Understanding hit me hard and fast, and I leaned back in my chair. “He’s one of them, isn’t he?” The still-wrapped Twinkie fell from my hand to land on the table. “Devich is one of the demons in that fucking paper.”
“He’s not just one of them.” Cale pushed his breakfast away, as if he’d suddenly lost his appetite. “He’sallof them.”
TWENTY-ONE
Ididn’t take the news that Devich was a demon very gracefully. Or very quietly. If there were people staying in the rooms on either side of ours, they were awake now, pulled from an ignorantly peaceful human slumber by my foul tirade and heavy stomping. “That evil, lying, hit-ordering, animal-torturing, baby-murdering son of a bitch. I’m gonna rip his horns off and shove them straight up his demonic a—” I paused in mid pace, whirling around to face Cale. “Does Devich have horns?”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “He calls himself Dever when he’s not pretending to be human. And I don’t know. I’ve never seen his demonic form. But horns are possible. So are wings and hoofed feet.”
“I bet hedoeshave horns.” I was pacing again, stomping from one end of the room to the other, the Twinkie in my hand squeezed into a sticky handful of cake and cream. “And his wings are probably all gross and scaly. I’m gonna tear them off one at a time and shove the damn things right down his throat. The world has neverseenthe kind of Picasso cubist motherfucker I’m going to make out of that infernal bastard.”
“Lex?”
“What?” I stopped near the far bed and turned to Cale.
“We have to catch up with him first. And before we can do that, we have to find the box.”
“You said Devich was more important than the djinni.”
“I said he’s the more immediate problem. Because he’s roaming free. But if we don’t find Xaphan before someone else does, he’ll be free too, and then we’rescrewed. We’reallscrewed.”
“Wonderful.” I licked a chunk of squished Twinkie from the mass oozing between my fingers, then spoke with my mouth full. “So, ‘et’s find the ‘amn ‘ox.”
“Easier said than done. I’ve been working on that for two days and have only managed to wear an entire eraser down to a stub.”
“Yeah, but you’re ill-quipped and untrained. I’m neither.
He frowned. “What, like you’re an expert?”
“Actually, yes. This is what I do. For a living, so to speak. Bring me what you have so far.”
Cale dug the atlas from his bag while I licked the last of the Twinkie cream from my fingers and warmed up a Canadian bacon-n-egg biscuit. “Here.” He dropped the atlas on the table and sat across from me, running one hand through golden blond hair as I flipped through the pages. No sense letting him know I’d already snooped throughallhis stuff.
He frowned, sausage biscuit in hand. “I was working on the Nova Scotia and Maine pages, but there isn’t much to go on. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure how I got in this position in the first place. IswearI dropped the damn box into the ocean. That should have taken care of Xaphan once and for all.”
I glanced up from the map. “Why would you drop him in the ocean?”
The microwave dinged, and he retrieved my sandwich, sliding it across the table toward me, still in the paper. “He’s a fire djinni. Surrounding him with that much water should leave him completely powerless. The plan was to drop him into the sound in mid-flight, then jump in after him. Some of my mother’s friends would haul the sarcophagus out to sea.Deepsea. The djinni disappears right out from under Devich’s nose, and I get away free and clear. Still on the payroll, in fact. If it had worked.”
“Your mother was in on the plan?” I was fascinated by a family dynamic unlike anything I’d ever personally experienced.
“It was her idea. She and the other elemental elders are trying to keep Devich from undoing what it took them thousands of years to accomplish.”
“And you’re helping.” I took a bite of my biscuit, chewing as he spoke.
“I’mtryingto. I was supposed to keep him from digging the box up for as long as possible, which is why I took a job with his crew in the first place: to sabotage the project. I broke pumps, cut lines, weakened chains, and even got one of the mechanics fired. But eventually I started to look incompetent. I couldn’t afford to get fired and lose access to the pit, so I had to quit messing things up.”
“At which point they reached the sarcophagus,” I guessed, speaking around another bite.
“Right. When I couldn’t stop them from pulling the box up, I was supposed to keep Devich from actually getting his hands on it. So far so good on that one.” He shrugged sheepishly. “Except nowIcan’t find it either.”
“Okay, so you snuck on board the helicopter, then the plane. Then you threw the box off the back of the C130 and into the ocean. In the middle of the night. In mid-flight.”
He frowned, chin dimple deepening. “Well, that was theplan. But it didn’t go like we’d hoped.”
I drained the last gulp from my juice carton. “What happened?”
“When I lowered the ramp, I must have triggered an alarm or something in the cockpit. The co-pilot opened the door just as I was un-strapping the crate. He…um…tried to throw me out the back of the plane.”
