I nod. “That doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.”
Dax makes a scoffing noise. “You might be from Hades and all, but you haven’t experienced torment quite like high school before.” He swipes at his tablet. “But at least it means no more lurking in the shadows, trying to grab hapless females, and almost getting yourself fried.” There’s an edge to his voice that tells me I haven’t been forgiven completely for my mistake, after all.
Then again, I never actually apologized. It’s against my Underlord nature.
“I didn’t get very far with her, if that makes you feel better.”
“Did she scream or something?”
“No. She hit me.”
“She hit you?” Dax suppresses a smile—not very well. “Where?”
“In the face. Hard.”
He laughs. “Well, I’ll be harpied. I haven’t met her and I already like this Boon.”
“That’s the thing, Dax. This Daphne girl isn’t like any Boon I’ve ever met.…”
“Forget those other Boons. There’s a difference between the girls who go easily into the Underrealm and the majority of mortal women. You see, most Champions get the chance to choose their Boons—they’re usually not preselected for them as with you and me—which means most Champions go after easy prey. Girls who seem like they’re already standing halfway in the dark to start with. Maybe that’s why they don’t last very long. Their spirits were weak from the beginning. But it sounds to me this Daphne girl has got fire.”
“True. And a really mean right hook.”
Dax chuckles. “She reminds me of someone else I met here …,” he says, more to himself than to me.
“Your Boon?”
He doesn’t answer my question.
“What happened to her? Why did you come back alone?”
Dax shakes his head. He rarely talks about his time in the mortal world, and he never mentions the girl he was supposed to bring back. All I knew was that he’d returned alone.
“It’s not something I can talk about.”
“Why?”
“Some things just can’t be said.” Dax returns his attention to his tablet, his jaw clenched as he swipes at it with a forcefulness that seems unnecessary. He’s grown so quiet that I know no amount of pressing will get him to speak of her now.
But there’s a more important question I need answered, so I let the topic of his Boon remain where it stands for now. I sit on the counter next to Brim, and give her another slice of meat so she’ll stop trying to eat my fingers, and then bring up the subject I’ve been wanting to discuss since we were in the owl roost in the Underrealm. It is hard to believe that it has been fewer than twenty-four hours since then.
“When I told you earlier that the Oracle had said my Boon—Daphne, that is—could restore something that had been taken from the Underlords, and I mentioned the word Cypher, you acted as though you knew something. You said something about rumors.…”
Dax stands up abruptly, leaving his tablet on the table, and exits the kitchen.
I jump off the counter. “You said you would tell me what you know,” I call after him.
“Shhhh!” I hear his command to be quiet coming from somewhere near the entrance to the garage. I hear a door open and close. The light from Dax’s tablet catches my eye. I glance down at the screen and see that he has entered the words abecie caelum into a search engine. The second word is Latin for sky, the first word is one I don’t recognize. I scan the rest of the page and see the words: 0 results found. Did you mean: abecu caelum?
Whatever Dax had been searching for, he wasn’t having much luck.
I hear him coming back and I look away from the tablet.
“Sorry,” he says, entering the kitchen. “I needed to be certain that Simon was still out. He has ears like a hawk—I had thought he was well out of range, and yet he still must have overheard us speaking in your room this afternoon. Trust me, Lord Haden. I did not tell him that you had gone to the grove.”
“I know,” I say. “But he obviously has sources beyond good hearing if he knew about me trying to grab Daphne. I told no one about that.”
I remember hearing someone entering the grove just before I left. Perhaps he had someone following me, or he himself had doubled back to the house and had seen me leave and he’d followed. One thing I should have been more careful about was not underestimating Simon, as Dax had instructed.
“What is he?” I ask Dax. “Simon isn’t an Underlord, but he’s most certainly not human.”
“I don’t know what Simon is, but he doesn’t look a day older than when I first met him six years ago. He could be three hundred years old, for all we know. My best guess is that he’s a satyr cloaked in the form of a human. That would explain his heightened senses and slow aging. Not to mention his love for vegetables. But it doesn’t account for his certain powers of persuasion, if you know what I mean.”
“I do,” I say.
No mere mortal—nor mere satyr, for that matter—could bring a lord of the Underrealm to the point of invoking elios like that. And the way I couldn’t move just because he told me I couldn’t—it was as if he were controlling my body with his words. If he could do that to me, I imagine most mortals don’t stand a chance against his persuasiveness. I look around at Simon’s opulent home, and think of the garage full of cars and how easily he had procured new identities for us, and realize just how useful that kind of power would be.
I can’t help wondering why he’s living in a house with three young Underlords and not off ruling a country somewhere. Then I remember what he had said—that all of us “have things riding” on my quest. Does even he know more about my true purpose than I do? And why hadn’t Ren or the Court bothered to fill me, of all the people involved, in on the details?
“What is a Cypher?” I ask Dax. “And why does the Court want it?”
Dax sits at the table, turns off his tablet, and sticks it inside his knapsack, which sits on one of the chairs. He gestures for me to take a seat across from him. Instead, I sit on Simon’s polished countertop and let Brim climb back onto my shoulders. She purrs contentedly next to my ear.
“What do you know about the Key of Hades?” Dax asks.
“I know that the Key was more than the instrument that locked and unlocked the main gates of the Underrealm. I know that it was Hades’s Kronolithe—the thing that granted him his immortality—and without it, the Sky God was able to kill him. I know that the Key was stolen by the Great Traitor, and because of its loss, we Underlords have been locked inside the Underrealm, godless, for centuries. And this brought an end to the Thousand-Year War between our ancestors and the Skylords.”
“All true,” Dax says. “Except the war isn’t over; it’s just at a stalemate, as far as many in the Court are concerned. Why do you think they train us to be warriors? It’s because they hope to restart the war someday. Someday soon, if there’s any credence to the rumors I’ve heard.”
“But how is that even possible? Only a few of us can pass through Persephone’s Gate at a time. And only once every six months. How can the Court wage a war without an army?”
“What if they could open the main gates again?”
“But they would need the Key for that.”
“Exactly,” Dax says. “And to find the Key, they need the Cypher.”
“Daphne? But she’s just some mortal girl. How could she help the Court get a Key that has been lost for millennia?”