Blinking open his eyes, he found himself naked in bed with Tory sitting on the floor, staring at him as if she were in shock while an odd noise kept an off beat rhythm in the background.
"Is something wrong?" he asked, his voice thick and scratchy.
She screwed her face up as she scowled at him. "Define something wrong."
Ash rubbed a hand over his face. "Did you beat me with a hammer while I was sleeping?"
"No."
"Then why do I feel like this?"
She still hadn't moved from her spot on the floor. "Apparently you can't hold your Sprite, buddy."
"Wha . . . ?"
She pointed at the two empty green plastic bottles on the night-stand. "Did you know that when you get drunk, she gets drunk too."
"She?"
Tory gestured toward the strange sound Ash had been hearing, but ignoring. He looked to see Simi lying on the floor, under the TV with her legs propped against the wall while she slept on her back and snored. That would have been bad enough, but the fact that she was in her demon form, complete with horns, tail and wings made his stomach shrink.
What had he done?
And then his gaze fell to the three-dimensional hologram on the floor that was a perfect replica of Atlantis. It even had tiny people moving around like some glowing white movie . . .
Oh shit.
Shit, shit, shit. It was all he could think to say as disbelief overwhelmed him.
Tory rose slowly and folded her arms over her chest. Narrowing her gaze on him, she approached the bed. "You don't remember anything about last night, do you?"
"I remember us . . ." He looked down to see the blood on the sheets that substantiated that part of his memory. They had slept together. The memory of her touch was branded in his mind and on his skin.
"But you don't remember the Sprite?"
He shook his head.
"Interesting."
He didn't know why that one word frightened him, but it did. "Interesting?"
She nodded. "You're a very cuddly drunk and quite the chatter-box too."
He felt the blood leave his face. "How chattery?"
"Very . . . Apostolos."
Ash sat up, mortified by what he might have said to her. Please gods, please . . . surely he hadn't told her what he was. Surely he wouldn't have been so stupid as to lose the only person he'd ever found who didn't see him as a whore. And it was then he realized she didn't have her glasses on. "Did I-"
"Fix my eyes? Yes. Then you summoned your demon and the two of you fought over taking me to Atlantis. Simi's the one who made the map on the floor so that we could all stay here because she said going there while you two were drunk might be bad since you'd probably destroy it before your mother had a chance. And then you shrank me down to toy size and took me through the city street by street, telling me about every piece of it, until you both passed out. Thankfully when you did so, I got bigger."
Still his stomach churned. "Did either of us physically take you to the real Atlantis?"
"I should tell you yes, to make you sweat. But Simi won the battle and we stayed here."
He let out a long relieved breath that he'd listened to his demon. Thank the gods for small favors there.
But it still didn't change the fact that he'd exposed himself to Tory. Completely. Utterly.
Damn.
He swallowed as he met her unflinching gaze. "Are you mad at me?"
"Furious. Truly. But I understand the lies. I mean, really, who's going to believe that this hot twenty-one-year-old buff stud Goth guy sporting a black backpack is an eleven-thousand-year-old omnipotent god who travels with a demon companion? Right? It's ludicrous."
Ash cringed as all of his secrets poured out of her mouth.
"By the way, you do know that you and I have met before."
He paused as he tried to recall the event and couldn't. "When?"
She sat down on the bed beside him. "1988. You were playing chess with my grandfather in the park when he had his heart attack. I was seven."
Now that Ash remembered vividly. Theo had just moved his bishop to take down Ash's queen when the old man grabbed at his chest and started groaning.
His tiny granddaughter with big brown eyes and a flurry of brown pigtails had come running. "Papou! Papou!"
Not wanting the child to see her grandfather die-if that was to be Theo's fate that day-Ash had summoned Simi to watch over the girl while he called an ambulance. "Watch her, Simi. Keep her happy and make sure she has everything she needs and wants."
Then he'd gone with Theo while Simi took Soteria back to Theo's condo to wait.
How had he forgotten that?
He shook his head as he looked at her and finally saw the little girl's sweet features in the face of the woman before him. "I remember."
"You know, I thought you were Billy Idol."
Now that he couldn't understand at all. "Billy Idol? I don't look anything like him and I've never had spiked hair."
She shrugged. "He was the only rock star I knew who wore leather and chains and sunglasses-like you had on that day. You also had long purple hair and an earring. Later, I kept telling everyone about this punk guy who saved my papou. My idolizing you is a big part of the reason Kim and Pam ended up Goth . . . ironic really."
She glanced over to where Simi was still sleeping against the wall. "It wasn't until I saw Simi again last night that it all clicked into place for me." When her gaze locked onto his, the intelligence and accusation in it actually made him cringe. "You're the one who dug my grandfather out of his burning house when he was seven years old and brought him over from Greece. The man who watched over him the whole way here and told him the stories about Atlantis that he told to my father and uncle."
Ash wanted to deny it, but how could he? She now knew everything. "Yes."
She nodded. "That alone is why I'm controlling my anger at you for lying to me and humiliating me in public after I was doing nothing more than telling the stories you, yourself, told my grandfather. How can I be mad at a man who braved a Nazi attack to pull a seven-year-old boy out of the wreckage of his house and save his life? My grandfather said that you bandaged his eyes and then carried him in your arms for days until you reached the docks where you had to bribe the snot out of everyone to get him out of the country. He was so scared and griefstricken from the loss of his family. The only thing that kept him sane was the deep voice of Acheron telling him that he'd be all right. That he wouldn't let anything else bad happen to him while the man held him and soothed his tears . . . that was you. You were the one who found the American family who adopted him, who helped him finance his first deli, and all his life you were the man he met in the park on Sunday afternoon to play chess with." She sniffed back tears that made his own eyes water. "How could I ever hate you?"
Ash looked away as his own emotions tangled. Everyone else had hated him. How could he expect her to be any different?
Tory swallowed and looked at Simi. "I've spoken to her so many times on the phone and through e-mails. My cousin Geary and I even named our expedition the Simi Project because Simi was the one who helped us find the location of Atlantis."
Ash's eyes widened at something he'd had no knowledge of. Anger snapped to the forefront of his emotions as he wanted to choke the demon. "Simi did what?"
"You told me to, akri," Simi said from her place on the floor before she yawned loudly. When she spoke again, her voice was a perfect duplication of his. "Watch her, Simi. Keep her happy and make sure she has everything she needs and wants." Her voice returned to normal. "So that's what the Simi did, akri. Just what you told me to do."
"That was for one afternoon."
"Akri didn't say that to the Simi. You say make her happy so the Simi did. If you wanted me to stop, akri, you should have said so."
Ash raked his hands through his hair as he realized how much pain he'd brought to Theo when all he'd ever wanted to do was help the boy-that he'd exposed himself and revealed the location of Atlantis without meaning to. Damn it. "I know better than to interact with humans. How could I have been so stupid?"