Modern Goddess: Trapped by Thor (Book One) (27 page)

I went to have a bath.

The feeling of warm, clean water surrounding
me was the most glorious experience I'd had in days. It was
comforting to be able to relax back in my simple, white bathtub and
watch a single candle flickering on the bench beside me. It was
such a stark difference to running away from gods and sea
monsters.

Though the thought of it pained me, it was
comforting to know that Thor was nearby to ensure no
militant/cycloptic girl guides tried to force their way into my
cottage temple.

Then
again, he was probably destroying my
stuff as I languidly lay in the bath. Or worse, he would be
searching through it. I imagined him grabbing my basket of old
weather reports – the one I kept in my lounge room – and sniggering
until he cried tears. That, or he'd be outside chewing on my roses
as he read through one of the many diaries I had that kept a
meticulous record of my days.

The damn brute. I didn't know how to deal
with him. He was a firecracker of a nong. What was worse, he was
always more in control than me.

I sunk fa
rther into the hot water, allowing it
to lap over my closed lips.

I swirled my fingers around in the water,
creating small eddies and vortices.

At least I wasn't sandy anymore. About the
only thing that I could be happy for. After this lovely, but brief,
bath, I imagined things would get dirty again. They'd get loud,
they'd get ridiculous, they'd get out of control. In the middle of
it all would be the loudest, dirtiest, and most controlling nong of
them all – Thor.

I sighed again.

“
Details,” Thor thundered
from the door.

I gave a startled jump. “Don't you come in
here, Thor,” I snapped.

He paused in silence, then laughed
heartily. “Are you threatening me again, Details? I have told you,
you cannot best me in battle. Do not provoke me.”

I stared at the door. I would not put it
past the giant cactus to burst in and laugh at me while waggling
his eyebrows.

“
You have bathed for long
enough. We must save the world.”

I glared harder at the door. If I was the
goddess of deathly stares, then the door would have turned into
dust by now.

That
thought sent an unsettled feeling
mucking up my stomach. It reminded me that, if Thor was right and
wasn't playing an outrageous game with me, then I couldn't be sure
of what goddess I was. All these years I could have been convinced
that I was the goddess of details and facts, only to be
wrong.

What was my legend? Where did I come
from?

“
Details? You have gone
quiet. Are sea monsters attacking you from the drains? Do you
require rescue, again?” he said the last word with enough sarcasm
to impress a school-full of rebellious teenagers.

The door handle rattled.

I leapt up from the bath immediately, water
sloshing everywhere, and grabbed for my bathrobe.

The door, despite being locked, opened
anyway. In strode Thor (keeping in mind that my bathroom was only
small and couldn't permit too many strides from a giant Nordic
god).

I had enough time to whip my bathrobe on and
to prepare a shocked and indignant glare.

“
Details,” he said with a
cheeky smile fattening his cheeks. He looked down at the bath and
appeared to inspect it. “There are no sea monsters there, unless
they are of the pitifully small variety.” He pressed his fingers
together in case I didn't understand how small he was talking about
here.

“
Excuse me,” I blustered at
him, “But where I come from, you don't walk into people's bathrooms
while they are in the middle of taking a bath!” I stamped my
foot.

He looked down at my foot then up at my
face. “Where do you come from? Where I come from, I walk into
bathhouses all the time. Two of the places I come from, anyway.” He
shrugged his shoulders.

I clutched at my bathrobe, aware that my
knuckles were as white as the toweling fabric that surrounded me.
What a lecherous jerk. “Thor,” I looked up at him, “What would Hera
think if she heard about this?”

At the mention of his half-wife's name from
another identity, Thor lost the act. He paled. “She wouldn't think,
she'd hit me.” He shrugged his shoulders, and this time it was a
far more genuine move.

“
Right,” I said, happy that the
mention of his paranoid, but still legitimate half-wife was enough
to make my point. “I'm going to go get dressed. Then I'm going to
reject your visa application.” I mentioned over my shoulder as I
headed for my bedroom.

Thor followed right behind me. He paused at
my bedroom door.

I had to turn and look at him pointedly.
“I'm going to get dressed alone,” I pointed out, “I'm a big
goddess, and I know how to put a sweater on.”

“
Toga,” he said
automatically. “I thought we discussed how—“

Luckily my bedroom door hadn't been damaged
in Loki’s attack on my house, and I took the time to slam it in
Thor's face.

I waited several moments, ensuring Thor
wasn't going to open it/kick it down/hammer it to pieces with
Mjollnir.

When it remained firmly closed, I dressed.
I didn't put on a toga. I may not know what goddess I was, but I
still wasn't one of those goddesses. Which was a comforting
thought; it reminded me that regardless of what I found out about
my past and my true powers, it would still not invalidate the life
I’d been leading to-date. It would frame it in a different
reference. Who I was – all those books, muffins, roses, and
mulching – wasn't going to be wiped away if I found out I was the
goddess of rejecting foolish god ideas. It would still remain as
part of my history, I would just look at it
differently....

I grabbed something sensible. No skirt and
heels for me, thank you. I put on a sensible pair of black work
pants, a sensible shirt, and a sensible pair of shoes. I tied my
hair into a sensible bun. If Thor was right – and I hoped he was
wrong – and this all did end up with a god battle somewhere, I knew
for a fact a toga wouldn't be a helpful thing to wear. Toga's had a
habit of snagging on broken tree branches/spears of war gods who
were chasing you. They also had a habit of slipping down at
inappropriate moments.

I patted my clothes neatly and reached over
to pluck up a pair of thick, black-rimmed glasses from my dresser.
I stopped. I didn't need glasses. I had no problem with my
vision.

My hand hovered there. My fingers closed
around the glasses and I pushed them onto my face anyway.

I didn't care if I didn't need them. I
wanted to wear them.

I walked over to my door and opened it
again dramatically.

Thor wasn't there.

He'd been shadowing my every move, and now
he'd nicked off. I checked through my bedroom window to ensure he
wasn't hanging around there staring in through the gap in the
curtains like a creepy giant stalker.

Nope.

I heard noises from the kitchen.

I marched there only to find Thor with his
head in my pantry. He had two tins worth of cookies and slices in
his arms, and he had almost devoured his way through both of
them.

I let my lips slide open and I stared at
him.

He stared blankly back as he finished a
swallow. “These are okay,” he shrugged his shoulders then wiped his
fingers on my pantry door, “But I could do with a beer to wash them
down.” He looked at what I was wearing. “Unless the fashion in
togas has changed in the past two minutes, then you have disobeyed
a direct order and are not dressed appropriately for divine
adventures.”

I shook my head and pushed my glasses
further up my nose. “You can't order me around, Thor – I don't
belong to your pantheon.”

“
That you know of, Details.” He
dropped the tins, having finished their contents, and waggled a
finger at me.

“
Precisely,” I crossed my
arms and raised an eyebrow before he could, “For all you know, I
could be from the Indian pantheon, or Chinese.”

“
You don't look Chinese,” he
pointed out with an easy shrug. He appeared to find more crumbs on
his fingers and wiped them on the rack of clean tea towels behind
my pantry door – all of them.

I responded by pushing my glasses further up
my nose, though they hadn't slipped down from the last time. “You
are a slob.”

“
And you don't need glasses.” He
walked past me and whipped my glasses off in a quick move that saw
me unable to respond.

When I tried to snatch them off him, he used
his superior height and held them aloft with one arm.

Yes, that's right, like a child keeping a
toy from a younger sibling. There was no way I was going to jump
for them. I did, however, consider a quick junk punch – that would
fell the brute. If he wasn't Thor, that was.

Instead, I settled for turning sharply and
heading for the back door. “Are you going to act childishly in my
kitchen all morning, or are we going to do something proactive
about saving the world?”

“
Childishly?” he repeated,
tone neutral.

He wasn't going to comeback with “Takes
one to know one,” was he? If this was going to degenerate that far,
then I was ready to call Odin and have him pick up his son before
the crotchety big baby needed a diaper change.

“
Where are you going?” He brought
down the arm that held my glasses aloft and stared at the rims
thoughtfully.

I thought he was going to offer them back
to me – realizing that the game was not funny to people who were
divine and much, much older than preschoolers (by a factor of
eternity). But as soon as I made a step towards them, he crushed
them in one of his giant hands.

The glass was just so much dust as it
filtered through his fingers.

My jaw could have dropped off.

“
You do not need glasses,
Details,” he said. “You hide behind them.”

“
You, you—“ I couldn't form
the words, but oh boy did I want to tell him how much of a giant,
universe-sized jerk he was.

He wiped his glass-covered hand on the
apron strung up on a hook by my pantry. “If you are to find out who
you are, then you can no longer hide from me.” He turned to the
side, too quickly for me to see his exact expression.

I saw my solid, cast-iron frying pan in my
peripheral vision, and I was seconds from reaching over, grabbing
it, and whacking Thor right on the nose.

“
Details, we must go.” He
headed towards my living room.

“
The nearest God Transport
Hub is this way,” I said through clenched teeth as I pointed out of
my back door.

“
You have one in between the room
in which you read and sleep. I thought you would have noticed
that,” he said casually as he walked for the door.

Yes. There was that. “You can't use it to
get to the Immigration Office,” I said through clenched teeth as I
followed him.

“
Perhaps if I was as uncreative
as you, Details, that statement would be true.” He burst into my
living room with the kind of drama and gravitas that my living room
door didn’t enjoy. The damn thing fell off its hinges.

I watched the door clatter to the floor.

Words couldn’t express....

“
This temple of yours requires
work, Details. Also, I have found through years of experience that
marble is a sturdier building material.”

If I kicked him in the back of his legs,
would I break my foot? Or would I just bruise it?

Thor stopped in front of the door that led
to my tamed, library-loving spatial anomaly.

“
It only goes to libraries,”
I pointed out with the lowest, most annoyed tone I could
manage.

“
Perhaps for boring goddesses,
like yourself. But there's one thing you should know about me,
Details.” He paused to look over at me dramatically.

Oh, there were plenty of things I should
know about him. All of them were as annoying and useless as the
next. “What's that, Thor? That you still sleep with a teddy
bear?”

He looked confused. “Who is this Teddy?
Has he been spreading rumors that he has shared my bed?”

My bottom lip wobbled, but I tried to look
as stony as I could. “It is a small toy in the shape of a
bear.”

“
I see, you use it to remind
yourself – as a visually striking image – to dream of fighting
bears and other creatures of great strength. Fitting images to
dream of. I see,” he looked thoughtful, “I will have to look into
these Teddy Bears.”

I could kill him, and, who knew, I would by
the end of this all.

“
But there is another thing
you should know about me: I’m anything but boring,” he admitted
with a flash of a smile.

I rolled my eyes, but not before he
simultaneously grabbed for my wrist and wrenched the door open. He
plunged us both through the gaping anomaly before I had time to
register what was going on.

I stumbled right out of a broom closet in
the center of the Integration Office. Not the front door, mind you
– but a broom closet.

The god of cleaning stood right outside of
it, blinking.

Thor walked out behind me, grinning
lasciviously.

The cleaning god raised one arched
eyebrow, then looked slowly from Thor to me. He shook his head at
me and walked off.