still a mess.

His gaze focused immediately on the knife. “It may already be too late to catch him,” he said.

She snatched the picture out of his hands and threw it across the room. The glass seemed to shriek as it cracked in a dozen new pieces.

“I’m going to find him,” she said, “with or without your help.”

“He may have succeeded in reaching one of the bridges and returned to the Jotunar’s Shadow-Realm.”

“And you said there are several bridges in this city.” She gripped the edge of the table, working to control her immediate impulse to run blindly out of the house. “Could Loki have gone out the way Hrimgrimir came in?”

“It is possible.”

“Then help me. If you won’t use your magic for fighting, maybe you can distract Loki so I can get Gungnir away from him without either of us getting killed. Isn’t that to your advantage, elf?”

Suddenly he was very grave, his brows drawing down, his jaw tensing until she could see the muscles clench under his skin. “Not to mine,” he said. “To Midgard’s.”

“Then will you help me find him?”

“Yes. But it would still be better if you remained behind.”

“You mean now you want to go alone?”

His expression tightened again. “You have no chance against him.”

“That’s why we need to work together.”

He gave a heavy sigh. “Very well,” he said.

And just like that, he acquiesced. She didn’t understand him at all.

“So how do we find him?” she asked.

“All the bridges Freya has located seem to appear in the vicinity of physical features that link one place with another.”

Okay, Mist thought. Golden Gate Park was, in a way, a link between the city and the ocean, stretching from Ocean Beach to Stanyan Street, even farther if you counted the Panhandle.

But there were a hundred other potential connections. Overpasses? Street corners? Where were they to start?

“Do you have any idea about how to pin it down?” she asked.

“You were close to Loki. Your . . . relationship may have left a residue of connection between you, mental or physical, that will make it easier to find him. If we can isolate this connection—”

Mist’s instincts rebelled before she understood why. She could feel Dainn assessing her, probing, teasing out the source of her unspoken resistance like a woodpecker plucking an insect from the bark of a tree.

“You will need little skill,” he said. “You are not entirely ignorant of Rune- lore.”

Her bad feelings about all this were growing progressively worse. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“We will temporarily join our thoughts, so I can search for such a residue. When I find it—”

“Wait a minute. You mean you’re going to get inside my head?”

“It is how Freya spoke to me.”

“Alfar have this ability, too?”

“To some extent, yes. It is why most work closely together when we practice magic on a large scale.”

The idea sickened her. No one, not even Odin, had ever done such a thing to Mist, and she realized now just how much she would have hated Freya contacting her instead of Dainn. Her mind had always been her own. Always.

“There is no reason to fear,” Dainn said, as if he were already reading her mind. “I can only touch the surface of your thoughts.”

“I can’t do it.”

He took a step toward her, enveloping her in the warmth radiating from his body. “I know you are no coward, Valkyrie.”

Pride made her want to lash out at him, but she knew the impulse was only a cover for shame. She was afraid—not of Loki, but of letting Dainn see her failure, her stupidity, her weakness.

Gods help her.

Dainn returned to the table, dipped his fingers into the ashes, and lifted them to his forehead. With quick, sure strokes he sketched a Bind-Rune above his dark brows. The ashes caught fire, and Dainn grimaced in pain.

Without another word he turned, walked back into the ward room, and sat cross-legged on the floor. Reluctantly Mist followed him.

“Sit,” he said, “and try to relax.”

Mist sat facing him. “You may have noticed that I’ve got this little problem with going blind into a situation I don’t understand. What exactly are you going to do?”

He stared into her eyes, and she observed again how dark his were, so different from that of most Alfar . . . the deep blue that came at the end of twilight, when the brightest stars had only just begun to appear. Fathomless.

But no longer unreadable. There was a sorrow that caught her off guard, just as his brief moments of anger had done.

“You will draw the Runes-staves in your mind,” he said.

Mist had drawn or carved the staves on wood, on walls, even occasionally on paper and other surfaces, especially those that could be burned. She knew how to chant them. But drawing them “in her mind” was something she’d never even considered. Runes had always been physical things, not constructs of mere thought.

She shifted uneasily. “How?” she asked.

“You must concentrate on the shapes, holding an image of Eric in your thoughts.”

“That easy, huh?”

He inclined his head. “Ordinarily I would ask you to clear your mind of all emotion, but in this case it may aid you to allow your feelings to strengthen your will.”

But only, Mist thought, if she could control them. “What Runes do you want me to concentrate on?” she asked.

“All of them.”

Oh no, not difficult at all. Bracing herself, Mist closed her eyes, called up Eric’s face, and imagined the Runes, each of the two dozen of the Elder Futhark in turn, mentally drawing the simple lines that added up to so much more than the sum of their parts. She assembled each Rune-stave carefully, as if she were rendering it in