My Date From Hell by Tellulah Darling

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