Modern Goddess: Trapped by Thor (Book One) Page 17

  I waited until the exact note in Hera's wailing tone was so high it could have cracked the ceiling, then I quietly made my way out. To my knowledge, every other god and goddess was too busy watching the show to see me leave the scene.

  As soon as the door to the Ambrosia closed behind me, I drew in the cool night air. I picked up the mingling scents of far-off rain, near-by curry, and the general muck of packed-in city living.

  The smell itself didn't matter, it was the fact I could take the time to note the details.

  I felt measurably calmer than I had in days. I wasn't on someone else's timetable here. I wasn't running from or running with anyone else. I was on my own. If I wanted to take the time to note the exact waft of turmeric and cinnamon in the air, then I was going to do that.

  I was also a practical goddess, and I wasn't about to get distracted. I would enjoy the details as I worked.

  I was going to head straight to the Integration Office. I wasn't about to brave my own home (though the prospect of a shower was one that seemed almost as important as saving the universe). For all I knew, Loki was still hanging around on my porch, sitting on the stoop, polishing his fake Jupiter gun, and sighing about how he'd lost “Da broad.”

  Nope, if I wanted to go alone and if I wanted it to be a success (i.e. If I didn't want to end up tied to a wall again), then I had to be smart. I knew, though it was an unpleasant thing to know, that Loki, Hades, and Seth would still be after me. I had to act now – no heading to the store to pick up some sugar and eggs for some late-night cupcakes.

  Time to go to work.

  The Integration Office was located in space, but I didn't have to hop a NASA shuttle every time I wanted to head there. The transport networks available to gods were more extensive than your average suburban bus route. Summoning them, however, involved less goat sacrifices than you'd expect.

  I stepped onto the road, looking both ways as I crossed to the other side. There were god-transport hubs (or great whacking spatial anomalies if you wanted to give them a science-friendly definition) at set points around the globe. These anomalies were of the trained, reliable, non-world-destroying variety. All you had to do was know where they were and know how to access them, then you could con them into taking you to anywhere in time and space.

  The reason I lived in a homely cottage on the edge of this city was there was a travel node close by. It was in a church on the outskirts of town. The exact location of the divinely-controlled spatial-travel anomalies was a little random. Some were in deepest-darkest forests. Others were in underwater caves. One was in a female bathroom stall in the London Underground. There wasn't a whole lot of reasoning behind the locations, at least from the modern point of view. They were, however, all related to ancient sites of power. The church at the edge of this city happened to be sitting over the location of an old, catastrophically epic god battle. The battle had sanctified the site with the kind of frantic, zippy, charged energy that made the fact a spatial anomaly had grown from the grass hardly a surprise. Those spatial anomalies love atmosphere.

  The church itself was rundown, and to my knowledge no longer had any regular parishioners. Despite its disuse, it had never been sold or torn down to make way for car parks and whatnot. Such a thing would never make it past city planning. The number one rule of the Integration Office – not to interfere with the freewill of other creatures – didn't extend to letting wily developers tear down the locales of spatial anomalies. That type of thing tended to irritate space-time rips something chronic.

  All I had to do was make it to the church, then hop a ride to the Integration Office. Once at the Office, I would be safe. Loki could try to walk in pretending to be any god he pleased, but he wouldn't get through. He could steal a whole hoard of sea monsters (who might object to performing a raid fryingly close to the sun) and try to attack the building – but it wouldn't work.

  When safe inside my own office, I could start to solve this problem my own way. I could delve into various files and amass all the details there were until I could construct the true story from the bottom up.

  That would be action. While happy hour would only result in a large tab, I would be solving this crime the proper way.

  I only had to get from my current location to the church.

  I let myself be pulled along by the tingly, nervous, frightened feeling welling in my gut. I glanced behind me at the ordinary door that led to the Ambrosia.

  Was leaving Thor the best thing to do?

  I pushed the feeling away as I turned around.

  Yes, it had to be. I was sure Thor's ways were the old ways (not that they had many happy hours back in ancient Norway, but the point still stood).

  Wiping my hands on my jacket, I paid close attention to the feel of the fabric as I ran my fingers over it. The move was quick, the fabric a mix of soft but hard.

  I took a breath and began to walk. I put enormous effort into focusing on my environment. The way the lamplights made the pavement seem a different color. The way the noise of traffic from the busier main roads beyond filtered through as I passed near the mouths of connecting alleys. The way the stars above were mostly enshrouded by a growing, thick cloud.

  If I was careful to pay attention to the details – and to stay within them – then my power would remain with me. The true divinity that kept me a goddess wouldn’t be far from my grasp. The details enthroned me. And if I enthroned them in my awareness, then I would be divine.

  I clicked my tongue against the base of my mouth as I walked. The sound was hollow and quick, and echoed through my jaw like a judge banging a gavel in a silent courtroom. Though a growing voice in my head kept questioning whether this was a good idea, I dismissed it. I'd decided to go alone, so alone I would go.

  Plus, I was a goddess for crying out loud – a bona fide immortal female with powers beyond the imagination. I wasn't like some poor old nanna who couldn't hope to defend herself against an armed robber or a slippery step.

  No. Just because Loki and his dodgy mates were supposedly big-time gods, didn't mean they automatically bested me. I’d shown Hera up, hadn't I? She was as big as they came.

  As I walked, the tingling in my stomach continued to grow, but I tried to rationalize the unpleasant sensation away. It was left-over nerves. It was the effect of being cast into the care of a god who couldn't care less about my welfare (or the universe's, apparently) and cared more for sitting at a table and watching eternity through the bottom of his empty ale glass.

  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 aw
ay 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.

  Chapter 11

  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 wh
ich 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.