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He rose as well — not to follow her, but to pick up her glass and carry it and the one he already held over to the table so the wine would be waiting for them when they sat down to eat. They’d already left the partially full bottle in the dining room, so they wouldn’t have to worry about that part.

Soon enough, they’d both seated themselves and started portioning out all the goodies they’d ordered — kabob and rice and grilled vegetables, shawarma and fresh pita bread and this amazing creamy dip that looked sort of like hummus but was made with puréed potatoes and garlic.

Once they were done with that, however, Caleb settled himself against the back of his chair and gave her a very direct look.

“Well?”

No point in trying to wiggle out of it, especially since she was the one who’d asked him over here specifically so she’d have a sympathetic ear for her tales of supernatural woe.

All right, maybe “woe” wasn’t exactly the right word, but she had to admit that yesterday had been weird by anyone’s standards…even a quarter demon’s.

“I got a text from someone who needed a house cleared,” she said.

Caleb looked nonplussed by that revelation. “And?” he responded, then put a forkful of chicken kabob in his mouth.

“The text was from Ty Carter,” she said.

Both Caleb’s brown brows — several shades darker than his hair — lifted in surprise. “His house is haunted?”

“I don’t think it’s his house,” Delia replied. “I think he just called me there because he wanted to watch me in action, so to speak.”

“But there was a ghost.”

“Definitely,” she said, then paused. Although she was glad that the spirit of the girl had finally been able to move on after spending so many years haunting the property, it was still sad to think of all the milestones she’d missed, from learning how to drive to attending prom, or going to college and discovering her passion as she moved into the world of adults.

All that gone, simply because of a trip and fall in the dark.

“What did you think of him?” Caleb asked, which Delia found telling. He hadn’t pressed for further details about the ghost she’d encountered, but instead was far more interested in the man who’d summoned her to the house in the first place.

“I’m not sure,” she said slowly. “There’s something about the guy that just feels off, even though I can’t really put my finger on it.”

“That’s the same vibe I’ve gotten,” Caleb replied. “I can’t explain it, either. But that’s why I’m having a private investigator look into him and that other guy from the tournament, Paul Reeves. They both ping my radar, but for different reasons.”

For a second or two, Delia could only stare back at him. His revelation had come from so far out of left field, she wasn’t sure what to make of it.

“A P.I.?” she managed at last.

He nodded. “Some guy named Jim Whitaker. Seems pretty solid. Anyway, I just have to hope he can find a lot more than I was able to look up online.”

A sip of wine sounded like a good idea right about then. After the mellow red blend had slipped down her throat, she said, “You could have called my friend Pru.”

“Nope,” Caleb responded. “I mean, I’m sure she’s good at what she does, but having me hire her for something like this didn’t feel right. It just seems smarter for each of us to stay in our lanes, if you know what I mean.”

Oddly, Delia thought she did. Or at least, even though there was no real reason why Pru couldn’t be working for both her and Caleb, it did feel less complicated for Prudence to stay safely out of his orbit as much as possible.

“If you think so,” Delia said, figuring she should leave it there. “What do you think the detective will find?”

“I have no idea,” Caleb said. Still holding his wine glass, he leaned against the back of the chair, his expression now almost rueful.

“I did my best to find what I could about the two of them, but it wasn’t much, and certainly nothing incriminating.

So I suppose I was just hoping that a professional might have better luck. ”

“What did you find, though?” she asked. Ty Carter seemed like such a cipher to her that she thought he could be almost anything from a hairstylist to a martial arts instructor.

“Like I said, not a lot. Paul owns a carpet cleaning business, and Ty is a tennis instructor at DragonRidge Country Club.”

Now it was Delia’s turn to raise her brows. Of course, she wasn’t a member of the country club, but she had clients who were, so she knew it was at least a sixty grand initial membership fee before you could even set foot in the place, and the greens fees were nothing to sneeze at, either.

Anyway, she had to believe that any of the pros who worked there — whether they taught tennis or golf — were probably paid pretty well for their services.

At the same time, though, she had a hard time imagining Ty Carter teaching the backhand to a bunch of trophy wives or out-of-shape executives. He seemed a little too high vibe…and a bit too odd, to put it bluntly, for that kind of career.

“But I couldn’t find anything more than that about either of them,” Caleb went on. “Which is why I reached out to a private detective. If he can’t dig up much more than what I did, then I’ll know my spidey-sense is broken and can just move on.”

Delia didn’t think there was anything wrong with Caleb’s instincts. So far, they seemed to have served him pretty well.

All the same, it would be nice to have some hard evidence to back up his suspicions that something was going on with those two.

“One weird thing,” she said, and now he grinned.

“Just one?”

“Well, okay, we’re dealing with more than that, but we’ll stick with the one for now. How did Ty Carter know that house was haunted when people have been living there for more than thirty years with not a single peep that they thought a ghost might be hanging around the place?”

“How do you know someone didn’t know about the ghost?” Caleb asked reasonably.

In most cases, that was a logical enough question to ask. But Delia had been clearing haunted houses in the greater Las Vegas area for the past ten-plus years, so she knew better than anyone else which ones had their resident spirits and which were clean as a whistle.

“Because I looked up the property records when I was at the office today,” she said.

“The house has changed hands four times since it was built in 1991. Even if one of the families that lived there vibed well enough with the ghost that they never detected her presence — and that happens more often than you might think — the odds are pretty damn low that none of the others ever noticed anything wrong. And as far as I can tell, no one ever called in a psychic or a priest or whatever to scope out the place.”

Caleb appeared to absorb all this, brows pulling together as he helped himself to a bite of grilled bell pepper. “That does seem a little weird.”

“Exactly. But Ty Carter knew the house was haunted, and he had me come there because he wanted to see for himself how I worked.”

“Were you able to banish the ghost?”

“It’s not really a banishing,” Delia replied. A fine point, but one she would always argue, because it mattered. “I send those spirits to the next plane — or at least, I help them understand that it’s better for them to move on, and they do it for themselves. It’s not like sending a demon to Hell.”

“But that’s what I did with the ghost of the serial killer who was hanging around my house,” Caleb returned, and she shrugged.

“He’d been avoiding Hell by staying on this plane. Most ghosts are a lot more benign than that, so they just need a nudge to go on to the next world.”

Maybe that wasn’t precisely a curl of Caleb’s lip, but she could tell he wasn’t entirely impressed. “Heaven?”

“I don’t usually like to call it that,” Delia said, knowing she sounded way too prim. “It’s possible Heaven exists, but — ”

“Oh, it exists,” he cut in. “You can’t have Hell without Heaven. But I suppose I can see how there might be other planes between Heaven and here.”

It seemed he was okay with conceding the point, and she could only be glad of that. After the past couple of days and all their assorted weirdnesses, she wasn’t sure whether she was in the right mental place to be arguing for the existence of Heaven.

“Well, then,” she said, and reached for her glass of wine.

She knew she needed a drink.

“But there’s something else, right?” Caleb probed. “What happened with Ty Carter was a little strange, but I get the feeling that’s not the only thing you wanted to talk about.”

To be honest, she wasn’t sure she wanted to talk about it at all, even with someone as sympathetic about supernatural goings-on as Caleb Lockwood tended to be. But she’d invited him over for dinner, so it would be pretty stupid to turn evasive now.

“It kind of starts with Ty Carter, though,” Delia said. “Just as we were wrapping things up at the haunted house, he told me, ‘I think you might discover you have talents you didn’t even know existed.’ At the time, I didn’t make much of it, but later that night….”

She let the words trail off, since she wasn’t sure how she could even begin to explain the way she might have heard Aaron Sanchez’s thoughts as they were standing next to her car in the parking garage.

“What happened?” Caleb asked. He sounded almost gentle, and she wondered what her face looked like right then.

Worried, probably.

“It was…strange,” she said. “We were done with our drinks and appetizers, and then Aaron walked me to my car. Up until then, the evening had been almost too normal, but….”

Once again, she found herself wondering if she should complete the sentence, especially since she couldn’t really describe what Aaron had been thinking if she didn’t also add at least a few details about what had led up to that moment.

Caleb still sat there quietly, one hand resting on the tabletop near his wine glass, although he didn’t reach for it. “But…?”