“School?”
“Simon’s call. I was hoping you’d get to avoid it, but he thinks it’s best if you and Garrick enroll in school. He thinks, with everything that happened today with Daphne and this other girl, it’s important that we all act as much like normal humans as possible. He also says the added benefit is that you’ll have the chance to interact with your Boon on more common grounds.”
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.