Modern Goddess: Trapped by Thor (Book One) (14 page)

“
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.

I awoke
. It took me several seconds to blink
my eyes open, several more seconds to realize I wasn't dreaming,
then one painfully long moment to realize I was chained to a
freaking wall.

The chains were tight and hard against my
wrists, and I knew immediately they were magical. These were not
the simple link chains you bought from the local hardware store for
a couple of bucks a meter. They weren't even the heavy-duty ones
you had to get from the engineering depot. These were the
specialized god-links you had to get direct from Vulcan.

They were not usually used to tie up
innocent goddesses. These were reserved for your pesky giant, ogre,
or sea monster. Yet here they were, nonetheless, fixing me in
place, and doing a thorough job of it.

I stared around at the room I was chained
to. Though I’d never visited the underworld of the Greek Pantheon,
I knew the style of the place. There were pillars and chains, oh,
and I had a great view of the hill outside where Sisyphus was busy
rolling his least-favorite boulder up the incline, only to fail,
and have to try over and over again for eternity.

I sunk my teeth heavily into my bottom lip
and sighed. It was a choked, shaky sigh.

I was defeated. I hadn’t put up much of a
fight, I'd been defeated from the outset, but I was only now
starting to appreciate what that meant.

I tried to pull at the chains holding me in
place. It was about as successful as moving mountains by blowing at
them.

I tried not to look out the window at
Sisyphus. I didn't need to be reminded of useless toil.

Except there was nowhere else to look.
This room was empty. The goddess tied to the wall was meant to be
the main feature, and the designers had cleverly decided that any
other details – like pot plants and colors other than stone grey –
would detract from the centerpiece: me.

I found my gaze drifting back out the
window. I had a remarkably clear view from here. My captors had
likely intended it to be that way. They were going to leave me in a
room with no chance of escape, with a clear view of someone else
who labored and toiled without gain, to underline how powerless I
was.

Gods were not above psychological
manipulation. They invented it. Divinities had the full gamut of
psychological conditions from narcissism to general egomaniacal
power tripping.

I let my gaze
drift to Sisyphus’
face. It was a punishment that didn’t fit the crime. Doling out
bizarre and unwarranted punishments on the human population was one
of the reasons the influence of the gods had been cut back. You
can't rest too much responsibility in the hands of the powerful.
They tend to think they are above the law and that they can get
away with whatever they like – whether it be smashing some poor
farmer's crops or accidentally letting out the leviathan while
tooling around on their skidoos.

No. Gods had to appreciate the rules too,
and that's why the Integration Office enforced them. Before that,
things had been chaotic, violent, and not that productive. Too many
god wars had led to not enough progress as far as humanity was
concerned. Plus, gods relied on humans far more than they would
like to admit. Without believers and perceivers, gods couldn’t
exist. If the divinities of Earth spent all their time warring with
each other and killing the population upon which they relied upon
for survival, they were going to war themselves to death. It had
been decided by the Powers that Be – literally – that if gods were
to survive as a species, they needed to become less active in human
life. Peace would come, or so the plan had stated, when the
divinities took their fingers out of the pie....

It hadn't worked out like that. Nothing
did.

Though I worked for the Integration
Office, and wouldn't go on record saying anything against it, I
could admit – while tied to a wall in Hades’ Underworld – that
things weren't as peachy as they seemed. While making gods step
back and stop demanding sacrifices from humans was a good thing,
the intricacies of belief in the divine were complex. Though most
gods found the new rules stopped them from having fun, they also
found that being less publicly involved in human affairs led to a
real downturn in belief. As gods were based on belief (in part), it
wasn't a good thing. Most gods these days found that in order to
survive, they had to live vicariously through their supporters.
That is, while no normal, modern human would admit to being an
acolyte of the God of Knit Wear, as long as people approached
cable-tie jumpers with sufficient reverence and belief, the God of
Knit Wear lived on. It was belief by-proxy, and took a creative
Hollywood-esque accounting on the part of divinities, but it
worked.

Therein lay the problem. While small-time
gods like Old Knit Wear scrape out a living based on recurring
internet memes depicting hilarious knitted-jumper-wearing children,
the new laws favored other gods in a disproportionate way.

I stared at Sisyphus as I thought. I’d
often wondered what modern humans would do if they found out about
us gods. How would the old lady down the street react if she knew
the giant man in jeans and a T-shirt could produce lightning at
will and had a magical hammer that could crash through any
substance in the universe? Would her whole worldview be irrevocably
shattered? Would she have a heart attack from the shock? Would she
take a couple of breathy minutes to think about it, then ask Thor
if he wouldn't mind using that hammer of his to fix her wonky
door?

It was a hard one. Humans – though their
beliefs often seemed entrenched – had a remarkable ability to adapt
to change. That was their gimmick: adapt to survive. If tomorrow
everyone on modern-day Earth woke up to the admission that, yes,
gods exist in all sorts of funny shapes and sizes, I doubted the
world would crumble. Yeah, there might be riots, but only because
some humans use any excuse to take to the streets to turn over
rubbish bins and engage in some good old group window-smashing. I
was sure civilization wouldn't crumble. While it would take
humanity a couple of years to adapt to the idea, they'd soon settle
into it and find a way to turn it to their advantage.

Tireless, was a word I would use for it.
The tireless ability to adapt to circumstances and integrate them,
without destroying or shattering your worldview. I realized with a
blink that the word tireless didn't fit humanity as well as it fit
Sisyphus continually rolling the stone up the hill. At this
thoughtful moment in my life, I could see the connection. Sisyphus
pushed the stone up the hill, and from the outside it always looked
as though he was failing to reach his goal: the top. To Sisyphus,
would it seem that way? Would it seem to him that he failed each
time the stone rolled back down? Or was success not based on the
perception of victory, but on the unyielding commitment to the
process?

I became drawn into the philosophy of it
all.

The door opened. In walked Hades.

Hades was one of those semi-evil, semi-good
gods. A little like Loki used to be before he turned all the way to
the dark side. Hades sometimes helped out the other Greek
divinities, and sometimes he dragged up giant sea monsters and
tried to get them to eat Zeus. He was a complicated guy.

Hades ran a finger over his eyebrows,
smoothing them both down. He was dressed in a regal purple toga
clasped at the shoulder, fittingly, with a black-skull brooch. He
had a shock of fuzzy black hair, and dark, strong features.

He walked in, glanced at Sisyphus as if to
check that the guy wasn't shirking off, then returned his gaze to
me. He blinked then wobbled his jaw from side-to-side.
“Comfortable?”

“
No.”

He didn't follow up with a boomed “Good,“
and a hearty evil laugh. Like I said: a complicated guy. He lifted
his hands in a shrug. “For what it's worth, I'm sorry we had to do
this.”

I didn't believe him. “You are?” I said
tritely.

“
It was necessary.” He tried
to smooth down his hair, which didn't seem possible this side of a
mound of hair gel and several industrial clippers.

“
Necessary? Was the sea monster
necessary, Hades, or was that just fun?”