Modern Goddess: Trapped by Thor (Book One)

  Chapter 6

  Thor deemed to tell me the plan. It was an exciting, exhilarating, genius plan. Not.

  We walked along the corridor of the floating god hospital and out into an open-air garden. He peered over the side, right down into the billowing clouds below. This god-hospital didn't have a railing – health and safety was less of a concern in building design when all the occupants were immortal.

  Watching him, I knew Thor had every intention of jumping over the edge in a furl of golden hair, hammer, and beard.

  I didn't know where I fit in. I couldn't fly, and although the drop to Earth wouldn't kill me, it wouldn't thrill me, either. I'd wind up in a giant crater in the side of some snowy Himalayan peak, and it would take weeks to walk to civilization. Hey, maybe that was Thor's plan – get me out of the way so he could do some monster smashing solo.

  When Thor didn't immediately grab my arm and throw me off the side of the building, I began to be drawn in by the details. He stood with one foot on the side of a small stone wall – small enough to offer no protection against the sheer drop, but large enough to constitute a tripping hazard. His hammer was held gently at one side, and the majority of his torso was twisted forward so he could stare down at the world below. The sunshine glinted easily, and happily, off the metal of his breast plate. It played along the wings of his helmet, the movement making them look like they were in full flight.

  His stare was... engaging. It was the kind of stare you could imagine a shepherd would give while watching his flock grazing below. His lips were pressed into a tight line, his eyes narrowed, and his brow furrowed enough to show his eager concentration.

  Without turning around, he pointed his hammer at me. “You are staring at me, Details.”

  I sighed through my teeth, rolled my eyes, and stood my ground – several thankful meters away from the ledge. “I hope you don't plan on throwing me down there,” I admitted. “I can't fly,” I pointed out with what I hoped was a righteous sniff.

  Thor snorted. “That doesn't surprise me. No. You go home. I fly.”

  “What?” My lips kinked up with surprise. “I thought we were meant to—“

  He turned around, resting his hammer on his knee. “You are meant to not die – a function you can fulfill while at home with your bake wear, books, and cat,” he said with enough disdain to impress a class-full of surly, authority-hating teenagers. To Thor, bake ware, books, and cats were about as welcome as Loki, Seth, and Hades.

  “Home?”

  “Home,” he repeated, voice strong. “I will track down who is responsible. You,” he pointed Mjollnir right at me, “Would just get in the way.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but closed it. He was right. I would just get in the way. Not because I was weak – because I wasn't a macho, god-fighting goddess. If solving this problem were up to me, I wouldn't do it the same way. I would gather every detail I could find and construct the reality of events from them. That way I would be sure to reach the correct conclusion.

  Thor, on the other hand, would run around, smash any monsters he could find, and hope that at least one of them was the bad guy we were after.

  We were different, irrevocably so. If Thor wanted to take charge, then yes, it was better that I stayed at home.

  I leveled my gaze, meeting his. “A good plan. I will go home and bake muffins,” I reveled in the word. “I'll feed my cat. Hey, I might even do some ironing.”

  Thor snorted, and before I could offer him a ring for that bull-nose of his, he stepped backwards off the edge of the building. When you were a god, that was how you finished arguments. Not suggested for humans, though.

  I watched him go, and when he was out of sight, I glared at him. I put all my godly powers into it, squinting my eyes and gritting my teeth. While I couldn't stop time with my gaze, like he could, I was still capable of a mean stare.

  Then... then I went home.

  Fortunately, my home was like a temple. That didn't mean I treated it with all the reverence of an acolyte. It was a technical term. While on Earth, as the goddess of details, I didn't have any churches, temples, or shrines set up for me – I was too complex a goddess for those types of things. It meant I had to build my own. Some of the older, more established, more powerful gods like Anubis or Venus still had functioning temples they could call home (and by functioning, I meant ruins). When they visited Earth and found themselves in a spot of trouble or were hankering for some free accommodation, they could hang at their own temples. Me, I had to build my own, replete with a white picket fence, white roses, a white cat, and multicolored cupcakes.

  The temple, shrine, or church was an important part of a god's existence. It was their home turf. When they were in trouble, they could retreat inside the walls of their homes, and said home would offer protection against whatever afflicted them. They were far more effective than a bunker, armored car, or highly-defended castle. The belief that kept the god or goddess alive was deeply woven into their place of worship.

  A cottage in my case.

  Thor was correct in thinking I would be okay at home. It was unlikely anything could walk up to my front door and force its way in. Unless it was wearing a skirt and insistently selling Girl Guide cookies. My shrine – my cottage – would, or should, protect against immortal attacks, for a time.

  It would take considerable effort to break through my front door. While some of the more powerful gods could manage it, they would still have to put up a noisy fight.

  Once I walked in my front door, I was sure to lock it securely, sliding the bolt to the side. I ensured my cat was inside, and went around securing all the windows. I had enough food, considering I didn't need to eat in order to live, and I could rustle up enough reading material to keep me happy. I didn't think this whole thing would take too long. As much as I hated Thor, I had to admit he was powerful and also suitably brash. Two things that should work in my favor. I could easily imagine him taking several minutes to track down the bad guy, another couple of seconds to knock him out, then a couple of hours to drink to victory. I'd be let out to go back to my ordinary life. If I was lucky, I'd only miss one day of work.

  I set about cleaning my already spotless house in order to give myself something to do. I made muffins – chocolate chip and raspberry ones. I decorated them with exquisitely detailed icing. I didn't bother eating them, though.

  After several hours passed, I wondered whether it would be a smart idea to go out into the garden and mulch the roses. Technically, although the garden was outside, it was still behind my picket fence. The fence was still part of my cottage-temple.

  I stared out of the window, watching the afternoon settle over my garden. I got caught up in watching the bees zip over my flowers. I had a bank of lavender, verbena, and cornflowers right next to my kitchen windows. The small, brightly colored finches usually rested in the sturdier branches of the verbena and tried to peer in through the glass, in the hope they could spy something more appetizing than bugs.

  I leaned down on the spotless kitchen bench, resting my chin in my hand. With my other hand I gently brushed a speck of something off the glass.

  The mulberry tree in the center of my garden was casting a long shadow over the wooden bench seated underneath it.

  The grass looked like it needed a cut.

  Thor was such an idiot – from that arrogant pose, to the way he treated me.

  I blinked. I had allowed myself to get distracted, by Thor of all people. I pushed air through my teeth. I wasn't going to sit here and moan about that Nordic nong. I was going to push him from my mind. Soon this would all be over and I'd be back to my old life, and I'd only have to put up with the arrogant bull whenever he wanted entry into Earth.

  I stopped noting the details on each petal of each stalk of lavender as they played in the gentle wind that swayed past my window. I stopped noticing the bees, too.

  It was the way he looked at you, it was the way he treated you. None of the other gods did that. Not even Odin
– though he wasn't exactly a cuddly bear of warm and generous godliness. Still, he seemed more stable and reliable than Thor/Zeus/Jupiter.

  His evil friend, Loki, treated me better than he did. Hades was polite, though sometimes he left parts of dead bodies wherever he sat. Hell, Seth – though he did tend to make a storm in a teacup, literally – treated you with more dignity than bloody Thor.

  Was there anything redeemable about the triple god? Yes, technically he’d saved me from the clutches of that sea monster, though more accurately he’d waited until I'd saved myself. He'd just taken the opportunity to smash some slimy, tentacled skull.

  The more I thought about it, the more I worked myself up into a tizz. I was fuming here. With little to no outlet – not being the type of goddess to smash things or start throwing needless lightning bolts around – I did the next best thing: I reached for a muffin. I ate it with a great deal more vehemence than your average muffin deserved.

  I walked into my lounge room and grabbed the weather report. Spraying bits of muffin all over, I read the report angrily. I glanced down it, and it took me a long time to allow the details of the thing to wash over me. Once done, I grabbed an almanac that listed the historical rain levels of various countries around the world. That settled me more.

  Then I grabbed my cat, patted it gingerly, and told it at length about how bloody infuriating a certain Nordic god was.

  Over the course of the afternoon and into the night, I finished off all twenty-four muffins and read through approximately two hundred books. I turned the television on. Storms in Egypt, an outbreak of a disease in Greece, and some frostier-than-usual weather in Norway – the news was never cheery. I turned it off after a while.

  I closed my eyes. Though a god didn’t need to sleep, over the years I’d experimented with it. I’d taught myself to breathe, to bake, to mulch, to pay taxes – sleeping was another notch in the ladder of finding out what it was like to be human.

  After several more angry thoughts, I felt stillness descend on me. The sensation humans know as sleep settled, and I – goddess of details – had a nap.

  I awoke to someone knocking on the door. At first I blinked languidly. Coming around from sleep – especially sleep you didn’t technically need – was always an odd affair. It left you drifting between two separate levels of consciousness.

  I rubbed my eyes, because humans did that.

  The knocking continued and grew louder. Either the Girl Guides were back and weren't going to take no for an answer, or Thor had returned.

  Thor. I stood up, picking up my cat in my arms. He’d fallen asleep on my lap and looked too comfortable to put on the ground, so I carried him as I half-jogged to the door.

  “Finally.” I reached the door. Thor had returned, victorious, and I could get on with my life again. Those darn roses needed some mulching.

  I went to open the door, but thought better of it. I peered through the eyehole. I saw a sight I wasn't expecting.

  I opened the door, eyebrows knotted. “Jupiter? You stated on your application you weren't going to switch identities while on Earth,” I pointed out, cat still in my arms. While I was eager to find out how Thor had fared, so I could get rid of the guy, I still thought it necessary to remind him of Earth Entry Rules.

  Jupiter grinned, slicked-back black hair glinting under the porch light. The gold chain around his neck glinted, too. Everything glinted in an oily way. That black suit of his with the unbuttoned shirt showing his supposedly manly chest hair, even his long, pointed, black shoes.

  Of all Thor's godly guises, Jupiter was by far the greasiest. He looked and felt like a small-time mob boss. Except one who could occasionally stop time with his gaze.

  “Officina,” Jupiter said, lips clinking up. They really did clink, as if they were made of gold, not flesh.

  I blinked. Thor never called me Officina – that would be giving credence to the fact I was a true goddess and not someone designed to get in the way of Earthly fun.

  “It's done.” With his hands still in his pockets, he shrugged expressively and peaked his eyebrows.

  I looked at him. His suit was unusually shiny and his hair was slicked back too far. His eyes also didn't glint nearly enough.

  “You're safe now.” Jupiter grinned again, dipping his head forward and looking up at me in what was meant to be a half-dashing, half-manly way.

  It was neither. It was wrong. All of it was wrong. I backed into my house, my arms still around my cat.

  Jupiter's grin faltered. “There's only one thing left to do.” He winked.

  I slammed the door in his face.

  He put his shoe in the doorway, jolting the frame with a powerful shudder and stopping the door from closing.

  I backed off.

  This was not Thor. It was not Zeus, and it sure as hell wasn't Jupiter. The greasy chap on my doorstep was, however, a god.

  The door blasted off its hinges. I twisted to the side, protecting my cat with the bulk of my form. The chips of wood struck my back and ripped the fabric of my pajamas.

  After my return from god hospital, the first thing I'd done was change out of that silly toga. As far as most other gods were concerned – or at least the Roman and Greek ones – if something was worth doing, it was worth doing in a toga. To them, there was no more functional or dignified item of clothing. Need to clean out the drains? Wear your toga. Need to give a rousing speech to your acolytes? Toga. War? Toga.

  I didn’t find the things comfortable. When it came to hanging around my own cottage, I preferred a large pair of flannelette pajamas and some soft slippers. The slippers weren't humorously shaped or anything – I was still a goddess, thank you. Comfort was just something I valued more than toga tradition.

  Now my PJs were ripped. Oh, and I’d opened my door to an evil god. Once you let them into your temple/cottage, they were harder to remove than cockroaches.

  I turned to see the fake Jupiter walk casually over the broken remains of my door. He tugged down on his black jacket, revealing more of his chest hair.

  He cracked his head from side-to-side.

  He reached behind him and pulled out one large, menacing golden gun.

  The gun, though it did make the whole mob-boss act more convincing, was not a conventional one – it glowed and crackled.

  Fake Jupiter gave a grin. “We do this the hard way, then. You are coming with me, goddess of details.”

  Like hell I was.

  I ran into a room before fake Jupiter could say another word.

  A shot from his gun sliced into the wall beside me, and my cat gave a loud cry, sinking its claws deep into the fabric of my PJs.

  Great. I would have to go shopping again.

  I had other things to think of now.

  Things were happening fast again – twice in the space of a day. I tried to push my detail-driven mind to catch up with the situation. I tried not to be distracted by how much PJs cost, or whether my neighbor had a functioning sewing machine I could borrow. I tried not to notice the pattern of wood chips that had spread through my bedroom. I tried not to be pulled in by the feeling of my loose hair playing across my neck.

  No. No. There was a fake Jupiter with a freaking magical gun hunting me down in my own darn house – I had to pay attention to the situation and not the details!

  I also had to think of a plan.

  “Come on,” fake Jupiter drawled from behind me, “Don't make this hard on yourself. You can't beat me, Officina. You can only prolong this by several seconds.” Another blast sunk into the wall – and I knew he’d missed deliberately.

  My cat struggled to get free, but there was no way I was going to let go of it – not while there was an angry and evil god with a magical gun on the premises.

  Whoever he was, he was right: I couldn't fight him, and I was stuck.

  He walked into the room, whistling through his teeth and cracking his head to the side. I'd seen that exact move before, and I'd heard that whistle, too. “Loki,” I realized.


  Loki shrugged his shoulders, one hand still stowed in a pocket. “Nice. Pity for you that you didn't realize sooner.”

  I’d opened my door to Loki, god of mischief, fire, magic, and general evil. By opening my door to him, by proxy I’d invited him into my temple.

  I winced. I was trying to run through the details of this situation as fast as I could. I was trying to come up with a plan. Planning wasn't my forte – creating strategies was a step beyond facts and figures. That's why, as a goddess, I was always stronger when I was with others.... The real truth to Thor's admonishment that I shunned my own kind. On my own, the most I could do was process visa applications and get lost in the details of how one simple gaze could stop time.

  “Why have you come here?” I demanded.

  Loki gestured at me with the gun. “Details you'll learn later. Officina, you are coming with me.”

  No.

  I didn't want to.

  I stared ahead, noting the door before me. It was the one that led to my library – the library that wasn't so much one room of books, but a spatial anomaly that led to every single library that had ever existed on Earth.

  It always led somewhere different every time you opened the door. Over the years, I’d learnt to control it somewhat, but spatial anomalies were always temperamental.

  I straightened up. “Hold on,” I made my voice even, “Let me turn the oven off.”

  Loki gave a sharp laugh. “Be my guest.”

  I reached for the handle of my library door, opened it, walked in, and closed it behind me.

  Loki would be confident there would be nowhere to run to inside my cottage. Or at least nowhere he wouldn't be able to find me and drag me from. He was one of the most powerful evil gods on Earth. He had considerable and formidable magic – and a nice golden gun to complete his outfit today. All I had was a cat.

  Loki, however, didn't realize I had a whopping great spatial anomaly squeezed between my bedroom and living room.

  It was too late. As soon as I closed the door, I was transported somewhere far, far away from my cottage. With the door closed, the anomaly reset itself. Despite his considerable magic, it would take Loki a while to figure out where I’d gone.

  I let out an enormous breath of relief and turned on my heel to find out where I’d ended up.

  Several toga-wearing men were staring at me, brows raised in surprise. Their skin was dark, and several of them wore the kind of heavy eye makeup you rarely saw in modern times beyond emos or goths.

  I glanced up at the wide, arched ceiling above and along the walls at the rows and rows of scrolls.

  Alexandria, I was in the library of Alexandria.

  One of the men who stood closest to me looked as though his bottom lip was about to drop off from surprise. To him, he’d seen a woman in strange but comfortable clothes holding a cat walk out of a shelf. Which wasn't something that happened often in the library unless it was hashish day.

  I held my cat and grinned. I noticed the detail of the man's skin – the soft scars scattered up the side of his face, probably from a childhood bout of some disease. I dipped my head down, and I noticed the detail of his hands as they tightly clasped a scroll. I scanned his head, seeing the pockmarked surface of his shaven skull. I drew him in.

  I was not Thor, I was not Loki, I was not Odin. I was the small-time goddess of details. Yet I was still a goddess. I still had powers. Just as I could lose myself in facts and figures, I could bury others in them, too.

  The man's eyes started to become glazed.

  I moved. As much as I didn't want to shock the inhabitants of the Library of Alexandria, I still had to get away from Loki. It could be minutes or hours until he found me.

  Luckily for me, when it came to the rules that stopped gods and goddesses from making themselves known, they became less strict as you travelled back in time. The closer you came to the real reign of the gods, the less it mattered whether you interacted with humans. Yes, you still couldn't act in a way that took away their freewill. But popping up magically through a shelf of scrolls meant one thing in a population already comfortable with gods and magic – it meant an entirely different thing if you did it at the local library during a meeting of scientific skeptics.

  I should get away with this. Oh, that and Loki was chasing me. Mitigating circumstances, that.

  I half-ran, half-jogged through the library. I hoped the oft repeated rule that you can't run through a library didn't count when you were being hunted by a magical-gun wielding mad-god.

  I broke into a full run. As I ran, I tried to draw the people around me into the details of the way my bare feet sounded as they slapped against the sand-encrusted marble floor, the way my hair fanned out behind me, and the way my cat still hung onto my arm for dear life.

  The more I concentrated on the details, the more they would, too – and it would take away the reality of the situation for them.

  I made it out into the city beyond. It had been a long time since I'd been to Alexandria city, though I did visit the library often enough (not usually abruptly while dressed in flannelette PJs).

  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 ordin
ary 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.

  “But that ain't all, baby girl.”

  Baby girl? What was he going to do next, pull a whole salami from his pocket and chew on it while he called Seth Tony and bemoaned the drug dealers that were moving in on his turf?

  No. He reached out a finger and patted me on the nose. “We've got someone who wants to see you.”

  I shivered. It was the tone, it was the light tap, it was the greasy hair. “Who?” I stuttered.

  “We're not super villains, goddess, we're gods. We don't give away the details of our plans.” Loki locked his hand over my wrist and pulled me up.

  I couldn't resist. I did furrow my brow at him, at least.

  Right. The situation was this: I was being goddess-napped by two powerful and evil gods, while holding my cat, and in my PJs. Damn, things couldn't get worse from here.

  Then again, there had been the ominous mention of someone else. Which other god was after me? Who else had joined this illustrious litany of evil to hunt me?

  Oh hell, I was going to find out, wasn't I? Hell being the operative word here.

  Loki wrapped a firm, tight hand around my wrist as Seth disappeared back into the sand and cloud from whence he'd come. I was alarmed at the fact the Egyptian meany was leaving me alone with the Nordic meany. Then I realized that two meanies or one, this wasn't a good situation.

  “Where are we going?” I managed, trying to ignore the distinctly fiery, yet icy feeling spreading through my wrist. My arm was beginning to go numb.

  “Down,” Loki said, lips spreading wide. He pointed to the ground with the gun he'd pulled from the back of his pants.

  The paradoxical fiery cold was spreading up my arm and into my shoulder. As it did, I began to lose hold of my cat, and I had to let him go. He jumped out of my grip, gave me a mournful look, then did the smart thing and high-tailed it out of there, literally, with his tail stiffer and fluffier than I'd ever seen it.

  I hoped he would make it to a nice cat-shrine somewhere.

  I fell against Loki, unable to keep standing on my own.

  The earth below us started to give way.

  I heard a howl from the desert. A fleeting, great, mournful cry of some jackal.

  It took a while to realize it was Anubis – the Egyptian god who protected the dead, right-hand man-dog of Osiris, god of the underworld.

  My head was becoming cold, and it felt as if my thoughts were freezing in place. The fact that Anubis was howling... was important, somehow....

  A set of stairs opened up below us as a great dark chasm appeared in the street. Loki pulled me down it, his eyes warily glancing behind us. “Seth,” he said as he poked a pile of sand on the stairs with the pointed toe of his shoe. “You keep him busy. I don't want any trouble.”

  The sand responded by furling up, a mouth forming in the chaos. “Do not step on me, god of fire and magic,” it hissed.

  “Yes, yes,” Loki dismissed him, “But there are more important things to worry about. If Anubis catches us wandering through the underworld, he ain't gonna be pleased. You keep him occupied, and I'll meet up with you in Greece. Got it?”

  The sand responded by shooting into the sky. All the sand that had once covered this city in a thick blanket started to recede. It formed a sandstorm in reverse, and soon the tidal wave of dust and grit was moving away from the city at a frightful pace.

  Anubis. I thought slowly. The Underworld.

  They were interconnected, weren't they?

  Yes.

  I'd read that. You could go through secret back doors that connected the underworlds of various pantheons. It was some administrative necessity in case a foreign national, who didn't believe in the local gods, died on your soil and you had to get his soul back to his own pantheon lickety-split so he could be judged and sent off to the afterlife.

  All the Earth-based underworlds had back doors that linked up to each other. That's what Loki was doing. He was going to take me down into the Egyptian underworld, hop a security door when no one was looking, and march right into the realm of Hades.

  The hot-cold spreading from Loki’s grip consumed my body. It was numbing, but in a painful and heavy way. It wasn't just that I couldn't move, but that I was being contained at the same time. My power was being locked away, and struggle as I might, I couldn't break free.

  Loki led me down the stairs to the underworld, his ridiculous shoes clinking on the dark obsidian stones. He had one arm wrapped around my middle, as I was as limp and incapable of movement as a broken doll.

  I tried hard to stay awake – concentrating on any details I could find. Loki’s chest was hard and uninviting, and my shoulders slipped against the smooth surface of his satin shirt. His gold chain was caught in my hair, and tugged it with every step he lugged me down. He smelt of fire: wood smoke, burnt remains, hot coals, licking flames.

  I let my eyes drift closed, intending to open them in a second. The seconds drew on and on, and the cold only became more and more encompassing.

  Then, blackness.