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Chapter Seventeen

“They were sucking the energy out of the players?” Delia asked, expression aghast.

“That’s what it sure looked like,” Caleb said.

They’d gone back to his house, mostly because, while a celebratory meal felt in order, they both knew they had way too many things to talk about that they didn’t dare have overheard by any regular bystanders.

The casino was slightly closer to his place than it was to Delia’s, which was why they’d ended up there.

Also, he liked the Chinese restaurant just a few blocks away better than the one near her house.

Now they were drinking pinot noir and passing around various plates of noshables, and some of the jangliness from the tournament was beginning to recede.

Not completely, because Caleb didn’t think he’d ever be able to forget the way Hank had put his hand on the other players’ shoulders or how it had felt like energy was being sucked out of them as if through a straw, but it still was much better to be home.

“So…the whole tournament was a setup to rob people of their life force or something?” Delia asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied, which was only the truth. “Maybe the energy-stealing is just a handy side benefit, and their real motives are even more sinister.”

Her brows drew together, and she set down the egg roll she’d been holding so she could reach for her glass of wine. “I’m not sure if you can get much more sinister than taking away someone’s life force.”

Caleb, however, had spent several years in Hell…and had been raised by a half demon…so he knew there was a whole world of sinister out there that she should never have to explore.

“What worries me is that it sure feels as if Hank has known all along that I was part demon,” he said.

If possible, Delia appeared even more troubled by that additional wrinkle in the situation. “Is he a demon, too?”

Probably better to ignore the whole “too” thing. Caleb could tell she hadn’t meant it in a derogatory way, only that it was easier to lump all demons together rather than trying to put a fine point on her comment.

Anyway, he didn’t think he could answer her question with any degree of certainty.

“I don’t know,” he said. “He doesn’t feel that way to me, but not all demons do. It’s possible that part of his game was to let me know I wasn’t hiding my identity quite as well as I thought I was.”

“To put you off balance?” she asked.

“That could have been part of it,” Caleb replied. “The problem is, since I don’t know what their overarching plan is, it’s hard for me to say anything about their motivations.”

Honestly, the only thing he knew for certain right now was that he’d somehow made it into the semifinals…even if his appetite for playing in the competition seemed to diminish with every passing moment.

“I wonder what they’d do if I walked away,” he commented next, and Delia’s eyes widened slightly.

“You mean…just bail out of the tournament?”

“Yep,” he said as he reached for the container of chicken fried rice and spooned some more onto his plate.

“I mean, what’s it even getting me at this point?

I’ve made it to the semifinals, so it’s pretty clear that I can hold my own at a poker table without using my powers.

And with this whole thing with Hank Bowers… .”

Not much point in going on, since Delia already knew the whole sordid story.

Rather than appear sympathetic, though, her chin lifted slightly, and her blue-gray eyes seemed positively steely.

“Isn’t that letting them win?”

“Maybe it is,” he responded, even as he thought they’d gone way beyond worrying about who was winning and who was losing. “I guess I just don’t see the point in putting myself in harm’s way when I don’t have to.”

“But Hank already knows what you are,” she pointed out.

All right, that much was true. However, it didn’t seem as if Hank Bowers — or whatever it was that was hiding inside him — intended to do much with the information.

By walking away, Caleb hoped he would send a signal that he wasn’t going to interfere…

and that he expected the same courtesy from Bowers in return.

The coward’s way out, possibly, but he thought he’d much rather live to fight another day.

“Maybe so, but I get the feeling he’d leave me alone if I bailed on the whole thing.”

More a hope than a gut feeling, and yet the more he thought about it, the more Caleb liked the idea of bowing out of the tournament.

It wouldn’t be such a big deal, after all.

They’d just call in one of the people who were eliminated from the quarterfinals and put them in his place. No harm, no foul.

Delia, on the other hand, looked anything but thrilled with him for even toying with the idea of backing out. “What about Ty Carter?”

“What about him?” Caleb asked.

Her eyes narrowed again. “Don’t be disingenuous.”

He didn’t bother to argue with that assessment, not when he knew that was exactly what he’d been doing with his response. “Okay, I think he was doing his best to intervene…him and those two other guys who were with him. I’m still trying to figure out whether Bowers noticed, though.”

“I don’t think he did,” Delia said at once.

“I was trying to keep an eye on him the whole time, and I have to believe that if he’d sensed what Ty and his two buddies were doing, he would have shown some sign of it and might have done what he could to stop them.

And if they were trying to keep things from getting completely out of hand, then that means we’re not in this entirely alone. ”

Possibly, she had a point there. “But what’s their endgame?”

She only shook her head, then broke the end off one of her egg rolls and put the morsel in her mouth. After she was done chewing, she said, “If they’re really angels or part angels or whatever, maybe they don’t have an endgame beyond doing their best to ensure that people don’t get hurt.”

As much as Caleb would have liked to tell her she was being hopelessly na?ve, he was forced to admit he didn’t know all that much about angels or their motivations.

Maybe they were involved solely to reduce whatever damage Hank Bowers and whoever else was in his cabal might be inflicting on innocent bystanders.

The sigil he’d seen on Lou Bishop’s wrist. That one brief glimpse hadn’t been enough for Caleb to tell exactly what it was.

Some way of controlling the man? Did that mean he wasn’t a demon, but only someone who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, a useful tool for Hank to discard when he didn’t need him anymore?

He didn’t know. Sure, he was a quarter demon, but this still felt way above his pay grade.

“Did Ty say anything to you?”

One corner of Delia’s mouth quirked. “He said he knew you’d go on to the next round.”

Caleb supposed he should be glad for such faith in his poker-playing abilities, but that wasn’t really what he’d been asking about. “Anything else?”

Her expression abruptly sobered. “He basically admitted that he woke up these weird psychic powers of mine…not that they were of much help today. But he also said they would have come to the forefront eventually even without his intervention. He just sort of helped them along.”

One mystery cleared up. That didn’t mean a whole lot more of them weren’t still unsolved.

“I guess that’s something,” Caleb said, then poured some more wine for both of them, since their glasses were almost empty. “But I’m not sure it’s enough to convince me to stay in the tournament.”

She’d picked up her glass after he’d refilled it and now settled against the back of her chair, expression earnest. “I have to believe you were there for a reason. Otherwise, you would’ve gotten knocked out early in the competition.”

He couldn’t help shaking his head at that comment. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

Maybe she didn’t quite roll her eyes, but he could tell she wasn’t going to let it go, either.

“This isn’t about my confidence in your abilities.

It’s about believing there has to be some purpose to all this beyond you just figuring out whether you could hold your own at Texas Hold ’Em without any help from your powers. ”

Well, that was how it had all started. Idle curiosity…along with a desire to show that he could do just fine at acting like a regular mortal.

But the whole thing had grown far beyond that, turning into some monstrous bloom straight out of Little Shop of Horrors. Backing away now might not even be an option.

Even if he still wanted to argue his side of the situation.

“Sometimes things don’t have any real meaning,” he said. “They just are.”

“Are all demons nihilists?”

“I’m not a nihilist,” he returned calmly. “Just realistic.”

Both her eyebrows lifted, but she didn’t reply at once, and instead scooped up some lo mein with her chopsticks and put it in her mouth. A moment while she chewed, her expression still thoughtful, and then she spoke again.

“I think we both have to acknowledge that our ‘real’ might be a little different from that of the rest of the population. Not when you’re part demon, and I have these psychic powers appearing from nowhere, and we’re dealing with a guy who might be an angel or at least angel-adjacent.

In that kind of world, it’s very possible that things do happen for a reason.

And if that’s the truth, then you need to acknowledge there may be a real purpose to you playing in that tournament, even if it’s just to protect the other players from getting hurt. ”

Caleb wanted to argue that no one had been hurt.

Sure, he’d gotten the sense of people’s life force being drained by whatever infernal spell or enchantment Hank Bowers had been trying to cast, but it wasn’t as if the losing players hadn’t walked away from the table under their own power or anything close to it.

Then again, he supposed that having people carried off in stretchers might have been bad for business…or at least would have attracted far too much notice.

Maybe they would have gotten hurt, though, if it hadn’t been for whatever kind of interference Ty Carter and his two companions had been running.

And since Caleb knew he was hip to Hank Bowers’ game, that meant he would be extra vigilant in the next round.

“Okay, fine,” he said, knowing he wasn’t being exactly gracious in defeat, not with that annoyed note in his voice. “I won’t bail on the competition. But if Bowers or any of the other players turn into big, scaly demons and go on the attack, I’m outta there.”

“Oh, come on,” Delia replied. She was smiling now, a sure sign that she knew she’d come out on top in this particular debate. “You know I always carry holy water with me. No matter what kind of tricks they try to pull, we’ll be ready for them.”

Not for the first time, Caleb thought it was a very good thing that he had someone like Delia Dunne to watch his back. After spending most of his life thinking he was utterly on his own when crunch time came around, he had to admit her support was a welcome change of pace.

“True,” he allowed. “Or at least, we’ll be as ready as we can be. But if there’s one thing I know about demons, it’s that they don’t like to do anything that outs them for what they are. They much prefer to work in the shadows.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call running a poker tournament ‘working in the shadows.’”

Caleb shrugged, then popped a piece of cashew chicken in his mouth.

“It is when no one else knows demons are involved. See, the thing is, if people are forced to admit that demons are real, then they also have to allow for the existence of Hell. And if Hell exists, then Heaven does, too, and that’s not anything the folks downstairs want to become a common belief. ”

Delia didn’t look all that convinced by his argument. “Lots of people already believe in Heaven,” she pointed out.

“They do in a sort of lip service sort of way. But that’s not the same thing as knowing it deep in your gut, of acknowledging it like you would that the sky is blue or the sun sets in the west every evening. Right now, it’s not anything a person can see with their own two eyes.”

Because she didn’t respond right away, Caleb could tell she was pondering what he’d just said, doing her best to square it with her personal experience.

“Okay,” she said at length. “I suppose I can see your point on that one. So I also can understand why demons wouldn’t want anyone to know they really exist. I suppose that’s why they’re so into disguising themselves and doing their best to conceal what they are.”

“Exactly,” Caleb replied. “Also, coming up here is kind of like a vacation for them. Sure, they get up to all sorts of mischief when they’re topside because that’s what they do, but they’re also doing their best to enjoy themselves.”

Delia gave a disgusted shake of her head and reached for her wine. Just as her lips parted to respond, however, Caleb’s phone buzzed in his pocket.

Under normal circumstances, he would have ignored it and let the call go to voicemail. However, since there were only two people he could think of who might be calling him at this hour, and one of them was currently sitting across the table from him, he figured he’d better pick up.

“Hi, Jim,” he said after a quick glance at the screen. “What’s up?”

Delia straightened, her face now bright with interest. Like Caleb himself, she’d probably realized that the private detective wouldn’t be calling in the middle of dinner unless he had a damn good reason.

“I found something sort of strange,” Jim said. “You know how it seemed as if Paul Reeves’ carpet cleaning business was some sort of front?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it turns out he actually has been servicing some properties. I did some digging, and it turns out they’re all owned by the same company.”

For some reason, tension knotted in Caleb’s stomach.

When Jim spoke again, his words weren’t entirely unexpected.

“Those properties all belong to an outfit named Aegis Holdings.”