Thor frowned at Thrym. “That one’s kind of slow, eh?”

  Thrym’s face flushed red. “And now you insult us, after we opened our doors to you.” He locked eyes with Freyr. “And you, Freyr of the Vanir, I thought certainly I could trust you.”

  Freyr shrugged. “We made peace with the Æsir long ago. Their battles are our battles.”

  Thrym turned to face Loki, still leaning heavily on Maggie. “What shall we do with them?”

  Loki perked up. “Excuse me?”

  Thrym gestured toward Freyr and Thor. “These two here. They have broken faith with us and breached our fortress to do us harm.” He shot the gods a derisive look. “Yet we still outnumber them. What shall we do with them?”

  “Wait a minute,” Thor blustered. “Who outnumbers who here?”

  “I think that’s whom,” Freyr commented behind him.

  Thor turned back to him and snarled. “Shut up.”

  Freyr rolled his eyes and waved him forward.

  Thor stomped across the floor and stood face-to-chest with Thrym. “You think you outnumber us? There are only four of you!”

  “Four giants, plus our allies.” Thrym gestured toward Maggie, Iduna, and Loki.

  “Heimdall!” Maggie gasped in delight.

  Thor spun around and found his brother standing in the doorway behind him. Thor lifted his wrench in salutations.

  Maggie started to move toward Heimdall—dragging Loki with her—but he gestured for her to keep her place.

  “Maggie, are you all right?” Heimdall asked as he stepped into the room.

  Her eyes filled with tears. “I am now. At least, I think so.”

  Valthrudnir grinned at Heimdall. “How is your head?”

  “Peachy, thanks,” Heimdall shot back.

  With his brother standing close by, Thor beamed up at Thrym in satisfaction.

  “All right,” the giant acquiesced. “So there are three of you now.”

  Thor frowned darkly. “There are six of us.” He waved toward Maggie, Iduna, and Loki.

  “I count as half, at best,” Loki murmured. “I’m barely conscious at the moment.”

  Thor’s exasperated gaze shifted from Loki to Maggie. She cocked her head.

  “Don’t look at me,” she complained. “If it’s giants versus gods here, you’ll have to count me out.”

  Geirrod dipped his head toward her. “Lady Maggie, what is this news? You are not recognized by your own kin?”

  Maggie shook her head and looked away.

  Thor lifted his eyebrows and looked at Iduna. She shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “The Goddess of the Grove refuses to take sides.” Thrym scowled down at Thor in triumph. “Four of us against three of you.”

  “Five,” came a new voice from the corridor behind Heimdall.

  Freya and Saga entered swiftly to stand on either side of Thor. He gripped his weapons with glee.

  Thrym’s face softened, his eyes almost moist. “Freya?”

  Heimdall grabbed Freya by the shoulder and spun her around to face him. “I told you to stay behind!”

  “Yeah, well.” Freya glanced sideways at Thrym and winked at him. The King of the Frost Giants looked at the floor and blushed.

  Freya removed Heimdall’s hand from her shoulder. “Doesn’t look like you’re doing so hot in here by yourselves.”

  “And when have you known me to obey any order, direct or otherwise?” Saga added. “We heard everything as we were coming down the corridors. We know what’s going on.”

  Thrym planted his fists on his hips. “Well? Is this everyone now?”

  Heimdall and Freyr crossed their arms over their chests and stared at him. Thor growled and slid the hammer and wrench back into his tool belt. He smelled the perfume of diplomacy on the air.

  “Five gods against four giants,” Heimdall challenged Thrym. “It’s not an unfair fight.”

  Thrym sighed. “We have no intention of fighting you, but we will take up arms to defend ourselves if necessary.”

  “So, what?” Saga asked. “You wanted some wives so you could build up your numbers again, and then what? You’ll just challenge us again later. And we’ll be right back here, fighting the same battle for Midgard. Why shouldn’t we just wipe you out, here and now, while we have the chance?”

  Thrym smiled sadly. “Because this is no longer a world for giants or gods to reign supreme. We do want to grow our numbers, but modestly. Establish a small population to prevent us from dying off completely.”

  Thor growled. “Do you believe this guy?”

  Heimdall paused, studying Thrym’s face. “Actually, I think I do.”

  Loki sighed—partially in relief, partially from sheer exhaustion. “Maggie? Would you mind doing me a favor?” He nodded toward the feast table. “Do you think you could help me down there?”

  Maggie smiled. “Of course.”

  Maggie and Loki started toward the table, but Thor held up a hand to stop them. “Hang on a minute. This isn’t settled.”

  “Actually, I think it is.” Saga stepped in front of Thor and looked up into her brother’s frustrated face. “They don’t want to fight. Yes, they’ve gotten out of their prison unexpectedly, and we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with that.” She paused. “And how to address their request for brides.”

  Thor felt the heat rising underneath the tight collar of his wedding gown. “Request?! There was no ‘request.’ Only treachery, thievery, deceit, subterfuge, and narrowly avoided mayhem. They would have imprisoned you in their stone dungeon, sister.”

  Thiassen moved forward and again lifted his hand. “Once more, I must object. This structure is in fact not a dungeon.”

  Saga took a step closer and rested a hand on Thor’s chest. He was tired. He’d put up a good fight against the same weakness and fatigue that was plaguing them all, but the single apple he’d consumed wasn’t enough.

  “Come with me.” Saga took him by the hand and pulled him toward the feast table. “I think we could all benefit from some of Iduna’s apples right about now.”

  She glanced at Heimdall and Thrym. “Can we agree to forget past conflicts for a few moments as we replenish ourselves? We can sort out the rest when we’re all in better form.”

  Freya fell into step behind Saga, while Heimdall looked to Thrym. The giant shrugged. “Despite these odd circumstances, you are our guests. Please help yourselves.”

  Heimdall gestured toward Thrym to lead the way. The giant took no more than three steps before a terrible crash sounded overhead. Everyone in the room stopped and looked up at the stone ceiling, where flickers of shadows passed over the high windows.

  “What?” Freyr exclaimed, but his voice was nearly drowned out by a series of loud booming noises from above. “It sounds like meteors are raining down from the sky!”

  The Frost Giants all wore the same anxious expression. Thrym grabbed Heimdall’s arm. “Your reinforcements?”

  Heimdall shook his head. “Whoever’s up there isn’t with us.”

  “You are sure you were not followed?” Thrym yelled above the din.

  “Are you daft?” Thor yelled. “You think we don’t know how to approach an enemy fortress without being tailed?”

  The deafening pounding continued. Powdered mortar and pebble-sized rocks rained down from above.

  Thor grabbed the front of Thrym’s brocaded jacket. “How secure is this place?”

  Thiassen dodged a few rocks as they fell and cracked open on the stone floor. He stormed toward Thor and yanked him away from Thrym. “You will not disrespect our king within his own stronghold!”

  Thor’s hands went again to his tool belt. He raised his hammer and wrench in the air and glared at Thiassen. After a tense moment, Thiassen backed down. Thor lowered his weapons and turned to Thrym. He nodded once in apology, and the giant nodded back in acceptance.

  Approaching from his side, Freya pulled additional weapons from Thor’s belt. She passed heavy sticks, rubber mallets, and a crowbar to her brethren.

  “Anyone have any idea what’s going on up there?” She handed an adjustable wrench and a section of curtain rod to Geirrod but was careful not to touch him.

  Sand filtered down into his hair, and Geirrod shook his head. “This is not your doing?”

  Freya sighed. “Definitely not.”

  Heimdall handed his wrench to Thrym. “Who else knows you are here?”

  “No one.”

  “You said only four of you came out of the ice?”

  Thrym nodded.

  “Are you absolutely sure?”

  A huge blow to the stronghold’s roof sent a melon-sized chunk of rock hurtling to the floor inches from where Thor stood. Valthrudnir pressed both Thor and Thrym against the wall for safety.

  “All the others were dead.” Valthrudnir looked Thor in the eye. “I pulled Thrym from the ice first and revived him. Then we released Geirrod and Thiassen.”

  Heimdall joined them against the wall. “Was there any evidence of other escapees?”

  “There was nothing but ice.” Valthrudnir shook rock dust out of his hair. “And the Shrine of the Cosmos, of course, which had also been partially uncovered.”

  Thor felt his blood turn to ice. He turned to Heimdall. “The newspaper photo, from the hotel.”

  The Shrine of the Cosmos, where Odin’s ancestors had gathered to revere the eternal force which brought the entire Universe into being—the stone temple beneath which Odin’s father and grandfather had buried the gateway to the Køjer Underworld.

  Heimdall’s face grew white as he studied the dark flickers that shimmied past the windows above. “Køjer Devils,” he whispered.

  Thor shook his head. It could not be.

  “The archaeologists were digging around a shrine, after the glacier retreated and left it exposed. That’s what the newspaper story said.” Heimdall leaned against the wall and grimaced. The pain was plain enough on his face. Thor grabbed his brother by the shoulder and held him up.

  Thrym’s eyes grew wide. He glanced nervously overhead. “If these are truly Køjer Devils attacking . . .”

  The other giants hissed through their teeth and pressed their backs against the polished stone wall. Geirrod shuddered.

  “The rocks.” Thor sought out Freyr. “The boulder and the rocks that were hurled at us.”

  Freyr ran a hand over his face and looked like he was going to be sick. “This is not good.”

  The pounding attack continued. Thor looked up at the ceiling. There was no telling how much force the stronghold’s roof could sustain. The structure had been carved from the mountain, but the roof had been engineered by the giants. Thor wished he knew something—anything—about Frost Giant architecture.

  Heimdall pushed himself away from the wall. “Listen to me, all of you! It looks like we’ve got Køjer Devils on the roof.”

  Thor ignored the sand and debris falling down around him, but the cackling laughter from far above made him shiver. He left the safety of the wall and stood beside his brother.

  “Our forefathers fought them.” Heimdall kept his voice steady even in the chaos. “But all we know about these creatures comes from our most ancient lore. And that’s spotty at best.”

  Thiassen dodged a rock the size of a wild turkey. “Our forefathers—yours and mine—were nearly wiped out by the Køjer Devils.”

  Heimdall nodded. “And they were driven back into their hole, and the gate was sealed.”

  Thor felt Heimdall leaning against him. Thor holstered his wrench and wrapped an arm around his brother’s shoulders to keep him on his feet.

  “And now it has been unsealed,” Thiassen retorted.

  “Are you arguing for your own destruction?” Thor bellowed at Thiassen as more chunks of stone collapsed from the ceiling. He gripped his hammer more tightly and wished he held Mjölnir in his hand. “For all we know, there are just a couple of those creatures up there, and they’re more nuisance than threat.”

  Thiassen shook his head. “One or a hundred, it matters not. Køjer Devils.” His hands balled into nervous fists. “And they are here for us.”

  A two-ton block of stone came broke free from the ceiling and crashed down in the center of the ring of wedding candles. Midnight sunlight flooded the chamber.

  With high-pitched shrieks of excitement, silhouettes of dark, contoured bodies flocked to the gaping hole in the roof.

  Thor counted the Køjer Devils screeching at them. “Two dozen at least.”

  Wispy cackles and what were probably taunts in a creaky language of squeals and clicks rained down on them. And then, so did a shower of skull-size stones.

  “Retreat!” Thrym pushed Heimdall toward an open corridor. The others scrambled for the walls, pressing themselves up against the polished stone as they inched their way toward the doorway.

  Thor maintained his exposed position in the center of the room. Several stones glanced off his shoulders and landed on the toes of his work boots as he stared up at this new enemy. He looked at the table at the far end of the room.

  Holstering his hammer, Thor called to Thiassen. “The apples! Help me!”

  Thiassen and Thor quickly skirted the walls toward the feast table. Thor gritted his teeth against the blows he was taking to his back as the devils pelted them with stones. Spots of blood seeped through Thiassen’s tunic.

  Reaching the table, they stuffed as many apples as they could into their pockets and down their shirts. Thor tired at his collar and emptied his bodice of stones to make room for more. They each grabbed a large serving bowl filled with fruit and hustled to the doorway to escape with the others down the corridor.

  “Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .” Sally texted on her phone with her friend Opal back in Portland. “I’m so freaking bored! Dragged all this way to some arctic island just to sit around some stupid house that doesn’t even have TV.”

  “Practice your spells,” Opal replied. “You made new runes? Get to know them while you’re waiting.”

  Sally sighed. She hadn’t told Opal the full story of the runes that acted more like Mexican jumping beans than any kind of oracle. And they had a nasty tendency to set things on fire. She was the Rune Witch—as Freya and Frigga kept reminding her when she doubted herself—but she’d started to wonder if she might be better off training as a lab tech or stenographer.

  Frigga had given her homework while she was supposedly on vacation, but Sally was tired and didn’t want to do any more exercises for focusing and training her magickal mind. Besides, Thor and Heimdall and the rest would probably make a raucous return at any minute, fresh from victory over the Frost Giants. Then maybe they could go out for burgers or pizza or something. Sally was awfully tired of fish.

  She looked out the window at the fjord and the mountain. Maybe after they got Maggie back, everyone would be less tense, and she and Freyr could find some time together—

  Her phone beeped.

  “And no love spells!” Opal texted. “He’s too old for you, even if he wasn’t a deity.”

  Opal was right. But no matter how many times Sally told herself that a seventeen-year-old girl had no business getting involved with a millennia-old immortal, and that there was no way Freyr could ever think of her that way anyway, she couldn’t keep her heart from racing and her cheeks from blushing whenever he entered the room.

  “It will pass,” Opal texted.

  “How do you do that?!” Sally started to type, but Opal had already sent another message.

  “Gotta get to work. Catch you later.”

  Sally smiled. A lot had happened to Opal since she was called up with the Einherjar to do battle against Managarm and his Berserkers. She was more confident in her own magick now. Instead of simply lighting a candle for the full moon or doing a spell to improve her grades at Portland State University, she was learning how to influence the weather and doing spellwork with a Portland coven to clean Oregon’s rivers.

  She’d also gotten a part-time job at Powells with Saga. Sally sometimes wished she could trade places with her friend and let someone else carry the burden of being the Rune Witch for a while.

  Sally stared at her phone, hoping for another text from Opal. She pulled open the drawer of the bedside table and peered at the bag she’d made out of her knitted cap and a length of ribbon. The runes appeared to have fallen silent.

  “About time.” Sally opened the pouch and poured the runes onto the patchwork bedspread. She was turning them right-side-up, one by one, when the runes started to vibrate beneath her fingertips.

  Sally dropped her shoulders and sighed. “Not this again.” She started to collect the runes in her hands, to store them back in the drawer. But the runes on the bedspread suddenly converged into a trembling heap, then pulled apart into two distinct groups. The runes in her hands leapt out of her grasp to join the others.

  She leaned over the two piles as the runes quivered and made sharp chattering noises that sent an unpleasant prickle along her spine. “This is new.”

  She reached for Uruz, jittering on the top of the left-hand pile, and felt a familiar tingle on the pad of her thumb. She still bore the ox-horn brand. Just as her fingers made contact with the russet shell flake, she heard a scratching sound on the roof.

  She was about to dismiss the disturbance as a feisty squirrel, but then it sounded like two squirrels. Then three. Four. Within seconds, Sally could have sworn at least a dozen ostriches were having a dance party on the roof.

  The runes were rattling like mad, beginning to lurch off the bedspread like kernels of popcorn. They leapt higher and higher and then suddenly they were all airborne, the two piles swirling separately in the air over the bed. There was a huge CRACK overhead, and Sally looked up to see a bulging rift zig-zagging across the ceiling.

  The runes flew like bullets from a gun, slicing across Sally’s skin as they rocketed past to embed themselves in the walls on opposite side of the room.

  Heart pounding wildly, Sally sank onto the sheepskin rug and held the cuffs of her sweatshirt against the bleeding gashes in her face.

  “What’s happening?!” she wanted to shout, but her voice came out as little more than a strangled whisper.

  Plaster dust rained down on her, and she looked up to find daylight peeking through the widening fault in the ceiling. She pressed her hands over her ears to dampen the sound of dozens of clawed feet dancing over her head but she couldn’t drown out the high-pitched, squealing laughter that shredded her nerves and pricked her skin with a thousand icy needles.