The Eternity Key Read online

  Skipping breakfast, I head straight for Mom’s office. The door is locked—she’s been doing that since she caught Daphne and me in there the night of the music department’s party—so I grab the spare key that’s hidden in a hollowed-out copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince on the shelf in Dad’s study. My parents don’t know I know about that. Nor that I know our family’s dirtiest secrets.

  Once inside her office, I bypass the glass cases housing her antiquities collection and go for the built-in mahogany cabinets where she keeps her mayoral-related files. I figure if I can start where I left off, then maybe I can pick up the trail again. I’m not sure what I’m looking for—something that might help Daphne and Haden find this Key of Hades, or anything—anything at all—that might help Dax and me track down Abbie.

  I don’t have the foggiest idea of where they’ve gotten in either search, because I’ve been grounded (aka under house arrest) for the last two weeks for taking off for a couple of days without telling my parents. My incarceration was my own damn fault.

  I’d gotten more than I’d bargained for on that trip—like the realization that my own mother was in cahoots with the real bad guys and the knowledge that my sister had been living under a false identity for the last few years in Daphne’s hometown. Not to mention my joining up with a quest to find the Key of Hades before the end of the world comes. As far as my parents are concerned, I’d been yucking it up with friends in Las Vegas, so I can’t really blame them, but the punishment has majorly cramped my ability to help out with both the search for Abbie’s new whereabouts and this all-powerful Key.

  But since the world hasn’t ended yet nor my long-lost sister shown up on my doorstep, I figured both searches were probably still under way, so I’ve been conducting what little research I can do within in the confines of my internment. As in, sneaking into my mother’s office whenever she isn’t hovering over my shoulder.

  With school starting up again and my finally getting some freedom back, I am determined to have something useful to offer the group when I see them again. Only, so far, all I’ve been able to find out is that the Olympus Hills master-planned community dates back only about sixty years. But the land itself has been owned by the rich and sometimes notorious for as far back as I was able to go. At one point, the land was even owned by a branch of the Spanish royal family in the 1700s.

  I skim through the files in one of my mother’s private cabinets. Another surge of anger flows through me when I see the file folder that holds the names of girls—my own sister’s included—who’ve gone missing from town during the last fifty years. I skip over it and keep flipping through files until I see an older portfolio folder labeled O.H. SURVEYANCE. I pull out the folder, thinking it might be useful. Inside, I find a stack of what looks like old geological maps of the Olympus Hills area. A couple toward the back are yellowed and brittle, and look like they were hand drawn, with handwritten labels like what you’d expect on a pirate’s treasure map.

  I hear a door slam upstairs, followed by my mother calling my name. My phone, which I had only been granted back post-grounding from my mother’s clutches late last night, chimes loudly with an incoming text. I curse myself for not setting it to silent before infiltrating enemy lines. I pull it from my pocket and see it’s a message from Daphne, asking me to meet her at school, before I switch it off.

  As quickly as I can, I slip the entire folder inside my old guitar case and close the cabinet drawer. I hear my mother calling me again, and this time it sounds like she’s headed down the stairs. I jog quietly through the door with my backpack and guitar case, lock it, return the key, and head for the kitchen. As I round the corner, I almost run right into Mom. She jumps like I’m some sort of monster leaping out at her.

  “There you are,” she says, clutching her silk kimono to her chest. She’s not wearing her usual makeup, and her face seems puffy and splotched, like she hasn’t been sleeping well. “Why didn’t you answer when I called?”

  “Bathroom,” I snap.

  She blinks at my curt tone, and I realize I’m letting my anger show too much.

  I try to dial it back. “It’s my fault. I called back, but I must not have been loud enough for you to hear me,” I say, with the politeness that she expects, but it physically pains me to do so when all I want is to yell and rage at her. But I’d promised Daphne and Haden I wouldn’t let on that I know she’s been aiding in the kidnappings of the daughters of Olympus Hills, not to mention that she was involved in what happened to my own sister.

  “And what are you doing with that?” she asks, pointing at my guitar case. For half a second, I worry that maybe the Underlords have gifted her with X-ray vision, like the strange powers Simon had, and she can see the file folder inside the case. But then she goes on in her best tiger-mom tone: “I thought we agreed last year that you would give up guitar in favor of violin.”

  I hate the violin and she knows it. I want to be the next Frank Sinatra or Bruno Mars, not the next Hiroaki Yura. I swear sometimes my mom gives me this look like she questions if I’m really half Asian.

  “I can do both,” I say. “Mr. Morgan wants me to play a little in the opera. Daphne said she’d teach me a few new things after school.”

  She narrows her eyes, and I realize I’ve said exactly the wrong thing. “And when have you been speaking to Daphne? You were grounded for a reason, and I’ve told you how I feel about you spending extra time with that girl.”

  I’d never admitted it but when I didn’t come home for two days, my mom had assumed it had something to do with Daphne. She’d been in a total panic when I finally returned. Maybe she’d thought I’d been spirited off by a group of Underlords. Though she hadn’t seemed to mind that idea when she promised to trade my sister for the capital she needed to get her wind energy company up and running. I bite my tongue, forcing myself not to mention any of this to her. She takes my silence for insolence.

  “I don’t have time for your teen angst, Tobin. Clearly, you need to be further reminded of your responsibilities to this family and the proper behavior that your father and I expect. You will be home straight after school today, no excuses.”

  “But …”

  “Don’t even start with me today, young man. I do not have the patience. This house, your school, that fancy music program I indulge you with, even though you should be applying to MIT, like Sage; you have no idea the lengths I go to so you and your brother can have a good life.”

  My anger twists into a knot inside my chest. So she’s saying that what she did to Abbie is my fault? So I can have this life? Her phone starts ringing in her hand. “Actually, I think I know exactly what you’re capable of doing,” I whisper under my breath.

  “What was that?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll be home right after school.”

  She eyes me for a second, and I worry she may have heard what I’d originally said over the shrill ring of her phone. She checks her caller ID, and a frantic look crosses her eyes.

  “You should answer that,” I say, and leave.

  As I head into the foyer, I hear her say into her phone, “No, Marta, still nothing from Simon. I have no idea—” before she shuts herself into her office.

  So my mother knows Marta as well as Simon? I shouldn’t be surprised. Joe had postulated that the reason Abbie had fled from her life of hiding as CeCe Caelum in Ellis Fields is because she must have recognized Marta, Joe’s assistant and Simon’s lackey, when they came to move Daphne to Olympus Hills.

  I make a mental note to look into what Marta might know about Abbie’s second disappearance and then pull out my phone. On my way to the car, with my guitar case packed with stolen maps, I respond to Daphne’s text: I might have something, too. Can’t wait to see what you found. Be there in ten.

  chapter four

  HADEN

  “You don’t look so good,” Daphne says to me as I enter the music room a half hour before school is supposed to begin. She’s holding a green bo
ok open in front of her, and what looks like a breakfast of a protein bar and a can of root beer. “Rough night? Rain keep you up?” There’s a challenging edge to her voice, and I wonder if she knows that I camped outside her window for most of the night.

  My throat is sore, my ears feel strangely heavy, and I can barely keep my eyes open, but I only shrug in response. I don’t feel like getting into it with her. I might slip and say too much.

  She looks like she’s about to question me further, but her attention is pulled away when Tobin and Lexie come through the door behind her.

  “Tobin!” she says, jumping out of her seat, that green book still clutched in her hand. “Finally. Two weeks is too long.”

  A flash of jealousy runs up my spine as I watch her embrace Tobin in an enthusiastic hug. His face brightens for a moment as he greets her in return, then falls into an expression that I recognize as a mask used to hold back a flood of emotion. I know the look because it’s one I’ve practiced all my life.

  “Remind me to leave a note the next time we run off to Vegas, then,” Tobin says. “My mom is the queen of grounding.”

  “At least she doesn’t have the power to have you executed, like my father,” I say. It was meant to be an aside to myself, but they all stare at me.

  “No, but she does go around handing innocent teen girls over to him for profit,” Tobin says, “so you don’t exactly have the corner on the market of evil parents.”

  I glare at him. If he really wants to split hairs over whose parent is more—

  “Okay, awkward,” Lexie says, settling into her desk with some type of bright purple smoothie in one hand and a cup of steaming coffee in the other. “Who peed in your guys’ Cheerios this morning?”

  “I don’t think Haden’s been sleeping very well,” Daphne says. She doesn’t meet my eyes; instead, she traces her fingers over the cover of her book.

  I blink and temper myself, realizing that my long night has me as cantankerous as a Gorgon. I should be as happy as Daphne to see Tobin, considering he risked his neck with the rest of us in coming back to Olympus, and was in an extra-precarious situation, living with his mother. Who knows what she would do if she found out we’re onto her secret life?

  “Gang’s all here?” Dax says, ushering a very non-enthusiastic-looking Garrick, my Lesser half brother and recently former servant, into the room in front of him and breaking the tense mood. “We’ve only got a few minutes before classes start. Anyone find anything new?”

  I shake my head. Not because I don’t have anything to report to the group since our last strategy meeting, but because I don’t want to tell the others about the person—or nonperson—whom I saw on the beach last night. Since Dax insisted he hadn’t seen anything, and nothing had happened afterward, I was trying to convince myself that it was merely a mirage.

  “I have my Sopranos researching different places in California that have either the words devil, god, key, or hidden in their names,” Lexie says. “They’re in the dark as to why, of course.”

  Leave it to Lexie to use her little mafia of minions to do her dirty work.

  “There’s a place called Devil’s Pitchfork in the Mojave Desert that’s topping the list at the moment. Maybe we need to take a little field trip this weekend.”

  “Sounds interesting,” Dax says.

  “I still think it’s here,” Daphne says, lowering her book. “It has to be.”

  It was Daphne’s insistence that the Key must be hidden in Olympus Hills that sent us back here. Her logic had been solid: if Orpheus had escaped from the Underrealm with the Key through Persephone’s Gate, which was located on the grove island of the lake in the center of Olympus Hills, while being pursued by a pack of Keres, he wouldn’t have gotten very far with his contraband. Therefore he must have hidden it somewhere close or within the town’s boundaries. Even after our searches turned up nothing, she still clung to the idea when the rest of us were ready to move on. The cursed Key could be all the way in Greenland, for all we knew.

  “I still think it’s in the grove,” Daphne says. “I’m guessing Orpheus ditched it the second he made it through the gate. If we dig around a little more …”

  “No way,” Garrick says. “We’ve turned that place inside out.”

  “I’m with the kid,” Lexie says. Garrick tosses her a death glare for being referred to as an infant goat, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “My manicurist threatened to fire me as her client if I keep disrespecting her handiwork. I was not made for digging in dirt.”

  “I think Daphne’s right,” Tobin says.

  Lexie and Garrick groan. “That’s because you haven’t been here,” Lexie says. “You’ve been lounging about in the cushy king-sized bed of yours while the rest of us have been searching. I have blisters.”

  “My blisters have blisters,” Garrick says.

  “I haven’t just been lounging in bed.” Tobin’s cheeks darken. “I’ve been investigating my mother’s files. I took some maps from my mother’s office, and I think I found something. One of the maps looks like the original plans for Olympus Hills, drawn up decades ago.” He sets his guitar case on the desks in front of me and opens the latches. Just when I think he’s planning on serenading us, he pulls a large folder from inside the case. He sets out map after map on the surrounding desks.

  “I think this one is the oldest,” he says, pointing at a map that is brittle and yellow. “And this is the most recent.” He indicates one on clean white paper. “I think it matches the brochures my mom passes out to prospective residents.”

  “Oh, I think I have one of those,” Daphne says, riffling in her tote bag. She pulls out a crumpled pamphlet and spreads it out with the other papers, then stands inspecting them while hugging her green book to her chest.

  Dax and I huddle around the maps with her and Tobin as Lexie drinks her smoothie, watching us with uninterest. Garrick lies on top of a couple of desks, as if he’s going to take a nap.

  “Do you see it?” Tobin asks.

  I study the maps in front of me. On the oldest map, the area is a wooded wilderness and there isn’t a lake. I remember Simon telling me that the Olympus Hills lake was man-made, but I wonder when it was excavated. I scan the maps and land on one that’s yellowed at the edges, but not yet brittle. I notice a handwritten note in the corner: OH prospective ver. 1. I compare it with the WELCOME TO OLYMPUS HILLS, A LUXURY MASTER-PLANNED COMMUNITY! brochure.

  “Does anyone else notice something missing from this map?” Tobin asks, pointing at what I assume to be the original design for the Olympus Hills community.

  I give it another inspection, and something catches my attention.

  “The grove,” Tobin answers his own question before I can respond. “The smaller island of the lake where the grove is, it’s not in this plan. Everything else is the same as the brochure, the island for the school, Olympus Row, the walking paths around the lake. Everything except the grove …”

  “Like someone changed the plan,” Daphne says. “Perhaps someone who knew there was something special about the grove?”

  “No way. You guys, get this,” Lexie says, paying attention now. “After Pear was attacked and Tobin and Daphne found her on the grove’s island, I overheard my dad talking to Bridgette’s father—he’s on the school board. Anyway, Bridgette’s dad said that several parents had been lobbying for the board to make some sort of rule, banning students from cutting through the grove to get to school. He said there had even been a proposal to tear the island down, but that it would be impossible. And he said it like that, like it was all weighted, and my dad nodded like he knew what he was talking about. At the time, I thought they were talking about the expense. But what if it really is impossible to tear down the grove—and that’s why the lake ended up different from what’s on the original plans? Like when they tried to excavate the grove, it was, like, protected or something.”

  “Or that the grove is protecting something,” Daphne says excitedly. “That makes total sense
! I knew the Key had to be there.”

  Garrick groans from his makeshift bed. “Uh, yeah, the grove is protecting something: Persephone’s Gate,” he says, like we’re all a bunch of addled idiots. “I imagine if there were Underlord emissaries involved in the design of the town, they wouldn’t fancy the gate opening up underwater. It doesn’t mean the Key is there, too. As we’ve already proven. If it were buried there, we would have already unearthed it.”

  I agree with Garrick’s point but Daphne looks so crestfallen over his doubt that I contemplate placing my hand on her back in order to reassure her. But would she just find that too forward? Would it be more appropriate to place my hand on her shoulder? But the small of her back seems more appealing. More intimate. I shake the thought off and stretch my fingers toward her arm to give it a platonic but assuring pat, but she steps away before I get the chance. I tuck my hand behind my back as if nothing happened, and she flops down at her desk and flips open her green book with irritated abruptness.

  “He’s right,” Lexie says, her interest returning to her smoothie. “My money is still on the Mojave Desert lead. Though I’m not picking up a shovel again. Not here. And certainly not in the desert.”

  “Whatever,” Tobin mumbles, and picks up a couple of the maps as if he’s about to pack them away.

  “These are still useful,” I say to him. “Can I hang on to them? I might be able to find some more inconsistencies. Perhaps there’s another—”

  “I think I’ve got something,” Daphne says, cutting me off. She waves that book of hers in the air, excitedly.

  “What is that?” I ask. She hasn’t set the book down once all morning—almost like it has some strange hold over her.