The Shadow Prince (48 page)

When I return to the bedroom, I find that Haden has made a nest out of the blankets from the closet for himself between the two queen beds. He wears a pair of light cotton pajama pants … and no shirt. I am not sure I have seen someone with such defined abdominal muscles before. He lies on his right side so I can’t see his scars. His eyes are closed, but I know he’s not asleep as I crawl into the empty queen bed. I lie on the side closest to him. I am motionless for a long time, watching him breathe. He’s so still,
except for his chest lifting and lowering ever so slightly, that he reminds me of a shadow. As sleep starts to creep into my mind, I relax on my side and let my arm drape over the edge of the bed. My hand dangles a few inches above his mouth. His warm breath sends tingles up my arm. After a moment, I feel his fingers close tentatively around mine.

I don’t pull my hand away.

A cool breeze awakens me the next morning. For a moment, I don’t know where I am until I realize that the cold wind is actually the air-conditioning kicking on. I open my eyes and find that I am lying on my back in the hotel bed.

And Haden is gone.

The blankets he’d used are folded neatly and stacked at the end of my bed. I sit up and look around the room. His duffel is gone, too.

Sunrise peeks in between the curtains. Garrick is lying on the floor next to the couch like he’d rolled off it in the middle of the night, and the door to Lexie’s room is still closed. Tobin moans and rolls over onto his back on the adjacent bed. He holds his hand over his eyes.

“Tobin?” I whisper. “Do you know where Haden went?”

“No,” he moans. “But I heard him leave a couple of hours ago.”

“Oh.”

Where did he go?
Why
did he go?

Is he having second thoughts about finding this new Oracle?

Has he changed his mind about me?

I thought maybe after last night he might …

Then again, maybe I’d imagined what had happened between us. That new awareness of each other—a connection. Maybe falling
asleep with our hands clasped had only been part of a dream?

Or maybe he’s just as freaked out about all of it as I am.

The hotel room door opens and Haden slips back inside, with his duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He acts like he’s trying to be quiet at first, like he’s slinking back in, but then comes to a halt when he sees me sitting up in bed.

“Oh good, you’re up,” he says, but I can’t tell if he’s happy to see me. That strange sphere of silence surrounds him and his face is devoid of emotion. He holds up a sheet of hotel stationery. “I found her,” he says. “I found the Oracle.”

“What? How?” I ask, practically jumping off the bed.

“I only require four hours of sleep, so I thought I would get started on the day. I used a courtesy phone in the lobby and started calling every S. Smith in the Las Vegas directory like you suggested.…”

“This early in the morning?”

“Yes. Is that a problem?”

“If you’re a normal human being, yes.”

“Oh. That explains why so many people hung up on me.”

“What did you even say? How do you know you’ve found the right Sarah?”

“I said my name was Dax Lord and I was looking for a Sarah Smith who had helped me out with a problem a few years ago. I had no luck until the thirty-second S. Smith. An elderly man answered. He seemed quite happy to have someone to talk to and after he gave me a quite lengthy lecture on his political views concerning fluoridated water, I told him I was looking for a Sarah Smith, and he told me he had a granddaughter by that name, but that she’d been committed to Sunny Ridge Mental Hospital a few years ago. Because she kept claiming to have visions of the future.
And then he gave me a health update on each one of his relatives, but I think Sarah sounds like the woman we are looking for. Don’t you think?”

“Uh, yes, definitely worth checking out. But how are we getting into a mental institution?”

“I called Sunny Ridge. I’ve got the address right here.” He waves the paper. “Visiting hours are from eleven a.m. to six p.m. We can go as soon as you want.”

“Do you still want to do this?” I ask. I know he agreed to take me to the Oracle only because he thinks she’ll convince me that there are no other options than to surrender to my so-called destiny. I thought after last night, he might change his mind.…

Haden stares at me for a few seconds, amber rings of fire dancing around his pupils. I wish I could read their meaning.

“Yes,” he finally says, sounding more determined than even I had been when Dax first told us of this option.

I want to ask him what he’ll do if the Oracle doesn’t give him the answer he’s looking for.

“Freaks!” Lexie says, pulling open the door to her room. She’s clad in a hotel robe and has a sleep mask advertising the hotel spa pushed up on her forehead. “Do you realize it’s seven a.m.? On a Sunday morning? Stop yammering right outside my door!”

Haden drops my gaze. “We’ll go as soon as you’re ready.”

I nod, not knowing how long it will take me to
ever
be ready for this.

“You people realize you’re going to visit a person who is clinically insane in order to find out your future, right?” Lexie says. “I mean, who’s crazier, the person who’s been put in a mental
institution or the person who asks that person for advice?”

“The rest of you can always stay in the car,” I reply, ringing the admittance bell at the main entrance to Sunny Ridge. It’s a small, shabby building at the end of a quiet street. Not the place where I would expect to find an Oracle living.

“No way.” Lexie slings her purse over her shoulder. “I so want to see the look on your faces when this so-called ‘Oracle’ starts drooling on your shoes and you all finally realize how gonzo you’ve been acting. I wouldn’t miss that for the world.”

“I’m not missing this, either,” Tobin says. “This Oracle lady had better have some answers about my sister.” He reaches out and rings the bell a second time.

“I wouldn’t mind staying in the car,” Garrick says.

“Not you.” Haden snags him by the back of his collar. “I’m not letting you out of my sight again.” He had caught him trying to use the hotel room’s phone while the rest of us were getting ready to leave. “You might be here unwillingly, but I have a feeling Simon isn’t going to care about that if he finds us,” he had said to Garrick, and ripped the phone out of the wall. Which meant we’d had to go to the hotel buffet for lunch instead of ordering room service. “He’s going to be in an ‘order you to walk off a bridge, ask questions later’ kind of mood, don’t you think?”

“What are you even going to say to get in to see this lady?” Lexie asks. “I doubt they’re going to let a bunch of teenagers stroll into this place.”

“Maybe we can pretend to be a traveling choir or something?” Tobin says. “We sing to the sick.”

Lexie snorts.

There’s a rustle behind the door and it opens. A short,
gray-haired woman dressed in scrubs is there.

I fumble to find something to say and almost go with the traveling choir idea, but the woman claps her hands together excitedly. “Oh, you must be Haden and Daphne and the others!” she says. “Sarah has been waiting for you.”

chapter fifty-three

“Did you tell them we were coming?” Daphne whispers as we follow the woman through the building. The floor is made out of a hard substance I believe is called linoleum, which tries to stick to my shoes with every step.

“No. I didn’t tell them anything.”

“Here we go,” the woman says, ushering us into what must be some kind of common room. It is a warm room, even though it has several barred windows along the walls. It is filled with plush chairs, small tables, and a large green table in the center, with a small net stretched across the middle. Two men are using paddles to smack a small white ball back and forth across it. An older woman with stringy white hair sits in the corner, glaring at the wall. It sounds like she’s having an argument with it. Others seem to be wandering almost aimlessly about the room. “Sarah will be so pleased you’re here. She’s been talking about you all week.” She points us in the direction of a young woman who appears to be painting … with her fingers … at an easel at the far end of the room.

I take a step back. “That can’t be her.”

My memory jogs to my encounter with the Oracle of Elysium.
Her skin was blue and glittery, and her veils swirled about her as if blown by an invisible wind. She emitted the power and majesty of the divine. But this young woman, this supposed Oracle in front of me, looks all too … human. Her skin is pale and peachy, and her hair is unkempt and matted in places. She licks the paint from one of her fingers and then looks up from her artwork as if she can feel my gaze on her.

“Haden!” She smiles and waves with a familiarity that makes it seem as though we are old friends. But I don’t know how she sees me—her eyes are milky and clouded over with blindness. “You came!”

She wipes her hands on her robe and bounds over to us. She clasps my hands before I can pull them away and then grabs Daphne in an embrace. “And you brought her! I knew you would.”

“Is this some big joke?” Lexie asks. “Are you guys pranking me?”

Sarah takes Daphne and me by the hands and pulls us toward a table near her easel. Lexie, Tobin, and Garrick follow tentatively behind. I notice then how quiet the room has become, and glance around. The gray-haired woman who brought us here and all the other patients have disappeared without my noticing. “You have many questions, I know, but we don’t have much time. Come sit. Please.”

I am hesitant to take the seat she offers.

“You are flummoxed by my appearance, Haden. I know. You also wonder what I am doing in this mortal vessel, allowing myself to be kept in an asylum. This is not my true appearance.” She taps her finger against her nose. “I am in hiding. Witness protection, you might say.”

“What did you witness?” Daphne asks.

“Everything,” Sarah says with a coy smile. “I see all the paths. All the possibilities. Not just the ones the gods want me to see.”

“So there is another way?” Daphne asks, leaning closer to this Oracle. “I have other options? I don’t have to be a Boon or a Cypher or whatever?”

“You were never meant to be a Boon.”

Daphne gives me a satisfied look. “You hear that?”

“But you are the Cypher. Your role in this is much greater than you can imagine, Daphne, Daughter of the Music.” Sarah reaches her bony hand across the table and places it over Daphne’s. “Being the Cypher is your destiny, no matter what path you take.”

“Ha,” Lexie says. “Your destiny is to be a zero. That’s hilarious.”

That satisfied expression slips right off Daphne’s face.

“I do not mean
cipher
as in the absence of value. Quite the contrary. You are
the
Cypher. You are the key to all of this.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, confused. “Do you mean that Daphne
is
the Key of Hades?”

“No. Daphne is the Cypher. She is the key to
finding
the Key.”

I nod, realizing that Dax’s theory had been correct all along. “But how? And why
her
?”

The Oracle cocks her head and seems to stare at me with her unseeing eyes. She plays with the mats in her hair. “Oh, I see now. My sister from Elysium told you very little of your and Daphne’s destinies.”

“Excuse me,” Daphne says, pushing up from her chair. “Can you please stop talking about me in the third person? I am right here. And I don’t like being referred to as an object. I am not a key or a Cypher. I am just a normal human girl.”

“No, you’re not. And you never were,”
Tobin says from behind
her—but his voice echoes out of him and I know it’s Sarah, the Oracle, speaking through him. Her milky eyes have rolled up into the back of her head. Lexie gives a little shriek and backs away from Tobin.
“You have many names, Daphne Raines. You are the Cypher. The Anoichtiri. The Daughter of the Music. The Descendant of the Great Musician. The Vessel of His Voice. You are the Keeper of Orpheus’s Heart and Soul.”

“Whoa, what?” Daphne asks.

“She’s a descendant of the Traitor?” I ask. “How can that even be possible?”

“Orpheus brought back more than the Key from the Underrealm. When Eurydice died, a casualty in the Thousand-Year War between the Underrealm and the Skyrealm, not only did Orpheus lose his new bride, but he also lost the child she carried in her womb. Distraught with grief, he prayed to his father, Apollo, for help in getting them back. Apollo had also heard the prayers of many mortals, whose homes and lives had been destroyed in the cross fire of the war, and he was determined to put a stop to it. In exchange for instructions on how to traverse the dangers of the Underrealm and bring back his wife, Orpheus agreed to steal the Key from Hades. It was intended to be a bargaining chip for Apollo to use to negotiate a cease-fire between the gods
.

“While Orpheus failed to save Eurydice, he carried with him the child and the Key, the Kronolithe of the original Lord Hades.”

“You guys,” Lexie says, hugging her purse to her chest. “I don’t know how you orchestrated all this, but the joke isn’t funny anymore. Can we go?”