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She might say she was on sabbatical. She might think of herself merely as a PhD candidate, Erik simply her academic advisor, and her nighttime excursions purely in the name of science. But some instincts never changed. The night still felt like her most familiar enemy, and whether the prey was demons or astronomical anomalies, the hunt was the same.
When the figure of a man appeared in the middle of the storm, her reflexes responded even before her conscious mind knew what was happening. Grabbing the wheel, pulling them at just the right course to hit him—it—as it fell. Even as they made contact she was grumbling in the back of her mind. It wasn’t until she heard Darcy’s gasp that she remembered the whole secret identity thing and was abruptly glad that her intervention looked like an accident. Erik was staring at her with wide eyes, thinking the same thoughts, as she immediately pretended to panic.
Jumping out of the van, she reached out to touch the figure. It looked human, male. Stunned but not dead. He was warm to the touch and breathing, so not a vampire. Removing the civilian was second nature by now, but as Darcy returned with the first aid kit, Jane was forced to admit that his appearance wasn’t out of the ordinary. Or well, it was, but not in a way that would have Darcy asking about demons. Erik started insisting that they take him to a hospital. She stared at him, silently arguing, wishing once again that Darcy wasn’t there. He appeared out of the sky, she argued, knowing he could read her meaning in her expression. Generally not a human thing to do. We can’t just leave the people at the hospital to deal with him. Erik was just as insistent. As far as we can tell he’s human. We have to presume innocent. We can keep an eye on it. She huffed, but conceded. She hoped that Erik was noting whatever the man was yelling about, she was too distracted trying to figure out options. That was, until Darcy tased him. Well, he was vulnerable to electricity. That was a good data point to start with.
***
Lies at hospitals were routine by this point, although this receptionist seemed remarkably unconcerned with the truth as Darcy told it. Perhaps it was the same in all small towns, the selective blindness necessary to avoid recognizing the weird stuff.
Back at their lab, she and Erik had yet another coded argument. He had always been a scientist, skeptical, but this was carrying it too far. The man—Thor—was clearly not human or even your typical demon. From another world, some hell dimension, she didn’t yet know, but he was not normal. He was her—their—business, and she did not like leaving that business unfinished. It wasn’t like she was going to run out and slay him, but leaving him alone was just as reckless.
And then Darcy noticed the silhouette in the picture. Damn it. She was already too close to this, why did she have to be perceptive?
Jane was done arguing. She was the slayer here, it was all ultimately her responsibility anyway, and the man was clearly not normal. She shouldn’t have even left him alone for that long.
She tried, later, to pretend to Erik that she’d meant to hit him that time too.
***
Lunch was spent trying not to stare too obviously, and trying to catalogue clues instead of the exact shade of his eyes. He was clearly not from earth, or at least not from their time—and she’d never heard of time travel, she should ask Erik if it had happened. But wherever he was from, it wasn’t too terribly different. Table manners, sure, but he ate their food (which was pretty much always a good sign, to be honest. Not blood? Check. Not psychic energy? Check. Not babies? Check. Good points in the “likely not a demon” box), and he knew the basics. What a table was. How to use the eating utensils. Stuff like that.
The “satellite crash” was interesting, the mention of the feds worrying. She might be a scientist, a skeptic, but she didn’t believe that strongly in coincidence—anything else weird coming from the sky was probably related to Thor. They’d known for a while that the Initiative, no matter how dismantled in name, had lingered on, diffused and passed down into a handful of other agencies. Which one of them was here? And did they know what they were looking at? She exchanged a worried look with Erik, but didn’t get further before Thor was striding out the door. She’d let him out of her custody once, and wasn’t going to let it happen again, regardless of Erik’s objections when he pulled her aside.
“Jane, I’m begging you, don’t do this.”
She glared at him. “What else am I supposed to do? I can’t just walk away from this one, Erik.”
He sighed. “I came out here expecting to be doing physics.”
“Well, now we’re doing this."
“Jane. We’re not prepared to deal with this right now. My books, your weapons. . . We’re just not ready to go up against the Initiative Take II, or whatever Thor is. We have no idea what we’re dealing with, we have almost no resources, we are in no position to fight a battle on two fronts.”
“And we don’t have a choice. Erik, you know how this works. World in danger means us saving it. It doesn’t matter if we don’t have books, or the weapons. Yeah, we don’t know what Thor is. Which means we need to keep an eye on him. And if he’s coming across from another dimension or something, he might not be the only one. This is important, too important to leave alone or let the feds get involved.” Besides, she really, really wanted to know what was going on.
Erik was looking desperate. “At least wait a bit, then. We know where he’s going, it’s far enough away that it’ll take him some time. Let’s get back to the lab, do some research so we at least have some clue of what we’re getting into and how we can take him out. We’ll find him again, it’s not like he can really blend in.”
Jane opened her mouth to argue, but the sense of his argument penetrated before she could find a rejoinder. “Fine. But not long. I don’t want to let all of this get too out of hand.”
She turned back to Thor and made their farewells. He strode away across the street, all of them staring after him for a moment. They stood a moment until Darcy broke the silence. “Uh, ok, so what the hell were you guys just talking about?”
***
Slayage was forgotten the moment she saw the truck with her equipment, as the scientist took over her brain. Let them take everything? She was ready to put up a fight, show them what a slayer could do if she had to, until Erik managed to talk her down. The real alarm in his eyes at the mention of SHIELD cooled her temper more than anything else; the colleague that he mentioned an easily deciphered code for another Watcher. The Council had tangled with SHIELD before, and it didn’t sound as if they had won.
She wanted nothing more than to sit around and mope about the loss of five years of work, but there was more urgent business to attend to. The carefully hidden and bespelled safe that held Erik’s other laptop and a few carefully chosen weapons had been undisturbed. He plunged straight into research while Jane was stuck trying to explain to Darcy.
“So, let me get this straight. There are demons and vampires and stuff out there.”
“Yes,” Jane repeated herself wearily.
“Everywhere out there. All over the place.”
“Yes.”
“And there’s some cosmic thing where there’s just one person who’s supposed to stop them. And that’s you.”
“Basically, yes. It’s gotten a little more complicated recently, but yes.”
“And Erik is your ‘watcher,’ which means that he does all this kind of research and stuff so that you can go kill stuff?”
“Slay. Demons. And yes.”
Darcy looked fairly satisfied. “And now I’m the plucky sidekick. With a Taser. Ok.”
Jane tried hard to look stern. “No. No, you are not getting involved. This is not like the physics, I don’t need an assistant, you don’t know what’s going on. You’d get yourself and maybe the rest of us killed.”
Darcy opened her mouth to argue, but Erik interrupted. “Jane.” She turned towards him. “I’ve been searching through the diaries,” he gestured at the laptop. “There’s not a lot of information about extraterrestrial events. Of course, none of the previous watchers were physicists, so the descriptions tend to be things like ‘A hollow asteroid, with an alien demon that climbed on ceilings.’” He was looking frustrated. “There is only one record of anything like the portal from last night, and it’s very old. My ancient Norse isn’t that good, it’ll take me a while to get through it.”
Not great news, then. “Nothing about Thor? Or, what was he talking about. When he crashed. There was something he was yelling about. . .”
Erik perked up. “A hammer.” He turned back to his computer, typing for a minute. “There is one mention of a hammer.” He paused for a moment, reading. “Well, unless we think this Thor is a troll, it’s not the same hammer.” Jane couldn’t help laughing.
“I think a troll is the last thing I’d call him,” Darcy chimed in.
“Yes, well,” Erik continued. “An old Scandinavian troll, who used a hammer. Good news, though, the slayer was the only other one who could wield it.”
“Ok,” Jane nodded. “So, if we can get it, there’s the problem of weapons sorted.”
Erik shook his head. “Jane, we still don’t have nearly enough information. We don’t know what Thor is, or what he wants, and we don’t have any backup coming. Wait a few more minutes, let me try to contact the Council, see if they can get us anything.”
“You can’t call them,” Darcy said mournfully. “They took the modem and the router and the phone.”
Erik’s voice was full of forceful patience when he answered. “Fine, then, I’ll go to the library. Jane, promise me you’ll stay here.”
She paused a moment, but agreed. “Fine. But just long enough to tell them what’s going on, Erik. I’m not going to sit around and wait for an answer.”
He nodded, and stood to leave. “Oh, and Jane?” He was trying hard to sound casual, but obviously faking it. “Don’t go thinking about Thor too much as anything other than a potential threat.” She glared at him. “I saw how he was looking at you, and you weren’t too far behind. Look, just remember that as far as we know, he’s a demon, and that means he’s a threat.”
Even though Jane had spent all day arguing that point as the reason they couldn’t let him go, she found herself disagreeing. “Look, he’s had plenty of chances to kill people, and he hasn’t done anything. The worst he’s done is dent our truck and escape the hospital, that’s hardly a rampage.”
Erik sighed. “Even if he’s not violent, he’s not human, Jane. You know how it’s turned out in the past. I don’t want to see you go down that road.” He was out the door before she could respond.
***
She’d meant to keep her promise to still be there, she had. But she saw Thor, passing by, and couldn’t bring herself to just let him go by. A little bit of information gathering couldn’t go too badly, now, could it? She was itching to do something: slay demons, get her data back, save the world. And Erik really had been gone a while.
Soon enough she was driving through the desert with him, then crouched outside the fence as he fought his way through. He was strong, and fast, more than a normal human—she gauged his abilities to be around par with her own, in fact. SHIELD was more interesting to watch, though. At some level, they were not prepared for an attack anything like this, or he wouldn’t have been able to get so deep inside so quickly. The guards certainly weren’t expecting anything like him. But there was not quite enough chaos, no sign of panicking at the higher levels of command. Someone in there knew something, that was clear, although who and how much was not. She could assume, though, that even if the knowledge of the Initiative had been passed on to a few, most of the soldiers down there had no idea.
She cursed quietly, as Thor was surrounded, arrested. She might not really know what was going on, but she did not want anyone else involved yet. If he was powerful enough, and of the right disposition, he might slaughter them all before they could stop him; on the other hand, if they interrogated him, they could get information they shouldn’t have. They had to get them out of there somehow. She would need Erik. But not before she tried another experiment.
***
Her watcher was, as predicted, unhappy. “You promised that you’d stay here, Jane! And instead you headed out with a demon we know nothing about to go confront a major governmental organization alone! What if he’d gotten the thing back? You don’t know what kind of a weapon it might be, what he could have done with it.”
She was quickly yelling back. “Well, I just watched him go through a dozen soldiers, and you know what? He didn’t kill any of them, and he absolutely could have.”
“So he wasn’t on a killing spree right that moment. That doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous. You’re the slayer, you’re not supposed to be helping them!”
“We’re always going on about demons, the forces of evil, but why is it so hard for you to imagine that just maybe there might be some forces for good?”
He shook his head. “Just because he has a pretty face doesn’t mean he’s trustworthy, Jane.”
She bristled. “Ever since he got here, we’ve seen him do nothing to threaten or hurt anybody, even when we hit him with a car, and electrocuted him, and they tied him to a hospital bed. And you’re so set in “Non-humans evil, must slay” that you’re not even thinking about any of the other possibilities. As scientists we should be looking at the evidence, and what it’s showing is that he’s not here to hurt people!”
Erik was still forming a reply when Darcy interrupted. “Look, here’s Mjolnir!”
She had been fully prepared to still be angry, but the sight of the book she was reading undid her. She managed to get her laughter under control as her watcher glared at her. “Norse Mythology for Children. It’s a bit of a comedown from your usual, Erik.”
He scowled. “It’s not exactly the Council’s library over there. I’m working with limited resources. We really must get more of the books digitized. Anyway, his name made me think that he must be referencing one of the Norse myths, I thought maybe we could figure out something more about what he wanted. . .” He trailed off, looking distracted, then turned rapidly towards the laptop, ignoring them completely. Jane and Darcy exchanged a look, bemused, as he spent a few minutes switching between the computer and the book, reading rapidly.
“Oh dear,” he said at last. “Jane, I think we may have miscalculated.” She looked at him quizzically. “I’m not sure he is a demon pretending to be a god.”
“What is he, then?” she asked, thoroughly baffled.
He gestured at the screen. “This entry, that describes something very like what we saw last night. It’s very, very old, even by watcher standards. There was an invasion—monstrous beings made out of ice, which were destroying everything. The Slayer, and everyone else, was trying to fight them, but there were too many. But then there was a “storm,” which sounds a lot like what we saw, except bigger. She even describes the pattern it left in the ground. And when it cleared, there was another army. Except that they fought the enemy.”
“Ok,” Jane said slowly. “So it is a portal of some kind, and there are other beings that can cross it. But what does it tell us about Thor?”
Erik paused a moment. “That other army was led by a king. A one-eyed king, who drove the frost giants before him.” He held up the book, the illustration of a fine army facing icy foes. “Odin led the army of Asgard against the frost giants and saved the earth,” he added matter of factly. “Odin, father of Thor, the wielder of Mjolnir. He’s not a demon. He’s a god.”
They all sat in silence for a minute. Darcy finally broke it. “Wow.”
Jane was trying to think. “We have to get him out, Erik. We can’t let the US government get their hands on a god who for whatever reason doesn’t seem to be able to escape.” He nodded reluctant agreement. “I have some good news, though. Thor’s not the only one who can wield Mjolnir.”
***
Despite Darcy’s strident objections, it was decided that Erik should go get Thor alone. This was, of course, after the shouting—he was not impressed by her “taking insane risks” to sneak into the facility, and was not mollified by her comment that stealing a uniform and a clipboard and looking purposeful was a tried and true method of infiltration. He was grudgingly pleased to know that she could lift the hammer, though—apparently the other one, from the troll, was one of the few weapons ever to be used successfully against another god. They still hadn’t resolved their earlier argument about Thor’s intentions, but Jane was happy enough to put that off.
In the end, she saw Erik off with a great deal of last minute advice and tips about the site, and not a little worrying. As he pulled out, Darcy turned to watch her. “Seriously, relax,” she said after a moment. “If he’s your watcher, I’m sure he can take care of himself and all. I mean, he knows more about this stuff than anyone, right?”
“No,” Jane said more forcefully than she’d intended. “I mean, yes, he knows a lot, but that doesn’t mean he can fight. He’s just a normal human. If something happens, he can’t necessarily fight it off.” She made an effort to relax, though, agreeing to play cards with Darcy when it turned out that her kindle had been take too.
As time passed her tension grew again, and by the time several hours had passed she was sure something had gone wrong. “They should be back by now,” she said heavily, as Darcy won again. “Something’s gone wrong.”
Darcy blinked at her. “Your watcher just went off to rescue an old Norse god from a super shadowy government organization that just stole all our stuff. Yeah, I think something went wrong.”
Jane was pacing by now. There were so many things that could have happened—She might be wrong, Thor might have hurt him. Or he could have been captured by SHIELD, who could be doing who-knew-what to him. After another half hour, she couldn’t take it any more. “Darcy, stay here. I mean it,” she ordered.
“Wait, where are you going? They have the van,” Darcy observed.
Jane shook her head. “I’m just going out to patrol. Take a look around. I’ll be back.” Looking over her small cache of weapons, she selected a stake and a knife before turning and heading out, ignoring Darcy’s protests.
In the next hour she found (and slayed) the sole vampire of Puente Antiguo, but found no sign of other supernatural activity, or her missing watcher. She returned to the lab, just as anxious. She sent Darcy home for the night, hoping that she’d remain there. She set off for her trailer. Not to sleep, however—the more time that passed the more certain she was that the trick with SHIELD had not gone as planned. She had a few more weapons in her trailer, including a few more suitable to this sort of infiltration.
She was sorting them out when she heard a knocking. She was relieved beyond words to see Thor and Erik, although she had a moment’s fright at Erik’s apparently inability to walk. Irritation and amusement overtook the worry, though, as she realized how they’d been passing their time, and she got Erik settled. Abruptly she realized that her weapons were still visible on the tiny couch. Flustered, she was trying desperately to distract Thor from looking over there, until she thought to take him outside.
She managed, between getting distracted by his eyes, to pump him for some information. If it was both about the potential supernatural threat, and him, and her science, well, that was just a bonus. She tried to focus on ascertaining how much of a threat he and his people might be; instead she found herself beginning to grasp the connections between worlds, not just his and hers, but the two in her head. She had always felt that science and magic were not as opposed as classically shown—that one could explain the other, that perhaps you needed both for either to really make sense. Erik had always listened with bemusement, and told her to get back to training. Watching Thor draw the world tree in her notebook, for the first time she could get a glimpse of how they were linked, how the myths and magic fed into the physics and vice versa. It was only the barest hint, a peek into a whole new world, but it promised so much beauty that she was entranced, listening to him until she drifted into sleep.
***
When the third portal opened, she knew that their luck had run out. Thor, she was certain by now, meant them no harm, and the Warriors Three and Sif (who she quite thought she’d like, if she got to know her) also friendly. But if there were three portals, it was inevitable that the third bring ill-will.
Evacuating the civilians was routine enough that she worried throughout. When the enemy finally appeared, she felt chills—not a demon, not at all. Not like anything she had ever fought. She was ready to go into battle regardless, deeply regretting the caution that had made her leave the hammer in place instead of just taking it. Erik held her back, though. “SHIELD is definitely watching, Jane. You can’t let them see you. They can’t know that you’re a slayer, they’d take you and you’d never get out. The warriors are also from Asgard, let them try to fight it first.” It grated, but she stood back.
They tried valiantly, but she could tell from the beginning that it wasn’t going to be enough. Sif’s brief victory was hopeful, but then futile. If a spear through the throat didn’t get it, what would? Not fire, obviously, not a stake through a non-existent heart. Decapitation, perhaps. She looked around wildly for a large enough weapon. “Jane, no!” Erik exclaimed as he noticed.
“I don’t have a choice. Secret identity always comes after saving the world, you know that, Erik.”
“Wait just another minute. Look, Thor is a god, he can fight it.” She had to concede that he was right, and reluctantly stayed back. Her heart lifted as he spoke and it turned away, but clenched in horror as it backhanded him. He was thrown through the air like a mortal, not a god, and for the first time she realized that for some reason, he didn’t have all of his power. It was too late, by then. She shook Erik off and ran to his side, not even trying to hold back the tears.
“No, no, no. I’m so sorry, Thor, I was too late, I shouldn’t have listened, I could have helped. . .” She knelt over him. “I’m sorry, I should have come helped you fight. Please, please don’t be dead.” Surely it had to be harder than this to kill a god? Even if he wasn’t at his full strength?
Movement in the sky caught her eye and she instantly knew that it must be Mjolnir. She stayed, crouched there by him. The hammer would come, and she would wield it, and destroy the thing that had hurt him. Abruptly, though, Erik was there, pulling her away despite her struggles. “No, no, I’m going to get it, I can help, I can kill it—“
“No Jane, no,” there was sadness in his voice. “It’s too late, I can’t let you die too. . ."
And then, of course, it wasn’t the end. Thor’s hand shot up, grasping the hammer. Apparently it restored his power, she thought dimly as she watched the incredible display. He made short work of the thing, then. She tried to quash the feeling of being left out. Other people were allowed to save the world too. And nobody knew who she was. Except Darcy. Well, she could figure out how to manage that.
Saying goodbye was hard—she’d only knew him for about 24 hours, true, but she’d fallen hard and fast. Erik had, perhaps, been right. It never ended well, falling for anyone who wasn’t human. Not, she thought, that she could have resisted it. And it might merely have been what she desperately wanted, but she thought that it was her precognition that told her that he’d be back. They’d need him again, now. She’d need him, too, and she knew he’d be back for her.
She blinked away the few tears lingering in her eyes, and turned to Erik and Darcy. “Well,” she said, “Who wants to go expand the boundaries of science and infiltrate a shadowy government association?”