The Shadow Prince

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 more 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.”

“I don’t know what to sing.”

“It’ll come to you.”

“There are hundreds of people here.”

“So?”

“This is crazy,” she says.

“This was your plan.”

She groans, but I know she wants to sing.

“Go,” I say. “Before the judges put a stop to it.”

Daphne hugs me. She pulls away too quickly and heads for the stage, stopping only to beg a guitar off a guy who all too willingly hands it over.

She stands on the stage, adjusting the guitar over her shoulder. I can’t help thinking she looks as bright and intangible as a ray of sunshine, standing in the spotlight. She leans into the microphone. “This is a song that I wrote with my dad. You may have heard it before.” She looks in the direction of where she left me standing. “For you, Haden.”

She strums the first few notes on the guitar and then starts singing. “Shadow of a star …”

Her voice echoes out from the speakers, filling the club. The entire room comes to a standstill. All other sounds, voices, movements stop. Or maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m the one who stops, everything else disappearing. Nothing else exists. I can’t even breathe, for fear of missing a single note of her song. Watching her is like staring into the sun, but I can’t look away.

When she finishes, the room remains frozen for a full three seconds, then explodes into cheers and applause. The judges hold up their cards. I can’t see what they say from here, but they make Daphne happy. She throws her hands up in the air and curtseys at the same time. I’ve never seen anyone look so alive.

And that’s when it strikes me. How can I take Daphne away from this world? How can I take sunshine and life into a place of shadow and death?

For the first time, I hope more than anything that the Oracle will tell me I am wrong. If my god were still alive, if I could pray, I’d send down a prayer. I’d beg him to tell the Oracle another way. I’d cry to him for another choice.

Because Hades help me, I’m falling for this girl.

Daphne runs toward me from the stage, the biggest smile on her face. I want nothing more than for her to throw her arms around me. If she doesn’t do it, then I will.

“Are you Joe Vince’s daughter?” a large man asks, stepping between us.

Daphne stops short. “Yes.”

“Ah. I thought so. Do you mind if I get a picture of you for our ‘before they were stars’ wall? We’ve got a picture of your dad up there,” he says, pointing to a wall of framed photographs. “You’re going places, kiddo. I’ll be kicking myself if I don’t get a picture now.”

“Um, yes,” she says, but her gaze flits to me.

She smiles at the man as he takes a picture with his camera. “Someday, we’ll hang this right next to the picture of Joe!”

When the man leaves, Daphne goes to the wall of photos. I follow her. There, right in the center of the wall, in a big black frame, is a picture of a much younger-looking Joe Vince. He poses for the photo with his arm around a girl who looks very much like Daphne.

“Is that …?”

“My mom,” she says. “Wow. This must have been taken the night they met. They were only together for a few days, you know.”

“I didn’t know.… Who’s that with your mom?” I point to a second woman in the photo, standing off to the side a bit. She and Daphne’s mom wear matching silver bracelets that look oddly familiar to me. Like the one Brim wears as her collar.

“Oh,” Daphne says. “That must have been Kayla.”

That name strikes me so hard, I feel like the wind has been knocked out of my chest.

“She and my mom were best friends until Kayla took off. I think that’s one of the reasons my mother never let me leave Ellis. Her one trip outside town—spring break, her senior year—didn’t exactly go as she’d planned. She ended up with a one-week marriage, a surprise pregnancy, and Kayla ended up running off with some guy to New York or something.”

I stare into the eyes of the woman in the photograph. Jade green eyes just like mine. Kayla hadn’t gone off to New York with some guy; she’d gone to the Underrealm. And I know exactly who she went with.

I search the faces in the background of the photograph and find the one I’m looking for: Ren. My father. He looks smaller than I remember in the picture, less regal, wearing blue jeans and a flannel shirt. This is almost eighteen years ago. Back when he was a Champion. Perhaps only hours or days before he returned to the Underrealm. It’s obvious he’s watching the three main people in the photograph, but his eyes aren’t locked on my mother like I’d expect. The person he’s intently staring at is Daphne’s mom.

“Come on,” Daphne says. “Let’s go.”

“Don’t you want to stick around to see if you won?”

She shakes her head. “Singing was prize enough. Besides, it wouldn’t be fair if I took home the trophy, since you bought my way into the competition.”