Chapter 1: Seriously, Anyone. Please.
The god of thunder is dripping on your Penguin Classics.
"Forgive the intrusion," he says, in a voice built for mead halls and not for a four-hundred-square-foot bookshop on Seventh Avenue. Rain runs off his cloak in sheets. It's pooling on the welcome mat, spreading toward the poetry table, and you watch a puddle creep under a stack of Mary Oliver with the specific horror of a woman who has not paid her insurance premium since August. "Are you the keeper of this hall?"
"I own the store," you say. "Could you possibly drip over there? By the umbrella stand? That's what it's for. Dripping."
He looks at the umbrella stand like it's a fascinating local custom and moves next to it obligingly, and that's when you see the man behind him.
He's tall too, but in a different way. Narrow where Thor is broad. He's wearing a black suit that fits like it was made for him an hour ago, a green scarf, and an expression of such total, aristocratic disgust that you feel personally responsible for the weather. His hair is black and wet and pushed back from a sharp, pale face, and his eyes are moving around your shop in quick flat assessments, the overstuffed shelves, the cracked leather armchair, the radiator that knocks like someone's trapped inside it, the hand-lettered sign over the register that says NO, WE DON'T HAVE A BATHROOM, THERE'S A STARBUCKS ON 9TH.
They land on you last. They stay there, and you have the immediate and uncomfortable sense of having been read cover to cover.
"No," says the man in black.
"Brother," says Thor.
"I said I would labor among the mortals. I did not say I would labor in a closet."
"It's a bookshop," you say. "The closet's in the back. You'd hate it, it's full of mops."
He looks at you again. Something flickers at the corner of his mouth and is suppressed with great force.
You know who they are. Of course you know. Everybody in New York knows. You were on the subway the day the sky opened over Midtown and things with too many teeth poured out of it, and you spent three hours in a stalled train under 42nd Street listening to the tunnel shake. You've seen the footage a thousand times since. You've seen this exact face on the news, grinning in a gold horned helmet, and you've seen the photos of the crater where the Stark Tower plaza used to be.
You'd imagined, if you ever met him, that you'd feel scared. Instead you mostly feel aware that he's dripping on your Graham Greene.
"Miss," Thor says, with enormous warmth, and comes forward to take your hand in both of his. They're the size of dinner plates. "I am Thor, son of Odin. This is my brother, Loki. By decree of the All-Father, he has been stripped of his seiðr and sent to Midgard to learn humility through honest labor among those he once sought to rule."
"I know who you are."
"Excellent! Then you understand our purpose." Thor beams. "He requires employment."
You look past him to Loki, who's examining the spine of a hardback Middlemarch like it insulted his mother.
"No," you say.
"We have tried other halls," Thor says. "The House of Coffee with the green mermaid. The great market of Whole Foods. A place that sells only mattresses, which I confess I did not understand. In each case, there were... difficulties."
"He told a pregnant woman her baby would be a disappointment to her," Loki says without looking up. "In my defense, he was."
"That's not even." You stop. "Okay. Why here? Why me?"
Thor's face goes solemn, which on him looks like a cloud crossing a field. "Because, my lady, you are the only one who said yes."
You blink. "I didn't say yes."
"You did. Three weeks past." He pulls a crumpled piece of paper out of his cloak. It's your flyer. HELP WANTED, PART TIME, MUST LOVE BOOKS AND TOLERATE CUSTOMERS. INQUIRE WITHIN. Under it, in your own handwriting, in a moment of desperation you'd forgotten, you'd added: Seriously, anyone. Please.
"Anyone," Thor reads aloud. "Please."
"That's not legally binding."
"It is, a little," says Loki, "in Asgard."
You open your mouth to explain, kindly but firmly, that you have no budget for staff, that you can barely make rent, that the last person you hired quit after two days to sell crypto, that you are fairly sure there are city ordinances about employing war criminals. And Thor reaches into his cloak again and puts a leather pouch on your counter. It lands with a heavy, soft clink.
You open it. It's full of gold coins. Not chocolate coins. Not dollar coins. Thick, rough-edged, hammered gold, stamped with what looks like a tree, warm from his pocket.
"For his wages," Thor says. "And for your trouble. I believe it is enough for one of your years? Possibly two."
You stare at it. You think about the letter from your landlord taped to the fridge in your apartment upstairs. You think about how you've been eating ramen standing over the sink since June.
"How long?" you hear yourself ask.
"Until he has learned," Thor says simply. "The All-Father's decree is that his seiðr will return to him when he has performed one honest act, freely, with nothing to gain. Only then may he return home."
From over by Middlemarch, Loki laughs, short and bitter. "So, never."
Thor turns. For a second the big, sunny, ridiculous man goes very still, and he looks at his brother with something so sad in his face that you have to look away from it.
"I do not believe that," he says quietly. "I have never believed that."
Loki doesn't answer. He puts the book back on the wrong shelf.
He is, without competition, the worst employee you have ever had.
Day one, he refuses to learn the register. "I have commanded armies," he says, when you show him how to scan a barcode. "I will not be defeated by a beeping box."
"So learn to work the beeping box."
"I would sooner learn to work a goat."
Day one, hour two, a woman asks for a recommendation for her book club, and he hands her a seven-hundred-page Russian novel and says, with absolute sincerity, "Everyone dies of tuberculosis and is better off for it." She buys it. You have no idea why.
Day one, hour four, a man in a fleece vest asks if you stock any Norse mythology, for his son's history project, and Loki goes very quiet and very pleasant. He leads the man to the folklore section. He pulls down a copy of the Prose Edda. He opens it to a page, and you watch him read for a full minute while the man waits, and then he snaps it shut.
"This," he says, "is slander."
"I'm sorry?"
"Snorri Sturluson was a drunk Icelandic politician who never met me in his life. He has me giving birth to a horse."
"Uh," says the man in the fleece vest.
"I'd never even met the horse."
You get the man out the door with a picture book about Thor's hammer and a fifteen percent discount and an apology so profuse it makes your teeth ache. When you turn around Loki is sitting in your armchair, the one by the window with the cracked leather, legs crossed, scowling at the Edda.
"You can't do that," you say.
"Do what?"
"Argue with customers about their own culture's mythology."
"It isn't their mythology. It's my life, badly translated." He flips a page. "Do you know what he says about my wife?"
"Sigyn. She holds the bowl over you to catch the venom." You lean against the shelf. "After they bind you with your son's entrails. Which is, I'll give you, one of the more disgusting things in medieval literature."
He looks up.
It's a slow look. It starts at your boots and works upward, and by the time it reaches your face it's changed into something sharper and more interested than anything you've seen from him yet.
"You've read it," he says.
"I did two years of a comparative lit master's before I ran out of money. I wrote forty pages on Lokasenna." You cross your arms. "For what it's worth, you win that one. You roast every single god at the feast. It's the funniest poem in the Codex Regius."
"It's not a poem," he says. "It's a transcript."
You laugh before you can stop yourself. It's loud, surprised, completely undignified, and the corner of his mouth does that thing again, the flicker, and this time he doesn't quite manage to put it away.
You try to fire him at six-thirty, after he tells a man that his novel manuscript, which the man had asked you to consider stocking on consignment, "should be buried at a crossroads so its spirit cannot return."
"That's it," you say, when the door slams. "That's it. I'm sorry. I know about the gold, I know about the decree, but I can't. You're done."
He doesn't look up from the Edda. "No, I'm not."
"Yes, you are. I'm the boss. I say so."
"Read your contract."
"There's no contract."
"There is." He produces it from inside his suit. A single sheet, handwritten in beautiful copperplate, and at the bottom is your own signature. You stare at it. You don't remember signing anything. You remember Thor handing you a pen to sign for the gold. A receipt, he'd said.
You read the paragraph above your name. It says, in essence, that you can only terminate his employment for "gross misconduct, defined herein as the deliberate burning of a book."
"I would never burn a book," Loki says. "I'm not an animal."
"You tricked me."
"I'm the god of mischief, darling. What did you expect?" He turns a page. "Also, I've reorganized the fiction section."
"You what?"
You go look. You stand in the fiction aisle for a long time. He has reorganized it. Not alphabetically. Not by genre. You pull out a few books, trying to find the system, and slowly it dawns on you.
He's arranged them by how much he thinks the author would have enjoyed meeting him.
Shakespeare is at eye level. So is Oscar Wilde. Dostoevsky has been moved to the very top shelf where nobody can reach him, with a sticky note on the spine that says too sad, too long, owes me money. Every copy of the Prose Edda in the building is in a box marked RETURNS.
You should be furious. You open your mouth to be furious, and instead you find yourself smoothing the sticky note flat with your thumb.
You live upstairs, which is the only reason you hear it at two in the morning. A shift in the old floorboards. A creak from the shop below.
You go down with a baseball bat. You're aware this is not useful against gods. It makes you feel better anyway.
The shop is dark except for the streetlight through the front window. He's standing in it. He's taken the jacket off and his sleeves are rolled to the elbow, and he isn't looking at anything in the shop. He's looking out, and up, past the brownstones across the street, past the water towers, at the narrow strip of orange city sky where there are no stars at all.
Thor had found him an apartment in Williamsburg. You'd assumed he'd gone there.
You open your mouth to say something. Then you see his hand.
He's holding it out in front of him, palm up, fingers spread, the way you'd hold a hand out to feel if it's raining. And as you watch, his fingers curl very slightly, a gesture so small and so practiced it looks like it's been done ten thousand times, and he whispers something in a language you almost recognize from the margins of your old thesis.
Nothing happens.
He tries it again. Nothing. A third time, and his hand starts to shake, and he closes it into a fist and presses the fist against the cold glass of your front window and leans his forehead on it and stands there like that, very still, in the orange light.
You should go back upstairs. This isn't yours to see.
The floorboard under your bare foot creaks.
He doesn't turn around. He doesn't move at all. But he says, quietly, to the window, "If you tell my brother, I'll reorganize the poetry section."
"What would you do to the poetry section?"
"Things," he says, "that Snorri Sturluson would weep to see."