Modern Goddess: Trapped by Thor (Book One) (12 page)

His evil friend, Loki, treated me better
than he did. Hades was polite, though sometimes he left parts of
dead bodies wherever he sat. Hell, Seth – though he did tend to
make a storm in a teacup, literally – treated you with more dignity
than bloody Thor.

Was there anything redeemable about the
triple god? Yes, technically he’d saved me from the clutches of
that sea monster, though more accurately he’d waited until I'd
saved myself. He'd just taken the opportunity to smash some slimy,
tentacled skull.

The more I thought about it, the more I
worked myself up into a tizz. I was fuming here. With little to no
outlet – not being the type of goddess to smash things or start
throwing needless lightning bolts around – I did the next best
thing: I reached for a muffin. I ate it with a great deal more
vehemence than your average muffin deserved.

I walked into my lounge room and grabbed
the weather report. Spraying bits of muffin all over, I read the
report angrily. I glanced down it, and it took me a long time to
allow the details of the thing to wash over me. Once done, I
grabbed an almanac that listed the historical rain levels of
various countries around the world. That settled me
more.

Then
I grabbed my cat, patted it gingerly,
and told it at length about how bloody infuriating a certain Nordic
god was.

Over the course of the afternoon and into
the night, I finished off all twenty-four muffins and read through
approximately two hundred books. I turned the television on. Storms
in Egypt, an outbreak of a disease in Greece, and some
frostier-than-usual weather in Norway – the news was never cheery.
I turned it off after a while.

I closed my eyes. Though a god didn’t need
to sleep, over the years I’d experimented with it. I’d taught
myself to breathe, to bake, to mulch, to pay taxes – sleeping was
another notch in the ladder of finding out what it was like to be
human.

After several more angry thoughts, I felt
stillness descend on me. The sensation humans know as sleep
settled, and I – goddess of details – had a nap.

I awoke to someone knocking on the door. At
first I blinked languidly. Coming around from sleep – especially
sleep you didn’t technically need – was always an odd affair. It
left you drifting between two separate levels of consciousness.

I rubbed my eyes, because humans did
that.

The knocking continued and grew louder.
Either the Girl Guides were back and weren't going to take no for
an answer, or Thor had returned.

Thor. I stood up, picking up my cat in my
arms. He’d fallen asleep on my lap and looked too comfortable to
put on the ground, so I carried him as I half-jogged to the
door.

“
Finally.” I reached the door.
Thor had returned, victorious, and I could get on with my life
again. Those darn roses needed some mulching.

I went to open the door, but thought
better of it. I peered through the eyehole. I saw a sight I wasn't
expecting.

I opened the door,
eyebrows knotted.
“Jupiter? You stated on your application you weren't going to
switch identities while on Earth,” I pointed out, cat still in my
arms. While I was eager to find out how Thor had fared, so I could
get rid of the guy, I still thought it necessary to remind him of
Earth Entry Rules.

Jupiter grinned,
slicked-back black
hair glinting under the porch light. The gold chain around his neck
glinted, too. Everything glinted in an oily way. That black suit of
his with the unbuttoned shirt showing his supposedly manly chest
hair, even his long, pointed, black shoes.

Of all Thor's godly guises, Jupiter was by
far the greasiest. He looked and felt like a small-time mob boss.
Except one who could occasionally stop time with his gaze.

“
Officina,” Jupiter said, lips
clinking up. They really did clink, as if they were made of gold,
not flesh.

I blinked. Thor never called me Officina –
that would be giving credence to the fact I was a true goddess and
not someone designed to get in the way of Earthly fun.

“
It's done.” With his hands still
in his pockets, he shrugged expressively and peaked his
eyebrows.

I looked at him. His suit was unusually
shiny and his hair was slicked back too far. His eyes also didn't
glint nearly enough.

“
You're safe now.” Jupiter
grinned again, dipping his head forward and looking up at me in
what was meant to be a half-dashing, half-manly way.

It was neither. It was wrong. All of it was
wrong. I backed into my house, my arms still around my cat.

Jupiter's grin faltered. “There's only one
thing left to do.” He winked.

I slammed the door in his face.

He put his shoe in the doorway, jolting the
frame with a powerful shudder and stopping the door from
closing.

I backed off.

This was not Thor. It was not Zeus, and it
sure as hell wasn't Jupiter. The greasy chap on my doorstep was,
however, a god.

The door blasted off its hinges. I twisted
to the side, protecting my cat with the bulk of my form. The chips
of wood struck my back and ripped the fabric of my pajamas.

After my return from god hospital, the
first thing I'd done was change out of that silly toga. As far as
most other gods were concerned – or at least the Roman and Greek
ones – if something was worth doing, it was worth doing in a toga.
To them, there was no more functional or dignified item of
clothing. Need to clean out the drains? Wear your toga. Need to
give a rousing speech to your acolytes? Toga. War? Toga.

I
didn’t find the things comfortable. When
it came to hanging around my own cottage, I preferred a large pair
of flannelette pajamas and some soft slippers. The slippers weren't
humorously shaped or anything – I was still a goddess, thank you.
Comfort was just something I valued more than toga
tradition.

Now my PJs were ripped. Oh, and I’d opened
my door to an evil god. Once you let them into your temple/cottage,
they were harder to remove than cockroaches.

I turned to see the fake Jupiter walk
casually over the broken remains of my door. He tugged down on his
black jacket, revealing more of his chest hair.

He cracked his head from
side-to-side.

He reached behind him and pulled out one
large, menacing golden gun.

The gun, though it did make the whole
mob-boss act more convincing, was not a conventional one – it
glowed and crackled.

Fake Jupiter gave a grin. “We do this the
hard way, then. You are coming with me, goddess of
details.”

Like hell I was.

I ran into a room before fake Jupiter could
say another word.

A shot from his gun sliced into the wall
beside me, and my cat gave a loud cry, sinking its claws deep into
the fabric of my PJs.

Great. I would have to go shopping
again.

I had other things to think of now.

Things were happening fast again – twice
in the space of a day. I tried to push my detail-driven mind to
catch up with the situation. I tried not to be distracted by how
much PJs cost, or whether my neighbor had a functioning sewing
machine I could borrow. I tried not to notice the pattern of wood
chips that had spread through my bedroom. I tried not to be pulled
in by the feeling of my loose hair playing across my
neck.

No. No. There was a fake Jupiter with a
freaking magical gun hunting me down in my own darn house – I had
to pay attention to the situation and not the details!

I also had to think of a plan.

“
Come on,” fake Jupiter drawled
from behind me, “Don't make this hard on yourself. You can't beat
me, Officina. You can only prolong this by several seconds.”
Another blast sunk into the wall – and I knew he’d missed
deliberately.

My cat struggled to get free, but there was
no way I was going to let go of it – not while there was an angry
and evil god with a magical gun on the premises.

Whoever he was, he was right: I couldn't
fight him, and I was stuck.

He walked into the room, whistling through
his teeth and cracking his head to the side. I'd seen that exact
move before, and I'd heard that whistle, too. “Loki,” I
realized.

Loki shrugged his shoulders, one hand
still stowed in a pocket. “Nice. Pity for you that you didn't
realize sooner.”

I’d opened my door to Loki, god of mischief,
fire, magic, and general evil. By opening my door to him, by proxy
I’d invited him into my temple.

I winced
. I was trying to run through the
details of this situation as fast as I could. I was trying to come
up with a plan. Planning wasn't my forte – creating strategies was
a step beyond facts and figures. That's why, as a goddess, I was
always stronger when I was with others.... The real truth to Thor's
admonishment that I shunned my own kind. On my own, the most I
could do was process visa applications and get lost in the details
of how one simple gaze could stop time.

“
Why have you come here?” I
demanded.

Loki gestured at me with the gun. “Details
you'll learn later. Officina, you are coming with me.”

No.

I didn't want to.

I stared ahead, noting the door before me.
It was the one that led to my library – the library that wasn't so
much one room of books, but a spatial anomaly that led to every
single library that had ever existed on Earth.

It always led somewhere different every time
you opened the door. Over the years, I’d learnt to control it
somewhat, but spatial anomalies were always temperamental.

I straightened up. “Hold on,” I made my
voice even, “Let me turn the oven off.”

Loki gave a sharp laugh. “Be my guest.”

I reached for the handle of my library door,
opened it, walked in, and closed it behind me.

Loki would be confident there would be
nowhere to run to inside my cottage. Or at least nowhere he
wouldn't be able to find me and drag me from. He was one of the
most powerful evil gods on Earth. He had considerable and
formidable magic – and a nice golden gun to complete his outfit
today. All I had was a cat.

Loki, however, didn't realize I had a
whopping great spatial anomaly squeezed between my bedroom and
living room.

It was too late. As soon as I closed the
door, I was transported somewhere far, far away from my cottage.
With the door closed, the anomaly reset itself. Despite his
considerable magic, it would take Loki a while to figure out where
I’d gone.

I let out an enormous breath of relief and
turned on my heel to find out where I’d ended up.

Several toga-wearing men were staring at
me, brows raised in surprise. Their skin was dark, and several of
them wore the kind of heavy eye makeup you rarely saw in modern
times beyond emos or goths.

I glanced up at the wide, arched ceiling
above and along the walls at the rows and rows of
scrolls.

Alexandria, I was in the library of
Alexandria.

One of the men who stood closest to me
looked as though his bottom lip was about to drop off from
surprise. To him, he’d seen a woman in strange but comfortable
clothes holding a cat walk out of a shelf. Which wasn't something
that happened often in the library unless it was hashish
day.

I held my cat and grinned. I noticed the
detail of the man's skin – the soft scars scattered up the side of
his face, probably from a childhood bout of some disease. I dipped
my head down, and I noticed the detail of his hands as they tightly
clasped a scroll. I scanned his head, seeing the pockmarked surface
of his shaven skull. I drew him in.

I was not Thor, I was not Loki, I was not
Odin. I was the small-time goddess of details. Yet I was still a
goddess. I still had powers. Just as I could lose myself in facts
and figures, I could bury others in them, too.

The man's eyes started to become glazed.

I moved. As much as I didn't want to shock
the inhabitants of the Library of Alexandria, I still had to get
away from Loki. It could be minutes or hours until he found me.

Luckily for me, when it came to the rules
that stopped gods and goddesses from making themselves known, they
became less strict as you travelled back in time. The closer you
came to the real reign of the gods, the less it mattered whether
you interacted with humans. Yes, you still couldn't act in a way
that took away their freewill. But popping up magically through a
shelf of scrolls meant one thing in a population already
comfortable with gods and magic – it meant an entirely different
thing if you did it at the local library during a meeting of
scientific skeptics.

I should get away with this. Oh, that and
Loki was chasing me. Mitigating circumstances, that.

I half-ran, half-jogged through the
library. I hoped the oft repeated rule that you can't run through a
library didn't count when you were being hunted by a magical-gun
wielding mad-god.

I broke into a full run. As I ran, I tried
to draw the people around me into the details of the way my bare
feet sounded as they slapped against the sand-encrusted marble
floor, the way my hair fanned out behind me, and the way my cat
still hung onto my arm for dear life.

The more I concentrated on the details,
the more they would, too – and it would take away the reality of
the situation for them.

I made it out into the city beyond. It had
been a long time since I'd been to Alexandria city, though I did
visit the library often enough (not usually abruptly while dressed
in flannelette PJs).