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Over the long centuries Dainn had gradually taken control of the beast, only to lose it again. But Danny was still the heart of his ancient magic, the embodiment of everything Dainn had lost in the Dispersal.

Dainn grabbed Danny and held him in his arms, burying his face in Rebekka’s dark hair. Loki made to snatch Danny away. Mist drew Kettlingr and stood over him.

“Back off,” she warned. “This has nothing to do with you.”

“If you interfere again,” Loki said, jumping to his feet, “our alliance—”

He broke off as Konur’s lieutenant, Hrolf, jogged up to them. Hrolf glanced from Loki to Mist and then to Dainn, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Konur sent me,” he said. “We are hard-pressed. Odin is using more human shields gathered from outside the park, and Hel is still absent. Without her dead to fight the Einherjar…”

“I’m coming,” Mist said, getting to her feet. “Loki, you’d better find your daughter if you still want to win this war.”

“I’m taking my son away from here,” Loki said, lunging toward Dainn.

But Danny was no longer there. Dainn’s arms were empty. He looked up, his eyes almost calm.

“Where is he?” Loki demanded, grabbing Dainn’s collar.

“I don’t know,” Dainn said. “I believe he is safe.”

Elf and godling stared at each other, but Dainn’s impassiveness gave Loki nothing to fight. He cursed foully and got to his feet.

“I’ll find Hel,” he said, “but there will be a reckoning when this is over.”

With a flash of teeth and a burst of flame that cleared the ground of snow within a six-foot radius, Loki transformed into a crow and hurled himself skyward into the blowing sleet.

“Why did Danny leave?” Mist asked, kneeling beside Dainn.

But she knew. Danny was afraid. He was afraid of what would become of him if he made the right choice.

Dainn only shook his head. “We should go,” he said. With a brief nod to Mist, he set off toward the distant sounds of battle. Mist caught up to him, and they ran together like wolves on the hunt.

*   *   *

Like an endless wave of soldier ants, the Einherjar crashed upon them.

Rick, Vixen, Roadkill, Tennessee, and the surviving bikers fought with almost suicidal courage; in Hild’s absence, Rota sang like the very soul of the storm; the other mortal recruits surged forward again and again under the command of Captain Taylor and his lieutenants, partially protected by the Alfar, who used their nature magic to entangle enemy feet in tree roots and blind their eyes with dirt and twigs. Loki’s Jotunar beheaded Einherjar with their axes and pounded them into sacks of shattered bone.

But the Einherjar continued to rise from death, and when Mist and Dainn arrived, the situation was critical. Loki appeared a few minutes later with assurances that Hel was on her way. Beside Loki was Fenrir, snapping and snarling at any two-legged being that came near. Dainn threw himself in among his Brother and Sister Alfar, using his dagger with deadly precision and showing precious little regard for his own life. Mist fought beside him. As if he felt compelled to prove his courage equal to theirs, Loki joined Mist and Dainn at the front lines.

Using his gift for illusion, he “increased” the ragged troop of Jotunar by half again, forcing the Einherjar to retreat. He took on the shape of the mighty fire-giant, Surtr, who had once been destined to burn up the Homeworlds in a holocaust of fire. His body turned black and red, a living flame that incinerated anything it touched.

“Do I look like my father?” Loki said to Mist in a voice like hot coals.

Mist parried the swing of an Einherji’s ax and cut off the warrior’s hand. “Surtr?” she grunted.

“Did you never wonder why I have such a gift with fire? Surtr took my mother, Laufey, against her will. She never recovered, even after she”—he cut down a screaming Einherji—“married Farbauti.”

There was little place for compassion in Mist’s heart, but she found that she could pity Laufey. She had given birth to an evil creature, but that creature had never asked to be born as the child of assault.

Before she could speak again, Loki had moved ahead of her. An ax-head bit into his arm, another into his side. He fell to his knees, and the false army of giants behind him dwindled to less than fifty. The remaining Jotunar closed ranks around him.

Then the battle simply stopped, as if someone had laid an apathy spell over all the combatants. Captain Taylor, fighting beside Mist, suddenly lowered his sword with a look of profound bewilderment, and the Einherji he had been fighting did the same.

Odin’s doing,
Mist thought, though it was far too difficult a spell to hold for long. She pressed forward against the magic, and when she found Dainn again, he was facing Odin across a wall of Valkyrie and twenty Einherjar. Dead Alfar, Jotunar, and soldiers lay scattered on every side. A curving line had been drawn on the icy ground, red as blood. More than a hundred captive mortals, paralyzed like caterpillars stung by assassin bugs, floated just behind and above it, each one guarded by a very mobile Einherji, ready to strike.

Mist stared up into Odin’s good eye. “Coward!” she shouted. “Come out of there and fight!”

Odin waved his hand, and a figure rose up behind him, blond-haired and bearded, bearing Thor’s weapons: the Belt of Power, Megingjord, encircled his thick waist, and he held the Hammer Mjollnir with a hand gloved in Jarngreipr, which had once been in Rota’s charge.

With such weapons, Thor had been almost impossible to defeat.

“Vali,” Mist said. Loki crept up behind her and Dainn, his hand pressed to the clotting wound in his side.

“The trick is on you, Slanderer,” Odin called out, smirking behind his beard. “Vali was ever
my
agent, not yours.”

Loki sighed. “I
am
disappointed,” he admitted. “And to think I provided him with those Treasures. One can expect no gratitude from one’s inferiors these days.”

Mist stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

“I admit my judgment was flawed in this matter.”

“In
this
matter?”

With a quick glance at Dainn, Loki shook his head. “Perhaps in more than one. But if we are about to die, it’s of little consequences, is it?”

“Why die when you can run?” Mist asked, sarcasm heavy in her voice.

“If I can keep my son safe, perhaps my ultimate fate is unimportant.”

“You have changed, Loki,” Dainn said quietly.

“Kindly don’t insult me,” Loki said. He snapped his fingers, and flames sputtered from his fingertips. “Shall we?”

“You are too weak,” Dainn said. He met Mist’s gaze. “And you must not face Odin and Vali alone.” He closed his eyes, and Mist “heard” him reaching out to the beast.

All at once Danny was there, sliding down from Sleipnir’s back, Rebekka’s dark hair curling over his shoulders.

“Papa?” he said.

“Come to me, Danny,” Loki urged. But the boy only gazed at Dainn with that peculiar, innocent wisdom that no longer seemed quite so strange. He gave Sleipnir a brief pat on one huge foreleg and walked slowly toward his father.

Dainn knelt, took Danny’s small face between his hands, and touched his forehead to his son’s.

“You should have stayed away, my son,” he said.

“No, Papa.” Danny smiled sweetly and brushed a tear from Dainn’s cheek. “I’m ready.”

Before Dainn could answer, Odin’s Valkyrie came—Olrun, Regin, Hrist, and Skuld—shouting battle cries and sprinting toward Danny with the mad commitment of
berserkir
. Mist swung Kettlingr toward the new threat.

She wasn’t nearly fast enough. Hrist and Regin grabbed Danny by his arms and carried him off, leaping with the grace and speed of battle-steeds. Too late, Dainn jumped up to snatch him back.

Loki stumbled after them, cursing as his wounds spattered blood in an uneven trail behind him. Before Mist could take more than a few steps, the Valkyrie had vanished behind Odin’s wall of Einherjar, and the clash of battle resumed all around her. She heard the pounding of booted feet as the surviving Jotunar fled.

The moment Loki’s foot touched the blood line in the snow, one of the mortal hostages fell to the sword of his Einherji guard. Mist stopped. Loki continued, and another mortal died.

“I know you care nothing for their lives, Laufeyson,” Odin said, “but once you have walked over their bodies, Vali will crush your head with Mjollnir.”

“Stop!” Mist shouted. “Loki, you can’t help Danny this way!”

I can
.

Mist turned. The beast was there, rising on its hind legs, eyes burning with savage intelligence. Dainn’s intelligence, fully aware and in control.

With a wordless scream of rage, Loki hurled himself among the Einherji. As another hostage fell, Dainn leaped after Loki, seized him by his collar, and flung him back over the line.

After that, there was only a blur of black motion as the beast moved among the Einherjar, striking them down with ruthless efficiency before they could murder their hostages. Mist concentrated on getting the mortals across the line to the relative safety of the battle behind her. To her astonishment, Loki had deliberately attracted Vali’s attention and was goading him into clumsy attacks on his former “master.”

But Mist knew that distraction couldn’t last. Odin bellowed a command, and Vali swung toward her and Dainn.

You know what you must do,
Dainn said as he paused to catch his breath, his tongue lolling between red-stained teeth.

Mist knew. She had to call on the Eitr again.

I am with you,
Dainn said.

Swallowing her fear, Mist opened herself to the Eitr. It came to her in wisps of cloud, more gray than white, veiling her face like netting. The root of the World Tree crept up through the soles of her feet.

Easy,
she told herself. She reached for a little more, and the netting became more solid, circling outward to curl around the beast’s face and those of the Einherjar and their remaining captives. Weaving the strands of Eitr, she sent them flying out like handfuls of ribbon, each strand working its way around the feet of an Einherji. The warriors tripped and stumbled as other strands snatched their axes and swords out of their hands and hurled them hundreds of feet away.

Odin shouted in rage, turning the storm into a fury of the elements. Jagged hail rained down on Mist’s head, and Dainn stood over her, shielding her with the beast’s immense, muscular body. As the Einherjar found their feet again, Mist pressed her palm to the earth, awakening the rock beneath, and the ground shuddered as thousands of small stones and pebbles worked their way to the surface. The warriors slipped and slid as they tried to retrieve their weapons. Dainn made certain they didn’t.

“Mist!” Loki shouted. She spun to see Vali hovering over Laufeyson, the Hammer descending in a slow arc to smash the life out of him.

Without thinking, she grabbed a handful of storm and flung it at Vali. The full force of wind and snow, laced with stinging pebbles and sharp stones, struck Vali with the force of a wrecking ball. He fell back, the Hammer swinging wide. Loki scrambled well out of his way.

But Odin had not been idle while her attention was distracted. More mortal hostages emerged from his warriors’ ranks … and among them was Rick Jensen. The big biker hung from Odin’s grip like a puppy by the scruff of its neck, but his face was hard with defiance. Dainn’s beast ran up to stand beside Mist and snarled.

“He is only the first!” Odin shouted. “I will pluck your friends from among your pitiful troops one by one, and they will suffer before they die.”

The cloud of Eitr floating around Mist grew heavier and darker, and the branches of the World Tree growing inside her began to wither. “Let them go, Odin,” she said.

“I could destroy this entire park, and everyone in it … including you.”

The Eitr filled the air with an acrid tang of chemicals, mingled with the sickeningly sweet scent of decaying flowers. What had been a filmy veil became a thick, ropy tangle of black substance like swollen intestines spilling their rotted contents.

Mist breathed in the poison and coughed violently. The hotter her anger grew, the greater the risk that she would tear those grotesque organs apart and let the contamination spread. And there would be more where that came from … endless supplies of toxins and evil magic from the flip-side of creation.

“Don’t, Mist,” Rick croaked. “He wants you to fight him that way. He—”

Odin ran Rick through with Gungnir’s sleek steel blade, and the biker slumped over the shaft. Odin jerked the Spear free and dropped Rick’s body to the ground.

“Do not think of it as losing a friend,” Odin said, “but of gaining another fighter for Hel.”

34

With a scream of rage, Mist called up all her memories of battle, of every fallen companion and friend, of the joy of seeing an enemy fall. The storm screamed with her, and Dainn howled. Her hair crackled with electricity. Kettlingr hummed in her hand. She advanced, knocking the newly risen Einherjar to the ground with blasts of ice flechettes that pierced their armor and tore their flesh in a thousand places.

“Dainn, get the hostages out of here!” she shouted. Swift as a sheepdog, Dainn’s beast rounded them up and drove them away. Then there was nothing between Mist and Odin. But Vali loomed behind his father, Mjollnir above his head, the leather and metal glove like some alien monster devouring his hand.

He came at her without hesitation, swinging Mjollnir to crush her bones. Kettlingr was already there to meet the Hammer. The sword cracked and shattered. Mist dropped it and, as Vali raised Mjollnir again, toppled a dozen moaning, leafless trees from the surrounding groves. The heavy shafts flew to her and stood around her like wooden guardians, linking branches like loving arms intertwining.

The first trees took the brunt of Vali’s blow and split down to their torn and quivering roots. Mist placed spears of lightning into branches that served as arms and hands. Some trees stabbed at Vali, while the branches of others, turned to steel, wrapped around his wrist and dragged his arm and Mjollnir down to his side. He toppled like one of the trees, bound and helpless.