The Shadow Prince

by Bree Despain

  I don’t understand why humans would want to come here to relax.

  Garrick collapses into a plush chair in the lobby, looking as though he might vomit again. If I find this place overwhelming, I’m sure his throbbing head can barely handle it.

  “Hey,” Tobin says to Daphne, pointing at the entrance to the Crossroads Blues Club on the other side of the casino floor. “Isn’t that the club where your dad got his big break?”

  “Yeah,” she says, after thinking for a moment. “I thought this place sounded familiar. Some big talent scout saw him play here … which means this is also the place where my parents met. Weird.”

  “I’m going to go talk to the front desk,” Lexie says, and makes her way through the crowd in the lobby. I can’t get over the amount of people here. Daphne is right; finding this Sarah Smith in a city this overrun feels improbable, if not impossible.

  “So how do we find this Oracle?” Tobin asks. “The sooner I can get a lead on Abbie, the better.”

  Daphne and I exchange a look.

  “I think you need to tell him,” I say. I feel gutted at the idea that, because of me and my family, she has to share such horrible news with her best friend. I’d do it myself, but I know he’ll take it better from her than from me.

  “Tobin, can I talk to you for a minute?” Daphne asks him. “In private.”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  I watch her lead him to an empty bench near a fountain in the lobby. The spray of the water drowns out their voices, and I am too far away to read their lips, but I can tell from their body language that Daphne is filling Tobin in on what Dax told us—or didn’t tell us—about what happened to his sister. She places her hand over his. His bright face darkens, and he crumples forward against her shoulder. I turn away, no longer able to watch.

  It’s a good ten minutes later when Lexie returns from the front desk. “There’s some big teen talent contest or some garbage being hosted by the club tonight, so the place is pretty booked up. I couldn’t get the penthouse, but I did manage to swing us a two-bedroom suite. A room with a king and the other has two queens. I don’t know how you all want to deal with your sleeping arrangements, but I finagled the room, so I call dibs on the king.”

  “I don’t care,” Tobin says, approaching with Daphne. “As long as I’m not sharing a bed with him.” He gives me a pointed look that says that even though I wasn’t here six years ago, he’s holding me responsible for what happened to his sister.

  “Tobin, I—”

  “Save it,” he says. “I’m not giving up on Abbie until that Oracle looks me in the face and tells me there’s no way to get her back.”

  “I don’t think …” I let my sentence trail off, not seeing the point of trying to dissuade him. Some people won’t see the truth, no matter how hard you point it out to them.

  “Now can we go to our room?” Tobin says.

  “Yeeessss,” Garrick answers, sounding like he’s about to black out again.

  “Suit yourself,” Lexie says, handing us each a key card. “I’m headed to the spa.”

  Daphne hangs back. “I think I’m going to stay down here for a while,” she says.

  She doesn’t quite sound like herself.

  chapter fifty

  DAPHNE

  I realize as I sit with Tobin near the fountain, that the lobby of a Vegas hotel isn’t the best place to tell him the worst news of his life—but it’s too late. I’ve already made up my mind to do it, and if I stop now, I don’t know how I’ll find the courage to do it later.

  “I know what happened to Abbie,” I say before my words fail me. “She’s gone, Tobin.”

  “Yeah, she was taken by one of these Underlords, right? That’s why I need to go see this Oracle. She’ll tell me how to get her back.”

  “It’s not that simple.” My voice catches, and I clear my throat.

  “What is it, Daphne?” he says, like he can see the trepidation on my face. “What’s wrong?”

  “I am afraid … I’m afraid she’s dead.”

  He pulls his hand out from under mine. “How do you know that? You can’t know that!”

  “I met the Lord who was supposed to bring her back to the Underrealm with him.…”

  “What do you mean, ‘supposed to’? Like he didn’t …?”

  “Your sister really did run away, Tobin. Or at least she tried to. The Lord who was supposed to take her, Dax is his name.… They fell in love and tried to run away instead of going back to the underworld. But something went wrong. Somebody came after them. And she died.”

  “What went wrong?” Tears flood his eyes. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.” I bite my lip, trying to hold it together. “I don’t know any more than that.”

  Tobin covers his eyes with his hands. He crumples forward and I catch him, leaning his head against my shoulder. He quakes as I hold him, giving off notes so strained with sorrow that it drowns out the Christmas music and hotel noises. They wrap around me and I feel as though I am engulfed in a cocoon of his grief.

  “There’s more, Tobin.” I don’t want to say it, but I have to. I can’t keep the truth from him any longer. I would want to know if it were me. “That list you showed me. The one of all those missing girls. Those have to be all the girls who have been taken to the underworld; these Boons as they call them.… And if my name is on your mother’s list now, before … before I was even taken … that means …”

  Tobin’s sorrowful melody shifts suddenly into harsh, broken notes. He lets go of me and I can see the anger flashing in his eyes, not just hear it coursing off him. “It means my mother knew,” he says, finishing for me. “She knew that my sister was one of their targets. But why wouldn’t she try to stop them?”

  “Tobin, I—”

  He looks at me, anger hardening his face. Or maybe it’s determination. “I’m going to get her back,” he says. “I’m getting Abbie back.”

  “But she’s dead.…”

  “That Orpheus guy did it. That’s what your dad’s play is about, isn’t it? He went down there and got his wife back.”

  And failed. “I don’t think it works that way.…”

  “I’m going to get her back.”

  I feel Tobin clinging to this idea like it’s the only thing keeping him from falling into a dark hole of despair. I can’t bring myself to tell him that even the son of a god had failed at trying to bring his loved one back from the world of the dead. Instead, I just nod and let him keep holding on. In the meantime, I can feel myself slipping off the edge.

  When the others retire to our hotel room, I can’t bring myself to follow. Talking to Tobin had done exactly what I feared it would—it had made all of this real. Far too real. The soft, filmy coat of denial I’d been looking at everything through had been eaten away by cold, harsh reality. Tobin’s hope only makes it worse. It makes him seem naive and delusional, and made me realize that I could no longer deny what is happening. That the world, as I have known it for seventeen years, is a lie, that it hides terrible secrets like monsters and vengeful gods, Cyphers and Keys, and a selfish underworld prince who isn’t going to stop until he gets what he wants: me.

  Is there even anything this Oracle can do to help me stop it? Is there anywhere I can hide where they wouldn’t just hunt me down? And if I do escape, would the consequences of losing the Cypher be as catastrophic as Haden had tried to make me believe?

  Do I really have a choice in any of this?

  I wander the hotel, looking for a distraction. Anything that can bring back that easy film of denial. Anything that can help me forget. I try going into the casino, where people sit at machines, looking like dull zombies, but someone barks at me when I try to step off the carpet walkway that leads through the area. No kids allowed. I keep walking until I find myself at the Crossroads Blues Club—the place where my parents met all those years ago. The place that led to a drive-thru wedding and a three-day honeymoon before Joe got a call from that talent scout and he ran
off to become a rock star. I expect someone else to yell at me when I walk into the club, but instead, the man in the entry takes one look at me, slams a green stamp on my hand, and tells me that the right half of the room is reserved for “contestants and their families.”

  The club is dim and smells thick of booze—which seems fitting since it reminds me of Joe. This is the place where it had all started. I probably wouldn’t have ever been born if my parents hadn’t both ended up here that fateful night.

  I laugh to myself at that word. Fateful. Fate. That thing Haden clings to and I desperately want to escape.

  I want to forget.

  A waitress stops at a booth with a tray of shot glasses. She sets it on an empty table and starts flirting with a group of frat boys who’ve called her over.

  I’ve always despised Joe for his drinking. I’ve never understood his need to drown out the world. But at that moment, I get it. Because all I want is to forget—if only for one night. I want to stop feeling. I want to be numb.

  I want to make it all go away.

  While the waitress is distracted, I snag four shot glasses—two in each hand—and retreat to a secluded booth in the back of the club. Where I can drown in the dark.

  chapter fifty-one

  HADEN

  “How many of those have you had?” I ask Daphne when I find her in the Crossroads Blues Club. There’s some sort of talent competition going on, and the place is packed. A teenage boy is onstage, playing a wicked solo on the bass guitar. Daphne sits in a booth near the back of the club. In front of her sit a few small glasses filled with an amber liquid that gives off a sharp, woody smell. She looks a bit green in the face.

  “Two,” she says, holding up two fingers. “Two sips, that is. I keep trying to down a shot whole, but the taste makes me gag.”

  I had begun to worry when it started to get late and Daphne hadn’t come back to the room. Garrick was passed out on the couch in the suite and Tobin was raiding the mini-refrigerator and giving me sidelong death glances, so I decided to go looking for her. Somehow, I knew she’d be in the club. And from the looks of her, I’d been right to be worried.

  “I think two shots will get me buzzed,” she says. “I think a third shot will get me properly drunk. It may take four or five before I black out. I don’t know. I’ve never had alcohol before.”

  “How did you even get those?” I’d used the ID that said I was twenty-one at the entrance of the club, but because of the talent competition, the place is overrun by underage kids and their families. Daphne has a bright fluorescent green stamp on her hand to indicate she isn’t legal.

  “Stole ’em off a tray.”

  “That takes some guts.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll leave some money on the table.”

  “That’s not what I’m worried about.”

  “I haven’t decided if I’m going to keep trying to drink this one yet,” she says, running her finger around the rim of the glass. “I don’t drink. I swore I never would because of Joe. My mom is always giving me lectures about how kids of alcoholics have to be real careful—how underage drinking increases their risks of losing control. I don’t like not being in control. It doesn’t fit into my plan. Everything I’ve done my whole life has been part of my master plan. Teaching myself music, rehearsing day and night, practicing self-discipline. It was all leading toward the same goal. I knew exactly where I was going and how I wanted to get there. And then you had to come along.…”

  “Can I sit?”

  She shrugs. “It’s not like I could stop you.”

  “You could if you wanted to.”

  She looks up at me. “Could I?”

  I purse my lips.

  The guy with the bass guitar finishes his solo, and the crowd goes wild with applause. A table of who I assume are judges hold up white cards with numbers on them. The audience gets even more excited.

  She slides over in the booth. “Knock yourself out.” She pats the seat next to her, and I figure she’s inviting me to sit next to her, not punch myself in the head. So I sit.

  She scoots the shot glass closer to her. “I’ve been in denial since the night of the festival,” she says. “Thinking I have some sort of say in all of this. It’s just … telling Tobin about his sister made all of this suddenly feel very real. Too real.” The tip of her finger curls over the lip of the glass into the amber liquid. “And I haven’t got the slightest idea what to do.”

  I want to tell her to give in. I want to tell her to stop fighting her destiny. I want to tell her to agree to come with me. Instead, I say, “I don’t think you’re going to find the answers in the bottom of that glass.”

  “Yeah, but maybe I’ll find some distraction. I want to forget for a while,” she says, holding the glass. She sighs and looks up at the girl on the stage. “That was supposed to be me, you know?”

  “How so?”

  “It’s funny,” she says, “that I’m here. This weekend. In Las Vegas. Trying to save myself. Because that was part of my original plan.”

  A girl onstage goes to the microphone and starts singing. She’s good, but not half as good as Daphne.

  “My plan was to be here for this very competition.” She points up at the sign over the stage. “All-American Teen Talent Competition. I was headed to the preliminary auditions for this competition the day Joe showed up in Ellis and told me I was coming to live with him. Before I met you. This was the plan. I was going to kill it at the auditions and make it past the preliminary round and end up here.” She laughs a little to herself. “I told Jonathan that I’d settle for second place, but that wasn’t true. I knew I’d end up here. Some big talent scout or college recruiter was going to see me sing and give me my big break. My big ticket out of Ellis Fields. Away from that small-town, nobody life.” She gives a short little laugh. “I didn’t know that the final competition was going to be at the Crossroads, though. That’s just kind of … weird.”

  I nod.

  “I guess it wouldn’t have mattered. They would have just sent you to Ellis Fields instead of Olympus Hills. I’d still be in this mess, and the plan would still have gone to hell.” She smirks like she finds it all pretty funny. From the way she’s talking so openly, I’d think she’s already had more to drink than a couple of sips.

  “You know?” she says, seeming to speak to the shot glass instead of me. “Why the hell not? Let’s get good and drunk. My life is probably over anyway.” She picks up the glass, like she’s going to down it in one gulp. “Bottoms up!” she says, pinching her nose.

  “No,” I say, putting my hand over the top of the glass, stopping her. “I’ve got a better idea for a distraction.” I set the glass on the tray of a passing server. “Come on.” I pull her from the booth.

  “What are we doing?” she asks, but she doesn’t protest being propelled from the club out into the casino.

  “You’ll see. First, we need some leverage.”

  I tell her to wait outside the club entrance and I make my way nonchalantly to an unoccupied slot machine. I watch how a woman in a giant, tentlike dress uses the machine next to mine. Then I pull a quarter from my pocket and put it into the slot machine. I pull the lever and place my hand on top of the machine and send an electrical pulse into it from my fingertips. The woman next to me goes nuts as the entire row of slot machines comes to life, blinking and beeping and announcing a winner. “Jackpot!” she shouts. “Jackpot!” All eyes are on her as I pull a slip of paper from my own blinking machine.

  Five thousand dollars. Not bad for my first attempt at the slots.

  “What was that?” Daphne asks as I lead her back inside the club.

  “I told you. Leverage.”

  I walk right up to the table where the MC for the competition waits while the contestants perform on the stage. She’s a middle-aged woman who is sporting more cleavage than shirt.

  “What are you doing, Haden?” Daphne whispers.

  I lean in close to the MC, and she looks up at me, a bit m
ore than startled. I set the slip of paper on the table in front of her. “How about a late entry?”

  “I’m sorry, sonny. I can’t do that.”

  “You’ve got to. You see my friend over there?” I gesture to Daphne, who stands very tentatively a few feet behind me. She probably thinks I’ve gone insane. “It was her dream to be part of this competition, but something came up that threw off her plan, something that was kind of my fault, and now I’m trying to make it up to her. And I need you to help me.” I smile at her in a way that, hopefully, doesn’t make her think of me as a “sonny” and slide the paper closer to her so she can see the amount of money she can redeem it for. “Just let her sing, please?”

  “All right, honey,” she whispers. “Can’t say no to a boy with a smile like that. And this ain’t too bad, too.” She picks up the slip of paper and tucks it into the front of her shirt. “I’d think about telling you my room number, sugar, but it’s obvious you’ve got a thing for your friend over there.”

  I whisper a few more things to her, and then when the latest contestant finishes and the crowd applauds, the MC heads up to the stage.

  “What did you just do?” Daphne asks, quite accusingly.

  I smile at her.

  “What. Did. You. Do?”

  “Seems we’ve got one more number for you all,” the MC says. “Daphne Raines, come on up here, hon!”

  “What?” She balks at me. “I can’t. I don’t … I don’t even have a guitar!”

  “Then ask that guy,” I say, pointing at one of the contestants. “Smile at him and he’ll give it to you.”