“The Djinn King?” gasped Pup’s brother, Pigeon.

“B-but . . . ,” Calypso stammered, “I never heard of him trifling with devils!”

“Nor I.” Magpie was solemn, looking around the small cabin. Aside from the seal, there was no evidence a devil had even been here. The odor was usually overwhelming when a devil had freshly been freed from thousands of years stewing in its own stench, but she smelled nothing. She sat back on her heels.

She’d caught quite a few devils since she got started hunting them eight years ago. The scarab devil had made twenty-three, which was, as far as she knew, twenty-three more than any other living faerie had caught. That was twenty-three ancient bottles fished up by humans and twenty-three broken seals. None of those had borne the sigil of the Magruwen. Magpie knew the legends of the devil wars better than anyone, and in none of them did the great Djinn King himself stoop to wrestling snags into their prisons. That had always been the work of his champion, Bellatrix, the greatest faerie of all legend, and the champions of the other six Djinn.

“What grim beast could need so strong a seal?” Calypso whispered, peering around the cabin. “Think it’s still aboard?”

“Neh,” Magpie said. “It’s gone.” She felt no devilish presence. In fact, but for the missing fishermen there seemed nothing at all wrong. She had seen the aftermath of plenty of devil escapes and they all had two things in common: blood and stench. Here were neither of those and yet a shiver gripped her spine. For here was something she had never expected to see: the Magruwen’s seal upon a snag’s prison. It shivered her to think what could have been inside it.

Something on the floor caught her eye and she leapt down to it. “Flummox me . . . ,” she said. The crows swooped down too.

Four pairs of battered canvas shoes were arranged around the table with their toes pointed inward, as if the fishermen had gathered here to open the bottle they’d pulled up in their nets. Whatever had been inside, it had been there for a long, long time, and it had come out hungry. Calypso whistled low. “Snatched ’em right out of their slippers,” he said.

“Why’d they let it out?” Pup wanted to know. “Why do they always?”

“I reckon they heard the story about the wishes,” replied Swig.

Magpie sighed. One devil, just one in all of devil history, had granted three wishes to the human who freed it. Magpie had caught that troublemaking snag five years ago and put him back, but the damage was already done. The mannies had a mania for it now, and every chance they got they freed some wicked thing back into the world, and they surely didn’t get wishes for their trouble.

What had these fools gotten? Just their shoes left behind, and no one to spread that story. “Poor dumb mannies,” she muttered.