Today the city was a ghost of itself, streets deserted, its buildings like bones of the long departed. 

“Christmas is special here,” Finn’s driver had said. “In Reykjavík, nothing bad ever happens at Christmas.”

Special. That was one way of putting it. Finn had never experienced a city so still, so silent. It was like walking through the aftermath of a nuclear blast. The only thing that told him he was awake, that this wasn’t some post-apocalyptic nightmare, was the fresh sting of salt air and ice crystals in his nostrils.

That, and the faint meaty, burnt-wood smell of smoked lamb shanks. “Hangikjöt,” they called it. “Hanging meat.”