Modern Goddess: Trapped by Thor (Book One) (16 page)

“
Why have you trapped me,
what do you want to do with me?” I tried to prod Hades into
continuing his lengthy explanation. As much as the prospect of
being saved by Thor was welcome, I was the Goddess of Facts, and
here was a big important one I was dying to know (and, in the long
run, would die to find out).

“
You were telling her the plan?”
Loki raised an eyebrow. “I thought we agreed we would let him do
that?”

“
Who?” I demanded
immediately. “Who else are you working with?”

“
Shut up.” Loki waggled a
finger at me. “Hades, if you can manage it, keep your old brother
busy.”

Hades raised one perfect eyebrow and
stared back at Loki without moving. “I would think that you are the
best to fill that ignominious task. As he is Thor, you can distract
him in a way I cannot. Plus, I don't get on all that badly with him
these days.” Hades shrugged easily.

Loki turned his gaze on Hades, and his
eyes became green as he partially lost Zeus' form. “Do you think,
ha, that old Zeusy-Thor is gonna get on a whole lot less nice with
you when he finds out what you've been up to?”

Hades locked gazes with Loki.

“
We're all in this together,
Hades.” Loki’s green eyes went back to the particular shade of
golden-brown Zeus had. “I know Thor better than you, and I'm
telling you our best hope is for you to go out there and use your
knowledge of the Underworld to hold him off.”

Hades dipped his head, then his skin aged
measurably. The clean and dapper look of his purple robes changed
and they rotted on him, the fabric peeling apart and withering like
dead leaves. Altogether, the effect was magnificently
creepy.

Loki held Hades’ gaze.

“
Very well, God of fire,”
Hades said, his lips a noticeable shade of dead-grey and
blue.

Hades retreated, probably to scrounge up
some sea monsters and giants to throw into Thor's path to keep him
occupied while Loki kidnapped me (or extended the current kidnap
situation to another locale).

“
Where are you planning on
taking me?” I struggled against my restraints again. “What do you
want from me?”

Loki took a moment to look bored.
“Ragnarok,” he said offhand.

“
What?” I receded from
him.

Loki enjoyed a private laugh. A creepy
edgy laugh that saw a violent chill spread across my
chest.

Hades was one thing – and I hadn’t been
lying when I'd said he was half-good, half-bad – but Loki was
something else. Loki was twisted, violent, gone. The old adage that
the gods were fundamentally there to protect and shepherd humanity
didn't seem to stack up when Loki was involved. He had plans to
kill all the gods at Ragnarok. While that had been a fact on a
piece of paper whenever I'd seen him walking through the
Integration Office – now it was a fact with a face, a laugh, and a
world-full of power and anger to back it up with.

“
Come along, goddess.” Loki
walked up to me and waved his hands.

My chains disappeared and I fell with a
thud against the hard stone floor.

I lay there, staring up at the man in white
walking my way, one hand stowed casually in the pocket of his yacht
pants.

As he made it to me and stared down, cocking
his head not to the left, but to the right, an out-of-place sound
echoed through the room. It was the mournful howl of a jackal.

Loki gritted his teeth. “Anubis,” he said,
his nose crinkling with anger.

He grabbed me roughly and pulled me to my
feet. “Move.”

Anubis was here. Obviously Seth had failed
to keep him occupied. Anubis had likely become a bit put out by the
fact kidnappers were using the underground tunnels he was tasked to
protect to transport their victims. From what I knew about Anubis,
he wasn't that nice when he was displeased.

Right about now, he would be having words
with Hades of the gnashing teeth and biting your ankles
variety.

If Anubis was free to tackle Hades, then
that left—

The doorway behind Loki shattered, sending
chunks of stone hurtling through the room. There hadn't been a door
there, and there was only one god I knew who would bother busting
into a place even though there was nothing stopping him from
entering in the first place.

Thor.

Sure enough, the beard, the hammer, the
armor, and the god himself walked in. His footsteps echoed in a
loud, clear, and oh-so-welcome way.

Loki seemed frozen to the spot. His lips
were stiffly pulled to the side, his teeth were clenched.

“
Loki,” Thor said, or should
I say, thundered. A giant spike of lightning flashed outside the
window, striking the hill outside.

I looked over to see Sisyphus roll his stone
around the lightning and the steaming crater it had created, and
continue with his task.

I looked up at Thor, though I had to twist
my head to do it. Loki still had me in one of his ice-hot
grips.

Thor walked into the room. There was no
act. He wasn't pretending to be casual. He wasn't pretending to be
arrogant, either.

Right now, he was Thor, god of thunder.
And I wouldn't have it any other way – well, at least until he
tried to re-enter Earth on a fake visa.

“
Put her down,” Thor
suggested as he wielded his hammer.

Loki did what he was told. He let go of my
arm, and I fell unceremoniously by his feet. I wasn't trying to be
pathetic. The ice-hot of his grip had cut through my power and left
me weak.

I watched Loki as his eyes flashed to green.
He exposed his teeth, but didn’t turn to face his once best
friend.

Thor let out a booming, mirthless laugh.
“You look good, Loki.” There was no conviviality there, just words.
“You will not face me? After all these years, you will not face
me?”

I knew – hell, every god knew – that the
relationship between Thor and Loki was exquisitely complex. Loki
hadn’t always been evil. Once upon a time, he'd been of the
manageably mischievous variety that only occasionally tried to get
his friend killed, somewhat like Hades. But he'd turned. And Loki
had turned in a big way.

“
Face you, Thor?” Loki’s
voice lost the Zeus-like edge, and returned to its real cold harsh
tone.

I watched patiently, but wanted to hurry
things up. Unfortunately now was not the time to point out to Thor
that hey, yes, the friend he once loved and cherished was evil and
it was time to come to terms with that. No more giving the guy a
break. Hell, Loki was publicly committed to destroying all the good
gods at Ragnarok. It was time to strike him off the Nordic
Christmas God card list for life.

Thor took one more
step into the room,
and he brought Mjollnir down and pointed it right at Loki’s
head.

Loki lost the act. He no longer resembled
Zeus – the stunning white pants and shirt melted away. Instead, he
stood there in a shining hotrod-red set of armor, with hair and
eyes the color of frozen water. A fine soft fire collected along
his brow, hair, and down the edge of each finger.

“
Thor,” Loki still faced the
wall, “You will get what is coming to you,” he promised.

Thor's lips kinked to the side. “Not today,
Loki,” he said assuredly.

“
No.” Loki twisted his head
to the side and looked at Thor askance, his ice-white hair
glinting. “But soon.”

Thor brought his hammer up, but, just in
time, Loki formed a tendril of ice with his hand and sent it
directly at me. Not at Thor – not at the guy about to shatter him
with a bloody magical hammer – but at me, the goddess pathetically
and non-aggressively resting by his feet.

I didn't have time to scream. Nor did I need
to. In a sharp, snapped moment, where all I could make out were the
details of the light glinting over the wings on Thor's helmet, he
moved before me.

The spear of ice Loki had sent my way
crashed into the armor of Thor's back as he bent over to protect me
from the blast. It didn't kill him. It would take more than a
little ice to kill the triple god of thunder and victory, but the
force of it did send him jolting into me.

He didn't fall, and thanks to him, neither
did I.

He turned, twisting on his feet with his
hammer in hand.

Loki was gone.

A heavy silence descended upon us. It was
broken when Thor dropped his hammer to the ground. Mjollnir made a
loud, sharp, resounding note as it struck the stone. That note
seemed to shatter the world without making a single break, scratch,
or dent.

I swallowed and stared at his back. His
shoulders dipped forward, the light making the shadows of his
curved back far more noticeable, far more... real.

Mjollnir hadn't cracked the flagstones. It
hadn't carved a hole right through the center of the Earth. It
didn't bring the whole building down. No. The only thing that had
been brought down was Thor.

I pressed my lips so softly together that
the slow move sent a tingle of nerves racing across my flesh. I
didn't know what to do here. On the face of it, I was the one who
should be comforted. I was the one who'd been plucked from my home
by a fake Jupiter with enough chest hair to build nests for a wood
full of birds. I was the one who'd been systematically hunted by
three – count it, three – mostly evil and very powerful
gods.

Yet I wasn't the one standing with his
head turned towards the ground, his shoulders rounded, his back
dropped. I wasn't the one staring down at his weapon with a look of
pity, regret, and shame that shouldn't be possible on the face of a
god of victory.

I reached out a hand, while still crumpled
on the floor, and let it rest against his wrist. I didn't squeeze
it and tell him it would all be okay. In all likelihood, it
wouldn't. So I just rested it there.

Time can be a funny thing for gods. It can
pass without you noticing. A thousand years can flit by you in the
wink of an eye, and you can look back and hardly remember anything
but a pall of sacrifices, bleating goats, and the occasional
cyclopes attack.

Sometimes time slowed down. It didn't do
it in the way human movies depicted. It wasn't that everything –
from the dust motes floating through the air, to the hair slowly
drifting across your face – moved tremendously slowly. No. When
time slowed down for a god, it wasn't the outside world that ground
to a halt. The inside world took over. Just as a human can
experience a seeming lifetime in one single dream, a god can impose
their own internal time onto the world around them.

I can't say the world turned to details,
or thunder or lightning. Instead, there was this palpable sense of
existence, devoid of the pressure of linearity.

...
.

Thor shifted his hand. Not before I had a
chance to note how warm his skin was and how stiffly he held his
wrist. I noticed countless imperfections along the surface – cuts,
grooves, scars – reminders of various run-ins with various
world-destroying giants over the years.

He pulled his hand forward and broke my
grip. He stooped down and picked up his hammer. Its song changed.
It took on the resounding hum of victory again. Yet, between the
oscillations, I could still pick up the sad note of remorse.

Thor turned to me. I’d never seen him
looking like this. What was more uncharacteristic – for me at least
– was I couldn’t define precisely how it was he looked. I couldn't
seem to separate the details, to pick up what his eyes were doing,
how far his lips were dropped, where the shadow was playing across
his face. All I could see was an impression of Thor. I couldn't
split it up into what lay beneath.

My, oh my, did it hurt my head.

I put a hand up to my brow and closed my
eyes sharply.

“
Officina,” Thor, for once in his
entire god-life, used my real name, “Are you whole?”

I blinked my eyes open. The look that had
distracted and overcome me before was thankfully gone. I could
again pick up the way Thor's hair brushed against his massive
shoulders and the way his helmet sat uncharacteristically
askew.

It was an odd question. I put a hand up to
my chest to check there wasn't a hole there or something. “I...
guess. My PJs aren't though,” I said as I noted the rips along my
sleeves.

Had I really just said that? Thor had
saved me from a triple-bad-god plot, then had a crushing moment
with his once-good friend, and the first thing I'd bothered to
mention was my PJs. Priorities, I didn't have them.

Thor cast a glance down me. He curled a lip
in amusement.

This was the Thor I was used to.

“
You have worn strange
clothes to this great god battle.” He cocked his head to the side
as he stared down at me for a little longer.

“
They are called PJs,” I
said, crossing my arms. In the real world – the one filled with
cynical humans of all shapes and sizes – it would be hilarious and
embarrassing to be saved from kidnappers in your PJs. In the
god-world, it was worse.

“
I see.” He tipped his head
back and laughed raucously, but the exact notes of mirth and
arrogance I was used to weren't there. “You are the first goddess I
have saved who has been wearing something so
undignified.”

I rolled my eyes. “Shouldn't we, I don't
know, get out of here? As great fun as it is to sit crumpled in the
Underworld while you laugh your ass off at me, don't you think Lo—“
I stopped in time, “Hades or Seth are going to come back?”