The Shadow Prince

“And you’re not afraid?” she asks. “What if you get hurt?”

“Do you care?”

She bites her lip, turns, and starts down the block. “Maybe,” she calls back to me.

Her maybe sets that heat tingling under my skin again. I follow her, staying a few feet behind, not wanting to push my luck. After a couple of blocks, she stops in front of a house with a red sports car parked haphazardly in the curved driveway.

“Looks like my father beat us home,” she says. “I’m good from here.”

“I’ll wait until you get inside.”

She gives me a look I can’t read and then places her hand on top of mine. The tingling under my skin shoots through my body. She pulls her hand back as if I’ve shocked her without realizing it.

“The strangest thing,” she says, looking up at the sky, “is that it was a burst of lightning that scared that thing away, but there isn’t a cloud in the sky.”

I slip my stony mask back on and step away from her. “Must be some freak of nature.”

She squints at me and I wonder if I’ve used that expression correctly.

“Freak of nature,” she mumbles to herself as she heads up the driveway. She glances back at me before slipping into the house and shutting the door behind her.

I may have lied to her about why I’d tried to get her to leave the grove with me before, but I keep my word about going back there now. Lexie had been attacked on the path leading to the island. I don’t find much evidence there, but when I cross the bridge and enter the grove, I find that it looks very different from when I was here last. Small saplings have been pulled up by their roots, and holes have been burrowed into the ground. It looks as though someone, or something, has been searching for something.

Is this simply the Keres’s chosen hunting grounds, or had it attacked on instinct to protect whatever it had been looking for here?

But Keres are supposed to be mindless creatures—so fearsome they have been locked away in the Pits of the Underrealm for centuries. What would it be looking for?

And the more vital question—how had it escaped the Pits?

“Keres!” I say to Dax when I see him sitting in one of the armchairs, fiddling with his tablet, in the family room. He looks up at me, startled. I pant and claw at my tie, trying to get more air. I’d run all the way here in my dress clothes after inspecting the grove. “They’re here. Or at least one of them is.”

Dax gives me a cautioning look.

“What’s all this?” Simon asks, stepping in from the kitchen, one of his green smoothies in hand. I hadn’t realized he was here or I would have called Dax out of the house before saying anything. He’s still dressed in the tight-fitting, shiny clothing he wears when he takes his bike out for a ride around the lake each night. Only this time, he’d taken a detour to the mayor’s mansion during his ride. “Care to fill me in?” he asks cheerily, his teeth gleaming white as he smiles.

My first instinct is to keep anything I know from Simon, but then I realize that he might be the one person who might be able to help. He’s in communication with the Underrealm, so he could possibly get us some instructions on how to send this thing back there.

“A Keres,” I say. “I think that’s what really happened to that girl who supposedly had a heart attack last week. It tried to attack Daphne and one of her classmates near the lake tonight.”

“What?” Dax asks. “Are they okay?”

I nod. “I scared … I mean, it got scared away before it did any damage,” I say, catching myself before revealing to Simon that I had used my powers in close proximity to a couple of humans.

“Are you sure it was a Keres?” Dax asks. “That shouldn’t be possible.”

I catch a movement in the corner of my eye and notice Garrick slinking into the kitchen, listening to us as he passes. Lessers have a talent for lurking.

“I saw it. It looked just like the carvings on the walls in the palace.”

“Well. That’s a relief!” Simon says brightly as he places his smoothie on the table behind the couch, careful to use one of the coasters.

“A relief?” I ask. “We’re talking about the most fearsome monsters of the Underrealm and you think that’s a relief?”

“They found an unconscious waitress at that party you went to this evening,” Simon says, his voice far too chipper sounding for such a revelation. “I had to do some damage control and convince everyone she’d had a heart attack like I did with that student. But I was beginning to think you had some kinky fetish for stopping pretty girls’ hearts, which you and I were going to have to have a little chat about. It’s a relief knowing we won’t have to have such an awkward conversation. I’d much rather deal with a monster on the loose.”

“Then you know how to deal with it?”

Simon smiles, but there’s an accusatory narrowing of his eyes. “Any thoughts on how it got here?”

I almost bring up the theory I’d postulated when Dax had told me about that Pear Perkins girl having a heart attack—that perhaps a Keres had somehow stowed away with us through the gate like Brim had. But I stop myself from mentioning it, because the last thing I want is for Simon to try to pin responsibility for this happening on me. It was a highly unlikely theory anyway. A tiny cat hiding in my bag was one thing, but a large, shadowy monster going completely unnoticed by me and the entire crowd surrounding the gate was virtually impossible.

“I think it’s more important to focus on how to stop it,” I say.

“Leave this to me,” Simon says.

“You’ll contact the Court, then? You’ll ask them how to send this thing back? Or kill it?”

Simon draws one arm across his chest and uses the other to grab his elbow, pulling it tight to stretch his shoulder. “There’s no need to bother the Court with this matter.”

“But it could go on hurting people.”

Simon shrugs. “I don’t really care. I just need to clean up after it in order to keep too many people from asking questions.”

I realize then that Simon is more concerned with appearances than about the people this Keres could possibly hurt. Or kill, if it gets strong enough.

Which it will, if it goes unchecked.

“Then I’ll go after it myself,” I say, balling my fists.