Unflustered, Cale continued. “He’ll grant your wish, then he’ll move on to someone else. Someone he’ll choose, after wandering around in search of the most perverted, psychotic, sadistic son of a bitch out there. Andthat’sthe bastard who will get unlimited wishes. At least until Xaphan gets tired of him. But until then, he’ll give the psycho du jour whatever he wants, consequences be damned. You’ve heard of Caligula? Vlad the Impaler? Nero? Attila the Hun?”
“Of course.” I rolled my eyes. “Let me guess, they were all buddies of the djinni.”
He nodded. “As long as they amused Xaphan, he granted them wish after wish. Glory. Power. Wealth. Victory. It was endless, and the world paid the price. If you let him out, it’ll happen all over again, this time in a society with access to countless weapons of mass destruction.”
Nukes. Oh, fuck. My hands clenched around the demon text, my pulse racing. And finally, I started to understand his point.
“So decide right now: is it worth it? A few million in the bank, or your face on the cover of a magazine, or whatever trivial thing you think you want—is worth it?” He stared straight into my eyes with the single most intense, imploring look I’d ever seen, and all I could think was that he didn’t know adamnthing about me. Not a fucking thing.
Millions of dollars? What good would that do me? No fortune would last an eternity, which was what I was facing without that wish. My face in the public eye? That would just make it harder to go unnoticed, as I failed to age, which would make it impossible for me to do my job.
But try as I might, I couldn’t overlook his point. Did I have the right to make a choice like that for the rest of the world? By taking that wish, I would be saving humanity from Devich, but I could also be sentencing it to Xaphan, and the truth was that no one had the right to do that. Not even me. Not even if it meant giving up my afterlife. Again.
Shit!
My fist slammed into the rented dashboard, and the glove box popped open. Cale reached calmly past me to close it, and I shut my eyes tight, trying to reign in my temper. I didn’t even know who I was mad at, but I was suddenly so pissed off that instead of seeing the dark backs of my eyelids, I saw only angry streaks of red and star-like bursts of light.
“No,” I said finally, opening my eyes to glare at him. “It’s not worth it. Ofcourseit’s not worth it.”
Relief flooded his expression, and for some reason that made me even angrier. I wanted him to be furious along with me—angry for what I’d lost again, instead of pleased that I’d made the “right” decision. But he didn’t know what I’d agreed to give up. And hewouldn’tknow.
“I’m glad you agree,” Cale said, and the urge to punch that smile off his dimpled chin was almost too much to resist.
I drained the last of my Coke as he pulled the car back onto the dark, empty highway, apparently satisfied by my capitulation. I was anything but satisfied. Unfortunately, with nothing around to punch, fury would do me little good.
“So Xaphan is a supernatural jack of all trades,” I said, popping the top on another can of regrettably non-alcoholic soda. “But what about Devich?”
“I’m sorry?” Cale kept his eyes glued to the dark road ahead, probably intentionally avoiding my gaze.
“Devich. What’s his ‘special demon power?’ The one he wants back.”
“Oh. Sorry, I thought you’d figured that out,” he said, in a tone of voice that clearly said I was an idiot for needing to ask. “He’s a demon of pestilence.Thedemon of pestilence, actually.”
I frowned, unable to see much threat inherent in such a power. “So he, what, causes disease? Isn’t that ability kind of passé? I mean, disease isn’t such a big deal in the age of mass-produced antibiotics.”
Cale turned to look at me, ignoring the road for waaaay too long. “You really don’t understand any of this, do you?” he demanded, and I cocked my head, letting my confusion show, as badly as it pained me to acknowledge my own ignorance. “How could you possibly know so much about the Netherworld in general, yet so little about demons and djinn?”
Before I could come up with an answer that wouldn’t reveal that I hadn’t beenborninto the Netherworld, Cale sighed. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that antibiotics won’t stop Devich any more than concrete-and-steel buildings will stop Xaphan. And even if antibiotics would fix it—they wouldn’t, even if all diseases were bacterial in nature—there’s no way the medical community could keep up with him.”
The feeling of dread grew in my stomach until I felt heavy and bloated with anxiety. “What do you mean?”
“The power Devich lost wasn’t the ability to create or even to transmit disease. He can still infect people one at a time with any illness in existence, and probably several we’ve never heard of. What he lost was the power of mass communicability. The ability to transmit disease in frightening numbers, with terrifying speed. I’m talking about a one hundred percent infection rate. Everyone who’s exposed gets sick.”
“Sick with what?”
Cale shrugged, and the steering wheel rotated a little with the movement. “You name it. His old favorite was bubonic plague. You’ve heard of the Black Death, right?”
“The one that wiped out a third of Europe? Yeah. I think I’ve heard of it.”
Cale ignored the near-toxic level of sarcasm in my tone. “That was Devich’s handy work, though I doubt he’s planning anything quite so nostalgic this time. He’ll probably go with something more modern and efficient, like that variant of the measles that kills up to seventy-five percent of those who catch it, or that nasty flesh-eating disease. Or maybe some kind of hemorrhagic fever. Hell, I bet he could breathe Ebola or Marburg straight into the air.”
“Breathea hemorrhagic fever?” I repeated, hoping I’d heard him wrong. “He could produce anairbornestrain of Ebola?”
“Every strain of every disease he transmits is airborne. He literally breathes disease at will, contaminating the very air and infecting everyone who breathes it. If he gets his powers back, instead of infecting people one at a time, he could infect hundreds in a matter of minutes, simply by sharing air with them. Any public gathering could turn into a massacre.”
My grip on the door handle tightened and nausea swept through me. I clenched my jaw to hold back vomit at the thought, but Cale wasn’t done.
“He could transmit tuberculosis to tens of thousands of people by attending a single Tigers game. He could cross the country, leaving a trail of crowded hospitals and packed morgues behind him like a great big ‘Devich wuz here’ spray-painted across CDC headquarters. Hell, why stop there?” Cale asked no one in particular. I’d never heard him sound so venomous. So full of hate. “He could take his private jet across the Atlantic and hit all of Europe in a matter of days. Then Asia, and—”
