Free The Eternity Key by Bree Despain Page A

audition for my new music video, but, yes, I got an address. It’s 1472, apartment 7, Icarus Court,” he says, like he’s dictating it off a piece of paper.
    “Good work,” I say, heading out of the restroom to the parking lot.
    “Oh, by the way, do you happen to know what Daphne’s favorite color is?” Joe asks.
    “Um …” I stop at the school exit, realizing that I don’t know the answer to that unexpected question. Here I’d been wishing I could confide in her my feelings, but she hasn’t even confided in me something as simple as her favorite color. “She wears a lot of green,” I say. “Teal green.” I almost say
jade green
, but that is the same color as my eyes and that seems oddly presumptuous of me.
    “Right. Have fun catching the bad guy.” Joe sighs. “But do me a favor, mate? Don’t bring Daphne with you.”
    “Don’t worry. I won’t.”
    I stand in front of the door of 1472, apartment 7, Icarus Court, with Dax standing behind me as backup. Three against one would normally be better odds, but Garrick is completely untrained and more likely to be a liability in a fight.
    I don’t want to knock and alert the Motorcycle Man of our presence. By the will of the Fates, the lock on the door is electronic, requiring a pass code to gain entry—but I don’t need one. I cup my hand over the electronic box above the doorknob and send a pulse of crackling blue lightning into it. I can hear the circuits sizzling. The lock clicks open.
    I turn the knob and shove the door, going for speed and surprise, with Dax close on my heels, as we burst through at theready. Lightning swirls inside my chest; a confrontation could be only seconds away.
    What we find is an abandoned apartment.
    A black leather couch is the only thing that sits in the front room. An empty closet stands open. An inspection of the kitchen and the bedroom yields only empty cabinets and a bed with a plush mattress, which has been stripped of its sheets. There are no pictures on the walls, no television, and nothing in the fridge but a container of Greek yogurt. If it hadn’t been for that last thing, I would have thought this apartment had never been occupied.
    “This yogurt is still good,” Dax says, testing the white goop with his finger. “This apartment hasn’t been empty for long.”
    “
Kopros
,” I hiss under my breath, and kick the closest thing. The trash receptacle sails across the room and slams into the oven. It falls over, and its contents topple out onto the tile floor.
    “Good thinking,” Dax says, crouching to inspect the mess. It looks mostly like food waste, but he fishes a piece of paper out from under a banana peel. “Look at this.”
    I take the slimy paper. It looks to be nothing but a grocery list—only it isn’t written in English. “This is Underlord writing.”
    A sinking feeling grips me. The suspicion that the Motorcycle Man was another Underlord had plagued me ever since Daphne had mentioned seeing someone with fiery eyes at her audition that first day I’d met her. She’d thought I’d stalked her all the way to the auditorium, but if it wasn’t me and it wasn’t Dax or Garrick, that meant there had to be another Underlord at play in Olympus Hills. The fact that this unknown lord was also the Motorcycle Man, whom I’d seen following me on more than one occasion, made perfect sense. But it also made him all the more dangerous.
    “Heads up,” Dax says, looking out the window. “Olympus Hills security just pulled up. Someone must have seen us busting in.”
    “Or they knew we were coming.”
    “Either way, we need to get out of here.
Now
.”

chapter nine
TOBIN
    I sit in the far corner of Olympus Brew, the coffeehouse next to the gelato shop on Olympus Row, observing my prey from over the brim of my gingerbread spiced latte. Marta sits at her usual table—or at least where she’s usually sat for the last three days that I’ve been following her after school—near the door. Her iPad