Mist

“I don’t know,” she said.

Ryan closed his eyes. “It was our fault,” he moaned.

“Then make up for it by doing what I tell you. Do you want me to walk you up?”

“We’re not afraid,” Gabi said. She pulled Ryan away from the wall and led him toward the hall door, carefully skirting the bodies without looking at them.

Mist watched them go. She hadn’t wanted them here, but it seemed Dainn had been right. They’d come for a reason, and now they were her responsibility. Norns save her.

Grabbing Kettlingr, which she’d laid on the floor near the wall after she’d removed it from her belt, she went straight to the closest Jotunn body. Bakrauf. The blood-filled, empty socket of his right eye stared up at her with seething hatred, even in death.

Willing herself to remember what she’d done before, she raised the sword. There’d been something about the Rune- staves coming alive. Uruz and Kenaz, the Ox and the Beacon. And the elements, the Vanir magic. No logic, no careful spells, just emotion, and need, and power.

But try as she might, she couldn’t make that strange new magic return. Maybe she’d exhausted her energy, the way Dainn had said happened to anyone who used their abilities to their full capacity for an extended time. In spite of what he had implied, she must have the same limits he did. Or like Loki or Freya or other gods, for that matter.

Or maybe it was just because she wasn’t being directly threatened. Dainn’s beast seemed to be provoked by physical or mental threats, and she couldn’t forget what she’d done to him in the living room with those same elemental powers.

There had to be another way. She decided to start from the beginning, the very first things Dainn had taught her. She concentrated on what she wanted to accomplish and drew the Rune-staves in her mind. They hovered before her inner eye, deep gray and seemingly solid, until she began to chant the Runes aloud. Then, all at once, they broke apart as if struck by Mjollnir itself, brittle as glass, shattering into a million pieces.

She tried again. This time the Runes held steady halfway through her chant before the centermost, Raiho, snapped in two. The others quickly followed, each portion vanishing in an explosion of miniscule particles like spores from a mushroom.

After two more tries, Mist knew it wasn’t going to work. Her Runes were fragile constructs, flawed by her inexperience and not nearly strong enough for what she had to accomplish. Holding them in her mind wasn’t enough.

Curse it. It was almost as if her Rune-staves had nothing to cling to, nothing to support them. But she knew instinctively that finding a piece of wood or paper and inscribing the staves wouldn’t help in the slightest.

Something to cling to. Something solid, but not physical. Something as real to her as her own body. If she could find that something, she could make it work. Just the way she could make a steel billet into a sword.

Steel. An image sprang into her mind, as natural as sunrise, and she let it take her. She envisioned her workshop, the glowing coals, the rush of hot air, the clang of metal on metal. She imagined herself picking the first Rune-stave up in her tongs and setting it on the anvil, striking it with her hammer, but not merely to reshape or refine it; with every blow it grew thicker and darker, layer upon layer, until it became heavy as the anvil itself, gleaming black and red.

She set down the tongs and gestured upward with one hand. The stave flew back into its place, suspended in midair, still radiating heat Mist could feel through her whole body. She chose the second stave and repeated the process twice more until the Bind-Rune was complete. She began to chant as she spread her hands, palms down, over the body on the floor in front of her.

Nothing happened. But the tattoo around her wrist began to throb, and she remembered the essential step she had forgotten.

Drawing her knife, she sliced her palm. Again, nothing happened . . . until her blood dripped onto Bakrauf ’s corpse. The Bind- Rune began to glow with its own internal flame, flushing scarlet, blackening around the edges. She “dropped” it onto the 09Jotunn’s chest. One by one the fingers and toes shriveled and burned away to ash. The fire moved rapidly inward, up the legs and arms, down from the head as the hair sizzled and the face melted into slag.

Mist watched intently, tempering relief with caution, half afraid the magic would stop before the work was complete. But in a minute even the ashes had consumed themselves, and nothing was left of Bakrauf. Even the blood surrounding the place where he had lain disintegrated and vanished as if it had never existed.

Without hesitation she moved to the next corpse, Hrimgrimir’s, and forged the staves again. The process was slower this time, and Mist began to sweat. Two full minutes passed before the deed was done.

She ran to the third Jotunn, whose head was detached from his body, and started again, stumbling over the words of the chant. She spilled her blood as she had done before, but the body remained unaffected, and Mist’s time had nearly run out.

Acting purely on instinct, Mist imagined catching one of the smoking Rune- staves in her bare hands. Into it she poured the heat of her emotions: her concern for the kids, her fear for Dainn, her rage at Loki and her own helplessness. She screamed as the red-hot metal burned the stave’s angular shape into her flesh and turned the tattoo around her wrist to a ring of flame.

She chanted through the pain as she dropped the stave onto the body at her feet. It sank through the rough clothing into the lifeless flesh and disappeared. She called up the second and third staves again, letting them sear her palms, charging them with her deepest passions until they, too, fell.

When she looked down, the third corpse was gone, head and all, and so were all traces that it had ever been there. Not so much as a scuff or burn mark streaked the rubber tiles. The burns on her palm were already fading.

But one final task remained. She tried to raise the fire in her mind once more, but it barely sparked before it went out. There had to be some other imagery she could use, something she had lived.

The forest on the border of Norway and Switzerland. The driving snow, the frigid winds, the weather almost as dangerous as the Nazis themselves.

This wasn’t just the elemental magic that still hovered somewhere just out of her reach, or even a Jotunn’s inborn control over the very essence of winter. It was built of her own experiences, and when she chose the Runes she created a template constructed of frost and bitter cold, the legacy of that day when she had parted from Rebekka and Geir.

With the images came the rage and guilt she had never been able to root out from the depths of her heart. She envisioned a brutal North Wind, carrying with it tiny slivers of ice that scoured everything they touched. The wind filled her with such a bitter chill that she thought it would congeal the air in her lungs, but she didn’t stop until every blood vessel and organ in her body was nearly frozen.

Then, with a low cry, she released the gale. The Rune- staves were torn apart as the blizzard roared through the gym, sweeping over the floor, the walls, every corner of the room. It devoured every particle of dirt, hair, or dried liquid, scrubbing away any biological residue Dainn, the stranger, or the Jotunar might have left behind, all without damaging anything else in the room.

The wind died abruptly, and the air turned still and heavy as stone. Mist collapsed to the floor, holding herself up on her hands and knees.

She’d done it. She’d made it work. She’d controlled her magic.

Mist pushed herself to her feet again, lost her balance, and focused on the simple goal of getting to the hallway door. Koji was no longer at the kitchen table. He wasn’t in the kitchen at all.

A card lay face down on the counter. Mist stiffened, remembering the last time someone had left her a note.

The writing was neat and precise. I have to go, the note read, but I’ll call you later today. We have a lot to discuss. – K.

Mist turned the card over to a simple name and address printed in an elegantly minimal typeface. He was who he’d claimed. Koji Tashiro, attorney-at-law.

Had he broken the spell she’d laid on him earlier? And if he had, was he going to the police?

No. He wouldn’t have left Ryan or Gabi here if he’d remembered the slaughter in the gym. And he still had