Page 20 of Thor

Unless Octavia found them first, while working through the night on some super secret project, which was what she was likely to be doing at this very moment, while the other residents of Bell House slept.

Sibyl should probably get some sleep, too. Shower, then sleep.

"This has to be the biggest hall I have ever seen. I've heard tales of kings, far in the west, who have such huge halls, but never had I seen one with my own eyes until today. Which king rules here?"

For the first time, she got a good look at His Norse Hotness, and had to admit, he was even hotter than she remembered.

Long, blonde hair hung to his shoulders, over which was draped the cloak he'd laid over her last night. Right before he'd used nothing more than his fingers to give her the three best orgasms of her life. In the light of her headlamp, she'd thought the cloak was black, but the wool was in fact a deep blue, trimmed with cream fur. His shirt hung open, baring his sculpted chest and abs, which ended in a sort of short kilt in the same blue, fastened around his narrow waist with a thick leather belt that looked like something a wrestler had won. Leather boots covered his well-muscled calves almost to the knee.

And in his hand he held a thick staff, topped by...

"Is that a poleaxe?" It was taller than she was, and more of a medieval weapon than a Viking one. "Where did you get that?"

He shrugged his massive shoulders. "I found it under the ice. It had a frozen skull spiked to the top of it, which I had to shake off, before cleaning it, for I did not think you would want your protector standing beside you with a bloodstained axe. It seemed a suitable weapon, until I find my hammer. The handle is unusually long, a bit unwieldy, so I thought I might cut it down to a better size, if you could provide me with a suitable axe." He looked expectantly at her.

Hallucination or not, no way was she going to stand by and allow him to destroy valuable artefacts. "A poleaxe is a perfectly adequate weapon for any fighter. There are plenty of manuals that have survived from medieval times, explaining polearm fighting techniques. In fact, I remember watching an online video not long ago..." She typed in a search on her laptop and two videos popped up at the top of the first page. She started to turn her laptop around to show him, then remembered he was only a hallucination, and shook her head. "What you're going to do is put that back where you found it, along with the skull and whatever else was with it, and I'll show you where your hammer is, okay?"

"Very well, Miss Sibyl." Then he just stood there, looking expectant.

Well, she had intended to take a look at the artefacts after dinner. Now was as good a time as any.

So she rose, leaving her laptop and dirty dishes behind, and headed to the lab.

TWENTY-FOUR

"I don't believe it! It's not here!"

Sibyl's anger simmered in the air. Thor wished he could punch whichever man or men were the source of it, but there was no one in this enormous building but the two of them.

"I'll check again, in case I missed something," she said.

Once more, she methodically opened each of the boxes, examining the contents, before closing each one and moving onto the next.

Thor spotted a number of arrows, some familiar and some very crude, a shoe, several pieces of bedraggled cloth, a bunch of bones that looked like they'd once belonged to a horse or three, and...

"A reindeer training harness. I haven't seen one of these in years. Not since we ran out of fodder one long, cold winter, so we had to slaughter everything but the goats. The ground was still frozen when we should have been ploughing and planting, so I announced that I'd train the goats to pull the plough. Everyone laughed, thinking it a great jest, but I found a reindeer training harness that fitted around their horns and hitched them up to a cart. It took time and patience and a lot of cursing – enough for some of the men to go out in search of oxen or horses or even reindeer to replace what we'd lost – but I did it. Those goats were the best matched pair I ever worked with, though they'd show anyone else their teeth if they tried to harness them," Thor shook his head fondly, as he reverently placed the pieces of wood back in their box.

He looked up to find Sibyl staring at him in wonder. "That's what they are? I can't wait to see Jorunn again so I can tell her. She is obsessed with reindeer. She keeps telling me how there are hundreds of them in the national park, but she has yet to see one."

"Which one was Jorunn?" Thor asked. He hadn't paid much attention to the other people at the camp, but if they were important to Sibyl, it was best that he learned as much as he could about them.

"We shared a tent. When she saw your cloak on my bed the night I first saw you, for a moment, I thought she was going to fight me for it. It's not reindeer hide, is it?"

Thor grinned. "No, it's fine wool. The sort of garment you should wear outside, instead of flimsy silk."

"My jacket is nylon, not silk, and it's full of duck down. It's probably not as suitable for the Arctic as something like sealskin, but until yesterday, I was doing just fine with it. I guess the windproofing just didn't hold up to polar winds, is all."

More words Thor did not understand. "If you want a sealskin cloak, I could..." he began eagerly.

"No! We don't steal artefacts, and we don't slaughter seals. For someone who's wholly the product of my damaged brain, you sure have some archaic ideas. Ideas you can't possibly have gotten from me."

"What about bear fur? It's not quite as waterproof as sealskin, but it's the warmest..."

Sibyl raised a hand to halt him. "No fur or skin or killing anything. I don't even need a coat in here, now the heating's on. See? I'm taking my coat off." As if to demonstrate, she draped the garment over the back of her chair. "I don't need anything heavier than a sweater inside now." She gestured toward the short moss-green tunic she now wore.

It looked more like fur than wool, but Thor had never known a creature to have green fur before. "What kind of creature has a pelt like this?" he asked, reaching out to stroke it.

She pulled away, out of reach. "Do you want me to find your hammer or not? Because that's what we're here for. I'm going through all the boxes just in case I missed something, but what I really want to do is take a shower. Maybe it would be better if I did that and came back to the lab in the morning to look for the hammer. It has to be here, so I must have just missed it. Or maybe Jakop put the box in a different lab, or the store room, or maybe it got mixed up with my stuff. I don't know. I'm tired and my head hurts and...is there any chance you can wait until morning for your hammer?"

---