Thor Read online

  Honestly, it had been a weird night.

  First there’d been Darlene, her art school pal, who’d shown up rocked out of her head on some kind of hallucinogen.

  Her roommate, Morty, seemed to think it was mushrooms, but they’d never gotten the exact substance out of her, so Silvia spent most of her time in the bar worrying Darlene might have taken something dangerous (as Darlene was wont to be reckless and impulsive) and wondering if they should take her to the emergency room, just to be safe.

  Darlene herself seemed to be having a great time, though, so eventually Silvia decided it must be all right.

  She even had fun for about an hour after that.

  Their friend Pug got up on stage and did her thing, belting out a full-throated Aretha Franklin song wearing an amazing purple gown covered in sequins.

  Then Silvia briefly wondered if she’d been dosed herself.

  Across the room, not ten yards from where she stood, right next to the bar covered in Christmas lights and tinsel, an unbelievably gorgeous––really inhumanly gorgeous––and ridiculously enormous, incredibly naked man appeared out of nowhere.

  He stood at about the midpoint of the bar, glowering around at everyone with shockingly ice-blue eyes, carrying what looked like a glowy sledgehammer.

  Silvia wondered at first if she’d hallucinated him.

  She definitely seemed to be one of the first people to see him, as most of the bar continued on its merry trajectory for those first few seconds, noisy and filled with laughter and catcalls at the stage, where another trans-woman was now belting out something by Adele.

  The man seemed to be staring right at her for those few seconds.

  The intensity of his blue eyes seemed to want to burn a hole right through hers.

  Silvia felt lost there, like she was being hypnotized by that stare…

  …when Morty came up to her, chatting happily and obliviously (and drunkenly) about someone he was absolutely dying for her to meet. Her roommate grabbed Silvia’s arm as he spoke, and began dragging her closer to the stage so he could introduce her to the guy he had a crush on from an art gallery downtown near the tech company where he worked.

  Silvia strained backwards even as she was being led, trying to keep her eyes on the man with the sledgehammer, but she lost sight of him as the crowd closed up behind her.

  But yes, that was new.

  Even for San Francisco on a Friday night, naked guys appearing out of nowhere, carrying impossibly shiny weapons that sparked with blue lightning, definitely constituted something out of the ordinary.

  Unfortunately, the super-hot naked guy with the hammer didn’t stay long.

  By the time she found him again with her eyes through the crowd, and managed to get Morty to look, too, over half the bar was staring at him.

  As for the naked guy himself, he looked around like he’d gotten off at the wrong Bart station. He scowled around at the patrons of Lucille’s, a foreboding yet somehow sad look in his pale blue eyes, until he seemed to abruptly make up his mind.

  Without saying a word to a single person inside the club, he turned on his heel and walked out.

  He didn’t look remotely bothered by his own nakedness. He walked to the front door of the bar and past the bouncer, Joe, like he didn’t have a care in the world.

  Silvia, along with everyone else––male, female, and non-gender-specified alike––watched him go, mouths hanging, until he disappeared through the metal-encased door.

  Then, they all let out a collective sigh of… disappointment?

  Gratitude? That they’d gotten to see that at all?

  Silvia honestly didn’t know.

  Either way, she decided nothing was going to top that.

  Best to end the evening on that bizarre, if memorable, note.

  It took her another few minutes to say goodbye to everyone she knew in Lucille’s that night, to gather up her coat and purse and find Pug and tell her she was fabulous, and do her best to say goodnight to a still very high Darlene. She checked in with Morty, who decided to stay for a bit longer, and waved at the bartender, Gloria, and then she was finally ready to go.

  Of course, it took her another few minutes to get to the door.

  She got stopped a half-dozen times before she reached the bouncer, Joe, who gave her a hug and a kiss before holding open the door.

  Then Silvia was on the street, walking up Hayes and hugging her burgundy-colored, crushed velvet coat around her throat and the super-shiny, silver minidress she wore.

  She walked fast to stay warm, trying to get her body temperature up for the seven or so blocks she still had to cover before she reached her one-bedroom apartment on McAllister.

  As she walked, she couldn’t help wondering how the naked man had fared.

  Not just with finding wherever it was he was clearly looking for, but with San Francisco in late fall. The November wind could be brutal even for the normally dressed; that guy had been wandering around without so much as a pair of tighty-whities.

  In her own attempt to beat back the cold, she made it up the hill in record time.

  It was when she reached the top, within full view of an even taller hill that rose out of Alamo Square, that she saw them.

  She saw the naked guy from Lucille’s, first.

  He was still naked.

  He stood near the top of the hill in the shadow of a great Pacific Cypress tree, that giant sledgehammer of his still gripped in one hand. Blue-white lightning coursed around the silvery block at the end of the ornate handle, and up his arms, flickering across his bare chest. It turned his eyes the same blue-white, making them glow from an otherwise shadowed face.

  Silvia stared for a few long-feeling seconds, her mouth ajar, the burgundy velvet coat still clutched to her throat and chest.

  The electrical charges continued to coil around the naked man, sparking up his arms in rippling rings, flickering out from the silver sledgehammer.

  The light only seemed to be growing brighter.

  It made his very skin glow, turning it almost translucent.

  She could see veins where it passed, muscles and bones under the skin.

  Silvia watched him stand there, electricity coiling around his bare skin, and she thought she had to be dreaming.

  That’s when she noticed the second man.

  Another figure stood there, so deep in shadow, Silvia saw nothing of him apart from his eyes. Those shone out of the dark near the tree’s trunk, reflecting that blue-white light like twin mirrors, but something in his expression struck her as cold.

  As she continued to stare, she made out the rest of his lean outline, slightly darker than everything around it.

  He was big, whoever he was.

  Almost as big as the naked guy with the silver sledgehammer.

  Not quite as big, though, nor as muscular.

  Silvia began walking towards the two of them.

  She aimed her feet for the steep, grassy hill of Alamo Square.

  It wasn’t some well-thought-out plan. She didn’t think about why she was doing it. She had no reason in her mind at all. She simply felt drawn there, to those two men, pulled in their direction without being able to articulate a clear reason why.

  Crossing the street, she walked over the sidewalk and onto the grass.

  Like the two men, she stuck to the darker, more shadowy patches of lawn. She began to walk up the hill, giving the two figures under the thick-trunked Pacific Cypress a wide berth. She moved slowly, maneuvering instinctively to get behind the man holding the giant electric hammer.

  She aimed for the grove of trees at his back.

  She didn’t want to get too close.

  Well, okay, she got pretty close.

  She kept a number of trees between herself and the blond giant with the hammer, finding a pocket of deep shadows on a dirt area off the main path, between four or five smaller cypress trees. Once hidden in the darkness of the trees, she didn’t move at all, but waited and watched, holding her breath
.

  She could no longer see the second man at all.

  The naked guy, the one with the glowing skin, the great ass, and coils of electrical charge sparking off his arms and chest, completely blocked his shadowy friend from view.

  She realized she could hear them talking.

  She couldn’t understand them, though.

  The language wasn’t one she recognized in terms of knowing where it came from, much less being able to pick out individual words.

  Something about it was weirdly familiar, though.

  The naked guy seemed to be doing most of the talking.

  He had a deep voice, a voice that sounded almost guttural within the syllables of the strange language.

  Whatever it was about, he sounded pissed.

  Clutching her jacket to her throat, Silvia shivered, pressing her lips together as she strained to listen to words she couldn’t even understand. For the first time since she’d entered the park, she wondered what the hell she was doing.

  Cute as he was, naked, glowy guy could be dangerous.

  His friend definitely had a dangerous vibe, and clearly, neither of them were exactly what you’d call normal.

  Silvia had no idea how the blond, naked man got his fancy sledgehammer to go all plasma-ball with the lightning and the coils of current, but that thing probably wasn’t fully legal, either, in terms of carrying around a sixty-pound weapon that shot out live sparks of electricity.

  Silvia wasn’t usually the type to follow guys around just because they were hot.

  She usually had more sense than that.

  She took a step backwards, wincing when her foot landed on something that crunched softly under her heel.

  Luckily, the two men were too absorbed in their argument to notice. Neither of the shadowy figures looked back, so she was about to take a second step, when the light around the naked guy suddenly got a lot brighter.

  Feeling her throat tighten, Silvia started to back away for real, taking a few more steps in rapid succession, even as she did her best to stick to the shadows. She had a vague idea of trying to leave out the other side of the park, catty-corner to where she came in. She figured if she could get to the other side of those trees, she could make her way down to Scott Street.

  From there, she could cut over to McAllister, and her apartment.

  She made it to the next tree and stopped, only meaning to linger there long enough to map out the rest of her path through the dense thicket. She looked behind her, gripping the trunk as she tried to decide which tree to head for next.

  She’d just made up her mind, when a sound in front of her brought her up short.

  She’d finally heard the other guy make a sound.

  Meaning, the non-blond one, the one lurking in the shadows with the cold eyes. The one wearing clothes. He continued to stand in pitch darkness, at the edge of the thicket by the widest and tallest of the Pacific cypress trees.

  He laughed.

  It was a deeply creepy laugh.

  Really, all jokes aside, something in that laugh brought on Silvia’s first real jolt of fear.

  She froze, staring out from behind her tree, unable to see any part of the other man but a sliver of one arm, and what looked like the top of his head, covered in black hair.

  When he laughed a second time, he tilted back his head.

  She saw his eyes briefly, over the shoulder of the muscular naked guy.

  Instead of reflecting the blue-white light from the blond one’s hammer and skin, the others’ eyes glowed now with their own internal flame, a green-gold color that reminded her of iridescent metals. She saw his pupil change from round to a vertical slit, just before his eye closed, first with a transparent lid, then with a normal, human-looking one.

  She let out a shocked gasp.

  It was soft, barely a whisper, but her fear exploded when she saw the one with the freaky eyes react. His eyes darted sideways, peering over the blond one’s shoulder, looking for her in the dark.

  Silvia froze.

  She swore she saw a smile flit across those narrow lips, right before he looked away.

  He went back to staring at the blond man.

  The two men remained face to face, in aggressive, standoff poses as they went back to arguing in that strange tongue.

  Their voices were growing increasingly harsh now.

  Carefully, as silently as she could, Silvia resumed her slow, careful progression backwards, placing one foot at a time in the soft soil, taking small, precise steps. She glanced all the way over her shoulder in the direction of Divisadero Street, trying again to get a sense of how far it was to reach that side of the hill.

  She could see the paved walkway that ran through the middle of the park. It forked where it met the thicket, winding around either side of the tree-filled patch of dirt.

  Careful, as silent as she could, she took another step.

  At the same instant, the light surrounding the two men flashed out––as bright as a sun.

  Silvia fought not to gasp.

  She clamped a hand over her mouth, holding her breath so intensely it hurt her chest.

  The glow around the naked guy brightened exponentially, expanding out in a sharp circle. The circle appeared weirdly perfect in terms of its defining lines, with the area inside the circle blindingly bright, and everything outside still in pitch darkness. The light blew out around his body in a dense ball, then stopped, as if it hit an invisible barrier.

  It looked as if the blond giant was encased inside a Christmas ornament.

  Silvia stared, trying to decide what could do that.

  With the hammer, she’d assumed it was some kind of tech-gadget the guy had custom made––part projector to make it look cool, part real electrical charges to make the hammer operate like a cattle prod.

  But that couldn’t possibly explain this.

  Unless it was more special effects.

  It sure didn’t look fake from where she stood, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. She’d never seen light behave that way before. Moreover, it didn’t look precisely like “light” per se, more like a diffuse form of that electricity.

  But if that blue-white glow was actual electrical current, it would be frying the guy.

  Silvia tried to wrap her head around it, to make sense of it.

  A few seconds later, she decided she didn’t care.

  She needed to get the hell out of there.

  Before she could take another step, the ball of light around the naked guy blew out even wider. Still in that round, dome-like shape, like his own personal force-field, the light’s arc expanded without warning, doubling in size in less than a second, then doubling again, like a giant was pumping it full of air.

  The wall of light ended only a few feet from Silvia now.

  Briefly, she could only stare at it.

  Then it expanded again, widening liquidly to engulf her.

  Letting out a shocked gasp, she stepped backwards, forgetting about staying silent as she tripped on a root with her high heels and landed unceremoniously on her ass. Scrambling backwards, she tried to crawl her way out of the light, but when she reached the edge, the wall sparked out, shocking her skin.

  She was trapped.

  She stared at the sizzling dome of blue-white current, panting, trying to make sense of what the hell it was. It certainly looked like an electric field. But why did it only shock her once she was inside? Why hadn’t she felt it when it bloomed out over her?

  She stared around at the dimensions of the curved wall, but didn’t dare touch it again.

  “What is happening,” she muttered under her breath. “What is happening, what is happening, what is happening…”

  She bit her tongue when two men began speaking again.

  That time, weirdly, she could understand them.

  Realizing they must have switched to English, she turned her head, still sprawled out on the dirt and pine needles.

  “You cannot hold me,” the dark-haired one
hissed. “You are deluding yourself, uncle, if you think you can pick me up and carry me around with this glowy little toy––”

  She definitely would have put that voice with the vertical-pupil guy.

  He even sounded vaguely reptilian.

  “I would not test that theory,” the blond one answered.

  His voice rang out, hard as the metal hammer.

  It was still deep, but had a kind of music to it, now that she understood him.

  Silvia pushed herself up to a half-seated position, her arms outstretched to either side, her palms planted in the dirt as she listened. She sat perfectly still, fighting to breathe, her heart slamming sideways in her chest.

  Everywhere she looked now, the world was tinted with that blue-white light. The ground around her hands was tinted with it. The grass, the bushes, a stone bench she could see to her right through the tree trunks. A flowerbed filled with sleeping yellow flowers.

  All of it shone with the same blue-white light.

  Silvia looked at the man with the sledgehammer.

  It was getting harder and harder to convince herself this was some kind of hallucination… or a bizarre form of performance art.

  The man with the reptilian eyes had moved back and to her right, maybe in an attempt to escape the dome of blue-white light.

  Because of that, Silvia could now see him clearly.

  He hadn’t managed to get outside the wall of current, but was presumably trapped inside, just like her. He’d lost some of that smirky, amused look she’d first seen on him. He now glared coldly at the naked blond man, his eyes flashing with anger.

  When he spoke, Silvia heard an open threat in his words.

  “I’ll never go back with you,” he said. “Never, uncle. You might as well spare us both this dance. Release me, and walk away. This is the last time I’ll ask––”

  “You don’t make the rules here, Jörmungandr,” the naked man growled.

  His voice rumbled like melodious thunder, heavy and deep, colored by an accent she didn’t recognize. Something about the sheer power behind that voice caught her breath. She felt a near-physical force there, like his words themselves pushed at some part of her brain.

  She could imagine him as a kind of master magician.

  Or maybe just a really good hypnotist.