Thor

  THOR

  Gods on Earth #1

  JC Andrijeski

  Copyright © 2021 by JC Andrijeski

  Published by White Sun Press

  Cover Art & Design by Sylvia Frost of The Book Brander (2020)

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit an official vendor for the work and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  Contents

  Free Box Set!

  A Quick Reminder Blurb

  1. Bad Landing

  2. Silvia

  3. The Local

  4. Houseguest

  5. Picnic In The Park

  6. The Gift

  7. The Experiment

  8. Chaos And Order

  9. God Of War

  10. Missing Person

  11. Oh. My. Gods

  12. Negotiations Among Gods

  13. Dinner With A Water Dragon

  14. A Voice In My Head

  15. Battle Of The Gods

  16. Screwed

  17. One Hundred Years

  What to read next

  Join the Light Brigade!

  Reviews are Author Hugs

  Sample Pages

  1 / Thief

  List of Book Titles

  About the Author

  A Quick Reminder Blurb

  He appeared out of nowhere in my neighborhood bar - naked, blue-eyed, flickering with blue and white light, a silver hammer perched on one muscular shoulder.

  I, Silvia Hope, should have known right then I was screwed.

  When he walked out of the bar without a word, I thought I’d never see him again. Naked cosplay? Drunken dare? I figured I’d never know. Until, on my walk home, there he is again, fighting with another guy in the park by my house.

  Then the lightning starts, the glowing eyes, and the guy he’s fighting seems to transform into a giant snake.

  I start wondering if someone dosed me in that bar. Still, I take Thor home, where he tells me he’s a god. Oh, and thanks to a Dragon God named Jörmungandr, I have some kind of magic object embedded in my throat, and there’s a good chance I’ll die if someone can’t fix me, fast. So that’s neat.

  Meanwhile, Thor stares at me a lot, and man, can that guy stare. It’s really not fair, that stare, especially with those eyes.

  I know it’ll never work. I mean, he’s a god, I’m a tech nerd who can barely make rent. Then there’s that whole, I’ll-probably-die thing, thanks to his crazy Asgardian family. But we keep getting thrown together as he tries to save my life, and it’s getting harder to pretend the only sparks between us are coming from his hammer.

  1

  Bad Landing

  He lands with the force of the mighty, they say.

  He lands on his feet where others must pray.

  He lands with his hammer, thrust up in the sky

  A cocky erection, a flame that won’t die.

  He lands with ALL POWER, summoned from high.

  …He lands like an idiot, drunk on her eyes.

  ~ Drinking song from Asgard, credited to Loki

  The God of Thunder stared around the dim, smoky room, fighting to clear his vision.

  He’d definitely not landed where he’d expected.

  It felt like where he was supposed to be, but the geography had changed. More time must have passed down here than he’d realized; the very shape of the smallish city he remembered had altered in the intervening years.

  It felt different.

  It even smelled different––less like fish and crab and whiskey and more like metal in the back of his throat, cement, cat urine, rotten food.

  Iron and steel, cement and glass.

  Beer. He could still smell beer, so not all of what he remembered had gone.

  Still, the change was palpable.

  He stood in a valley now; he could feel it through some element of his senses, a difference in the land under his feet. Where was the hill? The fields he remembered? The fruit trees? He remembered the hill giving him a view of the greater town, the ocean in the background. He remembered a cultivated park there, with a manor.

  Could so much time have really passed?

  A wave of melancholy washed over him at the question, a memory fleeting, but painfully sharp and raw, even now, despite the intervening years. Truthfully it remained so raw, Thor could barely stand to let it pass through his mind.

  So many years had passed. So many, yet still, somehow, not enough.

  He’d wanted so much to forget.

  It was easier to forget.

  Even as he thought it, he caught a pair of pale brown eyes, nearly amber in color, watching him from the other side of the dimly-lit room. She stared at him, and the hair was all wrong, the face different, if still stunningly beautiful in a different way. The clothes were all wrong, the figure, while luscious and ripe, wasn’t the one he remembered, which had been more muscular from those years, and fairer, either from seeing less of the sun, or some other reason related to pigment––

  It was those eyes. Those stunning eyes.

  The color might be slightly different, but… Asgard above.

  The expression there.

  That look, curious but intense, child-like but with a wisdom and stillness that caught his breath––it cut into him, so familiar, he felt like she might have plunged a knife into his chest, simply by staring at him in that way.

  Before he could take in a full breath, she turned her head, severing the connection between them. It happened so fast it bewildered him; someone approached her, spoke to her, gripped her arm, pulled her back so that she disappeared into the crowd.

  Others moved forward, taking her place.

  She was there, and then she was just… gone.

  Someone pulled her away.

  They took her away from him.

  Thor blinked as if coming out of a trance. Anger rose in him briefly, frustration, and then he felt foolish, like he’d been hijacked by memory, by the wants of his own heart and mind versus cold reality. Whatever caused that maudlin dive into unfulfilled wish and memory, it was the enemy of rationality, much less the duty bringing him here, to this world.

  Such a longing was weakness.

  Given who he was, Thor could ill-afford such weakness. All they did was provide openings to his more devious kin.

  Still, wishing a thing away was not the same as banishing it.

  Most days, he had no reason to think of her, so life went on as normal, with no more than the usual frustrations and pain. But the wound remained, dormant and silent, until something brought it to the forefront of his mind, and then the knife went deep.

  The lie that he was over it, over that life, over that love, was a useful lie.

  A necessary lie.

  Some things, even the gods could not change.

  She was long dead. Many years now.

  He forced his mind back to the present, to the purpose that brought him here.

  Looking around the crowded bar, he asked himself again.

  Was he in the right place?

  Had so much time really passed, that it felt both so foreign and so familiar to him still? Could he really have left off coming here, in the flesh at least, for such a long time as it now felt to him? With his feet now touching the surface of this world, he found himself thinking it had been that long.

  He’d neglected this place for far longer than he’d wished to admit to himself.

  He knew why.

  It was the same r
eason he nearly lost his mind in a familiar-seeming pair of light-brown eyes, eyes that seemed to reach into him from the dark, just to hurt him.

  Thor frowned, staring around at the dank, dark room.

  Eyes stared back at him, empty eyes this time, unfamiliar eyes, eyes absurdly bright in the dim light. It occurred to Thor that the look those eyes gave him was not normal.

  They stared at him, unnaturally wide.

  They stared with what had to be shock, possibly even terror.

  Realizing he was still sparking with his god’s light, Thor looked down at himself, trying to see what they saw. The snaking charges ran like liquid over his bare arms and chest, down his legs to his feet, coiling around the handle of Mjölnir, which he still gripped tightly in his left hand, holding it up like a lantern to aid him in peering through the dark.

  He realized something else.

  He was completely naked.

  Somehow, his clothing had not made it with him from Asgard to this world.

  That was… different.

  What could have caused him to become unclothed?

  Shoving the question aside, Thor stared from face to face.

  Most looked not just at his eyes and the blue-white light coursing over him, but now down at the rest of him.

  He frowned, staring around at them.

  He contemplated options.

  In the end, there was only one.

  Hefting Mjölnir up onto his shoulder, he turned away from all of those staring eyes, making his way in the direction where he smelled the freshest air, and from which he felt a faint breeze, coursing through the cracks of the dwelling.

  He ignored the flashing lights, the odd costumes, the painted faces and drinks clutched too tightly in fingers. He ignored the continued stares, the titters behind hands, the smiles, the winks, even a few who waved at him cheekily.

  Pushing his way through the odd, metal-encased doorway on the far end of the room, past a rather large human sitting on a stool who gaped at him openly…

  Thor emerged on the street.

  He stood on a sidewalk wet with fog and misting rain.

  One of the humans’ metal vehicles drove by, its twin headlights flashing in the wet air. Thor had seen these, of course. His father had shown him images, years ago, and the two of them delighted in the strangeness of the contraptions, the sounds they made, the different shapes they came in. They’d looked at flying machines too, and the enormous boats the modern humans had learned to build, also out of steel and iron.

  He looked around, sniffing the air.

  Ah. Now he could smell it.

  Ocean. Fish. Brine.

  The ocean had not left this place entirely. It still lived in the city’s bones.

  Thor began to walk up the hill, the same hill he’d aimed for via the Bifrost.

  He had been off-course. Strange, yes, but it might explain his lack of clothing. The Bifrost could be temperamental in its way. If one deviated from the intended target, sometimes not everything made it to the end of the journey.

  Still, Thor looked forward to getting a look at the city from the hill.

  He still expected to be disappointed, of course.

  His memory of that hill consisted of empty land surrounding the house of a human he’d been friendly with, a human who grew the most glorious plums, apricots, peaches, pears, cherries. A human who smoked his own pork, and always had venison on hand. That same human had enjoyed sitting by a fire and trading stories, smoking pipe-weed, and telling bawdy jokes until the wee hours of the night.

  That man would definitely be dead now.

  Humans simply did not live long enough.

  Frowning up at the tall brick and wood buildings to either side of the narrow street, Thor found himself missing those swampy fields covered in deer. Yet there was still a familiarity here, even though most of the externals had changed beyond recognition. Something in the style of the buildings, the shapes of the roofs, struck him as agreeable.

  Thor had just reached the hill––which still, surprisingly, sported a stunning view of the city and remained covered in grass and trees––when he saw it.

  The real reason he had come so far.

  He had not been so far off on his landing as he had supposed.

  Thor froze under a burnt-out streetlamp, watching the thing as it made its way up the grass-covered hill, with its carefully tended trees and flowering bushes.

  As was the creature’s wont, it kept carefully to the shadows, its eyes seemingly fixed on the view over the hill, gazing out over the myriad of human-made lights that dazzled like a million fires blotting out the city and beyond.

  Unlike Thor, the serpent had found clothes.

  He’d also acquired a new body, which was far less surprising.

  Thor recognized the light around him, though.

  He would know that light anywhere, particularly when it glowed this bright.

  He caught the shimmer of his nephew’s skin as the creature crossed the lawn to get to the shadow of a large cypress tree. Thor had already seen the smoke-like ripple across the other god’s features, even as the creature solidified its face and bone structure into the more locally acceptable shape of a young, handsome, Earth male.

  The creature definitely blended in better than Thor.

  The God of Thunder couldn’t help noticing his nephew’s clothes exactly mirrored the style of the odd clothes he’d seen inside the drinking establishment where he first landed, expecting an orchard and instead finding flashing, colored lights, a glass bar covered in different-shaped bottles, and women gyrating in gowns that barely covered their plump asses.

  Not that he minded that last bit.

  But how had this corrupt creature found a body and clothes so quickly?

  Scowling, Thor began to walk towards it.

  He would deal with this swiftly, at least.

  The rest was just detail.

  However, Thor wished now that he’d found clothing before he happened upon Jörmungandr, if only to keep the creature from noticing him too soon.

  Moving silently across the grass, Thor kept the hammer by his side.

  He walked towards the same tree where Jörmungandr hid, finding shadow where he could, without wasting a lot of time looking for it.

  Regardless, he would be sensed soon, and seen.

  Even as he thought it, the creature turned, scanning the hill with sharp eyes.

  Thor went totally still.

  Fifteen yards remained between him and the tree where Jörmungandr crouched in the shadows. Thor considered closing that gap with a leap––

  When those reptilian eyes found him.

  Rather than surprise being reflected there, the creature grinned.

  “Hello, uncle!” it called out. “Have you come to help me, then?”

  Thor stepped out of the shadows.

  He gripped the hammer tighter, feeling the charge of light and strength course through his arm and hand and fingers. Lightning crackled over the etched metal, sparking over his forearms, up to his bicep and shoulder, reaching his neck and face.

  Thor stared at the shape-shifter, seeing only the dragon there, the serpent that loved only the lowest of human existence, and very few of the other gods apart from his father, Loki. Bitter and often prone to angry, entitled rants, Jörmungandr didn’t even have the sense of humor that his father used to soften the worst of his treachery.

  “You’re coming back with me,” Thor said, infusing his voice with the harder charge of lightning that coiled off his weapon. “Your grandfather, Odin, would speak with you, nephew. He is not pleased with your abandoning of your post. Or your stealing of what is precious to him. Or your likely designs with the object you have stolen.”

  The creature smiled, his voice polite.

  “Stealing, uncle?” he said innocently. “What is it I am accused of stealing, precisely?”

  Thor had no patience for such games, however.

  Staring his nephew in the eye, he didn’t even both
er to express annoyance.

  “You know perfectly well what you took, Jor.”

  The creature’s gold eyes and vertical pupils shone briefly through the eyes of the human whose form it copied. Thor saw the human tongue turn forked, just long enough to flicker out between his lips, then morph back into the tongue of a human when he laughed.

  “You think I will simply heel when I am told to heel?” The Dragon God’s voice turned openly derisive. “You have no authority over me, uncle. Especially not here. You should call my father, if you wish to act the tyrant. He has more patience than I do.”

  Thor fought back a snort.

  The idea of Loki having “patience” in anything was laughable at best.

  He held the hammer higher, infusing more of his will into the silvery weapon. It began to glow, even as the charge of blue and white lightning crackled upward, leaving the metal entirely and sending out tendrils of electric flame into the sky, touching the low-hanging clouds.

  “I will not ask again––” Thor said, thunder in his voice.

  “Come catch me then, uncle,” the creature called out, his voice openly mocking. “…Assuming you can. I daresay it’s been a while since you had a good chase.”

  Thor didn’t need another word of invitation.

  2

  Silvia

  “What on Earth is that?”

  Silvia muttered the words to herself, staring up at Alamo Square, the famous park only a few blocks from her house. She’d opted to walk home alone after meeting her friend at the drag queen bar down the street, in Hayes Valley.