The Eternity Key (40 page)

I need to do something
.

I listen for the sound that Lex’s sword makes, thinking I can cause it to leap from his hands, but the weapon is silent. That is when it strikes me—this room is void of ethereal sound. No notes. No melodies, no special tones coming from any person or object in this room. Come to think of it, I hadn’t heard a single ethereal note since entering the palace.

I open my mouth with the idea to create my own music in hopes that it will be powerful enough to stop Lex’s blade on its own, but when I try to sing, no sound comes out. I try humming, but the same thing happens. Silence.

I don’t know why or how, but my music is gone. My power is
gone
. …

Lex raises his sword even higher.

“Wait!” I shout, almost expecting my voice not to work. Apparently, I can speak, but I cannot sing? “I don’t have the Key
with
me, I mean. But I can get it. I hid it somewhere.”

“More lies,” Lex snarls.

“You’ll never know if you kill Haden. I will never give it to
you.” I look at Garrick, imploring. “I hid it after the boat crashed. I can take you to it.” I am lying, but I channel as much sincerity into my voice as possible as I approach the altar.

A couple of guards try to step in my way. “Stop,” Garrick orders. “Let her come.”

I’m standing only a foot from Haden now. “Do something, Garrick. You are king now, aren’t you? Act like one.”

The guards holding Haden look to Garrick for his answer, but before he responds, Lex swings his sword at Haden’s neck.

“Stop!” I shout, feeling powerless.

A blast of lightning hits Lex’s sword, and he drops it. He reels on the perpetrator: the lord who had stepped forward from the crowd to defend Garrick’s place as king. The man stands his ground. “Let our new king decide Haden’s punishment,” he says.

While the Court is distracted, I make a run for Haden. I might not have my powers, but I still have my hands and feet. I try to grab him, but I am apprehended by two guards. They hold me up in the air by my arms. My muscles scream in response.

“What shall we do with her?” one guard asks, but his manner makes it unclear whom he is addressing—Lex or Garrick?

“Kill the lying witch,” Lex says.

I look to Haden, and he doesn’t even glance in my direction. One of the guards who holds me lifts his sword to my throat, while the other looks as though he wants to let me go.

“Halt!” Garrick commands, stepping in front of me. “Let her down.”

The guards comply. Garrick steps even closer to me. “Promise your allegiance to me, Daphne, and I will lessen Haden’s sentence. I will have him banished along with his father and brother.”

“Why not just let him go?”

Garrick rocks forward and whispers so only I can hear. “I cannot do less than banishment. The Court wants him punished. If I let him just walk, I may lose what little hold I have on this crown.” He turns away before I can argue and snatches a pomegranate from one of the fruit bowls that I imagine have been set out for the Court’s refreshment, and carries it to the altar.

“What are you doing with that, Garrick?” Haden asks.

He’s still kneeling, his hands bound, but the guards have let him raise his head once again.

“Saving your life,” Garrick says.

“I don’t need your help,” Haden says, going from indifferent to angry. His emotions—all negative ones—are all over the place. I wonder how long until even those are gone permanently.

Garrick shakes his head as if he recognizes that Haden is no longer himself. He smacks the pomegranate against the altar. The fruit cracks open, dripping red juice on the white marble. “Come, Daphne,” he says, sweeping his hand over the altar. “Bind yourself to me so you will be under my protection until you can bring me the Key, and I will let Haden live. He’ll be banished to the mortal realm.”

I kneel opposite Haden at the altar, and Garrick offers me the pomegranate. The juice running down his arm looks like blood. “Eat,” he commands me.

“Don’t do this,” Haden says to me, but his voice gives away no emotion—only that he thinks I’m being illogical. “If you eat that, you’ll be bound to this place.”

“I know,” I say.

“Let them kill me,” Haden says to Garrick, anger seeping into his voice again. “Send her back to the mortal realm, where she can’t cause any more problems.” He sounds as though he is merely
upset that I have delayed his execution, but I want to believe that there is at least an ounce of care driving his words.

Garrick shakes his head. “She’s the only one who can take us to the Key.”

Haden looks at me over the altar, his face only inches from mine. “Don’t trade yourself on my account, Daphne. You have a future to go back to. I don’t.”

My heart aches as he says this, because I realize he is willing to die because he thinks he has nothing left to lose.

“Why would you do this?” he asks, like he thinks I’m being completely irrational.

I probably am. But I don’t care.

I lean in closer to him over the altar and caress his cheek with my fingers. He does not react to my touch. I slip my other hand into my pocket and pull out the red arrow. I act before any of the guards have time to notice my weapon. “Because I love you,” I say.

And stab him in the chest with the arrow.

chapter sixty-two

She’s stabbed me!

Has she tried to kill me herself?

I look at her, my apathy gone, and an emotion I can only call loathing pulses through my black veins for her betrayal.

Her eyes widen. “No, no, no,” she says, and seems to lunge for me over the altar. Her hands go for my face, and I try to shake her off. She grabs me, both hands cupped under my chin, and she leans in as if she were about to kiss me. But just as her lips are about to touch mine, one of the guards pulls me away from her. Another takes her by the shoulders and holds her against the altar in front of Garrick.

A warm, pulsing sensation radiates from the arrow protruding from my chest. No blood spurts from the wound, but red, serpentine lines slither out from it under my skin, pushing back the black ink in my veins—as if sending it retreating toward the black cut in my arm.

The agonizing pain that has engulfed me since my arrival in the Underrealm lessens for the first time.

That small voice, the one that has been in my head, telling me that I am not acting like myself, grows louder.

“That’s quite enough!” Garrick shouts. “Take him to the gate.”

I hear Daphne protest. She’s trying to tell Garrick that she needs to do something, but he doesn’t listen. I am being dragged away from Daphne. Instead of feeling hate and betrayal, my instinct is to try to cling to her, but the fetters on my arms won’t allow me to reach for her. My captors drag me toward the corridor that leads out of the throne room.

“Finish the binding ceremony!” I hear the Heirs demand. They tell her I will be killed unless she partakes of the fruit.

I twist in my captors’ arms, just in time to watch Garrick offer the pomegranate to Daphne again. Before, I had seen her choice as illogical. A poor trade. But now I understand why she’s doing it.

She loves me
.

That thought melts through me as more warmth pulsates from the wound in my chest. Only moments before, I had felt incapable of caring, and now I care more than anything in the world about stopping her.

I thrash against my captors. Try to lift the leather straps that entrap my arms against the arrowhead protruding from my chest in an effort to cut them away. That effort fails.

I watch, horror-struck, as Daphne takes the pomegranate from Garrick and plucks one red seed from its flesh.

I have to stop her.

I channel the electric heat from my body into my arms. It pulses into my hands, and I send it crackling against my own chest. I electrocute myself in an effort to burn away the tethers on my arms. I writhe with pain as Daphne presses the red, gemlike seed to her lips, and I manage to rip one of my hands from the singed cords. I fling a bolt of lightning, blasting the pomegranate from her hands. She jumps back, and it falls to the ground as ash.
But I can tell from the look on her face that I hadn’t stopped her altogether. She’d already swallowed the one seed.

“No!” I shout, but I am so weak from absorbing my own blast that I am unable to struggle anymore.

“Take Daphne to the chambers that are reserved for the queen,” I hear Garrick say as I am dragged into the antechamber. I feel one of the guards’ hands closing around my neck and forehead. I have become too much of a nuisance, and will be rendered incapacitated for our journey back to the gate. And there is nothing I can do to stop it.

When I open my eyes, I find myself back in the grove. For a fleeting moment, I think that I never left—that I had only suffered a terrible dream after being knocked unconscious by Rowan. But I take in my surroundings and realize that there has been a battle here. Burned trees, and blackened rocks that have been struck by bolts of lightning. I remember the throne room and Garrick ordering my banishment, and watching Daphne with the pomegranate as I was dragged away.

Daphne!

I scramble to the two arched trees that cloak the gate in the mortal world. The green glow is gone, but I still try to thrust my hand through the archway. Nothing.

I hear a faint groan that sounds distinctly female. It comes from somewhere in the grove. My heart pounds against my chest as I follow the sound. I let myself believe that it is Daphne, until I find Terresa lying near a copse of trees in the grove. She groans, cracking her eyes to look at me for a moment and then seems to fall asleep.

I search her pockets, looking for a phone. I need to know the date.

If I have been gone for more than thirty-two hours, that means the equinox has already passed. I find her phone and fumble it open. Then throw it against the ground and watch it break against a rock. It is too late. The equinox is over. Without the Key, Persephone’s Gate won’t open again on its own for another six months.

I am trapped in the mortal world, and Daphne is a captive in the Underrealm.

It is my hubris that brought this upon us. I’d thought I could choose my own path. Weave my own destiny. But the thread I’d been clinging to hasn’t just slipped through my fingers, it has unraveled and snapped. Broken by my desperate attempts to keep hold of it.

In trying to keep Daphne out of the Court’s hands, I caused her to give herself over to them.

I fall to my knees. I want to sob, but I can’t seem to muster the strength for it. My arm throbs again, and I notice that the black inkiness in my veins has started to spread again, as if fighting back against the red. I don’t understand the meaning of this, and the red arrow had disintegrated when I blasted my own chest.

Just as I feel utterly alone in my hopelessness, something small and furry brushes against my leg. “Brim?”

She yowls at me and jumps up on my knees. Her gray fur is matted with blood, as if she’s been in a fight. “Where’s Dax?” I ask.

She shakes her little head and then bristles, sniffing the air.

I cast about and find that we are not alone. Two others lie in the grove, not quite yet recovered from the black sleep. I have not only been trapped in a world that is not my own, but I have been left with Rowan and Ren as my companions in exile.

chapter sixty-three

It was such a small thing—a pomegranate seed. It had sat like a plump red droplet of blood on the tip of my finger, like I’d pricked myself on a thorn. All I had to do was suck the sweet yet sour flesh from it. Let it dissolve on my tongue and allow the tartness to slip down my raw, parched throat. It had only taken me a moment to eat something so small. It had only taken a moment to change everything—to seal my fate to this dark place forever.

It didn’t matter that Haden had blasted the rest of the pomegranate from my hand. It didn’t matter that the rest of it had been destroyed. The one seed had been enough. I can feel a change starting to come over me. Starting to make me feel rooted here. The stronger the feeling grows, the more I know I need to escape.