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 i
ndie 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.
I fumbled, straightened, and turned to stare at Festos with a “WTF?” look because that had so been deliberate.
I took a hurried step back at the look of death he sent me. “Did I miss something?”
“He kissed you?” he asked, coldly.
“Yeah. That’s what got me in this mess? Magical kiss that awakens the goddess but sends serious interference with the memory spell?”
“Oh. You mean Kyrillos,” Festos said, relaxing. “What did you think, getting involved with him? He’s a douche.”
I blinked, startled. “Come again?”
“He’s been nailing everything in sight for years. Ever since he broke up with you. You know. When you were still Persephone 1.0.”
I shook my head, carefully unhooking myself. “Got your facts very wrong, honeybunch. I broke up with Kai. Couple months ago. On behalf of my Persephone self. He most certainly has never dumped me.”
I must have sounded less than positive about that fact because Festos singsonged, “But you don’t re-mem-ber.”
I ignored the taunt. “He never mentioned a break up. Though he never not mentioned a break up either. It’s highly complicated.”
“Yawn with two ‘n’s. Tuning out,” Festos said, shutting down the program.
“Who were you talking about, then?” I asked.
He actually blushed.
“That means it is all kinds of juicy.” I thought about it. There were very few guys in my life. So if he didn’t mean Zeus or Kai …
“Theo?” I squealed.
“Prometheus,” he corrected, blushing furiously.
“You have a crush on Theo. Prometheus. Why haven’t you made a move on him?”
His embarrassed look was replaced by an angry scowl. “Yeah, right.” He flicked his hand toward his lame foot in a “look at it” gesture. “I get all the hot deities this way.”
“I don’t think it’s the foot so much as the being so bitchy you could choke on it,” I pointed out sweetly. I bopped over to him and tapped his monitor. “Let’s find Theo. He’ll be online.”
Festos shook his head violently. “No! You think you and Kyrillos are complicated? That’s nothing on Prometheus and me.”
“Why?”
“You know how he was chained to a rock for giving mankind fire?”
I shuddered. “Yeah. The whole having his liver eaten by an eagle. Opposite of funtime …” Something dawned on me. “Whoa! You made the chain?”
Festos looked away sheepishly. “And chained him up. Both, as I pointed out many, many times, subcontracting under duress from Zeus. A fact which Prometheus refuses to take into account. Absolument rebuffed all attempts at a second date.”
“Honey, that’s effed up.”
“Five ways to Sunday,” he agreed.
“But nothing we can’t overcome.” I headed toward the kitchen and rooted through a couple of cupboards before finding a glass. “My best friend deserves to be happy, and if the depth of your blush is relative to the amount of your crush, all signs point to good thing. The guys at school have certainly never done anything for him. So let’s figure this out. Get it?”
“Got it,” he agreed.
“Good.” I poured myself some cold tap water, which I knocked back with only the teensiest of hesitations. No. Couldn’t let Zeus and his preferred method of drugging ruin basic hydration for me. “But first you gotta run that dance program again. It didn’t bring back anything.”
I washed the glass out and set it on the counter. “Or better yet, maybe we could just find a nice dark room with a comfy couch to lay down on. Someone could wave a watch over me or do a little magic thingamajig and we’ll release the memories that way. ‘Cause I’m telling you, that dancing was exhausting.”
Festos looked around, then beckoned me close.
“Why so cloak and dagger?” I asked, coming toward him.
He held up a finger, indicating I should wait, and then tapped a key on his keyboard. Greek folk music began to play from invisible inset speakers. Loudly. I guess to cover whatever top secret bomb he was about to drop.
“That music is gonna lose you your hipster decoder ring,” I said.
Festos grinned. “Exactly. No one wants to listen to this stuff.”
“Because it’s bad. Also, there’s the whole feeling like you gotta put on a toga to partake.”
I got his “you’re clearly an idiot” look again. “That’s Romans. Greeks wore Chitons. And no Greek has worn those in about two thousand years. A woman might wear an embroidered kontogouni but—”
I cut him off. “Theo is going to love you.” They could be Greek cultural police together.
“Here’s the thing,” he continued in a low voice, “the reason we’re trying a more scientific-based solution to your problem is that the witch who cast your spell is M.I.A.”
“I got that sense from Theo. Don’t need the bad music and the hush hush.”
“Yeah,” Festos said, “we do. You know that fact and I know that fact because of my vested interest in Prometheus’ well-being. But Zeus and Hades believe she’s is in hiding and that only Prometheus knows her whereabouts. So a little just-in-case paranoia is called for here.”
“Fair enough. But can’t we find someone else?”
Festos looked at me like I was slow. “There is no one else who can undo a magic spell. Which means that you, honeybunch, are screwed.”
Seven<
br />
“As if,” I scoffed. “There’s got to be someone who hates Zeus and can do magic. Even I’ve got my ribbons of death. Stranglers. Dusters. No, that sounds like a housecoat.”
“Ignoring the fact that your power name is pathetic, I preach the truth. Innate abilities are different from magic. None of us gods are turning princes into toads. Very few cast magic as seen on TV. Magic takes a toll. On the giver and the receiver.”
I thought about it. “Yeah. Delphyne did magic and she was certifiable.”
“Exactly. And then undoing a magic spell? There are a couple ways. You either have to find the person who did it to you in the first place and get them to undo it. Or option deux, use beings capable of just that. Undoing complex magic spells. It takes years of specialized training. Didn’t have much call for them, so the few that even existed are dead now.”
“And you can’t just teach someone?”
“It’s not like there’s an online tutorial for that level of skill. Besides, there are rules around this kind of thing. Procedures.” He looked at me sternly.
“Pierce said he could do it.”
Festos looked doubtful. “I can’t see how. He hasn’t taken the seminars.”
“Geez. Well. We wouldn’t want someone who hadn’t taken a seminar to practice on me.” I sounded vaguely hysterical.
Festos stood up and smacked me across the face. “Snap out of it!”
I raised a hand to my sore jaw and did a double-take. “Did you just Moonstruck me? I love that movie.”
He grinned in delight and turned off the annoying Greek soundtrack. “Yes, Cher, get over yourself and lose the hysteria.”
“Vague hysteria. What else am I failing to remember that could be important?”
Festos raised his hand and waved it around energetically as I began to pace. “Ooh. I know. How about whoever it was that tried to kill Persephone sixteen years ago?” he suggested. He lowered himself back into his chair, grabbing his cane before it fell over.
I nodded vigorously. “Exactly like that. I won’t even recognize them if I run into them, because I don’t remember! Like Kai and that knife trick he did before killing Delphyne? I saw someone else do that when I lay there bleeding out as Persephone. But would I remember who? No!”
My Date From Hell (The Blooming Goddess Trilogy Book Two) Page 9