Roman eased himself into a chair from my kitchen table and scooted up. “I did. Makes sense that she’d keep it as close to her as possible, though that takes some balls to have it out in the open that much.”

“So why won’t you let me tell anyone, then?”

He tsked. “Think, Georgina. Who are you going to tell? Which demon in this whole mess do you think you can trust? None of them like Jerome. None of them want him back.”

“I was going to tell Hugh.”

“You can’t tell anybody. I was walking along with you today when Cedric popped in.” It figured. There was no telling how long Roman had been following me invisibly. “If he was telling the truth about not telling Nanette about your theories, then that means one of your friends tipped her off.”

“No,” I said stubbornly. “It’s more likely that Cedric was lying. None of them would have betrayed me.”

To my complete and utter astonishment, Aubrey jumped on Roman’s lap. He scratched her head absentmindedly. “Well, believe what you want, but I don’t think it’s safe to tell anyone yet. Except me, of course.”

“Right. The guy who wants me dead.”

“Eh, we can talk about that later. For now, let’s go over what we know.”

I wasn’t really keen on the casual way we were tossing around my impending doom, nor did I like that I still didn’t know why he was here. Keeping my mind on Jerome did help, though, and it was nice to finally have someone to truly brainstorm this stuff with.

“We know Grace was the demon who helped with the summoning,” I said.

“There could be more, you know.”

“Yeah, but there’s only one archdemon position.”

“True. Just don’t rule other possibilities out. She and that other demoness here are pretty tight.”

I thought about Mei, whose poker face was as good as Grace’s. “Yeah . . . although, they seem to be operating pretty independently now. But, for the sake of argument, we’ll stick with Grace. So, we know she was part of the summoning and has half of the seal. What we don’t know: where the other half of the seal is, who helped her, and where Jerome actually is.”

“Kind of daunting,” he mused.

A thought suddenly came to me. “Wait a minute . . . you might make this simpler. A greater immortal can break up Jerome’s prison. With you, we don’t need to actually find the whole seal to free him—or get the half we know about from Grace.”

Roman turned sheepish. “Well . . . I don’t know for sure that I can do that.”

“Why not? You’ve got the same powers as Jerome.”