by Bree Despain
“And then what do we do with the Key?” Daphne asks.
“We find a way to destroy it.”
Daphne nods, the doubt in her eyes waning. “This all sounds completely insane but also kind of awesome,” she says. “But do you think we can pull it off?”
“You’ve said that there are only a couple of dozen Keres in the Pits, right, Garrick?”
He shrugs. “Give or take a few.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t know; it’s not like I went around giving the bloody soul suckers names or anything. No more than thirty, I would guess.”
“We could do that,” I say, nodding to Daphne.
She smiles at me as if she appreciates that I recognize how powerful she is. The sight of it soothes some of the aching in my heart. Like maybe there is still something between us …
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” says Joe. “Just a little while ago, you were claiming that would be too hard on Daphne. Why the rush to put her in harm’s way now?”
I return Daphne’s smile, though mine is small and tight. “Do you want to tell them, or shall I?”
“I will,” she says, and then launches into an explanation of how she figured out how to manipulate objects with her voice and how the song from the scroll increases this newfound power tenfold. She even gives a small demonstration, channeling her voice to cause Joe’s chair to lift several feet in the air with him still in it.
“This is brilliant,” Joe says, beaming down at his daughter. “You’re like a real Orpheus.”
She lowers him back down, to the awe of the others. I love watching the happiness her power brings her.
“If I could solidify one Keres before,” she says, “imagine how many I can help destroy now.”
“It won’t be easy,” I say, “but I’m sure you could subdue several of the Keres at a time, while we three Underlords take them out.”
Daphne nods to agree with me.
“So it’s settled. The play is the day before the equinox, so no one will be expecting us to come through the gate. Tobin and Lexie can stay here, of course. Once Daphne, Dax, and Brim have gotten the Key, Garrick and I will meet them in the grove directly after curtain call, then the five of us will go through Persephone’s Gate toge—” My voice catches like something is stuck in my throat. I try to clear it and go on. “We’ll go through the gate with Da—” It happens again; this time, it feels like my throat is closing up when I try to say Daphne’s name, and my thoughts muddle. I think for a second, backing up and trying again. “The plan is we’ll use the Key to go through the gate, and then Da—”
I am stopped once again. I grasp at the thought that was in front of me—that we need Daphne to use her powers to help us kill the Keres, which mean she will have to come … that she will have to do … something. My thoughts go blank, and I stare at the others as they blink back at me. “I’m sorry. I have no idea what I was about to say. We need to …” But I can’t remember what we need to do.
“Are you okay?” Daphne asks.
“Are you having a stroke?” Lexie says.
I shake my head. But maybe I am?
“Kopros,” Dax says. “It’s the oath. You made an unbreakable oath to never bring Daphne to the Underrealm. Which means you physically can’t do it. You can’t go together. It would be impossible.”
“No. I made an oath never to bring her to my father. We’re going to the Pits. That’s different. Daphne and I will go toge—” Together. That’s what I want to say, but the word slips away before I can wrap my mouth around it.
“You can’t even say it,” Dax says. “What makes you think you’re going to be able to do it? The Underrealm is your father’s kingdom, so whether you’re taking Daphne directly to his throne room or to the Pits, the oath sees it as the same thing. It will be physically impossible for you and Daphne to go into the Underrealm together.”
“But this doesn’t work without her,” I say, feeling my plan slip away from me. “She’s the only one who can make the Keres corporeal. Without that, we can’t kill them.”
“Then we split up,” Daphne says. “I’ll go through first, and then you wait a few minutes and follow.”
“I’m not sending you through the gate alone before me. We have no idea what might be waiting for us on the other side. And what if it doesn’t work, and I’m not able to follow, after all?”
“I’ll go with her,” Dax says, stepping forward. “I’m going anyway. And, logically, Daphne should go through the gate first since we can’t risk the gate’s not letting her through if you go before she does. We’ll wait ten minutes, maybe press forward, and then you and Garrick follow. If you can’t go through the gate, then Daphne, Garrick, and I will go on to the Pits without you. We’ve both got lightning, and you know I’ve got better aim than you regardless, so face it, bro, you’re the expendable one in this scenario.”
“Thanks a lot,” I say, folding my arms in front of my chest.
“The truth’s the truth, my friend. But you have to admit, it’s a good plan.”
“It is a good plan, except you and Daphne will have to go through the gate as soon as you get the Key. Taking Brim with you, of course,” I say, preventing the tiny cat from sinking her teeth into my leg once more. She’s quite protective of Daphne. “She can help you subdue the gate guards who will be on duty on the other side. Once that’s done, that should give you twenty minutes before I try to join you as soon as the play is over. I don’t want you to move on unless you’re sure I’m not coming through. Five of us against a couple of dozen Keres is far better odds than three.” The fact that I am able to say these words out loud makes me hopeful that this version of the plan will work. “If Garrick comes through without me, then you can stop waiting.”
“There’s a problem with your plan,” Garrick says, standing up from his beanbag. “I’m not going with you.”
“Pardon?” I ask.
“I can’t go back there. I can’t go back to the Pits. That place … I just can’t go back there again.…”
“We need you,” I start to protest, but Garrick shakes his head.
He looks at me, his eyes rimmed with red. “I won’t go.”
Garrick ducks his head and runs from the room, with his arms wrapped around his chest. I think I hear a sob before the door slams shut behind him.
I sigh heavily, feeling like a koprophage for pressing him to return to the Pits—and try not to shudder at how nightmarish the place must be to cause that reaction from him.
“I’ll go in his place,” Joe says.
“You don’t have any powers,” Daphne says.
“A man doesn’t need superpowers to try to protect his daughter.” He stretches his hands out over his knees. “Use me as your messenger. If I come through the gate, then it means Haden isn’t coming.”
I nod, giving my consent to this plan. Daphne glares at me. Things may still be somewhat strained between them, but she cares about his safety.
“And how are you all planning on getting out?” Lexie says, with a shudder, as if she’s happy to not be included in the plan. “Like my mom always says, never enter into any situation without an exit strategy. She means conversations at cocktail parties, but still.”
“Once the Keres are dead,” I say, “it will be safe to temporarily open the barrier between the Pits and the mortal realm. We just need to make sure we shore up the locks on our way out so no Underlords can follow us.”
Joe nods. “I’ll have my jet on standby in DC for you all.”
“If we need more firepower,” Daphne says, “maybe we should bring Ethan in on this. It’s a modified version of his plan, after all.”
“He’s also a Skylord, which means he can’t be trusted.” I look around at each one of them. “In fact, the only ones we can trust are the people who are in this room right now.”
chapter forty-two
TOBIN
Time seems to be stuck on warp speed, because the days between the big planning meeting and the u
pcoming play fly by at a breakneck speed. It’s only three days before “Key Day” when I find myself sitting in the Olympus Brew again, nursing a coffee. I’ve been sitting here all evening after rehearsal, and I plan on staying until closing. My hope is that Marta—who doesn’t seem to have set foot in Olympus Hills again since Joe fired her—will miraculously show up for a late-evening espresso. (The evil don’t need sleep, right?)
This time, I wouldn’t hold back. I’d confront her and not relent until she tells me everything she knows about Abbie. Who has her? Why? What do I need to do to get her back?
There has to be a better option than responding to Terresa, who’s been sending me texts for the last week, asking to know if I’ve made up my mind about teaming up with her.
But it isn’t Marta who is the last customer who comes in before closing. It’s Lexie. She orders a frozen hot chocolate with extra whipped cream and a chocolate-chip muffin. It isn’t like Lexie to ever eat carbs—at least not since eighth grade, when we’d celebrate Friday Pizza and Movie Night religiously—so I know she’s upset before she even turns around with her order and notices me in the corner. Her face is splotched with red, like she’s been crying.
At first, I expect her to leave, pretending she never saw me, but when I nod to her, she brings her food over to the table and sits across from me.
I watch her peck at the top of her muffin with her fingers and eat it a few crumbs at a time. I wonder if she’s doing that for my sake, like she thinks I’ll judge her if she bites right into it.
“Looks good,” I say, because I’m not sure what else to do at the moment.
“You want it?”
I shake my head. “It’s yours. Dig in.”
She takes a sip of her cocoa and then breaks off a slightly bigger piece of her muffin. “Pear would have a fit if she knew I was eating this much sugar. We’re supposed to be on the Paleo diet together ever since last summer. Then again, she’s just barely graduated from getting her food through a tube to eating broth and Jell-O, so I’d say the diet pact is off.” She sniffles and wipes at her nose with a napkin. I doubt it’s the idea of Pear eating Jell-O for dinner that has her tearing up again.
“Pear’s awake?” I ask. “I hadn’t heard.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I got word a couple of weeks ago, but I hadn’t gone yet. Not until today.”
“Why did you wait?”
She wipes her nose again, and a stifled sob shudders through her. I realize that must have been the wrong question to ask.
“I guess I was afraid to see her. Or maybe it was guilt.”
“Guilt?” I ask. “What happened to Pear wasn’t—”
“My fault? I know … but, at the same time, I still felt guilty. Like survivor’s guilt, you know. Because what happened to Pear had almost happened to me. I would have been the Keres’s next victim if Daphne and Haden hadn’t come along.”
I nod.
“I don’t remember much about what happened that night, but I do remember being terrified. I guess I was afraid to see Pear because I didn’t want to see the results of what could have happened to me. I didn’t want to hear her talk about being attacked, either, because it’d feel like reliving it.…” She takes another napkin and dabs it against her cheeks and eyes. “But then I realized that pretty much made me the worst friend in the world. So I sucked it up and went to see her today.…”
“How’s she doing?”
“She looks terrible, and her mom says she’s still not out of the woods yet.”
“Did you get to talk to her? Does she remember much about the attack?”
Lexie nods and then shakes her head. For a second, she reminds me of a bobblehead—that is, until she bursts into tears. “It was even worse than I could have imagined. She said …”
“What?” I reach my hand across the table and place it over her fingers. “What did she say?”
Lexie shakes her head again. “She’s still pretty out of it, and it’s hard for her to talk because of the tubes they put down her throat while she was in a coma, but from what I could make out, it sounded like she’d not only been attacked by some sort of shadowy beast, as she called it, but also by a man.”
“What?” A sick feeling pulls at my stomach. “What did she mean?”
“She said something like there was a guy in the grove, just standing there, watching while she was attacked. Like he was enjoying himself. Or like the beast had attacked her because he’d wanted it to.… She said she didn’t remember anything else before she blacked out, except that it seemed like the guy had swirls of fire in his eyes.”
“You mean an Underlord was there?” I ask, my anger surging.
She nods. “I didn’t get much out of her before her mom came back from the cafeteria and shooed me out of the room. But do you think … do you think Haden was lying when he said he had nothing to do with Pear’s attack?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “My money would be on Rowan. He came through the gate after them.”
Scum, I think, remembering what Terresa had called them. Rowan was nothing but Underlord scum. Haden and his two cousins may be different, but the rest of them make me sick.
“I wish there was a way to make him pay,” Lexie says.
“Me, too.” I wish there was a way to make all of them pay.
My phone in my pocket buzzes. I know it’s another text from Terresa without looking at it. Lexie and I sit in silence until she’s finished half her muffin. She pushes the rest aside, squeezes my hand, and then stands up.
I’m still seething when she says, “Thank you.”
I look up at her, a little taken aback. “For what?”
“For being here. For letting me talk. I know we’re not the best of friends anymore.…” She leans down and pecks my cheek with her lips. “Thanks for even wishing there were something you could do.”
She picks up her purse and leaves before I can think of how to respond.
My phone buzzes once again. I pull it out and find three texts from Terresa, all saying the same thing.
Are you in?
I almost put it back in my pocket, but instead I answer back. I’ll let you know my answer tomorrow.
I expect Terresa to be the one who is waiting for me on the front steps of the school in the morning, but instead it’s Daphne.
She gives me this look like she can hear my inner tone from a mile away. At the moment, I curse her intuitive abilities, because I don’t need her intruding on my feelings.
“Are you okay?” she asks, falling into step with me as we enter the building.
“Yeah,” I lie.
She gives me a very pointed look. “I’m worried about you, Tobin.”
“Don’t be,” I say.
Her look gets even more pointed.
“What I mean is that you shouldn’t be worrying about me. I should be the one worrying about you. You’re the one headed into the Underrealm in two days.”
I am trying to distract her, but it doesn’t seem to work. “I know you’re not okay, Tobin. You sound like you’re going to implode at any moment. You’ve just been so angry lately.…”
I shake my head. If she thinks the sound coming off me this morning is anger, then she’s not as intuitive as she thinks she is. I’m not angry. Not anymore. I’m resigned.
I stop and put my hands on her shoulders. “I’m okay, Daphne, really. I’m just worried about you and how this quest of yours to the Underrealm is going to play out. That’s all.”
“Okay,” she says, as if she hears the sincerity behind my words. She hugs me and I let her.
“Now, I gotta take care of something before music class,” I say, when she finally lets me go. “See you in a few.”
I know she’s watching me go until I round the corner. I go down another hall until I see the person I’m looking for.
Terresa stands by her locker, chatting with Iris Thompkins, as if she were any other student. When she sees me coming, she excuses herself from the conversation and co
mes to meet me. I pull a folded-up piece of paper from my pocket and hand it to her.
“What’s this?”
“A time and a location,” I whisper. “Meet me after the play the evening after tomorrow, and I will take you to the Key.”
She nods. I turn around and walk away briskly—only to almost run into Garrick at the end of the hall. “What?” I ask pointedly at his stare.
“Not a thing,” he says, and lets me pass.
chapter forty-three
DAPHNE
Over the last two weeks, I’ve completely immersed myself in either rehearsals for the play or practicing honing my powers. I’ve even gotten in a couple of sessions with Haden, in which I use my power to send something flying in the air, and then he blasts it with a bolt. It’s kind of like skeet shooting, but with lightning. He’s polite to me—kind, even—but he doesn’t ever try to touch me or press me more on our relationship status. Instead, he treats me like a comrade in arms.
I like the respect, but sometimes when I watch that concentrated look on his face when I’m teasing him by sending an object whirling in an erratic pattern before he can blast it, I find myself aching for more. A smile. A laugh. The touch of his hand on the small of my back. And then I curse my feelings for trying to betray my head.
The day of the play arrives too quickly. I wake early in the morning, worried that I’m not ready. But then I tell myself that there isn’t more that I could possibly do to prepare. In the late afternoon, I get in one last vocal warm-up while using my voice to rearrange the clothes draped on wooden hangers in my closet, and then get set to leave.
I can’t find Joe in the house, so I decide to head over to the amphitheater on my bike, but instead I discover Joe in the driveway. He’s sitting on the teal green Vespa that he’d bought me for Christmas, and is wearing a leather jacket, a charcoal gray helmet, and aviator sunglasses.
