by Bree Despain
“Not much,” the Shade says, rocking forward on its knees. “I think . . . I think I was herrrr manservant. She wassss my queen.”
“Do you have a name?” I ask him—finding it comforting to think of the Shade as a him instead of an it.
“Not that I remember.” He seems to look at me. He indicates the diamond laurel leaf crown on my head. If it hadn’t been pinned so thoroughly into my hair by the women who dressed me, I am sure I would have lost it by now. “Yoouu new queen?”
“Um, kind of?” I hesitate, realizing this might buy me some leverage with Persephone’s servant, then revise my answer. “I mean, yes.”
He rocks forward and shoves one fist against the cave floor and bows his head. “New queeen. New goddess. I am yourrr servant.”
I almost sputter with surprise, but end up keeping it together. “I don’t know about the goddess part,” I say under my breath as I stand, but this is definitely a welcome turn of events. For the first time in days, I feel truly hopeful. “Okay, Slim Shady, how about you roll away that boulder over there and help your new queen hightail it out of here?”
“Youu in trouble?” he asks. “Those men chase you? They wwwant to hurt you?”
“Yes,” I say, hoping to gain a little sympathy. “That’s why I need your help to get out of here.”
“No!” he roars and bursts to his feet so suddenly that it leaves me shaking. He grabs my arms. “You stay! You no go. Too dangerous. Your servant protect you. Your servant keep you.” He pushes me down until I’m seated once more on the cave floor. “Eat,” he says.
“You want to eat me?” I say, my voice shaking.
“I no eat queen,” he says. “Youuu eat those!” He points at the flowers. I can tell by the tone of his voice that he won’t take no for an answer.
I pick up one of the flowers and raise it to my lips. I tentatively take a bite of one of its gray petals. A taste similar to black licorice stings my swollen tongue. At least it stopped bleeding while I was unconscious.
“Like?” Shady asks.
“Mmmm,” I say, making a show of enjoying the bitter flower.
“Good,” he says. “I go now. You stay. Be safe.”
He heads toward the entrance to the cave.
“Wait,” I call, scrambling to follow.
I’m too slow. By the time I make it there on my injured leg, he has already moved away the boulder, exited, and sealed me back inside.
“When are you coming back?” I shout.
No answer comes from the other side.
Crap balls, I think as my leg gives out and I sink to the ground, no longer able to stand. I could be stuck in here forever.
chapter eleven
haden
I sit at Joe’s kitchen counter, holding my hands over my ringing ears. Brim is draped over my shoulder purring, but I don’t have the heart to tell her that her usually soothing habit is only making me more nauseous.
Lexie slides a steaming cup of brown liquid in front of me. It at least looks and smells more pleasant than the noxious concoction of tomato juice, raw egg, and hot sauce that Joe tried to ply me with a few minutes ago. “Hot chocolate,” she says. “From Olympus Brew. I also brought you a couple of pumpkin chocolate-chip cookies from the bakery. I remember Daphne saying something once about you having a sweet tooth.”
“Thank you,” I grunt.
“Carbs and chocolate—good for whatever ails ya. Most people might disagree, but hot chocolate is my preferred hangover cure. It will help with the dehydration and hypoglycemia that come from puking so much. Or maybe that’s just my excuse, since I don’t allow myself sugar on a regular basis.”
“Hangover? Is that what this is?” Another wave of nausea hits me and I look away from the cookies even though they’re my favorite.
“Plus, you know, chocolate is a mood lifter, so maybe if you eat enough, you’ll stop being such a cranky-pants.”
“Mmph,” is all I can manage.
I have little to no memory of the last few hours. As far as I know, I could have traveled through a time portal from the moment we were standing in front of the window talking about Terresa to when I was huddled over the toilet, losing everything I had managed to eat since returning from the Underrealm.
“How bad was I this time?” I ask.
“Not too bad. You did try to make out with a ficus, but I’m pretty sure that kissing a plant won’t invalidate your cure. Mostly, you just barfed. A lot.”
“What did Jonathan dose me with this time?” And why does it feel so much worse than last time?
“It was a dart that was supposed to make you punch drunk, not much different than the giddiness spell, but it seemed to hit your system pretty hard.”
It’s probably because I’ve never been any kind of drunk before. I’d never been held in high enough esteem to be offered ale at any of the Underrealm feasts—even the one when I captured and killed the hydra. Rowan had taken the credit and had been allowed to drink from the king’s cup, not me. On many occasions, I’d watched other Underlords become intoxicated on rich food and drink, and I never really saw the appeal.
I stifle a foul-tasting burp.
My opinion on the matter still hasn’t changed.
I break a piece off a cookie and take a nibble. The sweetness is a preferable substitute for the taste in my mouth. Brim sniffs at the cookie from my shoulder, so I let her have a bite as well. “I thought Jonathan was going to ration the darts one per day,” I say after a few bites.
“Well, when you started ranting about not being able to feel anything and then tried to put your hand through the studio window, we didn’t really have a choice.”
I flex my bandaged hand. It sends sharp twinges of pain up my arm. I never thought I’d be grateful for such a sensation. But at the same time, it makes me worry. The others had meant well by dosing me, and I am sure they did what they thought was best in the moment, but it only makes things more bleak in the long run. Jonathan is now down to only three darts. Only two of which are usable before we reunite him with his bow. There is no way I could ask him to use the last one before then, knowing what will happen if he loses his immortality.
“Plus, none of us were too thrilled with the tantrum you threw,” Lexie says with a forced chuckle. “You’re pretty strong for a toddler.”
“Toddler?” I don’t know this word. I look up at Lexie, meeting her eyes for the first time, and my query falls away when I see the purple bruise that sits under her skin, marring her right cheekbone. I avert my eyes, knowing the mark must have been my fault.
“I’m sorry,” I say, the words almost sticking in my throat. Apologies are not something Underlords are taught to ever give, but that’s not the reason the words are hard to choke out. I don’t believe I deserve to be forgiven.
I was raised a warrior, taught to fight from a very young age. I’ve done far worse, intentionally, to my fellow Underlords, but the idea that the black poison caused me to harm someone while not in my right mind has me reeling with guilt.
I’ve become a danger to my allies.
What if I’d done worse? What if they can’t restrain me next time?
What if it had been Daphne I had harmed?
“Just remind me to give you a ten-foot radius the next you start to lose it. That black poison sure makes you bonkers.” She pushes the hot chocolate closer to me. Her words and gesture aren’t exactly an acceptance of my apology, but at least she does not seem to hate me.
I pick up the cup of hot chocolate, welcoming the feeling of the heat against my bandaged hand. The steam warms my face and the smell only makes my stomach swish a little. If this is going to help me get back on my feet, then I need to get it over with.
“Tobin always loved Olympus Brew,” Lexie says, her voice sounding lower than before.
“I didn’t realize you were . . . close.” Then again, I had started getting a strange feeling about the two of them after the Valentine’s dance.
“We used to be.” She snif
fs. “A long time ago. And then I messed things up. I wanted to be popular, so I chose different people over him. Now that he’s gone . . . I wish I’d made a different choice.”
“I know how that feels.” There are so many choices I wish I could change right now. I break off half a cookie and push it toward her. I want to say something like “we’ll get him back” or “I’m sure he’s going to be fine,” but I don’t want to make a promise I'm not sure I can keep. “The best thing we can do is stick with the plan to find a way back into the Underrealm. On that note, I guess I had better figure out a way to negotiate with Terresa.”
“Speaking of which,” Lexie says after taking a nibble of the cookie. “I made some headway in that regard while you were busy praying to the porcelain goddess.”
“To the what?”
“Toilet, duh. While you were barfing your guts out I had a little chat with our resident lieutenant of crazy town, and I struck a new deal.”
I look at her in shock. “What? How? What?”
“Well, first I tried just telling her the truth. That if you kiss her, you’ll die. She started crying hysterically.”
“Oh, good thinking,” I say, lifting the cup of hot chocolate to my mouth. Why hadn’t I thought of that right off?
“Yeeeah, turns out not so much. I thought that might have worked since, you know, she’s supposedly in love with you, but then being a total psychopath and all, she started blubbering, ‘I’d rather have one perfect passionate kiss with Haden and lose him forever, than to have never kissed him at all.’”
I almost choke on a sip of hot chocolate. It burns my throat.
“And that, kids,” Joe calls from the pantry where he’s been rooting around for something to make for dinner, “is why you should never base a relationship on passion alone. It’s never the real thing.”
“Says the man who married a woman after only knowing her for thirty minutes,” Jonathan says from the kitchen entrance. I wonder how long he’s been standing there, listening. It feels awkward talking about matters of the heart with Cupid hanging around.
“Hey, there was more to it than that!” Joe says from the pantry.
Half a second later, Joe’s cell phone starts playing a tune from where it lies on the counter next to an open container of tomato juice. I see the name “Demi Raines” pop up on the screen.
Daphne’s mother. In all the turmoil, I hadn’t thought to ask what had happened to her after the night of the play. I pick up the phone.
“Speak of the devil,” Lexie says with a smirk.
“Do not answer that!” Joe says, running out of the pantry with an armload of goods.
He drops a box of waffle cones and a jar of something called caviar on the counter—making me wonder what exactly he’s planning on preparing for dinner—and snatches the phone out of my hands. He hits an icon to send it voicemail, and then leans into the counter with a heavy sigh.
“Why aren’t you answering her calls?” Jonathan says. “That’s the fifth time she’s called today. You’re going to have to talk to her eventually.”
“Nuh uh. Not yet.” Joe shakes his head violently. “The longer I can keep the truth from her, the better.”
“You mean seventeen years wasn’t long enough?” There’s a growl to Jonathan’s usually jovial voice, and I realize that at some point during the last few days, Joe must have filled Jonathan in on the full story concerning how Daphne had gotten involved with the Underrealm because of his deal with my father. Circumstances considered, I think Jonathan’s been holding in his anger—toward Joe and me—extremely well.
I can sympathize with Joe’s reluctance to answer Demi’s calls. However, if the mother is anything like the daughter, he isn’t going to get away with keeping the truth from her much longer.
“Hey, you’re not answering her calls either,” Joe says defensively to Jonathan.
“I promised Daphne I’d make sure her mother got out of town safely. The rest of it is your responsibility.”
I vaguely remember now that after Jonathan left the fight between Ethan’s men and the Skylords—wounded and nearly out of arrows—he had gone to assure that Joe and Demi had made it safely out during the town’s evacuation. Not wanting to show his injury to Demi, Jonathan had instructed Joe to put her on one of the mayor’s shuttles to an evacuation center in the next town over and to buy her bus tickets back to Utah for the morning. While I’m relieved that she’s on her way back to the safe haven of Ellis Fields, where the Skylords can’t touch her, I can see why she’d be frantically calling to see if Daphne is safe.
Not that I want to be the bearer of bad news, either.
Joe’s phone starts ringing in his hand. He almost drops it while trying to hit the decline icon. This time, I think I recognize the tune. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I am almost certain the ringtone he’s set for Daphne’s mother is one of his band’s more melancholy love songs.
“Anyway, since none of you all are going to woman up and tell the truth to Daphne’s mom, I might as well get on with my story,” Lexie says. “We are working against a ticking time bomb, so to speak.” She hitches her thumb in my direction.
“The floor is yours,” Joe says, switching off his phone and tucking it in his back pocket.
“So after I got Terresa to stop crying, I told her that Haden would be so eternally grateful to her for helping us rescue Persephone from the Black Hole that Haden would give her the most passionate kiss any girl has ever been the recipient of . . . So she has to wait until after the rescue mission.”
“And that helps Haden not die how?” Joe asks. Which was my thought exactly, but somehow it felt selfish to ask.
Lexie leans forward and lowers her voice to whisper as if she is worried that Terresa may overhear her from all the way upstairs. “It helps when you ditch her psycho ass in the Skyrealm and make a break for it.”
I blink at her. “You’re ruthless, has anyone ever told you that?”
“Only on a bi-weekly basis,” she says, inspecting her fingernails. “I didn’t get to be the leader of the Sopranos on looks alone, you know.”
“She’ll take us, then?” I ask. “She agreed?”
“Yes . . . Only there’s one more caveat I haven’t mentioned . . .” Lexie drops her hand at her side.
I lean toward her on the edge of my barstool. “That being?”
“She wants a bigger fish.”
“A bigger fish?” I ask, completely confused. “As in, a salmon?”
Lexie shakes her head. “You really suck with expressions, huh? Anyway, she doesn’t want to be implicated in Persephone’s escape, and she wants some insurance to cover her butt when the Sky King goes into hysterics over losing his favorite prisoner. Which means she wants a big fish—or a big prize—to be able to offer up to the big honcho in the sky.”
“Me?” Jonathan says grimly. “I am on his most hated list, after all.”
“I’m not going to let that happen,” I say. Daphne would never forgive me if something happened to Jonathan on my watch.
“Good,” Lexie says, “because that’s not who she wants.”
“Who, then?” I ask, “because I’m not willing to trade over Ethan either. We need him to go up against the Keres.”
Lexie looks at me. “Your father.”
“Ren?” In my ever swinging emotional state, I keep forgetting that my father is here in this very house. Drugged and sleeping in the servant’s wing of the mansion. I haven’t exactly been in an emotionally stable enough position during the last few hours to want to go in and see him. “She wants to keep my father as a permanent prisoner?”
The plan involves Terresa taking me, Jonathan, and Ethan as fake prisoners into the Black Hole where we can facilitate a breakout—hopefully with Persephone in hand—but we would be leaving my father behind at the mercy of the Sky King? For the last three months—kopros, for most of my life—I’ve seen my father as the enemy, and I also know he’s no longer technically the king of my realm, and even though t
here is no love lost between us, it still feels treasonous to him both as my father and my former ruler to entertain the idea of handing him over to the Skylords.
But Daphne’s life is hanging in the balance. And she is in danger not only because of me, but because of the deal my father made to own her soul. He was the one who brought this terrible destiny on her.
“All right,” I say. “We give her my father then.”
“Are you sure?” Jonathan asks. “The Sky King is known for his talents with torture . . .”
I nod my head before he can go on. “At least Terresa will get one of her demands. I only hope we can trust her.”
“We can as long as the passion spell doesn’t wear off in the meantime,” Jonathan says, “and she still wants that kiss.”
“Is that a risk?” I ask. “How soon will it wear off?”
“My arrows are far more potent than my emotion darts, but the subject is the determining factor. It’s like the flu. One person may be able to bounce back after a few days, where it takes another person several weeks. Let’s just hope she has a poor immune system, so to speak.”
“We should get going,” I say, lifting my cup of hot chocolate to take it on the road.
“Not so fast,” Joe says, mixing what look like minuscule black beads into a bowl of raw chicken eggs. I can’t help wondering if he knows any more about cooking than I do. “I’m making dinner here.”
Jonathan puts his hand on my arm as if telling me to wait. “Ethan is gathering supplies. The gate to the Skyrealm is at least half a day’s journey from here. Based on your last two experiences with the darts, it takes about three hours after an injection before you start to act, um, lucid again. You then seem to have another three to four hour window of rational behavior before the black poison starts to adversely affect you again. We’ll leave after dinner and travel as far as the gate. There, we’ll make camp, wait for the best time to dose you again, and then wait off the crazier effects before crossing into the Skyrealm. This should assure us the most optimal window of performance on your part when we infiltrate the palace. Once I have my bow restored, I will be able to make more. But again, both darts and arrows are only temporary treatments. Nothing I can shoot you up with will be an antidote without Daphne.”