Odin removed one of my shoes and brought my foot up near to his mouth, forcing me to raise my leg and bend my knee, giving Thor better access. Odin's breath was warm on my toes and a little bit ticklish.

Just then I felt a slick finger probe at my asshole. I gasped.

At that exact moment, Odin bit the fleshy tip of my little toe-just bit into it.

I cried out as I careened over the edge. "Oh my god," I said, losing myself in the sting of Odin's bite, and Thor's fingers, and my fingers, and an explosion of an orgasm. "Fuck!" I said, throbbing with exquisite waves of feeling from my eyelids to my toes.

"Ride it, baby," Thor breathed, slowing the motion on my nipple, caressing my ass cheek. I was so gone-my mind, my senses. Shattered apart. "Ride it." He slowed his hands, held me tight.

I lolled on his lap for a spell, panting, coming back to myself. "Oh my God," I said.

"And now we know," Odin said.

"Know what?" I breathed as Thor caressed my belly.

Odin put his glasses back on. "Things, Isis. We now know certain things."

"Like what?"

With one last devilish smile, Odin turned back to sit properly in his seat. "This will work." He shifted his gaze to Zeus, who continued to drive, all stern silence. Unsaid things seemed to pass between them.

What had he been planning to do beyond bite my toe? You didn't need to flex your knuckles to bite a girl's toe. It came to me that he might not ever have intended to do anything at all beyond what he did. It came to me that Odin was the mindfucker of the group.

"That was hot," Thor whispered. "Thank you."

"Well I...yes," I agreed. Were we done now? I pulled off his lap feeling totally weird. I straightened my skirt. So I had just masturbated in front of them all. "What about you?"

"I want to take you so bad, I can't think straight," Thor panted.

"But we're in a van." Odin twisted around. "You didn't think we were going to just make you blow us all here in the van, did you?" He handed my panties and bra back to me, looking amused. "And we'd hardly beat off in front of a total stranger. That would be uncouth, don't you think?"

I widened my eyes. Of course it was just what I'd done. "Shut up." I grabbed them from his hand. I put my panties back on, and then my bra, back on under my shirt-no easy feat.

"Our needs are more complex than just jacking off," Odin said, putting his smarty-pants glasses back on.

Thor touched my hair. "We can wait," he said. "We don't want to freak you out or...abuse your generosity."

"Yes we do," Odin said. "That is exactly what we want to do, and that's exactly what she wants. That is how the god pack works."

The god pack?

Thor threw an arm around my shoulders and glared at Odin. "Odin's fucking around."

"You will love the way we abuse your generosity," Odin said.

I caught Zeus's eyes in the mirror. Gaze grave, he said, "One week, and nobody does anything they don't want to, and then you go home while you still have plausible deniability. Got it?"

Nobody said anything more.

We sped through corn country.

It had been a wet, hot August and the crops stood high and thick, like short green walls, blurring by. Judging from the angle of the sun, it was dinnertime.

The mood of sex was still thick in the van, and I thought how frustrated these guys must be. My body still thrummed with energy; I couldn't let go of that crazy moment when Thor was lewdly fondling me, and Odin bit my toe. I badly wanted more of that.

Zeus said we'd stop for the night eventually. When? What would happen? I had this feeling like the whole road trip was foreplay.

Zeus said, "I saw a sign for a filling station coming up. Area's looking okay to me. Anyone see anything?"

"Come here." Thor pulled me against him, pointed at the sky. "I'm looking for cameras," he said. "Look at the tops of the poles and anything on the wires. Describe what you see."

I nestled back into him. I could do that now. I was the girlfriend. We were the god pack. It was weird they'd kept using their god names. Did they use their god names 24/7?

I described what I saw, shocked at how little I knew about the poles and webs of wires and boxes and barrels that had existed above my head for 25 years. Thor told me the names and functions for various shapes and things to watch out for, and I struggled not to wriggle in delight as his hands roamed possessively over me, or get too roamy on him. Apparently there would be no sex in the van.

"Always know where the eyes and cameras are. It's something you'll develop," he said.

Zeus grumbled. A warning of some kind.

That is how the god pack works, Odin had said. What did he mean? Had some other woman come before me? And if so, what had happened to her?

The three of them discussed the surroundings and various technological and geographical features of the area we'd traveled over in a way that impressed me. This filling station bit had turned the three of them from sex maniacs to all business, with a single-mindedness and a kind of discipline that felt almost military. They'd all straightened up and put their businessman clothes back on. Except me, I was still slutty central. I asked for my jacket.

It'll be good to have another pair of eyes." Thor handed me my jacket. "Being aware will be one of your jobs."

Again I got that sense of a ghost. A girl whose job it had been to observe things. I recalled, just then, the stutter of attention on me when I'd taken a god name. Did the last girl have a god name? What had happened to her?

"What are those green bell things?" I asked.

"Those are ceramic spacers. We'll have to do a whole tutorial on phone poles with you," Thor said. "That will be one of the few non-dirty tutorials you'll receive."

Shivers rained over my skin.

Apparently they were satisfied with this terrain, because Zeus pulled into a run-down filling station whose concrete walls had vertical brown stripes near the top, showing the path of leakage from the metal roof. Junker cars crowded the edges of the lot and a lonely pump stood out in front. "Anyone need to pee?"

The guys pulled their suits back on and we went in. A boy stood behind a counter surrounded by cigarette displays. Zeus slapped down two twenties. "Forty for gas, and we'll take both flavors of bathroom keys."

Odin and I took our women and men keys and walked around the side of the station together. "Welcome to the glamorous life. You always get tons of high security with the good bathrooms," he said when we were outside. "Those fucking modern gas stations are like fucking airport security zones. We hate them."

I went into the bathroom with Odin's words ringing in my head. Fucking gairport security zones. I wanted to find out where he was from. I wanted to find out everything.

The bathroom wasn't so bad. I peed and cleaned up and finally got up the guts to look at my hair in the mirror. It was completely crooked, but when I shoved it behind my ears, it wasn't all that crooked. But still, it needed work. I had always wanted to get it cut short, like a boy's hair. And maybe I could dye it pink. Isis would like pink hair.

When I came out, the van was on the other side of the station at the air pump. The side of it no longer said Romano's Catering; it said Marcomm Technologies in fat italic letters with two blue underlines. Odin loitered at the back of the van, partly concealing Thor, who was changing license plates. My bandits, like a bad-boy pit crew.

Soon we were back on the road, with Zeus driving again, and me in the back with Thor. I felt like I was moving far away from reality, from my troubles. I liked it.

Odin threw us each a small bag of Doritos.

"Ranch," I said, my mouth watering. "Thanks." I was ravenous.

"We can't stop until Chicago. But we'll stay somewhere nice," Thor said with a little smile.

"Is that where you're from?"

"A few ground rules," Zeus said suddenly. "Don't ever ask us where we're from or how we got into this, and you can never know our names. Don't try to get that information, understand?"

"Okay," I said.

"We took a leap of faith to trust you," he continued, "and as you can imagine, it's not something we would have done normally, just pick up a stranger. But you were in a position to help us and you came through, and that means something. We'll hold up our end of the agreement by taking down another of your boss's banks. Right afterward, we'll send you home with a plausible story that I don't want to have to work on right now. And we'll send your cut of the money to you somehow. And if you deviate from the story we develop for you or the rules for the money we set, we'll hunt you down and kill you."

The kill you made a little twang in my chest. Zeus didn't say a lot, but his words had serious heft. This wasn't a man to make empty threats.

It came to me then that he wasn't a man to have empty sex, either.

"How long until our heist?"

Odin snorted. "Heist."

"It'll happen when it happens," Zeus snapped. "You have to be cool with not knowing the future. That is what this life is."

It sounded like the voice of experience. "And then you eject me?"

Zeus watched the road again, not deigning to answer.

"It's better for everyone that way," Thor explained. "The longer you're with us, the less plausible it will be that you don't know anything and didn't see our faces."

"Right," I said, feeling suddenly upset at the prospect of being ejected-I'd only just become Isis! And, sure, I worried about my sisters, but I'd been dying on that farm. "It's just that, as long as I'm away, they won't take the farm."

"Don't you care about people who might be worried about you?" Zeus glared at me in the rearview mirror, which somehow seemed to amplify his disapproval of me.

"Of course I care," I said.

"Danger, subversion, and Hedonistic pleasures, it's fun for a while, but at some point you'd hit a low where you feel homesick. You don't want it to be too late to go back when that happens," he said. "We're doing you a favor by dumping you. In the meantime, don't even think about getting a message to your people. You have to come to us with that sort of thing, and we'll decide what's smart for all of us. You think you've given the finger to every rule you've ever had to follow? You think you've seized a week of freedom for yourself as Isis? No. You've traded in one set of rules for another. You've given up your freedom to the good of the group. We all have. That is how we stay strong. This is our power. It is a power beyond what you can imagine. Do not fuck with that power."

The silence in the van seemed almost thunderous after he finished this little speech. This was more than a gang. More than bank robbers, I thought.

Also, what was up with the danger, subversion, and Hedonistic pleasures bit? Who said that? Who were these guys?

Thor's cheekbones looked slightly pink, possibly from the sun, and he had blond scruff on his cheeks. He looked more like a tennis player than a soccer player, I decided. He said, "As far as you're concerned, we started our life of crime five hours ago when we hit your bank. We don't have a past or a future, okay?"

Odin looked back at me. "We're the fucking hive mind of crime," he said.

"Like the Borg?"

Thor gave me a heated look. "More like one for all and all for one."

My breath caught in my throat. "I never thought of that as dirty before."

He sat back. "This is an ideal time to start."

Chapter Two.

I rested my head against the back of the seat as the scenery zoomed by, drowsily wondering what my sisters were doing. Probably entertaining police at the farm. Did they think I'd be ransomed? Maybe I could get a message to them. Zeus hadn't said I couldn't. You have to come to us with that sort of thing, he'd said.

More scenery zoomed by. I closed my eyes. The next thing I knew, I was face down on the seat with my cheek glued to the vinyl, with a hand gently shaking my shoulder.

We'd arrived.

I pulled myself together and we walked as a group across a parking lot and into the lavishly gold-gilded and palm-treed entrance of the Regal Hotel.

A lot of the money they'd stolen, I presumed, would be spent at the Regal Hotel-I'd never set foot in a place so fancy. Thor and Odin and I lingered in a stand of marble pillars and potted tropical plants in a corner of the lobby while Zeus went to the desk.

Thor and Odin had even put their ties back on. I supposed we looked like a group of business people. Aside from my rip-hemmed mini skirt. They were the businesspeople and I was the businesspauper.

"They don't need our IDs?"

Thor shrugged. "Nah. We're special."

"Gods?"

Odin sat in a posh velvet chair. "That's right, baby."

"So we lie low for a while?" I asked. "Is that the idea?"

Thor got a devilish look in his eyes. "That's one way of putting it."

My cheeks heated, and I didn't have to look under my jacket to know my nipples were hardening like two eager bullets.

"I love when you blush," Thor whispered. "I haven't even told you what we'll do up there, and you're already blushing. This is very good already." He closed the distance between us, touched my jacket, then my neck.

I shut my eyes-it was like his fingers were magic wands, but instead of fairy dust, he seemed to be sprinkling me with shivers of apprehension. Good shivers. Crazy good shivers.

"Did you have something specific in mind?" I asked.

"Well, it's safe to say that first, you'll take off all your clothes," Thor said.

"Slowly," Odin grumbled from the chair, gaze cool on me. "Slow and one thing at a time."