by Bree Despain
My mom should be here, in the living room, directing the movers. Dad should be in the kitchen on a conference call, speaking in Japanese. Abbie and Sage should be on the stairs, fighting once again over who should get the biggest room.
That’s how I remember this all happening. But they’re not here. I race through the empty rooms looking for them but they’re nowhere.
They’re gone. All gone.
And I am all alone.
I sit on the stairs and cry until I can’t remember why I was crying. I can’t remember who I was looking for. The house begins to fade away . . .
I awake with a jolt. My body shakes, quivering with pain. I feel as though I have been struck by lightning. A face peers at me through the darkness. I feel like I should know him, but I’ve already forgotten his name.
“Awake again?” he asks.
I nod.
“Comfy?”
I shake my head but then nod. I am quite comfortable in this chair.
“Good,” he says. “You’re going to be there for a long time.”
“How long?” I ask. I have a sudden recollection of trying to find something. Someone? A feeling of urgency grips me and then fades away along with the recollection.
“Have you ever heard of Theseus?” the young man standing in front of me asks.
When did he get here? I blink at him, already having forgotten his question.
“Silly question,” he says, waving his hand. “I suppose if you have heard of Theseus you wouldn’t remember. You probably can’t even remember your own name at this point.”
“I can,” I say, but then I am unable to produce it. Something to do with winter perhaps?
“Anyway,” the young man says. “Theseus is best known from the myth of the minotaur. He was thrown into a labyrinth as a sacrifice to the beast, only he bested the monster and found his way out with a spool of golden thread. I am sure you’ve heard that story. But I wonder if you have ever heard of Peirithous?”
When I don’t respond, he goes on. “Peirithous was Theseus’s best friend. The two were a couple of cocky, douche-bag princes, and riding high on his minotaur fame, Theseus decided he and his bestie deserved to marry daughters of Zeus. Theseus chose a girl named Helen—you’ve probably heard of her even though you can’t remember. She had a ‘face that launched a thousand ships’ and all that. She was only thirteen at the time, so Theseus decided to snatch her up and keep her hidden from other suitors until she could reach marrying age. Peirithous, being king of the tools, decided that he wanted to wed none other than Persephone—never mind the fact that she was already married to Hades, the god of the Underrealm.
“The two young heroes marched right into the underworld and Peirithous, a jackass to his very core, boasted right to Hades’s face that he intended to steal away his bride. He even implied that the goddess would prefer his company over Hades’s. Much to everyone’s surprise, the god invited the two mortals inside the palace. He told them they were welcome to take his wife, but only if they would sit and have a drink with him first. He offered the two dickheads the most comfortable chairs in the palace, but when they sat they were entwined by the chairs. After a few minutes, they completely forgot why they had even come to the underworld. Actually, they completely forgot everything.
“You see, Hades had no intention of giving those two his wife. Instead, he sentenced them to imprisonment for life in the Chairs of Forgetfulness, where he could inflict all kinds of punishment on them for their assholery, and they couldn’t even remember enough to try to get up and leave. Hades had a really great sense of humor that way. Of course, as the legend goes, Theseus was eventually rescued by his cousin, Hercules, but Peirithous was never freed . . .”
“Is there a point to this story?” I ask. “I’d really like to get back to my nap.”
The boy’s voice drops lower, as if he’s trying to sound sinister. “The point is that Peirithous, after thousands of years, still sits in a chair just like the one you occupy right now. I believe he’s in a storage closet somewhere here in the palace. He’s just a shell, all of his memories and identity stripped away, but he’s still alive. And just as he does not remember anyone, nobody remembers him.”
I blink at the young man, struggling to keep my eyes open. I am so very tired. “So?”
“So?” he echoes angrily. “The point is that you are in the same kind of chair. A Chair of Forgetfulness. It will keep you alive, just barely, as it strips away all of your memories, one by one. You’ll never be able to escape—not even through death. I can torture you all I want and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. And when I get the Key, I will be immortal, which means you will get to be my plaything for the rest of eternity.”
He glares at me as if he wants me to ask him why. Or something. I don’t know. What were we talking about again?
“All my life I’ve been treated like a dog. Kicked and scorned and made to fetch. Now it’s someone else’s turn to be the dog.” He pauses and laughs to himself. “Honestly, I had intended to use this chair for Haden—to keep him as my prisoner and inflict on him every pain I have ever suffered, tenfold. But then Daphne had to go and make her binding to me conditional on Haden’s banishment to the mortal world. So you got promoted to the position.”
“Lucky me,” I say and close my eyes.
“Today, Daphne will take me to the Key, and then I will have what I need to set the Keres free . . .”
He goes on talking, but I can’t remember why I should be listening to him anymore. I drift off to sleep . . .
I am jolted awake. My body shakes as if I have just been electrocuted. A face peers at me through the darkness. I feel like I should know him, but I’ve already forgotten his name.
“If all doesn’t go according to plan today, you know what I’m going to do to you, right?” he asks.
I don’t answer. If he’s told me this so-called plan, I don’t remember.
“You had better hope she takes me to the Key, or else you’re the one who is going to pay.” He opens his outstretched hand and threads of crackling, blue lightning bloom up from his palm.
The sight brings on the faintest of recollections.
Memories of pain.
He leaves, sweeping out the door with his black cloak trailing behind him.
I close my eyes, already unable to recall what he said.
chapter seven
haden
I awake to the smell of lavender, vanilla, and pomegranate lip gloss. All the scents that remind me of Daphne. I am slow to open my eyes, knowing it’s too good to be true, for I had been dreaming of her since I fell asleep. Finally, I open them and find that I am in Daphne’s bedroom, lying in her bed, her white bedspread tucked all the way up to my chin. I vaguely recall Joe leading me up here while I laughed hysterically about something that had seemed quite funny at the time.
My mouth is dry. My head throbs. And nothing seems all that funny anymore.
A sudden pressure lands on my chest, making me cough. Brim stands on my sternum glaring at me with her bright green eyes. She growls in displeasure and I wonder what I have done to upset her—and then I remember leaving her behind and driving away. And then getting struck by thunder instead of a car. No wonder I ache all over.
“I’m sorry, Brim,” I say. “I don’t know why . . . I wasn’t in my right mind. I am so sorry for leaving you behind. I promise I won’t do it again.”
Brim is placated by my apology and her growl turns to a purr.
I lift my hand to scruff her cheeks, and see the blue-gray veins sitting under my skin. At least they aren’t inky black.
After I give her a good scratching, Brim allows me to get up. I dress myself in a pair of pants—Joe’s, I suppose, from how tight they are—and an old Saturn’s Ring T-shirt that have been left on the edge of the bed. With Brim perched on my shoulder, I make my way downstairs. I find the rest of the group sitting around the dining room table. Even Lexie, who I had assumed would have returned to her own home at
some point, sits with a bowl of colorful loops in front of her. Brim jumps down from my shoulder and bounds over to the bowl of canned fish someone has left out for her in the corner.
“Morning,” I say, tentatively standing in the doorway.
The others glare at me. I’m not sure if it’s because I had very callously informed them that I returned to the mortal realm without Daphne and the Key. Or because of the rap song—one I’d learned after buying the entire contents of a music store when I first arrived in Olympus Hills—I had decided to sing at the top of my lungs until one o’clock in the morning.
Now that I think about it, that song is much cruder than I remembered it being.
“Looks like someone is feeling more like himself,” Jonathan says. “If not a little worse for wear.” I notice that Jonathan is a little worse for wear himself. His left shoulder is bandaged and he wears his arm in a sling. Dark circles under his eyes mar his otherwise jovial features.
“What happened to you?” I ask.
“As I told you last night, your brother happened to me,” Jonathan says. “I tried to stop him from dragging you, unconscious, into the Underrealm. I shot at him with a black arrow but he got off a good blast. I am afraid I missed my mark for the very first time. I take it from the black poison spreading through your veins and your standing in oncoming traffic that the arrow hit you instead of your brother.”
So it is poison that was seeping through my veins. I recall the details now, that the poison will eventually cause me to lose the ability to feel anything at all. Just as I recall that Jonathan attempted to explain this all to me last night—while I threw kernels of microwave popcorn at his head, trying to coax him into catching them in his mouth.
I shudder, not merely at my cavalier behavior, but at the recollection of how empty and hollow I had felt in those last minutes before getting struck by Ethan. I had wanted to embrace it at the time, but the idea of slipping back into that nothingness terrifies me now.
“Daphne took the cure with her,” Jonathan says, “but from your current state, I assume she was unable to administer it.”
I shake my head, now sure what it was supposed to be.
“So Daphne’s really trapped?” Joe asks. He sits on the edge of his chair, hands shaking.
I blink, remembering now that they had tried to question me about what had happened in the Underrealm, but I hadn’t exactly made the best interrogation subject. At one point I had made a hat of one of the platinum records that hang on Joe’s living room wall and tried to challenge Ethan to a dance-off. And I don’t even know what a dance-off is. I don’t feel any mirth about the situation now, which means the effects of Jonathan’s dart must be waning.
Whatever it was he dosed me with helped to ease off the black poison and also made me act the fool. I’m chagrined by my behavior from last night, but it was still preferable to the overwhelming despair that haunts the edges of my thoughts. I can feel it trying to creep back in.
“Yes,” I say, finally answering Joe’s question about Daphne.
“There’s no way to get her back? We can’t storm the gate or . . . something?”
I swallow hard. Without the Key, Persephone’s Gate only opens on its own on the fall and spring equinoxes. Our plan had been to use the Key to open the gate a day early, beating the spring equinox, hoping to give ourselves the element of surprise to go in after the Keres. Nothing had gone according to plan, though, and now the Key was lost once more—somewhere in the Underrealm—and the spring equinox came and went while I was in the black sleep. “Persephone’s Gate won’t open again for another six months,” I say, the idea sounding considerably less amusing than the first time I went over the facts with them. “Daphne claimed to know where the Key was, but I’m pretty sure she was bluffing. Her right nostril crinkles a little bit when she’s lying.”
Jonathan gives a sad smile. “You’re right. But don’t ever tell her that.”
Joe sighs and runs his hand down the side of his face. “I should know that. And I should have been there. She was expecting me to come.”
A flash of anger bursts in my chest. Joe should have been there. If he hadn’t been incapacitated then I wouldn’t have had to send Garrick in his place . . .
“I don’t know what happened,” Joe says. “I was fine—a little parched from running around backstage. I asked someone to bring me my water bottle and then suddenly everything was spinning. I don’t remember much after that until . . .”
“I woke you up in a pool of your own drool,” Lexie says, finishing for him. “That happens when you get super drunk . . . Or, um, so I’ve heard.”
Joe buries his face in his hands. “I swear I wasn’t drinking again. I don’t know what happened. All I know is that if I had been there for her—”
“Don’t blame yourself,” I say, feeling compassion rather than anger. “It was an ambush on both sides of the gate. First Terresa and then Rowan in the grove, and then the Court’s army as soon as I was through the gate.” I give the others another brief recounting of what I remember happening in the Underrealm—in case they weren’t able to make full sense of what I told them about it last night. What with all the laughing and dancing, and tossing things at people, my previous account may have been less than coherent. After I tell them about Garrick taking the crown and the deal Daphne made with him, I fold my cold arms in front of my chest. “Absolutely nothing went as we expected. I’m the one to blame—I should have been more prepared. I should have considered other options.”
“If only you’d taken me up on my offer,” Ethan says. He had wanted to join forces and use the Eternity Key to take a group of his own loyal Skylords to storm the Underrealm and kill the Keres. It had seemed too risky at the time. I didn’t know if I could trust him not to do more damage to my world than he was claiming. If only I’d listened. Or if only I’d just given Rowan the Key to bring back to my father on his own—even that seemed like a better alternative than leaving Daphne behind.
If only she hadn’t loved me enough to trade her freedom for mine. There were so many if onlys.
Heat pricks at the back of my eyes. I cover my face, feeling as if I am about to cry.
“Seems like the giddiness has worn off,” Lexie says.
“Thank Zeus,” Ethan mumbles.
“Not good,” Jonathan says so gravely that I drop my hands and stare at him. “Based on when you fell asleep last night, the dart started to wear off after only three hours. Your metabolism is too quick. I told Daphne that it would take two weeks for the black arrow’s spell to take you over completely, but it’s only been a couple of days and we already almost lost you once.” He pulls a handful of colorful darts from the quiver that is slung over his dining chair. “These emotion darts will help push it off, but these four are the only ones I have left. At this rate, you’ll burn through them in no time.”
“How much time exactly?” I ask.
“If I ration one per day, then perhaps five or six days. Maybe less. It means you’ll have to deal with the mood swings—sadness, anger, despair—and other negative side effects for as long as possible between injections.”
Negative side effects. That is putting it mildly. The sadness and anger I can handle. The despair is worse. But it’s the parts where I feel nothing—like the moment before the car was about to hit—that terrify me. The irony that I had spent so much of my life pretending to be emotionless and unaffected isn’t lost on me. I let the tears come that burn in my eyes now. Because feeling something is better than feeling nothing.
“If only Daphne had been able to administer the cure,” Jonathan says. “A red arrow wasted . . .”
“Red arrow?” I ask. “That was the cure?” I pull the collar of the shirt down to show the others the fiery red wound just above my heart. “She stabbed me with it. Why isn’t it working then?”
Jonathan gasps at the sight. “Did she kiss you?”
“Kiss me?” I think of Daphne trying to kiss me over the altar in the throne room. M
y mind had been poisoned against her at the moment, and I had been so shocked, felt so betrayed, after she stabbed me with that red arrow, I had actually fought her off. “She tried but didn’t get the chance.”
It wasn’t until moments later, when the black poison that had been clouding my mind receded for a moment, that I even grasped the words she had said before trying to give me the cure—that she loves me. But by then it had been too late. I had been dragged away for execution, and in her desperation to save me, she had pledged herself to Garrick in exchange for my banishment instead of my death.
Jonathan’s brow furrows. “The arrow Daphne used to try to cure you contained a true love spell. Meaning that it would only work as a cure for someone who had found their true love. But it must be sealed with true love’s kiss.”
“And she knew this?” I ask, my mind whirling at the thought.
“Yes,” Jonathan says. “I made sure of it. I wouldn’t have let her go after you if that had not been the case.”
That means Daphne truly loves me. The words she’d said weren’t merely something she felt in the heat of the moment. Daphne is my true love, and I am hers.
“However, I worry the lack of sealing the cure has accelerated the black arrow’s poison,” Jonathan says gravely.
“Will it still work?” Lexie asks. “If Daphne kisses him before it’s too late, will it still seal the cure?”
Jonathan nods, but I can tell from the grim look on his face that he’s thinking what we all already know: I have only six days, maximum, before the poison takes me, and there are six months until the gate will open again to the Underrealm.
“Getting Daphne out of there as quickly as possible is my number one priority, regardless of what it means to me.”
“And Tobin,” Lexie says pointedly. “You’re not leaving without Tobin again.”
“Tobin?” I blink at her. “You mean Tobin isn’t here?”
Ethan and Jonathan both shake their heads. “He went with Daphne and Garrick to find you,” Jonathan says.