I knelt next to him, and our thighs touched, his body heat radiating through both layers of denim to warm me more than should have been possible. And damn, he smelled good. I blinked, clearing my head. “No, this is where you pushed it out.” I grabbed the notebook and pen from him and scratched out some quick calculations on the back cover.
“Okay, according to the flight data recorder, you guys were traveling at 500 feet—probably to stay below FCC radar—at 200 mph, so that’s…” I closed my eyes, watching numbers trek across the backs of my eyelids. “About two hundred ninety feet per second. S equals one half GT squared,” I mumbled, still scribbling as Cale squinted at my figures. “So, five hundred equals 16T squared. T equals 5.6. Times two hundred ninety-three equals 1,640 feet. That’s almost third of a mile.”
“What does all that mean?” Cale asked, when I finally smiled up at him.
“The box fell for about five and a half seconds, and momentum would have moved it west by as much as a third of a mile. Once we allow for drag and wind resistance, if you’re sure it didn’t hit the water…” I bent back over the map, staring at the circle surrounding the box-drop coordinates. “The only place it could possibly have landed is…here.” Using the red pen, I circled a small, vaguely L-shaped island just east of Casco Bay. “Seguin Island. It’s there. It has to be.”
“Are you sure?” Cale asked, peering at the tiny curve of land.
“No, of course I’m not sure. I won’t be sure until I actually see the box. But this is the best we have to go on, for now. You ready to go?”
“Give me five minutes.”
While he used the restroom and brushed his teeth, I devoured another couple of Twinkies and used the hotel’s free Wi-Fi to find out what there was to know about Seguin Island. “If this were June, we’d be royally fucked,” I called out to Cale.
“Why?” he asked from the bathroom, over the sound of running tap water.
“Fortunately, no one lives on Seguin Island, but the old lighthouse is a big tourist attraction on some historical society’s list. They’re busy during the summer. No one should be there this time of year, though. Even the caretaker moves inland for the winter.”
“Perfect.”
I was tempted to agree, but afraid to jinx us by acknowledging an apparent bit of good fortune. “We’ll see,” I said instead, taking a screen shot of the road map on the historical society’s website.
TWENTY-TWO
After a quick weapons check and a trip to the restroom, I donned my poor, shot-up coat, shrugged into my backpack, and headed out the door, with Cale on my heels. We’d driven less than a mile before I thought, for the first of many times, how much faster I could have gotten us there in Rusty. After fifteen minutes of annoying near-silence, I leaned into the back seat and pulled the demon book from Cale’s bag.
“You mind if I familiarize myself with our adversary?” I asked, settling back into my seat.
“Be my guest. But you won’t find much about Devich in there, except for the parts I highlighted,” he said, staring at the mercifully snow-free roads. “He’s a minor demon, thank goodness, and not of much interest to most humans who study the Netherworld.”
“That must be a small group of scholars.”
“Yes, actually. And most of those don’t even believe what they read. They study demons—and the rest of the Netherworld—as mythology. Stories made up centuries ago to explain the unexplainable.”
“Well, if the shoe fits…” I said, scanning a page of text about a demon blamed for fathering a rash of bastard children in an eighteenth-century colonial town.
“I guess so.”
I flipped another page in the book and could only stare, fascinated, at the image of death and destruction a particularly nasty-looking demon was unleashing upon a helpless mass of humans. No wonder demons were confined to hell. Except for Dever, apparently…
“Wait. The story I heard is that Dever is so evil they couldn’t keep him in hell, so he was exiled to our world. That doesn’t sound like a minor demon.”
Cale snorted. “No, that sounds like a story intended to scare children.”
“That’s whatIsaid!”
“The truth is that Dever is too minor a demon for anyone from hell to bother chasing after. But a minor demon on the loose is still amajorproblem for those of us in this world. It’s an issue of scale. Kind of like how a few raindrops won’t drown a human, but they can flood an ant hill.”
“Dever being the raindrops on our ant hill?”
“Exactly. He’s more than this world can handle.”
“Okay, except that he hasn’t been, historically. Right?” I twisted in my seat to face Cale. “He’s been here for thousands of years, yet we’re all fine, and he’s been playing billionaire philanthropist. Why would a demon bother blending in with humanity at all? Why not gouge a bloody path across the globe, if that’s what they get off on?” I held the image up for him to see.
Cale flinched in the glare of the passing streetlights and turned his focus immediately back toward the road. “He would if he could; you can bet on that. But about four hundred years ago, he was relieved of his most dangerous ability by a gathering of the most powerful Netherworlders around at the time. It was the last major inter-species effort in history. Unfortunately, because Dever is a demon, they couldn’t actually hurt him—”
“Because they weren’t indigenous to hell?” I asked, thinking back to my call from Evan.
