“You said you’d let Adam handle this,” Saul said. “I suggest you keep your word. You have no idea how much I want to shoot you.”
Raphael crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall as if it didn’t bother him in the least that his own son was threatening to Taser him. I knew it did bother him—I’d been around him too long not to know that—but he sure didn’t let it show on his face. He feigned a bored look and kept his mouth shut.
Adam turned his attention back to Foreman. “I’m going to be brutally honest with you,” he said. “I can’t promise you protection. Not when I don’t know who I’d be promising to protect you from. What I can promise you is that this will be a very long night for you if you don’t start talking before I lose patience. So, tell me who you think is going to kill you.”
There was a sheen of tears in Foreman’s eyes, and if he’d been any more scared, he’d probably have wet his pants, but he started talking.
“The recruitment team I’m supposed to be running,” Foreman said, looking at the floor instead of at Adam. “We’ve been picking up street people and, er, persuading them to summon demons.”
This time I was the one who had trouble keeping my mouth shut, but I bit my tongue and resisted the urge to say something indignant.
“Now why would you be doing that?” Adam asked.
Foreman looked around as if hoping to find an ally in the room. He was out of luck. He seemed to shrink in on himself as flop sweat made dark circles under his arms.
“Answer the question!” Adam demanded.
Foreman squirmed. “Um …” He cleared his throat. “We’re trying to shorten the waiting list for demons who want to walk the Mortal Plain. The Spirit Society has been recruiting hard, but they haven’t been able to provide enough willing hosts. So we were trying to … make more hosts available.”
“You do understand that that’s against the law,” Adam said in a suspiciously mild voice.
Foreman shuddered. “I know. But I didn’t have much choice.”
“Oh? I thought you said this was your recruitment team.”
“No, I said it was supposed to be.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning I’m not really running it. I’m just the stalking horse. Anyone who isn’t one hundred percent trustworthy thinks I’m in charge. Only I’m not.”
“So Bradley Cooper wasn’t one hundred percent trustworthy?”
Foreman started at the mention of Cooper’s name. “I wouldn’t have expected him even to know my name. Humans, by definition, aren’t trustworthy.”
This time, I couldn’t suppress my outrage. “Gee, could that be because you’re pulling an Invasion of the Body Snatchers on us and trying to make us into your handy-dandy puppets?”
Adam made a growling sound from deep in his throat. “Shut up!” he snarled at me. “If one more person butts in, I’m going to kick you all out of the room.”
Raphael snickered, and for once I got his humor. With three members of the royal family present, Adam wasn’t kicking anyone out unless they wanted to go.
I shut up, but that didn’t stop me from giving Foreman a death glare, which he ignored. I guess with Adam looming over him like that, the rest of us didn’t seem all that threatening.
“So if you’re not really in charge, who is?”
Foreman took a deep breath and let it out slowly before he answered. “His name is Julius. He’s not a royal, but he’s definitely of the elite. And his host was a football player in college. He’s about three hundred pounds of pure muscle.”
Adam shrugged. “It doesn’t matter how big he is. A Taser will stop him like anyone else.”
“You’d have to find him first. He didn’t trust me anymore, so I’m sure he’s been having me watched. Now that I’ve been captured, he’ll assume I’ve told you everything I know and will take evasive action. That was the whole point of making me the leader in name only. Besides, even if you could track him down, stopping Julius won’t do you any good.”
Adam raised an eyebrow. “Why not? Generally, when you chop off the head, the monster dies.”
I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but suddenly Foreman looked even more scared. His thinning hair was plastered to his scalp by sweat, and his eyes were practically bugging out of his head. Call it a hunch, but I think he was regretting his last words.
Adam nodded in understanding, though Foreman hadn’t answered him. “Julius isn’t really the head, is he?”
Foreman closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Dougal’s the one who’s really in charge,” Adam said. He hadn’t made it a question, but Foreman nodded anyway.
“If you manage to track down Julius and take him out, Dougal will just send someone else. He’s gotten so many people sucked into …” Foreman’s voice died, and he stared at the floor.
“Sucked into his conspiracy to take the throne,” Adam finished for him.
Foreman flinched, but again he nodded. “The only way to stop it,” he said softly, “is to stop Dougal. And the only way to stop Dougal is to kill him.”
Adam cast a quick glance back at the rest of us. “It’s on our to-do list. But you’re working with Dougal, so why do you sound like you think killing him would be a good thing?”
Foreman rubbed his eyes, wiping away some tears. “Because he lied to me. He lied to a lot of people. I supported him in the beginning, but I didn’t know he actually planned to kill the king. I just thought he was taking advantage of Lugh’s absence to arrange things more to his liking. He tricked me into throwing in with him until I was in too deep to back out.”
Adam suddenly looked a lot more … intense. “He lied to you personally, you mean. You’re not just some peon.”
Foreman blew out a breath. “I am now. But yes, I know Dougal. At least, I thought I did. I used to consider him my friend. But his only true friend right now is his ambition, and he’s making that more and more clear as the water gets hotter.”
“What do you mean, ‘as the water gets hotter’?”
Bitterness and anger did wonders to calm Foreman’s fear. “Dougal never made any contingency plans for what he would do if the coup failed—or at least didn’t succeed on his first attempt. He made a lot of promises to a lot of people, but without the power of the throne behind him, he can’t keep them.”
“What kind of promises are we talking about?”
Foreman grimaced. “He promised a lot of people that we would move them to the front of the waiting list to go to the Mortal Plain, for one thing. That’s how he got Alexander to throw in with him.”
Adam’s face registered shock. “He has a council member in his pocket?”
“He did,” Foreman agreed.
Lugh let out a quiet sigh. Remember when I decided to form my council on the Mortal Plain? I told you I feared some of my official council members would side with Dougal. Apparently, I was right.
“But Alexander got cold feet a few weeks back,” Foreman continued. “He insisted Dougal let him leave for the Mortal Plain, or he’d take the conspiracy public. Dougal had no choice but to let him go, but without Alexander, he can’t get the council to vote his way all the time anymore.”
“And that’s making the rest of his coconspirators nervous,” Adam said.
“Yeah. It was bad enough when Raphael betrayed him, but Alexander’s defection could turn out to be the last straw if Dougal isn’t careful. That’s why he sent some of us to the Mortal Plain to try to find more hosts so he can make the waiting list shorter. He hopes it’ll appease some of his supporters for a little while. I don’t know how well that’s working for him.”
Adam chewed that over for a minute, looking puzzled. “We talked to one of those newly arrived demons the other day.”
“I know.”
I think we all must have been wearing our thoughts on our faces, because Foreman paled and held up his hands as if to ward off a blow.
“I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to her!” he said in a voice tight with fear. “That was Julius. He said he needed to discourage the others from talking too much.”