The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (The Devils #2)(2)

I stare at her. She cannot be telling me I’m stuck on vacation with a retirement-aged couple I’ve met once, plus two people I loathe—one of whom suggested to his mother, when he thought I was out of earshot, that she’d better lock up the family silver until I was gone.

But no one is laughing, and Beth is wincing. If this was all a joke, I don’t think she’d appear quite this worried.

I look behind me, as if there might be a way to scramble back on the plane before the Baileys have seen me, but that would require time travel, something I haven’t yet mastered.

A camera flashes, and Josh’s gaze jerks in that direction. Heads are turning, a crowd is gathering. It’s the fucking hair. I have one of those vaguely ethnic, Eastern European faces you see everywhere in New York—high cheekbones, pouty lips—but the long platinum blonde hair is what gives it away every time. I put my hood back on but it’s too late…once they know you’re in the airport, it’s game over.

“We should go,” Josh says, glaring across the room. “Someone better hold Drew’s hand so she doesn’t get trampled by all the normal size humans.”

“Extreme height is correlated with early mortality,” I reply, craning my neck back to maintain eye contact.

He raises a brow. “That’s Marfan’s syndrome. And you sound hopeful.”

“Only if it could take place without ruining the trip.”

I see the smallest twitch of his mouth, but it doesn’t leave me feeling victorious. I think he just gets excited when people bring up death.





We get through the crowd to baggage claim where Jim Bailey, Six’s father, waits. Unlike his wife, he’s a man of few words and—thank God—not a hugger. He places a hand on my shoulder, nods, and asks what my bag looks like just before the crowd surges.

I told myself I wouldn’t need security here, but I’m not five minutes into this vacation and I’m having second thoughts. Phones are held in the air, filming me, and things are waved in my face to be signed—a boarding pass, the inside of a book, a Sbarro receipt, an arm. I feel the first signs of encroaching panic: sweat dripping down my back, heart thudding in my chest, the sense that I’m about to suffocate.

“How drunk were you in Amsterdam?” someone shouts and someone else is asking if I’m here to go to rehab. Pretty much everyone alive has seen the video of me falling off a stage by now. Drew Takes the Plunge! was The Daily Mail’s headline. So very clever. Within hours, there were gifs, memes, stitches on TikTok. You haven’t truly made it until the whole world unites to ridicule your personal crises.

I take a step back as the crowd swells, but people shove forward. The air grows too thick to breathe and just as I’m about to succumb to the panic, a hand wraps around my bicep. Josh pulls me from the crowd as if he’s plucking me from heavy surf.

I’ll go back to hating him later, certainly, but in this moment, as he shepherds me all the way to the waiting van, I’ve never loved anyone more.

The van door is flung open, and I dive inside. People already surround us, and are now filming the van itself. Like…who will ever want to watch that video? Did I show you the taxi Drew Wilson was in? they’ll ask their friends later. And those friends, if even vaguely rational, will say Why the fuck would we want to watch that? Why would you film the outside of a cab?

I wind up shoved to the very back, which is less than ideal given I get carsick, but there’s not really time to reorganize everyone.

With a lurch, the van accelerates away from the curb. Joshua’s broad, khaki-covered thigh presses against mine and he smells annoyingly good. Like soap and deliciously male skin. It’s clear I’ve gone too long without sex if the smell of Josh’s skin is doing it for me at a time like this. And he flew here all the way from Somalia. Shouldn’t he reek of airplane and sweat like I do?

Beth starts reading to us from her guide book about Oahu. Can a human voice actually make you ill? Because I feel like hers is. And there is no air coming from the vent near me. I press my face to the window like a dog.

“The medical care is apparently excellent,” she announces. “Some of the best in the country.” I can’t imagine why this is what she wants to read about. Sure, there are three doctors in here—Jim, Sloane and Josh—but I’d put that fact neck-and-neck with here’s the cab Drew Wilson was in on the interest scale.

“Are you about to get sick?” Josh asks me, sounding pretty horrified for someone who is ostensibly a doctor. I have my doubts: he seems more like the guy you hire to wipe out a group of civilians by drone.

I take shallow breaths through my nostrils. “I hope not.” My eyes fall to his laptop bag. “Open that up a bit more, just in case.”

He manages to look even more disdainful, a feat I didn’t imagine possible.

“You get carsick,” he says flatly. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I don’t know,” I reply. “Maybe it had to do with the swarm of teenage girls who were chasing me.”

“She’s just like you, Josh,” Beth says, turning to beam at her son as if either of us will take that as a compliment. “She does what needs to be done.”

His eyes sweep over me with disdain. “Practically twins,” he says, lip curling. Then he adds, under his breath, “Except I don’t twerk for a living.”