Modern Goddess: Trapped by Thor (Book One) (13 page)

It looked like morning, the sun peaking
over the horizon. Or, more accurately, considering where I was: the
sun being slowly dragged across the sky by a magical set of
star-dragging scarabs.

I needed a disguise, I realized as I began
to draw more and more stares.

While the people of ancient Egypt might be
more comfortable with gods than your average modern agnostic, a
woman in PJs with white hair was still a bit unusual.

I ducked into the first alley I could
find, and was more than glad when I spied a dirty, but
appropriately large thick sack-like cloth. It was hanging over some
cart, and legitimately belonged to someone else. While I wasn't the
goddess of minor crime or theft, I had to widen my horizons. Saying
a short prayer to Lady Luck – and reminding myself to send her a
present later – I begged that whomever I stole this cloak from
would be repaid for my crime.

I pulled the cloak around me as I ran,
settling into the disguise. By the time I made it to the end of the
alleyway and back out into the sun-filled glory of ancient Egypt,
I’d cut my pace to a respectable one, and was trying hard to fit
into the crowd.

To everyone else, hopefully I would look
like your average be-cloaked figure carrying around a shocked white
cat. Hey, this was ancient Egypt – carrying cats while wearing
cloaks was marginally more respectable than it was in current
times.

I still wasn't wearing shoes, and the feel
of the sand-encrusted road underneath my toes was distinct. It
played against my skin, reminding me I wasn't in – as the saying
went – Kansas anymore.

The sun beat down, and I felt the heat of it
through the thick fabric of my cloak. Though temperature didn't
usually bother me – unless it was at the extreme ends of the scale
(like the cold of the frost giants or the powerful fire of Vulcan's
forge) – I still noted it. Blame it on trying to integrate with the
humans, or the fact I was trying desperately to figure out what was
going on, but I was allowing myself to become too distracted by all
the facts, figures, sensations, and details to gain a handle on the
situation.

I calmed my mind by remembering the
average rainfall experienced in Paris over the last hundred years.
Then I ran through the ingredients listed on my shampoo
bottle.

Okay. I told myself with a lick of
determination. Fact one: I'm in Egypt. Fact Two: Loki is after me.
Fact three: he didn't kill me. Fact four: Thor... would have no
idea where I am.

I became dejected at that thought and
started to be sucked in by the heavy cold feeling descending
through my stomach. I was on my own here. Yes, I’d bought time by
hopping a spatial anomaly and galloping into the past – but how
much, and at what cost? As far as Thor knew, I was still at home.
By the time he came to check on me – if he bothered to – I wouldn't
be there. While I didn't put it past Loki to figure out how to
control my spatial-anomaly library-door, I did think it was beyond
Thor. He'd get frustrated and hit the thing with his hammer – and
while ordinary doors reacted predictably to being hit by heavy
objects, temporal anomalies never did.

I felt heavier and heavier as I walked. I
was on my own here, being hunted through time by a powerful and
evil god.

Why me?

It was a question I should have asked
earlier. It was a question I should have asked Odin, Thor, and Loki
at every opportunity that hadn't involved being ogled, attacked, or
menaced by them. Instead, I'd either looked-on dumbly, argued, or
run for cover.

In other words, upon the chance to gather
information I’d shirked my godly duty.

I held my cat fast to my chest with one hand
and used the other to rub my eyes and face.

This was a frankly unacceptable situation. I
wasn't having fun here.

I had to fight the urge to give up and sit
right here behind this sandstone building and wait for whatever
would come to catch up with me. In other words, to surrender to
defeat.

Being the god of victory, that would never
be a thought to cross Thor's mind. Being the goddess of details,
surrender was just a fact to me. I lived my life surrounded by
facts, but now they were deserting me. For in the current situation
it was not the things I knew that mattered, but the things I didn’t
know. Not knowing them drained power from me.

I glumly decided on a plan: I had to find
another god or goddess, hopefully a sympathetic one. I had to beg
them to either get me back to modern times, to alert the
authorities, or to at least let me hide out in the back room while
the storm blew over.

The only problem was Thor was right: I
wasn't the most popular goddess. As far as friends went, I didn't
have any. I had angered too many of my own kind with rejecting
foolish visa applications over the years to be able to count on any
of them in this time of great need.

...
.

Or maybe I was overreacting. I was still a
good goddess, technically, though most of them wouldn't like to
believe that. Surely they would have an obligation to help
me?

I steeled my gaze and looked up at the
sun. I fancied I could see the strong rays glancing off the armor
of the great scarabs tirelessly dragging it across the
sky.

I scratched my chin and tried to think of
what shrine or temple would be closest. Wasn't there a nice Horus
temple somewhere nearby? Though I always found it creepy when he
changed his head into that of a hawk, if I got down on my knees and
begged him for help, there was a chance he'd offer it. I'd end up
owing him a lifetime's supply of mice or something, but I could
weather that later.

Horus could contact Thor, Thor could come
here and beat Loki, and I could return home.

Yep: plan.

Unfortunately my awesome plan didn’t last
long, because the next corner I turned forced me to stop.
Alexandria was a port city. On one side she stared out to the
languid blue of the Mediterranean, and on the other back into the
expanse of the desert.

The corner I turned gave me an unusually
good view of both. Both views had abruptly changed. Moments before
I’d been staring at the horizon and watching the glint of the sun.
Now, from the direction of the desert, a giant sand storm loomed
like a tidal wave. A quick shift of my glance told me that an
equally foreboding, but meteorologically distinct, storm was racing
in from the sea. Two storms racing towards the city, both having
formed within seconds....

I gulped and clutched my cat all the
tighter.

I knew enough about weather to know storms
didn't appear out of nowhere, real or of the sand variety. Yet I
knew enough about gods to know the rules didn't always apply.

Soon, the growing clouds began to block
out the sun, casting the city in a long and deep shadow. One look
at the exact grey and dark blue of the clouds above told me this
sudden storm wasn’t going to be of the mild variety. A glance back
at the sandstorm behind the city told me it could easily engulf the
whole place in an instant.

“
Oh god,” I said without
thinking. One of the things about trying to integrate with the
humans was you sometimes picked up their expressions. I appreciated
the meaning of that statement in a way no mortal could.

My fate was with the gods, literally.

I considered both directions carefully –
sandstorm or ordinary storm – and decided I'd stick to the clouds
and rain variety.

I headed towards the docks. I had no idea
what I was going to do once I got there. I could hardly hop a boat
and paddle furiously all the way to Greece or Rome. While I might
technically be able to run back into the library and try to get
back to my cottage through the anomaly, I didn't like the idea of
trading a storm for Loki.

Due to the ferocity, suddenness, and locale
of this particular set of storms, I knew I wasn't dealing with
cloud seeding gone wrong. There was only one god who could produce
weather this frightful and chaotic in ancient Egypt: Seth. Least
favorite god of the Egyptian pantheon, and Loki’s equivalent this
side of Europe.

Oh dear. Either Seth was having an impromptu
and badly-timed hissy fit, or he was in league with Loki.

My cat had long ago become limp in my
grip. It was no longer trying to rip my PJs to shreds. It was
huddled as close to my chest as it could, resigned to the situation
in a cat-like way. I had always fancied he knew – as far as a
feline could – that I wasn't an ordinary human. From the day I’d
picked him up from the cat home, I imagined he'd figured out that
other people didn't treat their cats as regally. If something was
wrong with my dear, I would bypass the vet and take him straight to
the goddess of cats. If he was hungry for something other than
tinned cat food, I fed him ambrosia. If he wanted a nice place to
sit, I'd go nick one of the cushions from Olympia.

Now he was putting two and two together, and
figuring he was far safer in my arms than out on the street being
pressed between two humungous storms and a city's worth of
frightened people.

I tried to ignore the gritty feeling
between my toes as I ran full-tilt towards the docks. I figured
that at least during an ordinary storm I might be able to see more
than a meter in front of me. The sand storm would envelop me and
reduce vision to zero. If I was going to be of any help to myself,
I needed to be free to gather as many facts as I could.

Oh, sod it, who was I kidding? Seth and
Loki were both after me. I had no chance.

I ran desperately and let out a prolonged
and pathetic whine.

I didn't reach the docks before the
sandstorm hit, and boy did it hit. It grabbed the city as if trying
to pull it into the desert. In moments, everything was covered in a
seething golden cloud. The rain started, too. It poured down with a
rage and speed I'd learned to associate less with water and more
with bullets.

The force of the wind ate into me with every
step. While an ordinary gale I could weather, this extraordinary
one was taking its toll. With every howl and blast of the wind, I
slowed. With a powerful god behind each gust – a god far, far more
powerful than me – I had no hope to resist.

I did the only thing left, and inched down
to my knees. It was more of a slow collapse. Whatever it looked
like, it felt like surrender. I couldn't move against the elements.
I couldn't stand against the power.

I heard footsteps above the bellowing
gale.

I peeled my eyes open against the
sand-biting wind, and saw two silly, pointy, shiny black shoes stop
about thirty centimeters from me.

“
Now,” Loki leaned down, the wind
stopping around him, “Are you done playing games?” he asked with a
mischievous grin on his face. He was still pretending to be
Jupiter, and the gold chain he wore around his neck dangled a
centimeter from my nose.

I looked up into those eyes – the ones
that couldn't so much stop time as pull time into a bomb and make
it go boom right in your face.

I was starting to reassess my earlier
conclusion that Loki was better than Thor. The details were plainly
right in front of my nose, and I couldn’t ignore them any longer: I
would have Thor any day. Or rather, I would prefer Thor any
day.

As the gale stopped, I saw the damage it had
caused. Around me, the streets were covered in thick, wet sand. All
the buildings were standing and no people were in sight, which
hopefully meant no one had gotten hurt during this atrocious double
storm.

I sniffed softly.

“
Nice touch with the
spatial-anomaly door – can't say I was expecting that.” Loki
shrugged, his gold chain jingling by my nose as he leaned towards
me. “But wrong place to go.” He smiled.

As he did, the sand by his side formed,
combining with the residue from the grey clouds above. In another
second, Seth stepped into being. His gaunt face angled my way, his
black make-up clad eyes narrowed and blazing.

He didn't bother to speak. He just stared
with all the pent-up ferocity of a storm ready to break.

I blinked hard and held onto my cat for dear
life. This wasn't the first time I’d dealt with either of these
gods. I'd seen them in the Integration Office numerous times. Up
there, they had been kept in check. Down here, there was nothing
stopping them from being who they were. Which was totally evil.

Seth was dressed in a sand-colored robe
that ran the length of his towering thin form. He was totally bald.
He didn't even have eyebrows. In other words, he was like the
skinhead, robe-wearing, ancient version of a hooligan. A quiet,
imposing, sinister hooligan with the power of chaos and
storms.

Loki sucked at his teeth, then ran a hand
over his oily hair. “Enough of this,” he said as he flicked his
gaze over me. “Let's get out of here. Hades ain't gonna be pleased
if we're late,” he said in a mob-like voice. Either he'd been
watching too many human movies, or he wasn't sure how to pull off
the fake Jupiter act. While Jupiter did dress like this, at least
he didn't speak with his teeth clenched and his mouth puckered to
one side.

“
Hades?” I questioned, voice
high. Hades was in on this, too? Dear lord! I hadn’t only angered
Loki and Seth, but Hades also. Gosh, as things were going, every
bad god with an axe to grind would be after me, baying for revenge
for rejected visa applications.

“
Hades.” Loki shrugged. He
clicked his fingers right in my face.

I jerked back
.