Page 14 of Thor

"You can't be real. You can't be," she said, dropping the cloak on the stones at his feet.

"I assure you, mistress, I am Thor, your sworn protector, and both I and all I possess are at your service." He sucked in a breath. "Please, wear my cloak to keep you warm, until I can provide you with one that is far finer and more fitting for your station."

"I don't need a cloak. I need..."

An eternity he waited, or so it felt, but still she did not tell him what she wished for.

Finally, she said, "You can't be Thor. You don't have a hammer."

Thor hung his head. Of course she'd noticed. No wonder she had no commands for him. Without a weapon, he was hardly any protector at all. "I seem to have mislaid it," he admitted. Not entirely the truth, but he did not dare tell her that Jarl Erik and his pet wolf had taken his hammer from him. He could have sworn that Astrid had returned it to him, but that must have been a dream, for it was nowhere to be found now. "I will find a suitable weapon before sunset on the morrow, so that I might better protect you."

She huffed out an impatient breath, as if this did not meet with her satisfaction, either.

"I will protect you, mistress. I swear it, from now until my last breath," he said. "If you could persuade the other witch to return my hammer, I would use it solely in your service."

FIFTEEN

Thor? The other witch? A cloak, and now a hammer? Whoever this man was, he definitely wasn't Andreas or Lars or...Frederik, that's what the other guy's name was. She'd definitely have noticed if any of the other expeditioners had muscles like this guy, even if they didn't usually go around bare armed like he was now. Which was crazy, as it had be below freezing outside right now. Even the man's shirt hung open, so she could see his bare chest and abs and fuck he was hot...

Sibyl shook her head, which hurt, so she stopped. This guy couldn't be real. He had to be a hallucination, a product of her head injury and Lara's comments about Thor's hammer earlier, combined with too much reading and her own wild imagination.

A sensible person would ignore the Norse god kneeling at her feet, go to the bathroom tent, and then go back to bed and forget any of this had happened. If she hadn't imagined it all, in which case she should definitely forget about it.

But Sibyl had never really been that sensible. That's what had brought her halfway around the world to this alien snowscape, the complete opposite of home. So if she really was hallucinating a Norse god kneeling at her feet, then she was damn well going to see if her imagination would stretch to showing her the Norse god in all his glory, holding his hammer, before she came to her senses.

Octavia would have told her to go for it, if only so she could ask for all the details later. Alethea would tell her that even if he was a hallucination, she had to help him, because it was the right thing to do.

And she had found Thor's hammer today, hadn't she? She definitely hadn't imagined that.

Sibyl took a deep breath. Keeping her voice low, barely above a whisper, so no one else would hear her, she said, "Come with me. I might have a suitable weapon for you."

Then she forced herself to walk toward the mess tent, home to the dripping hammer that would hopefully yield enough information for her entire PhD thesis.

Her headlamp beam cut a clear path through the frosty air. Part of her mind told her she should be afraid, walking out here alone in the pitch darkness. She'd been warned about all sorts of creatures – including bears! Real, live bears! – that were found in the Jotunheimen National Park, but the clear crunch of Thor's footsteps behind her was so reassuring, she didn't fear anything right now.

Which was stupid, because even if she thought she could hear his footsteps, he wasn't really there, let alone capable of defending her against a bear or whatever else might be out there in the darkness.

Sibyl shook her head at her own silliness as she unzipped the door to the mess tent.

She swept the beam of her headlamp around the dark interior, wondering what she'd say or do if someone was still up. Not that anyone else would be able to see Thor, so it wouldn't have mattered, but...

Wordlessly, she held the door open, so he could duck inside.

The space felt so much smaller with him inside. Maybe it was partly because he was so bloody big – twice as wide as she was, even without the cloak now draped from his shoulders, and tall enough that his head brushed the ceiling. Then again, it would take a man this big to heft that hammer by himself. None of the expeditioners had been able to lift it alone, though the weight of the ice still encrusting it hadn't helped.

It was strangely silent in the tent. Just the sound of her rapid breath – nothing from Thor – without even the steady drip drip drip of the ice melting from the hammer that had punctuated the meal prep this evening.

Which meant all the ice was gone, and she'd be the first to see the hammer in all its naked glory.

She glanced behind her. Actually, she'd like to see Thor wielding his hammer, with both of them all naked and glorious, but her imagination refused to cooperate. The pants and boots and cloak stayed firmly where they were, and while his shirt still hung open, giving her plenty of to-die-for abs to ogle, he had no bare skin below the waist.

It was the hammer she should be looking at, she scolded herself. The very real hammer that definitely did exist, as opposed to the sexy man who most certainly did not.

She stepped up to the table, where they'd left the tray with the melting hammer inside, propped up on a bunch of rocks so it wasn't sitting in a puddle of its own meltwater.

She closed her eyes. This was what she'd come here for. An artefact that could make her entire career, and she'd been lucky enough to be the one who found it. "Here it is. Thor's hammer," she breathed, opening her eyes.

Only to see nothing but a tray of wet rocks, sitting in a puddle of water.

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