Modern Goddess: Trapped by Thor (Book One) (22 page)

“
This small-time goddess—“
Hera began. Her tone was vicious on the word goddess.

“
Shut up, Hera,” I said firmly.
There was such a note of... authority in my voice that the beer
mugs on the table beside us rattled. “I’m not going to stand here
and listen to your insults. I have told you there is nothing going
on between your possible husband and me. If you don't believe me,
that's an issue you are going to have to take up with your
overactive, paranoid imagination. Now get out of my way.” I didn't
puff out my chest as I spoke, I didn't glare, I didn't clamp my
hands on my hips. I let the words flow. The details of them...
seemed to flow together somehow – the tone, the timing, the
volume.

A terrible pain snaked through my brow, but
I wasn't about to follow up on my single act of defiance against
Hera with an “Ow, I've got a headache.” Instead, I held her gaze
and walked off.

Hera didn't lash out at me with her
high-heels, nor did she call up her godly powers and try to zap my
head off. Nope, she looked... shocked. It was probably the first
time a so-called small-time goddess had stood up to the precious
maybe-wife of Zeus. She must have been momentarily overcome by the
suddenness of it... and the exact tone I’d somehow hit. It had been
authoritative. It had suggested a power I didn’t have. It was the
same tone Odin might have used to shock and awe anyone who dared
scratch his throne.

It left a tingling in my chest and arms, and
the more I concentrated on the sensation, the more my head
hurt.

It didn't stop me from stalking away from
the table, head held as high as I could manage.

The place was as silent as deep space as I
walked away from Hera. All the assembled gods and goddesses had
stopped what they were doing – their ale mugs halfway to their lips
or their heads half tossed back, mid-laugh. They were all waiting
for what would inevitably come next.

Hera's reaction to Zeus’ various lovers –
whether confirmed, or innocent, as in my case – was the stuff of
legend. The viciousness, the violence, the single-minded
willingness to hunt them down and turn their lives into the
embodiment of misery.

While a majority of Zeus’
romantic-equivalent side-servings were of the pouting human damsel
kind (though not so much these days with all the anti-interference
laws), it wasn't unheard of for him to dip into the goddess basket,
too. Based on experience, Hera had every right to believe Thor/Zeus
was up to something. Based on how she reacted to such experience,
every single god and goddess in this room knew she was about to
attack me viciously and screaming at the top of her lungs from
behind.

As I mentally steeled for the attack,
something happened: there was a rustling of leaves. It wasn't all
that distinct, it wasn't all that loud, it wasn't all that
noticeable. Somewhere far off, at the edge of the room (or at the
edge of my senses), I heard the gentle shifting of leaves under a
slight breeze. While it could have been a draft unsettling any
number of laurels or tree gods, it felt different. The bare sense
of it sent such a tingle through my gut that I felt giddy from
shock.

Blinking and twisting my lips in, I tried
not to stumble as I walked, yet I couldn't help but slow.

“
How dare you!” Hera
shrieked from behind.

I hardly heard her. She sounded as though
she was at the edge of hearing, and the incessant rustling of
leaves was growing until it threatened to press in on me from
above.

I stopped moving, parking myself right in
the middle of the room, jaw humorously slack as I stared above at
the moving leaves I could hear but couldn't see.

I got the impression of a warm welcome light
filtering in through young, tender foliage. The green of spring and
the golden glow of the sun beckoning me on.

Then
something smacked me right in the
back of the head. It made a terrible thwacking sound and felt
suspiciously like the back of a chair.

I fell forward, but didn't drop to my knees.
It was more of a dignified stumble. Though the chair had been flung
at me with full-force by one of the most powerful goddesses of the
Greek pantheon, it was more of a surprise and less of a
concern.

I wasn't injured.

I turned to the side, putting a hand up to
the back of my head. It didn't hurt. It was an automatic move at
being struck with a heavy object from behind.

Hera, face a hotter red than the lava that
spewed from Mount Etna, still held the chair easily in one hand.
With a vicious twist of her mouth, her eyes pulled shut from the
anger clawing across her face, she swung the chair right at my head
again.

From her expression, to her movement, to the
light glinting off the chair – I saw it all at once. Every
detail.

I put up a hand, grabbing the chair leg and
stopping it in place an inch from my face. Despite Hera's huge,
grunting effort, she couldn't shift it from my grip.

I could feel the grain of the wood against
the skin of my hand, and the wood only served to remind me of those
rustling leaves.

I was aware of the fact I stared over at
Hera with a confused look on my face.

She looked out of breath and shocked.
“What?” she puffed at me as she tried to yank the chair from my
grip. “How are you doing this?” she spat through a tight jaw.

She gave another almighty (literally) tug on
the chair, and the thing snapped in two. I kept one of the legs.
She got the rest. The force of her effort sent her stumbling
backwards, face still a picture of sneering shock.

For my part, I kept my lips closed and my
head cocked to the side, as my eyes wondered from side-to-side
trying to locate the origin of that damn rustling.

Hera – because she was Hera, and wasn't
about to let the surprise of a small-time goddess besting her in a
chair fight stop her – came at me again. Except this time it was
fist-cuffs. With nothing but the look of calculated, frightful,
impending vengeance on her face and her fingers curled into the
equivalent of grappling hooks, the wedding-planner launched herself
at me.

I noticed it like you might when you take
a quick glance out the window to check what the weather is outside.
It was a fact, but not one that had much importance for
me.

Then
reality snapped back with a twang.
With no more edge-of-awareness rustling to keep me distracted, I
realized in a single strangled heartbeat that Hera – a goddess ten
times more powerful than me – was seconds away from ripping me to
shreds.

I screwed my eyes shut and gave a pathetic
yelp as I slammed my hands over my face.

I need not have bothered – Hera didn't
reach me. There was a half-strangled puff of air, and I opened one
of my eyes between the gaps in my fingers and saw that Thor had
grabbed an arm around Hera, stopping her in place.

Boy, was there a look on his face. Except
it wasn't directed at his malevolent, paranoid, crazy,
wedding-planning, half-wife from a different identity. Nope, he
looked right at me. His expression was such a mix of angry,
bothered, surprised, and something far, far deeper. Something...
old was gathering and tugging at the edges of his eyes, like a long
suppressed memory that could no longer be subdued.

He held my gaze for all of about two
seconds – though I'm sure time somehow squeezed several eons
between that stutteringly short moment – then his cheeks stiffened
and he turned back to his half-wife.

Hera still steamed, but was turning her
boiling inferno of a temper back to where it belonged – Thor.

She rolled up a hand and thumped it
against Thor's shiny breast plate. It gave a resounding twanging
sound. “You always do this to me,” she began to mope, then hit his
breast plate again. “Always.”

Thor took a rumbling sigh. “How many times,
Hera? When I'm Thor—“

“
You're still Zeus. When you
are Jupiter, I’m Juno. I know the mysteries of identity, Zeus,
don't you stand there and tell me it doesn't matter. You've been
telling me the same old story for millennia – and guess what? It
matters to me.” She placed a delicate hand on her chest and stared
up at the blond-bearded version of her half-husband.

“
When you're Juno you are a lot
less paranoid,” Thor mumbled to himself.

Which was the wrong thing to mumble – even
quietly – when he had an arm around the middle of his maybe-wife
from a different pantheon.

Hera sucked in a sharp breath of air from
between her clenched teeth and hit Thor a lot harder this time.

This was... great. Here I stood in the
middle of the Ambrosia, in the middle of a divine domestic. If they
started make-up kissing, I'd hit them both with my chair
leg.

I swallowed.

I wanted to point out to Hera that Thor
wasn't Zeus. I wanted to defend the buffoon. Though, as immigration
officer, I knew the differences that allowed a god to have more
than one functioning identity didn't run that deep. Hera was right:
underneath it all was still the same god. He still represented the
same forces, he was just given different names and systems of
belief under different pantheons.

That
point didn't seem important to me.
What was important was the fact that whilst entering Earth as Thor,
he couldn’t be held accountable for the actions of Zeus or Jupiter.
If it was good enough for the Integration Office, then it should be
good enough for Hera.

I watched them, a growing nervous feeling
swelling in my stomach. I flicked my eyes away and tried to find
something else to stare at. My gaze soon settled on the chair leg
in my hand. The one that belonged to the chair I’d somehow caught
after it had been swung by Hera of all people.

How had I done that?

...
.

I used to watch the leaves flutter above
me.

...
.

I blinked slowly. Words had formed in my
mind – unspoken but undeniable. I hadn’t thought them. They had
thought themselves.

I slid my gaze slowly towards the chair leg
still in my hand. Sudden Hera-chair-stopping powers, mysterious
fluttering noises, and spoken words forming directly in my
mind?

Being a goddess, I immediately skipped
through the possibilities, and none of them involved standard human
causes of delirium. I wasn't dehydrated, I hadn’t munched on some
suspicious fern shoots, and nor had I gobbled a brightly colored
pill I'd spied in an alleyway behind a club. There were all sorts
of divine sources of madness however, but none of them tended to
involve chair legs as far as I knew.

Was I tired? I hadn’t got much rest
between being chased by Loki, chained to a wall, taken to Asgard,
and coming to happy hour at the Ambrosia. Yes, that had to be it –
I was exhausted.

“
Details—“ Thor was somehow
right in front of me, his hands pressed into my shoulders. He gave
me a tender shake.

Blinking up at him, I realized I had
allowed myself to become monumentally distracted by my thoughts. So
distracted that I’d tuned out everything else in the
universe.

Everything – and that’s a lot of
things.

It hit me, and it wasn't another chair. It
was the same pain I’d been feeling on-and-off for the past several
days. No, not the same – this was worse by a factor of about a
billion.

I didn't shout anything indicative of my
situation like “Ow,” “Blimey,” or “My head is about to explode.” I
crumpled. It was too much. It was too severe.

It felt like the universe was either trying
to rip into my mind or rip free from it. It wasn’t a good
feeling.

Unsurprisingly, for the third time in three
days, I conked out.

I can't say I awoke in a nice
God Hospital somewhere. I can't say I awoke with a nice godly
blanket pulled over me and a curled-up toga supporting my
head.
Then
again, I wasn't, thankfully, strapped to a wall either.

I didn't wake anywhere either appropriate or
inappropriate for a potentially injured goddess. Instead, I didn't
wake up at all. I never lost consciousness.

Something far stranger occurred: my
awareness was shunted to the side as if someone had slapped me hard
on the face, jolting my head to a position that allowed a view I’d
never before seen.

And what was the view of? Those darn
rustling leaves.

I was lying on my back, I was sure of it –
though precisely seconds before I’d been standing in the middle of
the Ambrosia with a worried Thor shaking my shoulders. I was no
longer in that god-awful (excuse the pun) divine bar. I was lying
on wonderfully soft grass, staring at fluttering leaves above me.
The sunshine filtered through them in a divine, dappled light. It
was wondrous, relaxing, and oh-so welcoming.

I could stay here forever.

I had already spent eternity here.

I blinked rapidly as that thought raced
through my mind. I hadn’t been here for an eternity, had I? I
couldn't concentrate long enough to answer that. My thoughts faded
in and out like a dream lost upon waking.

I watched the leaves. I listened to them
move. They held more secrets than one person or god could
appreciate. It would take eternity to listen to their wisdom.

A smile spread slowly across my lips.

I had eternity. I possessed an entire,
immortal, never-ending existence to watch, listen, and know.

I could lie here with my back on the soft
grass, with the tree above me and my husband beside me.