“Africa,” I said, goosebumps popping up all over my body, despite the heater blasting hot air into my face.
“Yeah, he’ll probably hit Africa eventually,” Cale said, still ranting at the cold, quiet night.
“He’s already been there.” Every television and radio news broadcast I’d heard in the past few days played through my head at once, the words coming back to haunt me. “I’ve been hearing reports all week about a town quarantined with bubonic plague in Mozambique. That’s Devich, isn’t it? It has to be. He’s practicing, or something. Didn’t you say he could still infect people individually?
Cale nodded grimly. “But I don’t know why he’d bother with bubonic plague.”
Iknew. “Because he’s a vindictive bastard. He’s making a statement. A big ‘fuck you’ to all involved. If he gets that wish, he’ll revisit his glory days by spreading the Black Death to every corner of the world.”
Jesus.
“What’s the survivability rate of a demon-spread disease?” I asked, leaning my head against the headrest as the hood of the car ate up long stretches of highway.
“That depends. For those who can’t get medical help—which would be just about everyone, if the medical community were infected too—it has to be close to zero. For the lucky few who find treatment before infrastructure collapses, I’d say maybe fifty percent. Speaking optimistically.”
Fifty percent. The words echoed in my head for much longer than they should have. If Devich got his hands on that box, we were so unbelievably, massively, irreparablyscrewed. My latest client, the man who held my afterlife dangling from a single demonic claw, stood poised to decimate the human population using nothing more than a serious case of bad breath.
Screw the white night. What I really needed was a cosmic Tic-tac.
TWENTY-THREE
At just past five in the morning, after driving up the Maine coastline for a solid hour and a half, we wound up in the tiny coastal town of Fort Popham, which consisted of little more than a long stretch of beach and several tourist support industries. Because of the early hour, there was no place open to rent a boat. Fortunately, several trusting locals had left their vessels moored at the public dock, ripe for the takin’.
Excuse me, ripe for theborrowing.
In all my years, I’d never once driven a boat, so I followed Cale down a small pier to where two vessels were moored opposite each other, resigned to letting him choose, since he had the experience. One was an old-fashioned-looking rowboat, the other a sleek white motorboat with two seats behind the sharply sloping windshield and two more in the bow.
“You’re not serious,” I said when he turned toward the rowboat.
“What? It’ll be good exercise, and it’ll definitely keep us warm.”
I shot him a suggestive smile, which he probably couldn’t see in the dim glow of the security light twenty yards away. “I can think of amuchbetter way to keep warm.”
“I’m up for that. Let’s do itinthe rowboat.”
“Um, no. You can row, row, row your boat to your heart’s content, cupcake. Hell, swim across the channel for all I care. But I am not settingfootin that antique.”
Okay, I guess Iwasn’tresigned to letting him choose.
Cale huffed. “I was just kidding. Mostly. But I really could swim the channel, you know,” he insisted, following me to the motorboat, where I’d already tossed my bag into the passenger seat.
“And I’m sure you’d look fucking fantastic doing it.” I lowered myself into the floor of the boat and he followed me, kneeling in front of the driver’s seat to lift the cushion.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for the key.”
Rolling my eyes, I dropped to my knees in front of the panel beneath the steering wheel. I might not know a thing about boats, but Ididknow how to start an engine without the convenience of a key. “Shine some light over here,” I said, feeling around the edges of the panel. At my back, I heard Cale digging through his backpack, mumbling something about breaking and entering and grand theft.
“This coming from the man who hijacked Troy Devich’s C130,” I snapped, popping the panel loose.
Something clicked at my back and a perfect sphere of yellow light appeared on the exposed wiring in front of me. “Devich is thebadguy.”
I spun on my ass to face him, then I lay down so that I was looking up at the steering column. “But if it makes you feel any better, we’re not actually breaking; we’re just entering. And we’ll bring the damn boat back.” I wrapped my left hand around the wiring harness and jerked back, pulling a bundle of different-colored wires from the back of the ignition switch. Using my short-but-functional fingernails, I stripped the red hotwire—the wire leading to the positive battery terminal—and twisted it to the ignition system wire. Then I touched the exposed end of the starter wire to the twisted-together bundle, and the boat engine rumbled to life.
“I sure hope you know how to drive this thing,” I said, scooting over to make room for Cale at the controls. “Because this is where my expertise on the water ends.”
He looked at me like I’d just asked him what color the sky was. “Yeah, I think I can handle it.” As I settled into the passenger’s seat, he untied the boat from its mooring, then he dropped into the driver’s seat and backed us smoothly away from the dock.
