My Date From Hell (7 page)

“Thanks.” I really appreciated him saying that. I sighed. “Is it all over school?” Just what I needed, to be considered the skitzy chick for the next year and a half.

“You’re safe. The guys and I hacked Doucette’s office before the holidays with this hard core spy listening software we got online. You can get all kinds of mercenary gear, yo. Course, he found it and trashed it. Still got away with it, though,” he said proudly. He shrugged. “That’s why I know. I heard her.”

“Impressive work, Patel. Bugging the big boss.”

He grinned. “I’ve got depths, Bloom.” And with that, he left.

“Anil still crushing on you, huh?” Hannah teased.

“Giving me whack hacker tips, yo,” I joked. “Too bad he can’t hack my brain.”

“The memory retrieval?” Pierce had just arrived. He sported a cream tailored button-down with grey pinstripes over grey cargo pants. The colors brought out the green in his eyes and more than one girl did a double-take as she passed him. The fact that he managed to smell like sunshine didn’t hurt. “Leave it to me.”

Theo and I stared at Pierce in amazement.

Hannah looked at him like she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with him. She smoothed out her expression. “How can you help?”

I wanted that answer, too, but there were too many kids around. I pulled them into an empty classroom. Toys were strewn around the room, while very colorful drawings hung on the walls, which meant this was Ms. Kim’s kindergarten class.

“Is this you just cozying up to the best friend for Brownie points? Because I’m good with that.” I would give him a kidney if he got me the memories back.

He glanced to Hannah. “Does it get me Brownie points?’

She shrugged, idly poking some Play-Doh laying out. “Maybe.” If Hannah was playing things this cool, she had obviously gone into extreme “stay objective until results are tabulated” mode.

Pierce just as obviously didn’t seem to care because he lit up and said, “Brilliant.”

I snapped my fingers to get his attention back to me. “You’re serious? You can do it?”

He leaned against Ms. Kim’s desk. He kept focused on me, but I could tell that he was forcing himself not to watch Hannah. “Thought it over, yeah.”

The Brit accent was super adorable. Hannah narrowed her eyes at me when I grinned at his voice. That just made me grin harder.

Pierce remained oblivious to the covert girl exchange going on in front of him. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got it solved. Gotta handle Bethany, put some things into place.” He looked me over. “You’’ll need to prep yourself. I expect you’ll find it painful.”

I crossed my arms, worried. “How painful? Like scale of one to ten.”

“Fourteen.”

I braced myself against a tiny red kiddie chair, and shook my head. “No. I’m not good with that. There has to be another way.”

Theo had a thoughtful look on his face.

I pounced on him. “You have an idea?”

He shook his head.

“Spill,” I ordered.

He kept silent.

I snagged Theo in my ribbons of light, since I was now fully recharged.

“Watch the goods!” he protested.

I tightened his bindings slightly. “I don’t know what your issue is but you need to man up and give me the info. Now.”

“There might be one god who could help us,” Theo said, reluctantly. “Hephaestus.”

I released him from my plant prison.

“Isn’t he the God of Fire, Forge, and Volcanos?” Hannah asked.

“I am not being sacrificed to a volcano,” I said.

“If only,” Theo replied. “He’s also the God of Technology. Anil’s hacking reminded me that maybe we could approach it that way.”

“Hack into her brain?” Hannah squealed.

I whacked her arm. “I was kidding about that.”

She leaned forward eagerly to Theo. “Can I come?”

Theo was serious about this. I glanced at Pierce. “Will Hephaestus involve less pain?”

“Undoubtedly,” he replied without hesitation.

That settled it. “Okay, we’ll save your kind offer for Plan B.”

Which is how I found myself standing in front of a pine tree, bound for Hephaestus’ lair.

Hannah came with Theo and me, having wanted to observe my new traveling abilities. All of us were bundled in warm winter coats. Hannah held a black umbrella over us, protection against the rain pelting down.

Boom
!

We startled.

“Wrong conditions for a thunderstorm,” Hannah mused. “Although the sonic boom would explain the ground rattling.” Her eyes widened. “What kind of lightning storm is
that
?”

I stared up at the sky in dread. A small team of Gold Crushers and Infernorators were wailing on the wards with fireballs and lightning. Hannah couldn’t see the minions but their efforts were apparent. Anyone else seeing this would just chalk it up to a freak storm. Weird natural disasters could be used to explain away a lot. “Theo,” I whispered, my throat dry with fear.

He clapped my shoulder and squeezed reassuringly. “They can’t get through. I’ll strengthen the wards anyway.”

Hannah was whipping her head around, curious and desperate to see something.

“Minions,” Theo said. “Don’t panic.”

She stamped her foot in frustration. “What if you injure a couple of whatever are up there and we bring them in to study? Could I see them then?” So much for panic.

“No,” Theo and I both chorused.

I watched the single-minded focus of the minions. “Hades and Zeus will send everything they’ve got to the ritual location. Not to mention themselves. How can we possibly ward it up so it holds?”

“Blood. Yours and Kai’s.”

“But
—
”

Theo shook his head, cutting me off. “Memories first. Go see Hephaestus. We’ll deal with finding Kai and everything else when you get back.”

I gave a tight nod.

Theo wrapped his coat tighter around himself at the wind that had picked up. Or maybe it was just the force of the Gold Crushers and Infernorators battering against the wards.

“They’re stepping it up, aren’t they?” Hannah didn’t look as enthusiastic to meet one now. She held her whipping hair out of her face with her free hand.

Theo slung an arm around her shoulders but kept his gaze on me. “Just focus on the address I gave you. And when you get there, the password is ‘man behind the curtain.’”

I shot him a pleading look. “Come with.”

“No way. You are most def on your own on this one.”

“Why?” I had to raise my voice over the rising drone of the wind.

“Just leave it, Soph. I’m not going,” Theo said, testily.

I sighed.

“Have fun,” Hannah tried her best to give me a cheery wave, despite glancing worriedly up at the sky every few seconds. “And bring me back a brain scan.”

“I hate you both,” I said.

Then clutching my pendant, palms sweaty with fear and hope, I parted the branches. I had a split-second of perfectly rational fear that my next step would end with me whacking my face on the bark, but the pendant did its job. It was like the pine tree wasn’t even there. I simply stepped through the trunk, and went looking for help.

Six

The next step brought me out through a spindly pine in front of a nondescript industrial warehouse in a run-down area of Seattle. From what I could tell. Weather, architecture, all looked grey. I was on unprotected ground now, and the Photokia and Pyrosim would probably be locking and loading onto me at any second.

I bolted across the empty street to the building matching the address Theo had given me. Going around the side as he’d directed, I stepped up to a metal garage door that had been tagged in a variety of bright colors and buzzed the single white button inset on a brown plaque on the wall.

A hologram of a red demon’s face appeared in front of me.

“Who dares disturb me?” it boomed in a thunderous voice.

“Holy crap!” I yelped.

The hologram disappeared.

Photokia and Pyrosim arrived. The Pyrosim floated down in a rush of hot, flaming air, their fiery tentacle arms outstretched my way.

Guess the Photokia felt lazy because they were content to just hang back and let the Pyrosim tenderize me up.

The fact that they’d put aside their deep-seated hatred of each other to work on “Operation Obliterate The Bloom Chick” both continued to worry me and remind me of how serious the stakes were.

I took out the ones closest to me with a couple of blasts of green light and stabbed at the button again.

More minions arrived, dotting the sky.

The hologram appeared again. “Who dares
—
”

“Man behind the curtain!” I yelled, glad to have the password.

Wrong. At those words, the demon’s face blew up by a thousand degrees.

Its presence helpfully knocked away the Photokia and Pyrosim, but this didn’t bode well for me.

The holograph turned a massive frown on me. “Impostor!” it roared, and whirled around me, sucking me up and spitting me out in a large interior room.

The space was mostly bare, in a grey palette. The walls and floors were concrete. The only natural light came from a row of windows along the far end, which looked out into a charming desolate alley. Home to crackheads and miscellaneous shifty characters.

On the left lay a small galley kitchen, with white hi-gloss cabinets and stainless steel counters. There was no table, but instead a lounge area with a few ultra-sleek red leather couches and a coffee table piled high with various tech gadgets and books. A couple of closed doors were to the right of the front door.

The focus of the room was, well, I’ll get to that.

A lone figure stood awaiting my arrival.

Take the natural snobbiness of your everyday hipster, compound it by the regular arrogance of guys in their mid-twenties, and magnify it by infinity thanks to that whole god factor. You’d start to come close to the waves of disdain that just naturally rolled off this dude. The Eau de Smarm he exuded ensured that I wasn’t going to be cozying up to him any time soon.

It may have seemed like his denim shirt, worn unbuttoned over a white wife beater and skinny jeans had been picked up directly off of the floor that morning, but no. From the top of his rakish fedora sitting on his bright red-dyed hair to his pink socks and white vintage Keds, Hephaestus was calculated cool.

And weirdly cute, but I wasn’t going to give him that.

Not even the cane he sported, due to his left foot being twisted inwards could detract from his projecting an overall “don’t even bother reaching for my greatness” status. If anything, the cane was a sleek, black, way cool accessory. “Hephaestus, I presume.”

He crossed his arms. “It’s Festos. And you better have a damn good reason for showing up here with
that
password, honeybunch.”

“Theo sent me. Prometheus,” I amended, since I wasn’t sure if he knew Theo’s human name.

Given the double take I received, I guess he did.

“I don’t believe you,” he said flatly.

“I swear. He thought you could help break a memory spell.”

“Too bad. I’m busy.”

I took a step forward, my hand up to keep him from ordering me out. “Please. I don’t think he would have sent me unless he believed you were truly the one person who could help.”

Festos considered me for a second, then rolled his eyes. “Lovely. You’re
her
. Did Prometheus mention any type of payment for my services?”

“His undying thanks?”

Festos looked a bit too hopeful at that. You know, if you looked past the “couldn’t care less” vibe.

“Not really,” I amended. “But you’re the only god he’s ever mentioned in a remotely respectful way.”

“Wow. Such flattery.” He sighed and waved me toward the machine in the middle of the room. “Get on.”

I hesitated.

He limped over to the contraption. “You want it undone or not? Lose the pillow you’re wearing and move.”

I tossed my puffy coat onto one of the sofas. Then glanced outside. I couldn’t help it. I was worried the minions had come back.

“We’re warded up,” Festos said and flicked a switch.

The machine came to life in a roar of sound.

I bet you a bajillion dollars that if you made a list of all the ways you might remove a memory suppression spell, no matter how weird you got, none of the items would include being hooked up to one of those kinda grungy, video arcade dance machines and trying desperately to keep up with the patterns whipping past.

I win, right?

I stepped onto the hammered aluminum platform attached to the screen and froze. Embossed in the frame under the large monitor were the letters “FeE.”

I glanced over at Festos, watching me with a puzzled frown, and the penny dropped.
Holy crap
! This was the guy who’d created the torture machine, the manacles, and who knew what other nefarious devices. Heart racing, I jumped off the machine and bolted for the door.

Which, of course, was locked with several deadbolts. Despite my speedy unlocking and several blasts, Festos managed to cross the room and press the tip of his cane against the door, holding it firmly shut.

He was freakishly strong.

No way was I getting on that death trap. I spun, called out my vines, wrapped one around his right ankle and flung him across the room.

Then I reached for the door and
—

Screamed and jumped away as a blob of molten lava blasted past beside my head, sealing the door’s hinges.

“You better hope that was some kind of brain tumor impairing your judgement,” Festos said from behind me, “otherwise I am going to be
so
pissed.”

I turned to face him, hands up, placating. “I’m really sorry. Let me go and we’ll pretend I was never here.” I pressed myself into the wall as he came toward me, using his cane to support his weight.

He stopped about a foot away and took in my wide eyes and shallow breathing. “Why are you so terrified? What exactly did Prometheus say?”

He sounded extremely angry.

“Nothing. I swear.”

He glowered harder.

“Really. It’s just … you’re the Fee guy,” I babbled.

His anger turned to confusion. “Fee?”

I pointed at the dance machine. “Capital F small e capital E. Fee. Maker of Zeus’ torture device and the …” my voice wobbled, “cuffs.”

The last thing I expected him to do was sigh heavily. “Yeah. That’s me. But you’re pronouncing it wrong. It’s not Fee. It’s Irony.”

I relaxed a fraction because he didn’t look like he was going to hurt me. And I was confused and wanted to know more.

Festos gestured as he spoke. “‘Fe.’ For both Festos and the symbol for iron, my favored material. ‘E’ for excellent. Put them together, you get irony.” He looked up and I finally saw he was really distraught. “The irony being that I am so excellent at making things so awful. Generally under threat of death, I’d like to add.” He blinked back to attention. “But this puppy?” He waved his cane over the dance machine. “A pet project. All good. I swear.”

Something in his expression convinced me. I believed him, in part because I figured Theo must have known what he invented and still sent me here.

I let Festos lead me over to the dance machine and tape to my head a bunch of wires which ran down into the contraption. Truth be told, I was sort of impressed with him. It had to have taken wicked intelligence and skill to create these things. Perhaps a dash of sociopathy, but I was willing to chalk that up to his client Zeus. For now.

“So you’re like the Acme Corporation of the gods?”

Festos laughed. “Lookie lookie. Persephone gets a sense of humor.”

Not a fan? I loved this guy. “Call me Sophie.”

“Well, Sophie,” he stepped back from the machine and limped over to a desk holding a small fortune in the latest Apple technology. “Brace yourself. It’s going to be quite the experience.”

He sat down, winked, and hit a button.

The dance program began.

Fast, furious, and requiring all of my focus, it ran at a speed regular ‘ole humans wouldn’t be able to follow. Plus, get real. Those stupid “dancers” in the background onscreen were pulling moves impossible to mere mortals without wires and a team of visual effects artists. How was I supposed to keep up by stomping the correct foot on the correct pad?

I took my eyes from the screen for a nanosecond to glower at Festos, who was busy running this gongshow by redirecting dance moves in accordance with my brain wave patterns.

If trying to co-ordinate my brain and my feet at the speed of light wasn’t zapping all my energy, I’d have been making very loud gagging noises in his direction. “This is stupid.”

“Oh look, she’s mastered the art of juvenile generalizations. Goody.” Festos clapped his hands. Even his applause was sarcastic. “
This
,” he continued, “is cutting edge technology, predicated on years of experimentation and study into how dance increases temporal and prefrontal activity to improve memory through the formation of new interconnections. And in my opinion, which is the only one that matters whenever you and I are in the same space, it’s utterly wasted on you.”

Note to self. Festos was mega touchy about his work. I veered right, barely nailing a move. My reward? A whack in the face from one of the wires taped to my head. Sweat dripped down the back of my neck but in the face of Festos’ haughty disdain, I wasn’t quitting until the program ended or my feet were bloody stumps.

“Brilliant,“ I said, gulping down air. “And don’t tell me. You’ve also figured out how to cure cancer by playing Twister?”
Front, back, back, left, right
…

Festos looked at the enormous monitor plugged into his laptop and frowned. “While I’m heartbroken you’ve forgotten such obviously important items such as your fashion sense, this is a colossal Waste. Of. My. Time.”

“Hey” I replied, “don’t let me keep you from such life-pressing tasks as updating your Genius playlist with obscure indie bands.”

Festos snorted. I glanced over at him. He met my glower with a scowl. Despite the momentary hostility, it was really a moment of kinship. By the grins both of us tried not to crack, we had recognized a kindred spirit.

The song switched tempos. Still fast, but somehow easier for me to follow. “Okay, Fee. Start from the top and explain how trying to follow this DDR wannabe is gonna bring back my memory?”

Festos stretched out his bad leg. “Your brain is really plastic and changeable. It rewires itself with use. Dancing is one of the best ways to rebuild cognitive reserve
—
basically, how your brain deals with damage. The memory spell, in this case, is the damage.”

He paused to type in a command, amping up the speed of the routine. “See,” Festos continued, monitoring my somewhat pathetic progress, “dancing integrates a bunch of brain functions at once. Because of your goddess side, in minutes rather than years, I can hopefully improve your memory function to a point where the new pathways in your brain will override the memory spell. Rewire you back to full functionality.” He frowned. “The science isn’t the problem, it’s the magic of the spell that might throw off results.”

I wiped some sweat off my neck with my left shoulder. My hair was plastered to my head and my purple sweater was a bit stinky. Given how, in the past, Kai had always seemed to show up in time to catch me at my worst, maybe this is what it would take for the universe to send him back to me.

Festos broke into my thoughts. “True confessions time.” His eyes remained focused on his computer monitor, keys rapidly typing adjustments to the dance program, “what’s he like these days?”

I startled because he couldn’t have been talking about Kai, could he? “Who?”

Festos gave an exaggerated swoon.

Oh. He was.

“He’s absolutely maddening.”

“Still?”

I laughed, missing a step.

“Talk and dance, honeybunch.”

I nailed a couple more steps before speaking. “You want to kill him one second and then he does something to make you all melty.”

Festos sighed. “Yeah. Surprised it gets to
you
, though.”

I sank into my thoughts of Kai, while still managing to stick with the program. I flushed, my stomach flip-flopping in remembrance. “An amaaazing kisser.”

The dance program stopped. Suddenly and without warning. I practically flew off the machine in my crazy jumping state as my body tried to catch up with my brain and process that there were no more steps. My head snapped forward violently, still attached to the machine.