“I have a lot of work to do.” He waved again at the pile of wood behind him. “It’s been a slow year. This art isn’t going to make itself.”
Odin made his living selling chainsaw art. He was great with the chainsaw part of chainsaw art, but he wasn’t all that good with the art part.
“Odin.” I waited out a crack of thunder. “Come with me. We’ll deal with Crow’s emergency, then I’ll go home and get dry, and you’ll come back and make bigger piles of sawdust. Deal?”
He curled his lip.
“I have a thermos of hot coffee in the Jeep. All yours.”
His snarl disappeared as the reality of a nice hot cup of coffee soaked into his chainsaw-rattled brain.
The rain, which had been steady and cold, turned hard and freezing. It was like some god up there was pelting us with frozen marbles.
“Fine,” he said. “Fine. This better not take all day.”
He stowed the saw under the tarp, took one lazy swipe at the sawdust and wood chips covering his face and short beard, then stomped over to the Jeep. The Jeep bent under his weight as he crammed his huge shoulders, muscles, and girth into the front seat. He didn’t bother with the seatbelt.
Thunder cracked again, rain going liquid and gloopy, drenching me even beneath my rainproof jacket.
Thanks a lot, Thor.
As if in answer to my thought, thunder chuckled across the hills.
~~~
Ordinary stretched along the Oregon coast, a small vacation town where gods kicked off their powers like a pair of old shoes and went about living a normal life among the creatures and mortals who lived here year round.
A Reed such as myself had always been in Ordinary. I’d grown up here with my two younger sisters, Myra and Jean. After our dad’s death a year ago, I had taken over his place as Chief of Police. Myra and Jean worked with me, keeping the peace in the sleepy little tourist town.
We Reeds were mortal, with a twist. Our family line had been chosen by the gods for one important thing: to uphold the rules and laws of Ordinary by making sure god powers were guarded and the secrets of gods and creatures who resided in Ordinary remained just that.
I loved my job, loved taking care of Ordinary and all the creatures, deities, and mortals within its boundaries. Even with all the trouble that came with those responsibilities, I still managed to live a pretty normal life.
Why just a couple months ago, my heart had been broken by Ryder Bailey, the man I’d been infatuated with for most of my life. I pushed the thoughts of Ryder way, way to the back of my brain where there were so many pushed-away thoughts of him it was standing room only.
Still, it was better to keep my mind on my job instead of on things I couldn’t change.
When gods vacationed in Ordinary, they became mortal. That meant they could get sick, hurt, or killed just like any other mortal. Like the fisherman Heim, who was also the Norse god, Heimdall, who had washed ashore dead. I’d not only tracked down the killer, I had also found a mortal to take on his god power before it tore apart the town.
That mortal was my ex-boyfriend, Cooper Clark.
Like that hadn’t been awkward.Hey, I know you and I used to date, and you dumped me at my father’s funeral, but would you like to be a god?
Okay, maybe my life wasn’t exactly normal.
“What?” Odin snapped. His beefy arms strained to cross over his chest like twisted tree trunks.
“What?” I flicked the windshield wipers up a notch and slowed for the puddle that spread across one-and-a-half lanes of the main road through town. If Thor didn’t get over his temper tantrum and give us a break, we were going to have to close roads and issue flood warnings.
“You look worried.” He shrugged as if uncomfortable admitting he was paying that much attention to me.
“It hasn’t stopped raining for five weeks, tourist dollars are way down, we’ve got a fundraiser coming up this week, one month of summer left, and our resident trickster is calling an emergency meeting. A little concern isn’t out of place here.”
“Think he’s leaving?”
“Crow?” He’d been in town all my life. I’d grown up thinking of him as an uncle. It would be a different town without him. “I don’t know.”
“It’d be better without him.”
