The Shadow Prince

by Bree Despain

  “Oh,” she says. The tension in her relaxes ever so slightly.

  Another half hour passes.

  “So what did you do?” she asks. “To piss your dad off so much? I got the gist a few weeks ago that you’re kind of on the outs with him.”

  “That’s putting it lightly. My father disowned me.” I’m not sure I want to talk about it, but Daphne shifts in her seat, turning her body toward me. Maybe talking is the best thing for getting her to open up to me again. “I cried,” I say. “When my mother died, I cried.”

  “What? Your father disowned you over that?”

  “No. It’s what I did after he punished me for crying.…” I realize I need to back up the story more for her to understand. “I have a twin brother. His name is Rowan. But you have to understand that twins are very rare in my world. The first two sons of the Underrealm were created by our god, Hades. They were the first twins—the eldest of whom became the father of our race, while the younger twin became the progenitor of our greatest enemies, the Skylords.

  “Because of this, firstborn sons are treated with great respect—made Lords and trained as warriors and Champions—while younger sons are deemed Lesser, and treated with suspicion and disdain.”

  “Like your cousin Garrick?” Daphne asks. “You called him Lesser.”

  I nod, but don’t tell her that Garrick is actually my half brother and not my cousin. “When my mother learned from the healers that she was carrying twins, she was overcome with dismay that one of her sons would be forced to live as a Lesser. So when Rowan and I were born, she allowed no one to be present with her. That way, no one other than she would know which one of her children was the eldest. Before she would allow my father to see us, she made him swear an unbreakable oath that neither of her children would ever be cast out of the ranks of the Underlords.”

  “Smart,” Daphne says.

  I sigh. “Some say that my mother granted us the greatest favor of our lifetimes—but unfortunately, her actions caused Rowan and me to become rivals from the moment we drew our first breaths. Everyone speculated as to which one of us was the true Lord, and which one of us was undeserving of our status. Everything we did was considered to be a competition. In the beginning, I was my father’s favorite. I was bigger and stronger than Rowan and resembled my father with my dark hair and olive skin, while Rowan was slighter and fairer like our mother.

  “But as we grew older, it became apparent that Rowan had inherited more of my father’s cunning and cold temperament, while I was called nursling well past my second year because—as I am told—I clung to my mother’s skirts and screamed when my father tried to pit me in fights with the other boys my age. That is when the Court started to whisper that perhaps I was too human for my own good—that I had inherited too many of my mother’s human traits. My father’s favor had already started to shift toward Rowan before my mother’s death.”

  I pause, changing lanes so I can pass a slow van and pick up speed. “Rowan is the one the Court wanted to send here, not me.” I shiver at the idea of that sociopath sitting here with Daphne instead of me. What tactics would he have used to coerce her into agreeing to be his Boon? The thought of her saying yes to him … “Be happy he isn’t here.”

  “Noted,” she says, like she’s realizing there could be worse things than being stuck in this car with me.

  “It wasn’t until my mother’s death that I fully realized my father’s disdain for me. For her … When she collapsed, I sent a serving boy—Garrick—to fetch my father. My father took so long to come, and when he finally arrived with a couple of members of the Court … it was like he didn’t care at all.

  “I begged him to help her. I yelled at him to do something. To save her. We have these places called healing chambers, and I thought if he brought her there, she would get better. But he wouldn’t listen to me.

  “One of his servants grabbed me and pulled me away from my mother’s body. I screamed and kicked, trying to escape. And then I started to cry.…”

  I stop speaking when I remember the stinging sensation that pricked behind my eyes and the warm liquid that welled up in them and then escaped from the corners. At the time, I didn’t have a word for the water that made tracks down my face and tasted salty as it ran over my lips and down my chin. Tears, I found out later, when I heard the Heirs hiss the word to each other whenever I neared, like I’d done the vilest of things.

  “Crying is forbidden past the age of two, and once an Underlord reaches the age of six, he is supposed to be a man. At seven years of age, crying like that is considered disgusting. My father told me to shut up and be still, but instead, I wailed terribly at him, the tears coming faster and harder. The servant who held me was shocked by my tantrum; he let me go; and I fell to my knees.

  “I remember looking up at my father just in time to see the back of his ringed hand come sailing at the side of my face. He hit me so hard, I thought my teeth were going to shatter. ‘No son of Hades cries,’ he said to me.

  “That was when I retaliated. I told my father that he wasn’t Hades, that he wasn’t my king, and that I didn’t want to be his son anymore. I was so angry, I could feel a burst of lightning forming in my chest. I’d only been in training for a few months and I didn’t know how to use it properly yet. But I stood in front of my father and demanded that he help my mother. I told him that if he didn’t, I would blast him.

  “Speaking to the king like that, even if you are his child, is considered to be a sin akin to heresy. I had questioned his authority in front of the Court. Threatened to harm him. I expected him to hit me again—part of me wanted him to. But instead he laughed at me. Laughed at my tears. And that’s when I lost control. I attacked him. With a great, raging scream, I lunged at him and threw a lightning bolt at my father, the king of the Underrealm.”

  “Whoa,” Daphne says under her breath.

  “He deflected it easily, and sent his own bolt at my feet. It ripped the ground right out from under me and I went flying. I hit the floor and crumpled into a ball. When the ringing in my ears ceased, I realized that the room had fallen completely silent. The servants and the members of the Court who were there looked at me like I had just committed the most unforgivable act in our realm. And that’s when I realized I had. I’d dishonored my father, blasphemed against his title—the name of Hades—physically attacked the king, and brought shame upon myself.

  “I tried wiping the tears from my face and begged for his forgiveness. I groveled and laid myself down in front of him in supplication, hoping he would show me mercy.

  “But it was too late. I saw it in his eyes. His disdainful glare made me feel hollow all the way down to my bones. He said, ‘You are no son of mine.’

  “And that was it. My life as I knew it was over. I was removed from the royal living quarters, dropped to the bottom of my rank, stripped of my honor, and forced to carry this shame for the rest of my life. The only reason I wasn’t thrown out of the Underlords and made a Lesser is because of the oath my father made to my mother when I was born. Rowan gladly stepped into the role of favorite son, and I’ve been trying to win it back—along with my honor—ever since. I didn’t think I’d really get the chance until the Oracle of Elysium chose me for this quest.”

  “I’m sorry,” Daphne says after a few long, quiet minutes. “Sounds like you’ve got even worse daddy issues than I do.”

  I can tell she’s trying to lighten the mood, but mine grows darker. I am the one who had encouraged her to open herself up to her father—only to be the one who is supposed to take her away from him again.

  “They call me the boy who cried,” I say. “They equate my showing that kind of emotion to the ultimate sign of my weakness. They act like it’s the crying that was my undoing—but that is only because it would be dishonorable for them to speak of someone physically attacking the king.”

  “Sounds like a great place to live. Can’t wait to get there!” Daphne says sarcastically.

  “Well, when you
put it that way …” I try to grin sheepishly, but it comes out more like a grimace. I am quiet for a few minutes, staring down the long stretch of highway in front of us. “I think I’d do things differently, if I were king. I’d bring music back to the Underrealm, for one thing. And I wouldn’t treat you like a prize. You’d be my queen. My real queen, not just a figurehead like my mother and the others who fill the role. I think that’s one way the Underlords have gone wrong—what’s missing from my world. I’ve heard that things were different when Persephone and Hades reigned together. Things changed after she left.…”

  “She left? Like, for good? I thought she was bound to the Underworld.”

  “She was bound to Hades. After he died, she left. She stayed for a while, but then she was so overcome with grief that she went through her gate to the mortal world one spring, and never came back. Or at least that’s how the old stories go.”

  “How did Hades die?”

  “The Sky God killed him.”

  “You mean Zeus?”

  “That’s what humans call him.”

  “But weren’t they brothers?”

  “They were. But they had been at war for nearly a thousand years.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of us. The Underlords.” I check the map on the car’s GPS and see that we’re halfway to our destination. Then I glance in the rearview mirror. We’ve passed through thicker patches of traffic, but now we’re alone on the road, except for a green BMW a few hundred yards behind us.

  “I don’t know which version of the Persephone story is the correct one,” I say. “Whether she was stolen into the Underrealm by Hades or if she chose to go with him to be his queen, but I do know that he was devoted to her, and we Underlords are the proof. Persephone’s mother, the Terra Lady, or Demeter, as your book calls her, wasn’t too happy about Persephone and Hades’s union. As goddess of the Overrealm, the mortal world, she was the one who gifted the harvest to the fields and fertility to the womb. She cursed her own daughter, so Hades and Persephone would never be able to have children. Hades couldn’t stand the sadness that overtook his wife, and so he decided to create children for her. His first attempt went horribly wrong. You’ve seen the results of that.”

  Her mouth pops open. “You mean that thing that attacked Joe? That was supposed to be a child?”

  I nod. “It’s called a Keres. They’re an experiment gone very wrong, and certainly not the bouncing little baby Persephone had wanted.”

  “I’m sure that came as quite the surprise.”

  “Have you ever heard the story of Pandora’s Box?”

  “Yeah. A woman was given a box and told not to open it. But her curiosity got the better of her, and she opened the box only to accidentally release horrible evils on the world.”

  “Close,” I say. “But in the real version, the box is actually a prison, and the things inside are the Keres. We call it the Pits. Short for Pithos.”

  “So Hades imprisoned his first creations?”

  “He had no choice. They were monsters. There are different kinds of Keres. Some of them are reapers—like the one we destroyed—and he used to use them to help collect the souls of the dead on the battlefield. But even those proved to be too bloodthirsty—instead of going after only the dead, they started to attack the wounded also. There’s one thing everyone who was attacked in Olympus Hills had in common. They were bleeding. Wounded, I guess you could say. Even if it was only a paper cut. Eventually, the reapers were locked up, too. You can probably imagine why.”

  She nods. “So then Hades, having botched it the first time, still decided to try again?”

  “He was more careful this time. He created the Underlords after his own image, out of mud from the river Styx, fire from the heart of the Underrealm, and shadows from the shades of the dead. Persephone herself breathed life into the first two. Twin sons named Life and Death. They were gifted with the Helm of Hades—the ability to be nearly invisible in the dark—and the fire that burns in their eyes. The twins were the light of their lives.”

  Daphne shakes her shoulders like something has made her feel cold. “It’s that nearly invisible in the dark thing that really creeps me out. You shouldn’t have followed me backstage at my audition like that. You freaked me out so much, I almost couldn’t sing.”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask her. “What auditions? I never followed you backstage anywhere.”

  “After we met in the grove, didn’t you follow me to the school? There was some sort of invisible presence with me backstage. Wasn’t that you?”

  I shake my head. “I didn’t follow you to the school.”

  Her eyes widen as she looks at me to make sure I’m not lying. “I did hear a weird hissing sound, like before the Keres attacked. Maybe that’s what followed me—but wouldn’t it have been attacking Pear at that time?” Her shoulders convulse again. “And I could have sworn I saw your eyes flashing in the shadows of the auditorium. Someone was watching me.”

  “I swear to you, Daphne, I went straight back to Simon’s place after the grove. If someone was watching you, it wasn’t me.”

  But the question that haunts me is: who was it?

  As far as I knew, Dax had been with Simon at that time, and Garrick had been sick and locked in his room at Simon’s mansion.

  Could there be another Underlord in Olympus Hills that I don’t know about?

  “Where does the lightning come from?” Daphne asks like she’s eager to get off the disturbing topic of invisible people following her. “I thought that was a Zeus thing?”

  “It is. The Underlords were gifted with the ability to throw lightning bolts from the Sky God himself. But that’s where the story takes a darker turn. You see, Hades was already in trouble with Zeus for creating the Keres by accident, and the Sky God fancied himself the only god who was allowed to create new life out of the elements. So he stole the twins and claimed them as his own creations—his own children—and even gave them his lightning bolts as supposed proof of his paternity.”

  “I can imagine Hades and Persephone were not too happy about that.”

  “To say the least. Hades opened the gates to the underworld and unleashed a couple of the reaper Keres to bring back his children from the Skyrealm. They kidnapped Death and brought him home, but Life wasn’t so lucky. He’d fallen and scraped his knee earlier in the day, and the Keres, unable to restrain themselves, tore the poor child apart.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Not as terrible as the war that followed. It went on for hundreds of years, trashing everything in between the Skyrealm and the Underrealm—namely, the mortal world. Hades caused volcanoes to erupt, sending ash and fire into the sky, and then Zeus would retaliate. Did you know that almost every culture in your world has a legend of a great flood that almost destroyed the earth? That’s what happened when the Sky God opened the heavens in an effort to drown out the Underrealm. He failed, luckily, because Hades was smart enough to lock the gates. Nothing living can get through them when they’re locked.”

  “Rain is living? Well, it has a song, so I guess that would probably mean it’s alive.”

  “A song?” It’s my turn to sound surprised.

  “Everything has an inner song. Everything living, that is. I can hear it. You probably think that sounds crazy. Most people do.”

  “I’d say it sounds far less addled than ‘hello, I’m an underworld prince and I’m here to take you to live with me in the land of the dead’ and all.”

  A smile on my behalf cracks her lips for the first time since she learned the truth about me. It’s fleeting and small, but I see it out of the corner of my eye before it goes away.

  “How did the war end?” she asks. “I mean, the world is still here, so I imagine it stopped.”

  “It’s more of a stalemate, really. The war has been at a standstill since Hades was murdered.”

  “How did that happen?” Daphne asks. Her voice sounds almost void of the hostility she’s sh
own me all day—it’s been edged away by curiosity. “You said a god has to lose his … totem?”

  “That’s the closest word in your language for it. We call it a Kronolithe. It’s his symbol, object of power. It’s what gives him his immortality. It means ‘Kronos’s stone.’ ”

  “Kronos? That name sounds familiar. Wasn’t he one of the first gods, in Greek mythology?”

  “Yes, he was the father of Zeus and Hades and many others. He was a greedy, prideful ruler and he feared that his children would overthrow him someday—so he ate them as soon as they were born. All except for Zeus. His mother wrapped a rock in a blanket and fed that to Kronos instead. Zeus then killed his father and cut his siblings free from his father’s stomach. Once Kronos was overthrown, they decided to draw lots and divvy up control over the five realms. Each new ruler was given a piece of the stone Kronos had eaten. I am not sure how it works, but those pieces of Kronos’s stone are what make them gods. Zeus became the Sky God, and he fashioned his Kronolithe into an iron thunderbolt. Poseidon, who was chosen as the god of the Oceanrealm, made his into a trident. Hades drew the lot of overseeing the realm of the dead, and he made his Kronolithe into a golden bident—kind of like a two-pronged staff. That’s where Christians get their stories about their devil carrying a pitchfork. But it was also a Key.”

  “The Key of Hades? I read something in my mythology book about that. It was what he used to lock and unlock the gates to the underworld. So the Key and the bident were one and the same? But how did he lose it? The book said he never let the Key out of his sight.”

  I smile at Daphne. Her enthusiasm for the subject surprises me for someone who claims to want nothing to do with my world.

  She gives me a look that I can’t read.

  “What?”

  “You look different when you smile,” she says. “You should do it more often.”

  “I’ll try,” I say, but my expression defaults to my practiced mask. Why does smiling in front of her make me feel so … vulnerable? “As for the answer to your question, I don’t really know. There are lots of versions of the story, and I have no idea what’s myth and what’s real, but according to the version Master Crue taught us—”