Modern Goddess: Trapped by Thor (Book One) (24 page)

Or maybe it was the slight chill in the
air.

I tapped my fingers against my legs then
clenched and unclenched my hands.

In the Integration Office, I’d been taught
that the classic distinctions between the gods – the assumptions of
power that came along with their slice of believers and legend –
didn't count for much these days. The system mattered, not the
individuals who went through it. When Jupiter had been banned from
Italy for a destructive bar-fight, the system had overpowered him.
If the system could do that to one of the most powerful gods out
there, then it could do it for Loki, Hades, and Seth,
too.

Yes, they had thwarted it somehow by
getting to Earth/letting out sea monsters/kidnapping me in the
first place. But that fact didn't stand alone. I knew what they
were up to, I could bring this information to the system, and
everything would work smoothly again.

It had to.

My strides became stronger – my legs
stiffening in a determined fashion that saw my pace increase
measurably.

Plus, Loki and his assorted illegal
brethren were hardly likely to attack me on a populated, modern,
human city street. They might have gotten away with using their
godly powers in ancient times, when such powers would cause less of
a ripple in the belief of the humans who saw them. That wouldn't be
the case here. Seth could hardly order up a sandstorm to pin me
down, and Hades wouldn't be able to pop out from the drains with a
couple of thousand denizens of the dead. That would draw real and
quick attention from the Office. They might have gotten away with
their sea-monster-in-the-flood-drain escapade, but there were more
people to notice their inappropriate shenanigans above
ground.

Some part of me knew all of this
self-posturizing was just that. I didn't want to listen to her. I
needed to justify why I’d left Thor – who could demonstrably
protect me against everything but a lack of beer and his
half-wife.

I swallowed.

I looked up and saw something. No, that
wasn’t right – I heard it before I saw it.

It wasn't Jupiter clicking his fingers and
munching on a cigar, and nor was it a sea monster throwing a ladder
at me in the hope I'd climb it before it attacked me.

It was an oak tree.

It was... beautiful. The leaves shone and
the trunk was so indented and gnarled you could spend your life
following every twist and turn.

Its leaves were rustling.

I smiled up at them.

How long did I smile for? How long did I
watch it? How many details did I process before I realized... it
was smack bang in the middle of a street?

It was in the middle of a street. There was
a giant, beautiful, old oak sitting right in the middle of a main
road.

Okay, that wasn’t normal, unless the
city's pro-tree council had upped their ante.

I twisted my head left and right, checking
whether any cars were speeding around the tree. There were no cars.
No traffic. No pedestrians.

I clicked my tongue, and it echoed along the
empty street.

I was a sensible, in-control goddess, or
so I liked to think. Before my recent run-in with out-of-control
kidnapping situations, I’d led a stable life. A life that didn't
involve leaf-filled hallucinations or oak-filled
streets.

But there was a problem: I hadn’t always
been the same goddess I was. Or rather, my power hadn't always been
refined in the way I now displayed it. There was a time, long ago,
when I'd have been the worst person to leave in charge of a global
divine immigration scheme. When I was still a young newbie goddess,
I would wander about with my head in the clouds, mesmerized by the
details that unfolded around me. I wouldn’t think, I wouldn’t
process, I wouldn’t reason.

I'd been a real airhead.

Thankfully I'd grown up and out of that
stage. I was an adult now. I was sensible. I was
rational.

Except... somehow, I’d just stared at a
tree for god knows (not this god) how long without picking up it
was in the middle of the bloody road! The incongruity hadn't been
noticed because I'd been too mystified by the detail of the
bark.

This... this was old me. This wasn't
Officina Immigration Officer to Earth – this was Officina Airhead
Goddess who walked around like she was perpetually off her
head.

A spike of genuine fear shot through my
belly, and I clutched a hand to my stomach immediately. The
kidnapping I could intellectually take. Loki wanted me and was
going to find a way to get his fiery paws on me, story closed.
This... this was me losing control....

I drew a sharp breath and took several
snapped steps back from the oak tree. It didn't disappear. It
stayed merrily in the middle of the road, shining in a light I
realized couldn't be coming from the sky. There was no sun – it was
night.

How hadn't I noticed that before? Why
hadn't I been suspicious of the dappled sunshine playing across the
leaves sooner?

Another spike of fear raced through me,
leaving an angry, nervous tingling in its wake.

The oak tree didn't have roots. It sat on
the road as if it had been cut in half by the bitumen. Yet another
all-important detail I’d failed to see.

I knew the tree was not changing before me.
I knew the roots hadn't been there before only to disappear when I
checked. I just hadn’t noticed them the first time around.

The problem was with me, not the tree.
Reality was normal. I was not.

I put a hand up to my throat and rested it
there. I kept glancing this way and that along the street – trying
to convince myself I was alone, that Loki wasn't standing right in
front of me with a giant goddess-catching net. That was just the
thing: I didn't trust my eyes. I didn't trust myself to be
concentrating on the right details. If I hadn’t noticed the
incongruity of the oak before, then I could still be allowing
myself to be drawn in by the wrong details of this scene. I could
be concentrating so hard on the fact it didn't have roots, that I
couldn't notice the cyclopes leaning behind the trunk munching on
some goat kebabs, getting ready to wash down his tucker with some
goddess blood.

I was doubting myself like I never had
before.

I closed my eyes tightly, then opened them
again, giving the world time to revert to normality in
between.

The oak was still there.

So I ran. It wasn't dignified. It wasn't
sensible. It wasn't reasonable. It wasn't something an in-control,
powerful, knowledgeable, dignified goddess would do. I was
reverting, body and soul, to that airhead who couldn't see the
forest for the trees.

I ran, and for all I knew, I wasn't
running from anything. An oak in the middle of the road, sure. But
it was hardly likely to uproot itself and start chasing me
(hopefully).

I ran from myself. From the realization
that the person I thought I was, was not who was there.

I ran until I saw the cars, the pedestrians,
and the buildings.

I didn't stop running. The slice of normalcy
restored to me by the sight of headlights reflecting in puddles
(and not through the foliage of lane-dividing giant trees) was not
enough to restore faith in myself. For all I knew, the headlights
were attached to giant titans running along the road playing catch
with toasters.

I couldn't trust... anything.

So I ran. Where did I run to? Home, of
course.

It was my temple, my shrine, my house of
solace and worship.

If I’d been able to trust my senses – if
I’d been in a state capable of appreciating reason – I would have
either headed for the Immigration Office or back to the Ambrosia.
But reason was far from my grasp. Reason required justification –
proof that something was the right thing to do given the situation
– and I could no longer justify a thing. For all the details I
could still pick out, I had no idea what I was missing beyond them.
For all the certainty I could concentrate on, the uncertainty that
bounded it was insurmountable.

I ran home and, in a daze
that threatened to
overcome everything I thought I was, crumpled. I didn't bother
performing any invocations to restore my power. The details
wouldn't work anymore. I held no trust in myself and that meant no
more faith.

Was it this easy to overcome the divinity
within?

I picked my way over the broken remains of
the door strewn over my carpet. Leaves and sticks from outside had
blown their way in during the day-and-a-half my door had been wide
open. These details alone caught my attention. But they weren't
enough to offer any form of solace. They were only integrated into
the nightmare of confusion playing out in my waking mind.

I stumbled to my bed and fell on it,
curling into a ball, lying there on top of the covers. For all I
knew, Loki stood in the corner making a success-fist and jumping up
and down from the excitement of having his target come to him. That
was just the thing: I couldn't know. I could no longer be sure of
what I knew and what I didn’t. For the evidence of my senses was
too closed, too specified, too untrustworthy.

I didn't sleep. I didn't have my
consciousness shift pleasantly to another happy, tree-filled
dimension of leaves and sunlight. Instead I lay there in a ball. It
was a human thing to do, but without direct access to my own
divinity within, what was I now?

Time passed. In chunks, in days, in
thousands of years. I lay there. With my eyes tightly closed, I
blocked out the external world. All I could wonder at, all that
seized my mind, was the palpable tornado of doubt shaking me from
within. It felt as though my mind was being capsized or broken
asunder by giant and never-ending earthquakes.

The snippets started. Snippets of...
details. Leaves, sunlight, temples, stones, lives, time, movements,
change. At the edge of my consciousness, a swirl of different
images and experiences – none of which were mine, but all of which
was a part of me.

I saw the oak tree again. I saw myself lying
on my back and staring up at the leaves above me. A dove cooed from
somewhere nearby. The pleasant scene was almost reassuring, but it
wasn't enough to calm my twisting, writhing soul.

Then
a hand gently reached out and touched
my shoulder. It anchored me. It brought me back to
Earth.

It was tender, it was warm, and it was the
kind of reassuring that could only be linked to surfacing from
drowning to suck in a life-saving breath of air.

It was my husband.

“
Off—“ I heard at the edge
of my hearing. The word didn't come from beside me, but from the
leaves above.

Confused, I stared up at them. They moved
this way and that in the gentle, pleasant breeze.

“
Offic—“ the noise came
again.

The scene around me started to shake. The
hand, the hand that anchored me to the spot, the hand that had
saved me from drowning, it began to drift away.

I struggled to stay where I was, but with
nothing to hold on to and nothing to hold on to me, I couldn't.

The oak above shook so violently I feared it
would fall and crush me to death.

I lay there shaking with it.

“
Officina.” The leaves
melted into the unmistakable face of Thor.

For the second time in several hours, Thor
was shaking me awake from a leaf-filled hallucination.

Except this time was different.

I woke screaming. I couldn't help it. As
the dream – if that was what it was – faded, so too did my grip on
reality.

“
No!” I squeezed my eyes
tightly closed and tried to remain inside the dream.

I couldn't. The more the memory of it faded
from my mind, the more the moment of reassurance faded with it.

I couldn't trust my senses, I remembered
with a terrible shudder. The face before me, why, it could be Thor
or it could be Loki pretending to be him. Without the ability to
concentrate on the right details, how was I to know, how was I to
pick out the inconsistencies, how was I to trust myself?

I tried to shrink away from Thor or whoever
he was.

I kept my eyes tightly closed.

“
Details,” he boomed, then cupped
a hand to my chin, pulling my head gently this way and that as he
peered across my face.

I put my hands up and clamped them over my
eyes.

“
What are you doing,
Details?” he asked, except his voice had a foreign tone. It shook
on the high notes and bottomed at the end as if he'd run out of
breath.

“
Just go away, go away,” I
mumbled into my hands.

Who knew who I was talking to?! Thor?
Loki?

He sighed. He let me go. He got up – I felt
his presence shift though I wasn't about to open my eyes.

I heard him leave the room.

I heard his heavy footsteps until they
picked their way over the scattered wood of my door and out onto
the porch.

Under my hands, which were still pressing
into my face in a last ditch attempt to keep the unstable reality
around me outside, I blinked.

“
Is this far enough?” he
called from outside, still presumably on my porch.

I kept blinking.

“
I’m not Loki,” he said in a
deep voice. “And you should not have left the Ambrosia.”

I didn't remove my hands from my face. I
couldn't trust my ears. The details of the words I was picking
up... I could be mistaken.