My Date From Hell (The Blooming Goddess Trilogy, #2)

From Bad to Worse (Part 2)

Kai sliced through most of them with the point of his black light, clearing a path. "Get out of here."

I shook my head. "Being outside is recharging me. I can feel it."

Kai's eyes flashed as he spared me the briefest glare. Big deal. Like I hadn't seen that annoyed look before.

I was prepared to fight him. And fight with him. My power was coming back. Not a lot, but enough to help.

What I didn't expect was Kai to press a single gentle kiss to my lips and murmur, "Trust me. I'll be there before you know it."

He leapt us over the minions, whipped around to face them, and shoved me toward the tree with the admonishment to "Stay alive."

I stumbled, hands out, prepared to catch myself before I hit rough bark, but instead flew through the tree and straight out the other side.

I was back at Hope Park Progressive School in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island, my index finger to my lip, pressed against the spot where Kai had kissed me.

I stared at the cypress that I had emerged through, but Kai didn't materialize.

I shivered. It was January. This was Canada. And I was cold.

I sat back on my knees, drinking in the familiar peak of Mt. Baker in the distance. My eyes landed on my school. The rambling, three-story, brick building that had been home for most of my life. What a relief to see it.

Another glance at the cypress. Continued lack of Kai. I pushed to my feet and brushed myself off.

My stomach clutched in anxiety. No. I couldn't think the worst. He was more than capable of taking care of himself and if I went back, I'd only get into trouble. The safest place for me right now was behind the wards at my school.

He wanted me here, so here I'd stay. I uttered a wish for his safe return and tried not to feel like a coward. Because truth be told, I didn't want to go back.

Didn't want to be in danger.

A tingling on my neck made me glance up. Sure enough, a couple of Gold Crushers and Infernorators were already hovering in the sky, just outside the invisible demarcation of my school's safety wards.

Let me rephrase. I didn't want to be in immediate danger. Supernatural creatures loitering outside school grounds were nothing anymore. Funny what you could get used to.

Especially since my human classmates couldn't see them.

A fact I was hugely grateful for seconds later when I was rushed and enveloped in a giant Hannah hug.

I was so pathetically glad to see my best friend that I almost burst into tears. Instead, I planted a smooch on her lips. "Baby, I'm home."

"How very Katy Perry of you, love."

The sound of a sexy British voice startled me out of my homecoming euphoria.

"Well, she isn't wearing cherry Chapstick. So there's that," I said, as I turned to scope out the pretty, pretty boy standing before me.

With his green eyes and sun-kissed, tousled hair, slightly shaggy like a surfer boy's, he looked like he should have been on the cover of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue in board shorts, not standing in my school yard, dressed in a warm wool coat.

While this mouthy stranger was model material, I, on the other hand, looked like I belonged in a dumpster. I wanted to get to my room, shower in scalding water, and sleep for the two weeks of winter break that I figured were about to happen.

Give or take daylight savings time in Olympus.

Yeah, and get cracking on the memories. But damn, I was just so very tired from the emotional and physical minefields I'd waded through.

New dude grinned at me with this beautiful smile and I felt meltiness. Not like with Kai. I doubted anyone would be like Kai for me, but more in a "I'd have to be dead not to feel something" kind of way.

He was mushy happiness personified.

I turned toward Hannah to check her reaction to him but was unable to see her expression because she'd placed her hands on my shoulders and was killing my warm fuzzy by shaking me into concussion city.

"Quit it." I pulled myself loose. "People go to prison for shaken Sophie syndrome."

"That's babies," she shot back, punching me on the shoulder, "which is exactly what you acted like, leaving school." She flipped her long, blonde hair out of her face to better send me a grey-eyed glower of death.

Then she noticed the blood on my face. Her glower ratcheted up a few notches.

Hannah gave damn fine stare, and on most other people, the look combined with her five-foot-ten height would have them conceding whatever point she wanted. Years of proximity had made me immune.

I felt bad because she seemed really worried. Her "tell" being the calming, deep breaths she took under her winter coat.

Pretty boy had noticed too. He was pretty fixated on making sure her chest rose and fell okay. His concern was touching.

"It wasn't willingly. I had to, uh," I glanced at pretty boy, "visit with my dad. For maybe four days. You're acting like I was gone for—"

"Two months, Sophie Magoo," Theo said, arriving at my side, looking comfortingly rumpled and spiky-haired. He draped me in my heavy winter coat. "We've been keeping watch for your return."

I staggered back a step. "Two months?" How long had Zeus been drugging me?

"Theo found out where you were," Hannah said. "But we had no idea ..." She swallowed hard. "We knew whatever going on with you was bad."

"I'm sorry." I felt terrible that my friends had gone through that worry. And even more upset that Zeus had stolen a chunk of my life away. Absently, I pulled the coat tighter around me, pondering payback.

"Sophie." I blinked back to attention. Hannah had scrounged around in her pockets and located a small pack of wet wipes. She handed one to me so I could scrub my face. "You can't go inside like that."

Theo sighed. Even though I knew my other best friend was really Prometheus, currently stuck in human teen boy form, he always reminded me of an anime character brought to life. He pushed his black, fat-framed glasses back up his nose in a familiar gesture. "I'm tempted to let Saul kill you."

Saul being his nickname for Hannah. It had mutated since childhood from Hannah Solo to Solo to Saul. No one else could call her that. Just as only Theo could call me Sophie Magoo.

Hannah frowned at me. "Do you know how many possible horrible scenarios I calculated in the time you were gone? Six hundred and thirty seven. And that was before I factored—"

I drowned out her reasonings behind all the ways I could have bit it. All I could think about was Kai. Two months? For how much of it had Kai been clamped to the torture board? What kind of strength had it taken for him to resist the pain and the madness? To come back from being manacled?

And why hadn't he shown up yet?