The Eternity Key (36 page)

My hand goes to the hidden pocket in my dress. The only two things I have in my possession, besides the Key, are Jonathan’s arrow and Joe’s sobriety coin. And there is no way that I am going to use Haden’s antidote to barter for a boat ride. “I have Joe’s sobriety coin,” I say, taking it from my pocket. “It doesn’t have any monetary value, but it resembles a bronze coin.”

Garrick takes a look at it in my outstretched hand. “Charon is
as blind as a bat; that’ll probably do.”

“Wait, a blind guy is going to steer our boat?” Tobin asks.

Garrick doesn’t answer. He picks up his pace, practically running down the beach. He’s too fast for me to keep up with while supporting Tobin. I look down at the coin. I don’t want to part with it, knowing what it means to Joe—to me—but, at the same time, I know he would want me to use it if it would help. “I just wish I knew why Joe didn’t make it to the grove,” I say softly to Tobin. “I hope he’s okay.”

Tobin stops leaning on me and starts walking slowly on his own beside me. “About Joe …,” he says, a regretful tone coming off him. Like he doesn’t
want
to say what’s on his mind. “I saw him right after the play.…”

“Was he okay?” I ask.

“Yeah. I mean, no.” Tobin takes a deep breath. “It’s just that I think he was drunk. He could barely put one foot in front of the other. That’s why he didn’t come.”

I squeeze the coin in my hand and shake my head. “That can’t be.…”

But whatever else I am about to say gets drowned out by a shout from Garrick. The sound of it is so urgent that we respond by jogging down the beach. I pull ahead of Tobin and find Garrick huddled over what appears at first to be a pile of gray rags, but then I realize it’s an old man dressed in tattered robes, curled in a fetal ball.

“You can keep your coin,” Garrick says. “Charon’s dead, and his boat is gone.”

“You mean we’re stranded?” Tobin asks as he appears behind us.

“As in, we’re dead,” Garrick says. “It’s only a matter of minutes before the shades catch our scent.”

chapter fifty-seven

As it turns out, the old boatman isn’t dead but merely knocked out (unlike Garrick, Daphne bothered to check his pulse), but that still doesn’t change the fact that we’re stranded. The old guy isn’t going to be waking anytime soon, based on how many times we jostle him, and there is no sign of his boat.

“Rowan must have commandeered it,” Garrick says, pointing at several sets of erratic footprints in the wet sand on the riverbank. “It looks like there was some sort of altercation.”

“That looks like too many footprints to be just Rowan,” Daphne says.

“Perhaps the guards were with him.”

“Then why would there have been a fight …?” I start to ask, but then I picture Haden trying to escape. Maybe he wasn’t as far under the black sleep as we had thought. “It doesn’t make sense that Rowan would leave us stranded, either.”

“Seriously,” Daphne says. “Doesn’t he
want
us to bring him the Key?”

“Maybe he’s hoping the shades will kill us for him and then he can come back for the Key later—” Garrick swings around, looking in the direction of the horizon behind us. “
Kopros
. They’re
coming,” he whispers, as if he hears something we don’t.

I listen hard and catch a sound in the distance that reminds me of a moaning wind.

“Shades,” Garrick says. “They’ve caught our scent faster than I thought. Do you have to smell so rank, Tobin?”

“I’m sorry; I sweat when I’m onstage … and, you know, about to be eaten by zombies.”

A small, wispy bolt of lightning crackles up in Garrick’s hand. It’s not nearly as impressive as the lightning I’ve seen Haden throw. “Get behind me,” he says, sounding braver than I have ever given him credit for.

“Wait,” Daphne says. “Look, across the river. I think that’s a boat!”

I follow her pointing gesture, straining my eyes to see what she’s so excited about. At first, I don’t see anything, but then I make out what appears to be the underside of a small, capsized boat. It looks like it’d been swept across the river from the dock and crashed into a small cove on the other side. It bobs in the water as the current pushes it against the rocks over and over again.

“We’ll never make it!” Garrick says as the ethereal moaning grows closer. Between the sound of the encroaching shades and the rushing water, we have to shout everything we say just to be heard.

“Maybe we can bring it to us.” Daphne runs out to the edge of the dock … and starts singing. For a moment, I think she may have lost her marbles, but then I watch as she raises her hands toward the capsized boat—and it bobs higher in the water than it had before. She increases her volume (really belting now), and the boat lifts up out of the water. Daphne twists her hands, and the boat responds by turning itself over so it’s right side up. She beckons
the boat to come to her. The vessel, slightly bigger than the two-man sailboats that many of the lakeside residents of Olympus Hills own, skids and skips across the water until it thumps into the front of the dock. Daphne flattens herself on the dock, grabbing the nose of the boat before it can be swept away again.

I stand, staring at Daphne in awe. She’d told us about this newfound power, but I hadn’t seen more than her floating-chair demonstration of it until now. “That. Was. Awesome.”

“The shades are getting closer,” Garrick says. “And that boat has no sail.” He points to where the mast of the small boat has been broken off. “And there are no oars. It’s useless.”

“Maybe we can just sit in it and float?” I yell.

“Rivers run backward in the Underrealm,” Garrick says. “Look at the current: it runs in the opposite direction of where we need to go.”

“I just lifted a boat across the water with my voice,” Daphne calls. “I think I can sail this thing. Now hurry and get Charon into the boat before my arms fall off.”

I grab the unconscious man, grateful that he’s even smaller than I am, drag him to the end of the dock, and heft him into the boat. Then I grab the end of the dock and hold on while Daphne climbs in with the Key and settles herself against the broken stump of the mast.

The moaning sound turns to wails, and I see a line of shadowy figures coming over the ridge. I don’t know if it’s just my imagination, but it appears they have no faces save their gaping mouths.

“Come on!” I shout to Garrick.

He flings his bolt of lightning at one of the shades that advances ahead of the others with terrifying swiftness. The bolt misses, and Garrick stumbles backward, almost falling.

“Garrick!” Daphne shouts.

He rights himself and runs for the boat, the shade barreling after him. Garrick leaps from the dock, and as his feet touch down in the boat, I let go of the dock. The faceless shade shrieks and tries to take a swipe at me. The boat, caught in the current, carries us away from it just in time.

“I hope those things can’t swim!” Daphne shouts.

I sigh with relief when it doesn’t follow, only to have it drowned out by Garrick’s shout: “We’re headed for the rocks again!” Sure enough, the boat is careening toward the cove where Daphne had found it.

“I’m working on it!” Daphne shouts, before launching into song. Her voice warbles at first, but then gains strength as if she is fighting against the current. With the Key still clenched in one of her fists, she pushes her hands and arms out in front of her and then sweeps them back toward her chest in a fluid movement that almost reminds me of a mix between hula dancing and Tai Chi.

I want to ask what she’s doing but realize that would break her concentration. Then I remember one of the lines from Joe’s play about how Orpheus’s voice was so powerful, he could even command rivers to change their courses. The boat lurches away from the incoming rocks, and I stare over the side of the boat, realizing that Daphne is pulling the water around the boat in a different direction from the rest. She’s changing the current.

We’ve been sailing for what feels like an hour but could be longer, for all I can tell. There’s no sun here, even though the sky (or whatever it is above us) is lit up by some sort of ghastly, dim light. It had been evening when we left Olympus Hills, but the time of day seems indeterminate here. I can tell Daphne’s strength is
waning. Her voice is beginning to sound hoarse, and the movement of her arms is much slower. The river is calmer here, wider, and without any rapids. I see what I assume is a tree branch drifting in the water and hope to hell—or, um, Hades—that it is as I reach for it over the side of the boat. I snatch it up and toss it to Garrick, and pick up another branch that I had collected earlier.

“Take a break,” I call to Daphne. “Garrick and I can row for a while.”

Garrick, who has been doing nothing while I manned the rudder through the rough patches, grumbles at this, so I throw him a cross look. Daphne drops her arms and sinks to the floorboards beside me, leaning her head against the mast, and sets the Key down beside her.

I let her rest while I dip my branch into the water like an oar. I hear a small sniffle, and I watch as she tries to blink away tears from her eyes before anyone sees. I may not share her ability to discern others’ emotions through tones and all that, but it’s obvious she’s overwhelmed, exhausted, and worried about Haden. I kick myself for trying to tell her about Joe, but an even heavier weight pulls on me.

I need to confess.

“Daphne,” I say softly. “I need to tell you something.…”

She opens her eyes, gives a small sigh, but doesn’t look at me. Just watches the river straight ahead.

“Terresa did come to me. She wanted me to help her get the Key in exchange for help finding my sister. She wanted to use it to exterminate the Underlords. I’m not going to lie; I thought about helping her, briefly. I was tempted.… But I couldn’t do it. Not when I thought about other people’s sisters and daughters being down here. I couldn’t let Terresa hurt them.”

“What about the notes?” she asks, still not looking at me.

“There were no
notes
. Only one …”

She rocks her head so she’s staring in the opposite direction from me now.

“I told Terresa that I was going to help her but then gave her a note with the wrong information. I told her the Key was hidden at Old Sutton Mill—the place where I used to play with Abbie. I said we were going to go for it after the play when we were supposed to be at a cast party. I swear, everything I told her was a lie. I was trying to draw her away from the grove, not lead her to it.”

Daphne is quiet for a few moments.

“If that was really the case, then why didn’t you just tell us beforehand?”

“Because you would have tried to stop me.… I was going to take her to the mill myself just to make sure she was as far away from the grove as possible.”

“But, Tobin,” she says. “Terresa might have killed you when she found out you were tricking her.”

“I know,” I say under my breath. In my head, I had convinced myself that I would be able to talk myself out of danger. That I could convince Terresa that we had merely been too late to steal the Key before the others went through the gate, or that I could run away while she was distracted by searching the mill, but I had also known that there was a possibility I would fail. It might seem crazy, but that possibility had seemed worth it to make sure all the other girls like Abbie in the Underrealm would be safe from Terresa’s wrath.

Even if I didn’t go to the mill with her, she still would have tried to hurt me. As evidenced by the throbbing burn from the electrified knife she’d held to my throat.

I paddle the boat, propelling us around a bend in the river. Daphne turns toward me now. “But how did Terresa know, then, before anyone else? It was like she was hiding in the grove, just waiting for me to unlock Orpheus’s tree.”

“Maybe someone else tipped her off as to our true plan. She was gone before things even went wrong with curtain call … like she already knew.”

“Dax?” she asks. “He wasn’t in the grove like he was supposed to be. Do you think he …?” She lets the thought drop off as if it’s too hard for her to contemplate.

“I don’t know.…”

“Kopros!”
Garrick shouts. He stands up so suddenly that it rocks the boat in his direction. He almost falls out, but Daphne grabs his ankle, pulling him back down. “Look!”

As we come fully around the bend, I see it in front of us: a whirlpool. The current grabs the boat, and we start to spin. Daphne tries to stand, in order to command the water, but we’re turning too fast and she has to cling to the broken mast. I try rowing against the current with my branch, but it’s swept right out of my hands. I can barely hear Daphne’s singing over the raging water, but she’s trying her best to propel us away from danger.

“Do something!” Garrick shouts as the boat goes careening toward an outcropping of rocks. He thrusts his branch against one of the rocks, but the push sends us back into the spin. The whirlpool has us now, water sloshing into the boat like a giant wet hand, trying to pull us under. I didn’t even know rivers could have whirlpools (apparently they can in the underworld), but this one seems almost as if it were alive.