Chicks Kick Butt (34 page)

Smothered in his bearish embrace, Mist felt the pressure of his body pushing her away from the wall. He was moving her toward the door to the bar, inch by subtle inch.

“Get out of here,” he hissed, his mouth pressed to her ear.

“Where is Vídarr?” she whispered.

“You can’t see him.” They reached the door, and Mist heard the hinges creak. “Save yourself.”

Save yourself
. Vídarr wasn’t in league with the evil ones. He was in trouble. Bad trouble.

Without warning, Mist shoved Váli aside and ran for the back door, swinging Kettlingr in a deadly arc. Hrimgrimir swiped at her and missed. The rest were too startled to intercept her before she got to the back door and flung it open.

Vídarr sat in a battered chair in what served as his office, his face blank as uncarved stone. His eyes barely flickered as Mist entered the room.

“Well, you have created quite a disturbance,” a voice said from the shadows behind the chair. “I had hoped you would take warning and flee. After all the pleasure you’ve given me, I had intended to spare you.”

Eric
. But it wasn’t Eric’s voice. And the figure that emerged from the shadows was not tall and broad, but as lean and wiry as a stoat. Tight black leather covered him from neck to toe. His long, handsome face was smiling. The expression wasn’t friendly.

Mist wasn’t feeling particularly friendly herself. “I’ve come for Gungnir, Slanderer,” she said.

“How charming.” Loki walked past Vídarr without a glance in his direction and stood before her, hands on hips. “You always were impulsive, my dear. That was what made you so good in bed.”

Mist swung Kettlingr at his head. Loki sent the sword spinning to the floor with three short words and a wave of his hand.

“It’s no use,” Vídarr said, his voice thick with despair. “You can’t beat him.”

“Listen to him, Villkatt,” Loki said. “Like you, Odhinn’s son has been corrupted by his long residence in Midgard. He proved remarkably clumsy in his attempts to interfere.” Loki reached for the glass of red wine that stood on the nearby desk and sniffed it critically. “In fact, we had nearly reached an arrangement to the advantage of both of us.”

Mist ignored the pain in her hand and stared at Vídarr. “What arrangement?”

“To use Bifrost as headquarters for my future endeavors. Did you know there are other hidden rooms beyond this one? Very suitable for what I have in mind.”

“Stealing the other treasures,” she said. “But what good would it do you to keep them here? Why didn’t you take Gungnir back to wherever you came from?” She took a step toward him. “Why didn’t you go straight through the passage on the bridge?”

For a moment Loki’s smug expression darkened. “No more questions.” He relaxed and smiled again. “I’ll give you one chance, sweetling. Join me, or you’ll have no more use for such inconvenient curiosity.”

He was probably right. She’d always known the odds of beating him were slim; he was, after all, a god, and her
jötunn
blood wouldn’t be enough to defeat the Sly One. Dáinn had abandoned her, and even Vídarr had failed to stand up to him.

Still, giving up was not an option. And there was one thing she still didn’t understand. Why was Loki offering her a chance to join him? Why had he felt the need to sneak around in the first place, pretending to be her human lover, if he didn’t think she was a threat to him?

There was only one way to find out.

“You were always a coward,” she said. “Go ahead. Strike me down.”

He laughed and sneered at her bravado, and yet he hesitated. Vídarr’s eyes fixed on hers, as if he were trying to tell her something important. Something that might change the game completely.

“What are you afraid of, Slanderer?” she taunted. “My sword is out of reach. You need have no fear of a fair fight.”

Loki’s face contorted with rage. “Pick it up,” he snarled.

Mist dove for the sword before he could change his mind. In seconds she had snatched it up, secured her grip and was ready for attack.

Her enemy wasted no time. All at once Gungnir itself was in Loki’s hand, and he was aiming straight at her heart. The Swaying One hummed in his grip as he let fly. Mist swung Kettlingr with all her strength, desperately singing the runes that might make the difference between life or death.

She wasn’t fast enough, but no cold metal pierced her chest. Gungnir pierced the door behind her shoulder. Loki’s mouth gaped in disbelief as she struck, her blade sinking into his left arm.

She knew it was little more than a distraction. He would heal almost instantly. Still, she brought Kettlingr to bear once more … and froze as Loki’s burning hand clamped around her neck.

“You have tried my patience once too often,” he said into her face, his spittle spraying her cheeks.

“And you’ve … tried mine.” She wheezed a laugh. “You were never … as good as you thought you were. In anything.”

He shook her like a child’s straw doll. “Perhaps I won’t kill you first,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll take you one last time, and show you just how good I am.”

A shudder of loathing drained the strength from Mist’s body. To die was one thing. To suffer such humiliation after what she and Eric had shared …

No.
She stared into Loki’s eyes. “Try it, and I’ll roast your balls like chestnuts.”

Loki flinched, and his grip relaxed.
He’s afraid
. It made no sense, none at all, yet she could feel it, see it in his face.

But what was the key to his fear?

“Freyja is the key.”

Dáinn’s voice, speaking inside her head. This time she was grateful for the intrusion. She shaped an urgent question out of her thoughts, but Dáinn heard it before she was finished.

“Loki has always feared and desired the Lady,”
he said.
“He taunted and mocked her and called her whore because he wanted her but could not have her.”

But that had nothing to do with Mist. Loki’s grip had tightened again, and Mist felt her breath stop in her throat. It was over. She had nothing left with which to fight.

“Halfling,”
Dainn’s silent voice whispered, unraveling like thread caught in a kitten’s claws.
“A
jötunn
was your father. Your mother…”

Dáinn’s presence faded, but he left in her mind a single image. An image of a face she knew, a beauty beyond compare.

Mist silenced her disbelief. She had nothing to lose. She met Loki’s gaze, letting him feel every last particle of her contempt.

“Is that why you pretended to be an honorable man and lied your way into my bed?” she wheezed. “If you couldn’t have the mother, you’d take the daughter?”

Loki’s fingers loosened again. “She was a whore,” he said, his voice not quite steady. “She lay with every
álfr
and god in Asgard, every giant and dwarf in Jötunheimr and Svartâlfheimr. You’re nothing but a—”

He broke off, his face blanching under his shock of red hair. The illusion came over Mist without any effort on her part, a radiant warmth that filled her with a peace she had never known. Loki dropped her and stumbled away.

“Freyja,” he croaked.

Mist raised her hand, and Kettlingr flew into it like a tame sparrow. “It is you who have the choice, Laufeyson. Come back to us.”

Loki’s face slackened. “I … I want—”

Vídarr slammed into him, and Loki staggered. The spell was broken. Loki knocked Vídarr aside with a sweep of his arm and leaped up on the desk. He crouched there, hatred in every line of his body.

“You haven’t won, bitch,” he said. “It isn’t over. In the end you’ll come begging at my feet, eager to service me like the whore you are.”

And then he was gone, vanished into the shadows, the stench of his evil dispersing like a frenzy of roaches exposed to the light.

Mist closed her eyes. The warmth and joy and power were already abandoning her, leaving her an empty sack of skin and bone.

“Mist.” Dáinn came up behind her, breathing hard. “Are you well?”

She turned on him, letting anger erase her despair. “Where were you, coward? You had words in plenty, but where was your magic?”

Dáinn said nothing. He simply walked away. Vídarr got to his feet, popping his shoulder back into its socket.

“Mist,” he said. “You have to believe I never—”

Váli came into the room, grave and utterly sober. “There will be time for explanations later,” he said. “We have more urgent concerns, including a heap of
jötunar
to deal with.”

Mist didn’t ask what he meant. She pulled Gungnir from the door, sang it small again, and strode past him into the other room. There literally was a heap of giants, most unconscious and the rest groaning in pain.

“
He
did it,” Váli said, jerking his head toward Dáinn, who stood quietly in a corner. “I helped a little. But he kept them from interfering while you dealt with Loki.”

Laughter choked Mist’s reply. Had
she
dealt with Loki, or had it been Freyja all along?

My mother
. Mist wasn’t just half
jötunn.
She was half goddess as well. It would take some time to digest that knowledge and understand what it might mean to her. And to the battle that was coming.

She walked slowly over to Dáinn, who refused to meet her gaze. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

But it did. She’d thought of Dáinn as a traitor to his people and to the Aesir. And he had left her during her fight with the
jötunar.
Still, she might have to revise her opinion. So much was changing. The world was growing dark, and her sisters had to be warned. She couldn’t do it alone.

“It isn’t over,” she said, swallowing her pride. “I need you.”

He finally looked up, his mouth quirking in a weary half smile. “I have nowhere else to go.”

She nodded and looked over her shoulder. Váli was busy with a bottle, and Vídarr leaned against the wall, his expression locked as tight as a virgin’s legs on her wedding night.

Maybe they’d help, too. Vídarr still had some explaining to do. But now they had a little time. Maybe it was enough.

“Well,” she said to the room in general, “let’s get this rubbish cleaned up. It stinks in here.”

“
Links! Verdammt,
left!
”
Lukas yelled at Meg, his voice crackling through her headset. “He’s there!”

Ebony trees and jet-black bracken jagged into silhouettes as Meg galloped wildly through the snowstorm. Her hair, braided and pulled back with an elastic band, hit her back like a fist. Deluged by sleet, still she sweated under her standard-issue German police riot helmet. Unlike the others, she’d painted no insignia on it, no coat of arms, no totem. Just her last name: ZECHERLE . The miner’s light attached to the front strobed icy blue on ferocious boughs of fir and pine. Wet splatted on her mask. She smelled the cold, and the mud, and her own stinking fear. Of smoky magick, there was no trace. And of their quarry, no sight.

To her left, the Black Forest raged and shook. To her right, boulders jutted toward treetops, and behind them, she knew, a waterfall cascaded. As if the icy flow had leaped the riverbanks, she was drowning in darkness and snow.

“Meg!” Lukas bellowed. “Reply!”

“Where?” she shouted into her headset. The mouthpiece was loose and she let go of the reins of her massive black stallion, Teufel, with one hand and held the mic to her mouth. “Shit,
where
?”

“You
must
see him! Twelve o’clock!”

Doggedly, she squinted through the protective mask. No night-vision goggles, no GPS, nothing. If the Great Hunt got you and dragged you across the Pale, you were worse than dead.

If they didn’t get that baby back …

Snow. Darkness.

“Then my Sight’s not working,” she announced.

“Bitte?”
Lukas cried. “Not
working
?”

Through her earphones, she could hear the others responding in disbelief. It almost made her smile; they were so serious and smug. But she was clearly in deep trouble, so she spared no time for pettiness.

“I see trees and rocks,” she said. “Period,
kaput.
”

“Meg, where are you?” That was Sofie, Lukas’s twin sister.

“Where the fuck are
you
?” she shouted back.

Static crackled in her ears and snow rushed at her; tree branches smacked her chest, bolted into Kevlar body armor. Teufel grunted, then sailed over a fallen log long before she put her spurs to his flanks. She understood now why they didn’t use motorcycles or ATVs, which had been her first question when Lukas had explained about the magickal Haus of the Knights—Haus Ritter. He’d rolled her eyes and told her she was a typical arrogant American, and that the old ways were best because the old gods were alive and well in Germany. Well, yeah,
heil Hitler
to you, too.

“Meg, just focus,” another voice advised, in the polished, aristocratic British accent of Heath, who had deposited a hundred thousand pounds into a trust fund for her brother and paid off her parents’ refi, just like that, when Meg had protested that she couldn’t leave the States because her parents were too wiped out to deal with anything except their favorite TV shows. “Your Sight manifested. It can’t go away. It doesn’t work like that.”

“It
did
go away,” she yelled, furious. “I’m blind out here!”

Desperately, Meg scanned the flashing landscape dead ahead, then to her left, right. The German Black Forest glared back at her, far from still. Pines and firs shuddered and bowed. Snow poured from the sky. Aside from the voices of her team crackling in her ears—the four other Gifted Border riders on her patrol—the howling wind overpowered every sound, including the steady rhythm of her own horse’s hooves and the staccato pounding of her heart. In their world—of magick, and evil—she was blind, deaf, useless. It was only through sheer accident that she’d wound up on point, ahead of the others on the craggy slopes of the alpine mountain.

Or maybe it had been by design: Sofie had insisted that Meg wasn’t ready to ride, that she’d slow them down. Two minutes ago, the snotty German chick had been in the lead. Now Meg didn’t know where Sofie was, and her precious Sight had failed. Maybe Sofie had cast a spell of some kind to get rid of the deadweight. What had Sofie said?
We travel light, or we die
. Sofie’s thick German accent had made her sound like a mad scientist in a bad movie.

“Turn left!” Lukas shouted.

Setting her jaw, squinting, Meg pressed her heel against Teufel’s flank and the horse turned sharply—directly into the path of a low-lying pine bough. Meg flattened against her horse’s neck, holding on tight as Teufel soared over it, landing very hard. These animals weren’t bred for grace. Or long lives.

Like horse, like rider.

Icicles rattled down on her helmet and shoulders. Thank God for her body armor, uncomfortable though it was. And her kicker boots, which she’d insisted on wearing. She wasn’t losing her steel toes for anything. Though truth be told, her feet were freezing.

“Meg?” That was Heath, again, eagerly welcomed into their ranks six months ago by Lukas and Sofie. Meg was the newer newbie. Not a lot of eagerness on Sofie’s part when Lukas showed up with Meg, like a little boy with a stray puppy he wanted to keep. Heath was a European and he had a strong Gift. Plus he was incredibly hot, and Sofie was on her own Great Hunt to get him into bed. Meg supposed it made sense for Sofie to be a little bit German-centric, given her vocation as a Bavarian Border guard. But Meg would have thought she would be a little more human-centric, given what they were guarding the Pale from.

“Where are you?” Heath persisted.

“Unknown.” She was out of her element; this was crazy. “I can’t see anyone.”

“I’m coming for you,” Heath said.

“
Nein
. Heath, keep going.” That was Sofie. “We’re almost at the Pale.”

How did Sofie know? What could she see?

White-hot lightning crashed, revealing a rider to Meg’s left—Edouard, the fifth member of their team. The Haitian held up his gloved hand in salute. She returned it as Teufel increased his speed, slaloming around trees like a skier.

“Eddie at nine o’clock,” she announced.

Sofie said something in rapid French, Eddie’s language, and Eddie answered. Everyone on the team spoke at least two languages; unfortunately, Meg’s second language was Spanish, and no one else spoke it. After a month in Bavaria, Meg still couldn’t understand 90 percent of what Sofie said—in any language. Her accent was very heavy.

“Going ahead of you, Meg. I’m too close to the Pale,” Eddie informed her, rising in his saddle jockey-style.

Like her, he was dressed in black body armor over a black cat suit, camouflage for their night ride. Their saddles were black leather, too, and each had an Uzi and a crossbow strapped behind it. She was a good shot with a submachine gun; she had that going for her. But what use was that if she could never see the target?

A curtain of snow swallowed Eddie up. To dodge another tree limb, Meg cantered left, in the direction from which Eddie had just retreated.

“Also,
Meg,
vorsicht!”
Lukas yelled as Teufel lost his footing, and dizziness hit Meg like a fist. Vertigo fanned from the center of her forehead, smacking her temples and ripping in a zipper down the back of her neck. Jerking on the reins, she imagined the top of her head exploding and her brains shooting like a geyser toward the moon.

She knew she was skirting the Pale. The Great Hunt must have crossed over. If so, Team Ritter’s mission had just failed. Humans, Gifted or not, couldn’t cross the border between the realm of Faerie and humankind. Or so they’d told her. They seemed to be telling her a number of things that might not be true.

She thought of that little Mexican baby, six weeks old. Her stomach clenched as the old anger overtook her. She wasn’t turning back, not this time.

Screw it,
she thought.

“Giddyap,” she ordered Teufel. Not the proper German command, but she couldn’t remember what it was. She put her spurs to him, and he obeyed. She grabbed her mouthpiece and held it still, wanting to make sure she was heard. “Proceeding for extraction.”

“Nein!”
Lukas yelled.

“No, abort!”
Heath’s voice cracked in her ear.

Dimly she heard the four of them shouting at her as she leaned forward and kept her head down. The pommel pressed into her stomach as she gathered up Teufel’s mane in her fists.

For one strange moment she saw herself back home three months ago, out in the desert with the temperature topping 110. Before she’d known there was a Great Hunt or a Pale. Before she’d met Lukas. Red hair in a bun, khaki fatigues, mirrored sunglasses, Beretta in her hand and another in Jack Dillger’s. Opening the door to the stolen U-Haul and seeing what the
coyote
had left—seven desperate Mexican nationals attempting to cross illegally: six dead, one alive; and that one nearly dead and begging for water, and begging more desperately not to be sent back across the border.

“Lo intentaré de nuevo.”
I will try it again. He said it through cracked, bleeding lips, and then he burst into heaving sobs, crammed as he was among corpses.

Holding the baby in her arms, Meg had started to cry, too. She never broke down in front of anyone; she was a tough bitch, but that day her mirrored sunglasses could do only so much. That damn desert day of the dead she had cracked apart, right down the middle.

Shortly after that, Lukas had contacted her. And now she was here at a very different border.

The howling wind shimmered into silvery wind-chime voices:

Oh, come and go with us,

Death never visits us

Oh, come and go with us …

“Pull back. Don’t cross. You will die. Repeat: do not cross,” Lukas said.

Her tears:

The baby had worn a tiny gold chain and a religious medal around his chubby neck. He was curled in the limp arms of his dead teenage mother, and for one hopeful moment, Meg had thought he was still alive. She had gathered him up, feather light; his little head fell back and his last breath came out, a death rattle in a dried husk. Still she had hoped, prayed, whispered to him just please,
por favor, hijo,
to whimper, to take a breath. Part of her mind had registered that he was dead; another part spun fantasies, bargains that would pull him back to earth and make his lungs inflate. She was here; she would save him. It would be all right.

It would never be all right again.

Jack didn’t tell anyone that she’d cried and gotten sloppy drunk and yanked at the waistband of his jeans, Okay, what about just once; they had a strong partnership and they’d be fine afterward. Or that she’d wound up drinking even more, sitting on his couch and watching the remake of
Night of the Living Dead
and sobbing, “Why? Why?” And Jack, bless him, fully clothed, bless him, had said, “I
know
. I thought George Romero got it right the first time.”

She asked for a week of leave and spent it driving through the desert, looking for more stalled vehicles. She’d ridden Mesa, her dappled mare, along dusty trails bordered with deer weed, white sage, and manzanita that she couldn’t reach with a vehicle. Sweating in the heat, thinking of the baby, armed with a rifle.

Glad Jack hadn’t asked for a new partner. Yet. Watching the ghostly forms in night vision, in the surveillance center. Men, women, children, pushing through holes in the fences; wading the swell of a stream; white blurs like phantoms. Was she looking at the
coyote
who had left the baby to die?

In a phone call, her cousin Deb, who lived in Fargo, North Dakota, had told her that every winter, she and her friends routinely got in their cars and trolled for stranded drivers, whose car engines had frozen, whose hoods were buried in snow.

“So it’s in our blood,” Deb had concluded.

In her blood.

After the baby died, Meg doubled her visits to Matt in the care facility.

Matt, her big brother. Matt and Meg. Once a West Pointer, an athlete, a practical joker. Growing up, she’d hated it when he hit on her friends. Then at twenty, he’d been struck by lightning; his heart had stopped; his frontal lobe had been fried. She’d been eighteen. How could that happen? He’d been caught in a downpour at a party; he wasn’t alone. There were twenty-seven other people there.

She researched the histories of people who had been struck by lightning. A man named Roy Cleveland Sullivan had been struck seven times, and had some “deficits,” but he lived to tell the tale. Then he committed suicide at the age of seventy-one.

Matt couldn’t even ask for more applesauce.

Their parents checked out emotionally when they checked Matty into the facility. Meg slipped the orderlies extra money so he would never sit in dirty diapers. So they wouldn’t drug him. So if he ever did remember her, he would be able to tell her that they had treated him well.

Her parents protested only mildly when she dropped her plans to get a teaching credential and instead became a Border Patrol agent. None of her friends understood. So she dumped them. Of course, she didn’t understand it, either.

The Mexican baby, Matt, and the child in the glowing white snowstorm. Meg wasn’t losing this one, too.

“Giddyap, Teufel,” she told her horse, who responded as if he spoke her language.

Haus Ritter—the House of the Knights—had been after the Erl King for a thousand years. Their lineage was long and illustrious. They had snatched back hundreds—maybe thousands—of babies, right out of the arms of the Erl King’s goblin minions. There were stories, paintings, songs about Ritter heroes who had died in glorious service to the cause. But no one had ever crossed the border between Faerie and forest and returned to tell the tale.

“Meg!”
Lukas bellowed at her. His voice echoed off the rocks. The snow-battered moon blazed. Too close; too close; someone fired off a warning round; maybe they figured she had lost her mind, which is what supposedly happened to humans when they crossed the Pale. Which was about to happen to the kidnapped child, if it wasn’t already dead.