The Shadow Prince (19 page)

“True. And a really mean right hook.”

Dax chuckles. “She reminds me of someone else I met here …,” he says, more to himself than to me.

“Your Boon?”

He doesn’t answer my question.

“What happened to her? Why did you come back alone?”

Dax shakes his head. He rarely talks about his time in the mortal world, and he never mentions the girl he was supposed to bring back. All I knew was that he’d returned alone.

“It’s not something I can talk about.”

“Why?”

“Some things just can’t be said.” Dax returns his attention to his tablet, his jaw clenched as he swipes at it with a forcefulness that seems unnecessary. He’s grown so quiet that I know no amount of pressing will get him to speak of her now.

But there’s a more important question I need answered, so I let the topic of his Boon remain where it stands for now. I sit on the counter next to Brim, and give her another slice of meat so she’ll stop trying to eat my fingers, and then bring up the subject I’ve been wanting to discuss since we were in the owl roost in the Underrealm. It is hard to believe that it has been fewer than twenty-four hours since then.

“When I told you earlier that the Oracle had said my Boon—Daphne, that is—could restore something that had been taken from the Underlords, and I mentioned the word
Cypher
, you acted as though you knew something. You said something about rumors.…”

Dax stands up abruptly, leaving his tablet on the table, and exits the kitchen.

I jump off the counter. “You said you would tell me what you know,” I call after him.

“Shhhh!” I hear his command to be quiet coming from somewhere near the entrance to the garage. I hear a door open and close. The light from Dax’s tablet catches my eye. I glance down at the screen and see that he has entered the words
abecie caelum
into a search engine. The second word is Latin for
sky
, the first word is
one I don’t recognize. I scan the rest of the page and see the words:
0 results found. Did you mean: abecu caelum
?

Whatever Dax had been searching for, he wasn’t having much luck.

I hear him coming back and I look away from the tablet.

“Sorry,” he says, entering the kitchen. “I needed to be certain that Simon was still out. He has ears like a hawk—I had thought he was well out of range, and yet he still must have overheard us speaking in your room this afternoon. Trust me, Lord Haden. I did not tell him that you had gone to the grove.”

“I know,” I say. “But he obviously has sources beyond good hearing if he knew about me trying to grab Daphne. I told no one about that.”

I remember hearing someone entering the grove just before I left. Perhaps he had someone following me, or he himself had doubled back to the house and had seen me leave and he’d followed. One thing I should have been more careful about was not underestimating Simon, as Dax had instructed.

“What is he?” I ask Dax. “Simon isn’t an Underlord, but he’s most certainly not human.”

“I don’t know what Simon is, but he doesn’t look a day older than when I first met him six years ago. He could be three hundred years old, for all we know. My best guess is that he’s a satyr cloaked in the form of a human. That would explain his heightened senses and slow aging. Not to mention his love for vegetables. But it doesn’t account for his certain powers of persuasion, if you know what I mean.”

“I do,” I say.

No mere mortal—nor mere satyr, for that matter—could bring a lord of the Underrealm to the point of invoking
elios
like that. And the way I couldn’t move just because he
told
me I couldn’t—it was as if he were controlling my body with his words. If he could do that to me, I imagine most mortals don’t stand a chance against his persuasiveness. I look around at Simon’s opulent home, and think of the garage full of cars and how easily he had procured new identities for us, and realize just how useful that kind of power would be.

I can’t help wondering why he’s living in a house with three young Underlords and not off ruling a country somewhere. Then I remember what he had said—that all of us “have things riding” on my quest. Does even he know more about my true purpose than I do? And why hadn’t Ren or the Court bothered to fill me, of all the people involved, in on the details?

“What is a Cypher?” I ask Dax. “And why does the Court want it?”

Dax sits at the table, turns off his tablet, and sticks it inside his knapsack, which sits on one of the chairs. He gestures for me to take a seat across from him. Instead, I sit on Simon’s polished countertop and let Brim climb back onto my shoulders. She purrs contentedly next to my ear.

“What do you know about the Key of Hades?” Dax asks.

“I know that the Key was more than the instrument that locked and unlocked the main gates of the Underrealm. I know that it was Hades’s Kronolithe—the thing that granted him his immortality—and without it, the Sky God was able to kill him. I know that the Key was stolen by the Great Traitor, and because of its loss, we Underlords have been locked inside the Underrealm, godless, for centuries. And this brought an end to the Thousand-Year War between our ancestors and the Skylords.”

“All true,” Dax says. “Except the war isn’t over; it’s just at a
stalemate, as far as many in the Court are concerned. Why do you think they train us to be warriors? It’s because they hope to restart the war someday. Someday soon, if there’s any credence to the rumors I’ve heard.”

“But how is that even possible? Only a few of us can pass through Persephone’s Gate at a time. And only once every six months. How can the Court wage a war without an army?”

“What if they could open the main gates again?”

“But they would need the Key for that.”

“Exactly,” Dax says. “And to find the Key, they need the Cypher.”

“Daphne? But she’s just some mortal girl. How could she help the Court get a Key that has been lost for millennia?”

“That is not a piece of the puzzle I have been privy to.”

I can feel my heart racing and energy pulsing through my veins. The Oracle had said that the fate of the Underrealm rests on my shoulders, but part of me had tried to dismiss her words as hyperbole. Had I truly been Chosen for such an important assignment? Could I really have the means to help restore the Key of Hades to the Underrealm? I can only imagine the kind of glory and honor that would accompany such a victory, if Dax’s speculations about the Cypher are correct. Had I truly been Chosen by the Fates to accomplish the greatest task that any Champion had ever been entrusted with?

But that is the thing; I hadn’t been
entrusted
with anything. The Court hadn’t told
me
any of this vital information. As far as I am concerned, I have been sent to the Overrealm blind—thinking I am merely to bring back another Boon for the harem. I had to find out this information from a
servant
. Is that because they have so little
trust
in me that they think I will fail if I have any clue of what an important task is before me?

“How do you even know all this?” I ask Dax.

“There are benefits to being treated with as little regard as furniture,” he says. “Many in the Court have a tendency to say too much when servants are around, because they do not care that we exist. What I have told you is what I have pieced together from snippets of conversations and the rumors that circulate among the servants. I can tell you that in the last three years or so, your father has made many journeys to consult the Oracle of Elysium, but it was only now that the Oracle agreed the time is right for obtaining the Cypher.”

“What will they do with Daphne? How will they use her to get the Key?”

“I don’t know that much. But I heard what the Oracle said in the ceremony—that you are the one who can bring her back to the Court.”

Can
—that being the word that sticks with me. She didn’t say I
will
—there is no guarantee that I will succeed. As it stands at this moment, I am just as likely to fail as I am to succeed.

And with the mistakes I made today, the scales seem tipped too much in failure’s favor.…

No. That is the way Rowan would want me to think. He would want me to let my fears get in the way. I was the one who was Chosen, not Rowan. I am the one who is here, not him.

The only thing standing in the way of my restoring the full power of the Underrealm is Daphne herself. Part of me worries I’m not prepared for taking on this Cypher, but at the same time, I am glad for the challenge of a worthy opponent. It will make my victory all the more satisfying.

“What is the best way to defeat her?” I ask Dax. “How do I take her down?”

“Take her down?” he repeats, as if I’ve just said something distasteful.

“You said it yourself. Daphne isn’t like other Boons. She’s a more formidable opponent than—”

“Whoa,” Dax says. “You’re looking at this all wrong. First of all, you can’t think of her as an opponent. That’s you thinking like an Underlord warrior. You’re going to have to take a more human approach. You’re not here to defeat her; you’re here to get her to trust you. You need her to
like
you. Actually, more than that,” he says with a weird smile. “You’re going to have to get her to fall in love with you.”

I stare at Dax, dumbfounded. He might as well have told me I needed to sprout wings and fly into the sun. “How am I supposed to get her to fall in love with me when I don’t know the first thing about … 
it
? Love, I mean.”

Dax sighs like he has no idea of how to explain it to me.

And I thought he was supposed to be my guide.

Brim bristles on my shoulder. Her purr turns into a growl. I follow her glare toward the hallway that leads to the garage.

“Simon,” Dax says. “She must hear him pulling in.”

“Time to hide you,” I tell Brim, catching her in my hands before she can go running toward the garage.

“I’ll distract Simon with questions about your school arrangements,” Dax says as he ushers us toward the stairs. “Hmmm. Maybe he does have the right idea with sending you to school. You need to get to know Daphne on a personal level. Just try to act as
human
as possible. And no more of your little excursions. I mean it, Haden. Especially with Simon on the warpath.”

I nod my acceptance and head up the stairs with my cat contraband. I think I hear Garrick’s door click shut as I walk down
the long hallway, and I wonder how much he overheard.

When I get back to my room, I make a nest of blankets for Brim under my bed and pull out my iPhone. Brim snubs her nest, and instead curls up at my feet. I hit one of the phone’s icons and pull up a search engine. I am not sure which question to research first:

“What does it mean to be human?” or “How do I get a girl to like me?”

Because when it comes to both of those queries, I haven’t got a clue.

chapter twenty-two

I’m the first one in the music room on Monday morning. I had to get to school early to pick up my finalized schedule now that I’ve been accepted into the music program. The official verdict had come via my new Olympus Hills High email account Sunday afternoon. I had celebrated over speakerphone with the crew at Paradise Plants. Jonathan had led the employees in a hip-hip-hurray cheer, and my mother had done a somewhat decent job at hiding her disappointment—in her voice anyway. She hadn’t been thrilled about my having found a nearly dead girl in the lake, either. But Jonathan, having been pre-warned, was able to keep her from going into a full-on mother-bear panic. CeCe still didn’t know about my getting into the music program—nor about the girl in the lake incident—because she had called in sick, and still hadn’t returned my voice mail.

Joe had been gone when I got up this morning—hopefully not out wandering in his bathrobe again—so I’d ridden my bike to school, taking a different path from the one through the grove.

I stand by myself in the music room, drinking in all the sounds of the new room and its state-of-the-art facilities, when I realize that I’m not sure where to sit. I’ve gone to the same school all my
life, sat next to the same friends, and suddenly the idea of not being able to do that today really hits me. I’d known I’d be starting over; I just didn’t know what that would feel like until this moment. I finally settle into a seat in the middle row—not too eager, not too aloof—of the semicircle of chairs that face a small stage, and watch students trickle in through the doorway. Some I recognize from auditions, and others are strangers, but there’s only one topic of conversation that consumes them all—what happened to Pear Perkins in the grove.

Even the ladies in the main office had been gossiping about it. Which is how I’d heard that the Olympus Hills Medical Center had released a statement saying that Pear had a heart attack brought on by a pre-existing heart condition.

Part of me wants to be filled with relief, knowing it was a medical issue and not something I could have prevented by warning her not to go into the grove, but another part of me can’t shake the image of those gashes on her arm from my memory. Could tree branches have really caused those wounds? Or had my theory been correct about the stranger in the grove and nobody had bothered to investigate that angle?