Gods on Earth: Complete Series (Books 1-3): Paranormal Romances with Norse Gods, Tricksters, and Fated Mates

by Andrijeski, JC

  Within seconds, he had the pants off entirely, and then they were both naked.

  He hung over her, his ice-blue eyes staring down at hers.

  She watched as those eyes lowered, as he took a moment to look at the rest of her.

  She found herself doing the same with him, fascinated and intimidated and turned on all at once by the lines of muscle and bone that made up his chest, waist, abdomen, thighs.

  He was beautiful.

  He was shockingly, mind-numbingly beautiful.

  Again, Silvia wondered what the hell she was doing.

  Why was she doing this?

  There’s no possible way this would be the same for him as it was for her. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had a one-night stand. She’d dated her last boyfriend for four years. He’d been a jerk the last few months, panicking because his mom was pressuring him to get married and for some reason he took it out on her.

  In the end, they’d just imploded.

  She’d barely dated at all since––

  ––and why the hell was she thinking about this?

  Thor leaned down from where he supported himself on his arms and hands.

  Slowing things down, he kissed her more deeply that time, his kiss turning more and more sensual as he gradually sank his weight.

  She started losing her breath, for a different reason that time. Her whole body softened into his, melding into every part of him––

  Well, like she belonged there.

  She wondered if that was a god thing, too.

  Then she stopped asking questions.

  The last part of her resisting this abruptly surrendered.

  She couldn’t even remember why she’d been fighting it.

  Leaning up to kiss his throat, she put her hands on him, massaging his chest, sucking on his skin when he groaned, startling her. His hands pushed her thighs apart. She saw his shocking blue eyes close, his jaw clench as he looked down at her, and something about the expression there, the taut look in his eyes, hit at her very core.

  She didn’t let herself think about what any of it meant.

  She clung to him, feeling a last shiver of fear…

  Then he was inside her.

  For a moment, neither of them moved.

  Then he let out a rumbling growl that turned into a heavier groan, right before he slammed into her with all of his weight. She cried out, her back arching. He growled louder, and she felt a crackle of electricity shiver over her skin. She saw it reflected in his eyes, even as she coiled her legs around his.

  They fell into a rhythm and she fell into a near-trance.

  It felt so good for so long, she was shocked when she actually came.

  She bucked up against his cock in a whimpering disbelief.

  She hadn’t thought it could feel better. She really thought it couldn’t feel better than it already did, but then she nearly blacked out when she came a second time, bare seconds after the spasms slowed from the first.

  Then Thor was fucking her harder, and she felt him beginning to build.

  She followed him with it, somehow, lost in the slack expression in his face, lost in the near-agony in his eyes…

  She had no idea how long that went on, but by the end, she could barely stand it. She felt grief on him, a denser, warmer emotion… want, a kind of longing that hurt her, even though she didn’t understand it. He was looking at her then, his blue eyes too bright, and she could only stare back at him, caressing his face, caressing his chest…

  Then he was orgasming, that heavier growl in his chest going so deep she felt it down to her toes. He threw his whole weight into her, pinning her to the rug, and she felt like she might die, even as her body wound sinuously against his.

  Even then, it was the emotion behind it that knocked her off balance.

  Possessiveness, grief, longing… disbelief…

  By the end, she wasn’t thinking about how strange it was.

  She wasn’t letting herself think about how unlikely it was that this would ever happen again, that this was anything other than a one-off.

  She knew it was ridiculous to be thinking about it, so that was part of it.

  Also, she couldn’t.

  After all that, after seeing that in his face and eyes, after feeling him like that…

  She just couldn’t.

  8

  Chaos And Order

  T hey did that three more times.

  Well… maybe four.

  Depending on how they were counting––and Silvia hadn’t asked the specific counting method preferred by the gods for sex––it could be as many as five times.

  Well. Technically, she supposed it could be six.

  Some unspecified number of times later, they were both lying on their backs on the enormous black-bear rug, breathing hard, their bodies sheened with sweat.

  She didn’t feel sated.

  She had no idea how Thor felt, but she still felt that aching want somewhere in her lower belly, whenever she thought about what they’d just been doing. She felt it shiver her skin, pulling on her in a way she couldn’t describe, even to herself.

  It was like a drug, only worse.

  She could tell she would want more, and probably relatively soon.

  She wanted it badly enough, she was already worried about not getting it, about running out of supply before she could get it out of her system.

  But for now, for the first time, this felt like a break.

  This pause felt like an honest-to-goodness breather.

  They both needed to just lie there for a few minutes.

  Silvia needed to collect her thoughts, and just, well, calm down a little, stop acting like some kind of starved sex-junkie. Maybe find some water. Possibly scrounge up a bowl of mac and cheese… or some Asgardian equivalent to pepperoni pizza.

  She stared up at the crazy-high ceiling above her, and tried to make her brain work.

  For the first time, it occurred to her that Morty was probably freaking out, thinking she’d been abducted or hit by a car or something.

  Then she remembered something else.

  The experiment.

  They’d been doing this, ostensibly, for a reason.

  “Did it work?” she said, still breathing too hard, still focused up on that high, wood-beam ceiling. “With the Andvaranaut, or whatever? The magic ring?”

  She glanced at Thor, and saw a kind of memory bloom in his pale eyes, just enough to make her wonder if he’d forgotten why they initially started this, too.

  There was a pause, then he shifted to his side, propping his body up on his left hand and arm and looking down at her. Laying a finger just under her chin, he tilted her face up, focusing on her neck. After a pause, he moved closer, laying the fingers and palm of his other hand on her throat, right where she remembered the strange symbol being burned onto her flesh.

  She lay there, watching his blue eyes as he seemed to be concentrating.

  He began speaking then, even as heat began to come off his hand.

  Like it had with the reptilian nephew, Thor’s skin seemed to sink into hers, melding into her as he spoke the foreign words faster, with a deep, guttural, yet sing-song cadence, almost like a Gregorian chant.

  He did that for what must have been a few minutes.

  Silvia remained perfectly still throughout all of it, her head tilted back, breathing shallowly as his fingers warmed and merged with her skin.

  It never burned as badly as it had when the green-eyed one did it, but it was an odd sensation, weird enough that she found herself fighting not to hold her breath. Her emotional state was a little like sitting in a dentist’s chair, waiting for him to touch an open nerve with the end of his drill.

  It never did hurt like that, though.

  Eventually, Thor stopped chanting those odd words.

  He removed his hand a few seconds later, frowning.

  “No,” he said simply, looking into her eyes. “It didn’t work.”

  Silvia
nodded.

  She didn’t want to ask him if that meant they wouldn’t be having sex again. She found herself lost in his ice-blue eyes instead, watching him think as he stared off in the direction of the still-burning fire in the grate.

  “We may need to ask my brother, Tyr,” Thor continued after that pause, still frowning as he stared into the fire without seeing the flames. “He’s dealt with Jörmungandr before, perhaps even more than I. And unlike my other brother, Loki, we should be able to trust what Tyr says. Providing he doesn’t have his own agenda in wanting the ring.”

  Silvia nodded, her lips faintly pursed.

  When Thor didn’t go on, she cleared her throat.

  “Why did he take it?” she said. “Jor, I mean… Jörmungandr. Aren’t you all immortal already? What does he care about a ring like that?”

  Thor frowned faintly, looking down at her.

  Briefly, his eyes softened as he looked down at her face.

  Lowering his mouth, he kissed her, parting her lips with his tongue to deepen the kiss. Forgetting everything they’d been talking about, she reached up, gripping his thick mane of hair in one hand, leaning up to kiss him back, winding her other arm around his neck.

  Thor ended the kiss a few seconds later, sighing regretfully as he raised his head.

  “That is part of the problem,” he admitted, as if she’d only just asked her question. “I do not know precisely what he wants the Andvaranaut for. This worries me, Silvia Hope, for Jörmungandr has his own ideology when it comes to the mortal worlds… an ideology he more or less shares with his father, Loki. For various reasons, both of them tend to obsess on the world you inhabit, the Earth world, in particular. But their views do not align with the rest of the leadership council of Asgard. They do not align with my father, our king.”

  When Thor rolled off her, returning to lie on the bearskin rug, his head cushioned by one folded arm, Silvia rolled to her side, propping her jaw on one hand.

  “Ideology?” She pursed her lips. “What kind of ideology does he have?”

  Thor turned his head towards her without lifting it off his arm.

  “He believes the mortal worlds should serve us,” he said, sighing, rolling his eyes. “He believes we did them no favors, leaving them to their own devices… that we should go back to a more primitive system of punishment and reward, based on their behavior and their adherence to the godly laws. He believes humans, in particular, are a danger to themselves and their entire world without discipline and structure to guide their actions and decisions.”

  There was a silence.

  Truthfully, Silvia was having trouble arguing in her head that Jörmungandr was entirely wrong about that.

  At the same time, the idea of going back to some pre-Dark Ages view of humanity and the cosmos, organized around fear and superstition, didn’t exactly strike her as an improvement. If anything, from her point of view, today’s Earth had too many people like that already. Not just with the superstition part of things, but people who wanted some higher power, even just a richer or more powerful human, to tell them what to do.

  “I don’t think that would help,” she said, exhaling.

  Thor looked at her. Studying her eyes, he smiled.

  “Nor do I,” he said. “Thankfully, my father holds that view, as well.”

  “So what does any of that have to do with the ring?” she said, folding her hands on his chest, resting her chin on her folded hands. “Does Jörmungandr plan to hang out on Earth for a few hundred years? Whip everyone into shape by putting the fear of God into them?”

  “Gods,” Thor mused, giving her another of those smiles. “…not ‘God.’”

  Sighing a sigh of his own, he looked back up to the high ceiling.

  “And yes,” he continued. “I suspect that is exactly what Jörmungandr intends, perhaps with some aid from Loki. My nephew is a shockingly rigid thinker in most ways. He believes every season must be adhered to, every rule, every pattern, every hierarchy within creation. He does not like the chaos of free will. He does not like the instability that comes of my father’s attempts to teach free will. He sees none of the benefits and all of the harms. He is repulsed by his own inability to predict what may occur.”

  Thor smiled distantly, his voice turning musing.

  “It is ironic, really,” he said. “His father, my brother, is the ultimate spreader of chaos. Every realm Loki visits will assuredly devolve into anarchy shortly after. They are each extremes of the other, father and son… yet they are weirdly aligned in some respects. Compatible, perhaps you could say. Loki loves the glory of being king. His son, Jor, cares for none of that, and is happy to be a puppet master behind the scenes. Jörmungandr plays at rebellion, but the reality is, he is power-mad, and adheres too tightly to the old ways. He would destroy all of Earth and bring them back to a time of woven-reed baskets and spears, if he thought it would achieve his aim.”

  He turned his head to look at her, his blue eyes serious.

  “He only feels safe when humans are frightened by the gods,” he said. “He would likely prefer that god to be himself, or his father, Loki, who is quite happy to enslave humanity for his own amusement. Jörmungandr wishes humans to be so frightened they only mindlessly obey, like kicked dogs.”

  Exhaling, Thor added,

  “Odin, my father, has more wisdom than the both of them combined. Despite their relative ages, it is not my father who fears the future.”

  Silvia nodded, thinking about his words.

  Although he was talking about her world, the possibility of her own enslavement, it was hard to fully see it as real. The whole idea of the gods battling back and forth about whether or not to enslave the people of Earth just struck her as surreal.

  Reaching out, she found herself stroking his hair, tugging on the red-gold locks.

  He sighed, looking at her.

  For a moment, she thought he might say something.

  He looked like he wanted to speak.

  Then he looked away, and the harder look returned to his expression.

  “We will go,” he said, decisive. “We will speak with my brother, Tyr.”

  9

  God Of War

  T hey got dressed.

  Silvia pulled on her cut-off shorts and tugged the filmy white peasant blouse back over her head. She couldn’t stop herself from watching surreptitiously as Thor got dressed in Morty’s T-shirt and the strange, skin-like brown pants he wore under it.

  She tried not to let herself think about what any of it meant.

  She definitely tried not to think about whether or not her being with Thor would ever happen again.

  Once they were both dressed, Thor walked to one side of the long hall and Silvia followed. An intricately-carved wooden chest the size of large coffin stood there on iron legs, taking up half the space under a long, thick-paned window.

  While Thor cracked the lid of the chest and began rummaging around inside, Silvia stood on her tip-toes and looked out the window.

  It was night outside.

  She tried not to think too closely about how it went from day to night so quickly, from that black-rock cliff to this longhouse in the woods. She supposed, given the dimensional travel side of things, time of day or night was a pretty meaningless detail.

  Under an enormous, full moon, shadowy pine trees formed a line on the other side of a field covered in tall grasses. The field was broken through the middle by a snaking river that sparkled under the blue moonlight, with trees lining either side closer to the hills. Snow-covered peaks shone under that blue-tinted moonlight in the distance.

  She gazed out at the moon and stars, pausing to stare intently at something really big flying through the air, darkening a path across the moon. Whatever it was, its outline looked a lot more like a dragon than an owl, or even a bat.

  It also looked way too big.

  She was still squinting at it through the glass, trying to decide exactly what she was looking at, when Thor shut the trunk’s
heavy lid.

  “Ready, my love?” he said.

  He gripped the gold handle of a six-foot long, double-bladed ax in one hand.

  She shivered a little at his words, looking at him with the golden ax.

  It hit her that he didn’t have his hammer with him. She considered asking, then decided that wasn’t really any of her business.

  “Sure,” she said.

  He took her hand.

  …and again, everything around them vanished.

  “ I s he inside?”

  Thor spoke to one of a half-dozen men standing guard over a red, metal door the height of a two-story house. The red door was set in a stone wall that stretched so high, Silvia could barely make out the top of it against a blue sky.

  She honestly couldn’t decide if the whole thing looked like a castle, or like something out of a science fiction movie.

  “I would speak to him,” Thor added to the man. “Providing he can spare a moment.”

  The man Thor addressed also looked bizarre.

  Dressed in old-school armor with bare legs and a kind of metal skirt, he reminded her of paintings she’d seen of Roman Centurions. He and the others stood at attention when Thor approached, gripping long spears in their hands. Swords hung in leather scabbards from their belts, and they had knives strapped to their bare legs above sandals.

  An ornate breastplate covered the soldier’s thick chest, decorated in more of those complex runes. The sculpted metal glinted blue in the bright sunlight.

  It was daylight again.

  Between that and the figure of the Centurion-like man in front of her, Silvia felt like she’d fallen through time.

  Even though her mind labeled him “Centurion,” however, and she was hardly an armor expert; she had no idea if any of what he wore really fit one of the historical periods of Earth. It was more like a weird amalgam of things she’d seen in museums over the years.

  She would have thought, given the Thor-Thunder thing, that they’d be wearing more Viking gear, but maybe the weather in this part of Asgard didn’t allow for that.