I sucked in a deep breath, not at all sure I was making the right choice. Then I made it anyway. “I wish for you to bring Cale back, just like you said. Just like he was—not so much as a scar.”
Xaphan nodded. Then he was gone. In a blink, less than a single instant, he was just…gone.
Cale sucked in a huge, gasping breath. My hand found his cheek, his blessedly intact cheek. His eyes flew open, wide and shocked. He blinked. Then his gaze found me. “What happened?”
I ran my hands all over him, pushing aside his shredded clothing, probing his chest for a wound that had already healed. That might never have been there at all. His clothes were ruined and still bloody, but his flesh was whole. Unscathed. Unscarred. Just like Xaphan had promised.
“Lex, what the fuck just happened?” he demanded, pushing me back as he sat up. Plucking at the torn, drenched remains of his shirt.
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t figure out how to tell him what I’d done.
Cale stood and pulled me to my feet. He frowned and his gaze moved from my face to the cemetery at my back. “I—”
A scream ripped through the night, cutting him off. We both turned to find Xaphan standing on the granite base of the monument, red hair still plastered to his head from the rain. He held Dever up by one arm, as if the demon weighed nothing. Dever’s clawed feet dangled in the air, kicking helplessly. His right wing hung from Xaphan’s free hand, dripping dark, dark blood onto the granite and the ground.
“Alexandra!” the djinni called, and I met his gaze, half afraid of what I’d find. He smiled. “This one ison the house.” With that, and with a single wink, the djinni tossed the detached wing to the ground at Orthus’s feet. Then he unleashed a mighty roar of triumph and ripped the remaining, semi-attached left wing from the demon’s back in a single, powerful heave.
The demon screamed. The djinni disappeared. Dever crashed to the ground on his knees, clutching at his severed wings like a child with a broken toy.
“What the living hell...?” I murmured, watching the pale demon shriek as he clenched handfuls of his own feathers.
“It’s a gift,” Cale explained, taking me by the shoulders. “The damn djinni just sheered the demon’s wings. For you.”
I shook my head, comprehension passing me by entirely. “What the hell am I supposed to do with a pair of severed wings?”
Cale blinked at me in astonishment. “Nothing.” He shook his head. “The gift isn’t the wings. It’s Dever’s mortality. Without his wings, a demon is no longer indestructible.”
My pulse raged through my body like a river rapid. “You mean…he can be killed?”
“Like any human.”
“Take care of Lacey,” I said as I plucked the abandoned bottle of antibiotics from the ground and pressed it into Cale’s hand. He nodded as I stood and grabbed my blade on my way across the rain- and blood-soaked earth.
Dever knelt on the ground in front of the monument, clutching his wings. Thick black blood poured from his back onto the stone. He looked up as I approached, his eyes glowing red with rage. “I will end you,” he snarled. His hand shot out. Claws sank into my calf.
My pulse racing, I shoved my knife between two of his ribs, into his heart, and he screamed.
I twisted the blade, and he gurgled.
Dever collapsed at my feet. His claw fell from my leg.
I sank onto the ground and sobbed.
EPILOGUE
“How’s Lacey?” Cale asked as he sank into the waiting room chair next to mine. It was a small room with only a dozen seats, one of three just like it on this floor of the hospital. For the moment, at least, we were the only occupants.
“Better, but still quarantined,” I said. “They took him off the ventilator about an hour ago, and he’s breathing on his own.”
Cale nodded, exhaustion evident in his unbroken stare at the floor. “Do they know what it is yet?”
“Pneumonic plague. Same bacteria as the bubonic form, from what I understand, but it settled in his lungs. Because of that, you can catch it from respiratory droplets. Thus, the quarantine.” Which was just atasteof what Dever could have unleashed upon the world, had he gotten his powers back. “Fortunately, the antibiotics are doing their job.” Massive doses of intravenous antibiotics. “The CDC is looking for the source, because there hasn’t been a case east of the Oklahoma panhandle since 1970.”
Cale snorted. “Good luck with that.”
“You have any symptoms?”
He shook his head, still staring at the linoleum. “Not likely to have any, either. Nymphs aren’t susceptible to most human illnesses.”
