The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea （The Devils #2）
Elizabeth O'Roark
PART I
OAHU
“Argued by many to be the most beautiful of all the islands, it is not to be missed.”
From Oahu, The Adventure of a Lifetime
1
DREW
January 21st
A love story is like a bus ride. You can take the express—short and to the point, not exciting but it gets you where you need to go—or you can make it a road trip. Lots of transfers and stops, operating with blind hope in search of the extraordinary.
I don’t need extraordinary, and I’m not a big believer in blind hope, but a thirteen-hour flight to meet an ex-boyfriend could hardly be deemed express either.
Honolulu comes into focus through the window of the plane—the jagged cliffs of Diamond Head looming to my right, white sand and the bluest water you’ve ever seen.
Come to Hawaii, Six said after the incident, the one that propelled me from mere fame to infamy. Let your publicist spin the whole thing as exhaustion.
He’s very persuasive, my ex. My best friend, Tali, would use the word opportunistic. In fact, that’s precisely the word she used. But she has far higher expectations of men than I do.
So here I am, sleep-deprived and stumbling off a plane into bright sunlight and clammy air, ready to give him another chance. Trying to ignore that there was a catch to this whole thing, one he waited to share until I couldn’t back out: his family is coming too.
“There she is!” cries a voice, and suddenly Six’s mom, Beth, is pushing through the crowd to hug me as if I’m her long-lost daughter instead of the ex-girlfriend she’s only met once.
It’s sweet, I guess, but I really need to remove my hoody. This airport either doesn’t have air-conditioning or considers eighty-five degrees pleasant.
“We got here a bit ago,” she says, still hugging me, “and thought why don’t we just wait for Drew?”
“Funny,” says a grim voice I’d know anywhere, a voice that makes my stomach tighten like it’s being sewn too small from the inside. “I don’t quite remember it happening that way.” I look up, up, up to find Joshua Bailey, Six’s brother, looming just past his mother like the Shadow of Death, six foot five inches of glowering male. His eyes meet mine, and we both scowl at the same time. The look he gives me is one part loathing, one part assessment. It’s the way you’d look at someone if you were hoping to make her death look like an accident.
“You’re sweating,” Joshua says, running a hand through his light brown hair. He makes the human ability to cool off when overheated sound like a personal flaw.
“And you look like you’re dressed to attend an estate planning convention,” I reply, letting my gaze raise from his khakis to his neatly pressed button-down. God, he’s such a dork.
A hot dork, however.
If karma was really a thing, Josh would be hideous, but in truth he has the kind of eyes a lesser female might get lost in, such a pale blue against his dark lashes they hardly seem real, perfect bone structure, and a disarmingly lush lower lip—if you’re into that sort of thing. And he’s also ridiculously tall and broad-shouldered and muscley, the sort of guy who’d feel like a force of nature above you.
Again…if you’re into that sort of thing.
He turns to the statuesque blonde behind him. “Sloane, you remember Drew,” he says, dropping my name like I’m the girl who poisoned the town well…or wanted to steal the family silver, which he apparently believes.
And how are they even still a couple? They were in Somalia together, but Sloane moved to Atlanta last summer and she’s way too uptight for phone sex. She probably sends illustrations of her fallopian tubes in lieu of nudes.
She extends an expertly manicured hand to me with a stiff smile on her face. I notice her ironed blouse isn’t even wrinkled after a flight that must have been as long as mine and is perfectly dry to boot. One of the benefits of her being half-snake, I imagine, is that it keeps her core body temperature low.
“Sorry about Joel,” she says.
I blink then. First, because I’d forgotten Six’s family still calls him by his much-loathed given name. Second, because where the hell is the guy who called me just a few nights ago, swearing he’d changed?
I attempt to look past them. I’m five-six, but they’re all so damn tall I can’t see a thing. “What?”
They glance at each other, locked in some silent exchange, and my stomach drops.
“I texted you,” Beth says. “Maybe it didn’t go through. Oh, shoot. It didn’t. Airports always have no signal.”
She frowns and starts messing with her settings, still hoping to get the text to go through, apparently. I doubt it’ll help much at this point.
“He’s in jail,” Josh provides, without a trace of emotion.
I give a startled laugh. Because arriving halfway around the world to vacation with Six’s family but not Six is too ridiculously terrible to be real. “What?”
“It’s all a big mix-up,” Beth assures me, while Joshua rolls his eyes. “The band was searched at the Tokyo airport. One of them had a bit of marijuana in his bag, and they were all arrested. But his lawyer says he’ll be out on bail by tomorrow and this whole thing will be settled in three days.”
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.