Page 49 of Devil in the Details (Vegas Slayers #2)

Chapter Twenty-One

Obviously, there wasn’t any talk about going out to eat afterward. No, Delia drove Caleb straight home, and he was gladder than ever that she’d offered to be the chauffeur today.

Right now, he was feeling like a wrung-out washcloth and didn’t know whether he could have even mustered the mental and motor capacity to pilot his Mercedes back to the house.

All this time, he’d only played with his demonic talents…

teleporting here, influencing a throw of the dice there…

sending his consciousness into the body of a dead woman so he could be safely transported away from the Victorian mansion where a madwoman had opened a hellmouth to summon Belial, her erstwhile lover.

But today Caleb had been forced to reach down into the core of his being, to awaken powers he hadn’t even realized he possessed to defeat the demon who’d taken control of a poker champion’s body — and to make sure the circuit Hank Bowers and his minions had tried to create was broken forever.

In a word, he was fucking tired.

Because of the way the demons had rushed the tournament, doing their best to make sure the ritual happened on their own time, it was barely six o’clock when Delia pulled into Caleb’s driveway.

Normally, he would never have eaten this early, but now he knew his body was ravenous, needing fuel to replace all the energy he’d used to stop the creatures’ unholy plans.

“Pizza,” he said briefly as Delia guided him up the front steps and into the house.

A smile hovered around the edges of her mouth, but he could still see the worry in her clear gray-blue eyes. “I can manage that.”

Her arm remained steady beneath his until he sort of collapsed on the sofa. While it felt good to sit down, Caleb wished he could have kept holding on to her. Nothing romantic in that touch, sure, but it had still been good to have her so near, so strong.

So reassuringly human.

She got out her phone. “Vito’s?” she asked, naming the restaurant they usually ordered from when they were at his house.

“Perfect.”

A brief detour into the kitchen to get him a glass of water — he would have preferred something a little stronger, but knew he needed to hydrate before he put any alcohol in his system — and then she made the call, placing an order for an extra-large pepperoni with extra cheese.

How had she known the exact kind of pizza he needed?

Because she was Delia, of course.

Call completed, she set the phone down on the coffee table rather than returning it to her purse. “It’ll be here in about twenty minutes.” She paused there and sent him a searching look. “How’re you doing?”

“I feel like shit,” he said frankly. “But it’ll pass.”

She sat down on the couch next to him. “That was really something. Want to tell me exactly what you did?”

Caleb summoned a weak smile. “As soon as I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”

Delia chuckled. “You just…played it by ear?”

“More or less.” He shifted so he could look at her directly and saw nothing but concern in her face. No fear or awe, nothing to signal that what she’d witnessed earlier had changed her opinion of him.

Then again, he supposed that once you accepted someone was a quarter demon, you kind of had to roll with the punches going forward.

“What do you think Ty told the cops?” he asked.

Before she could reply, the man himself…whatever he was…appeared a few feet away, standing next to the floor-to-ceiling fireplace with its impressive slabs of white-veined black soapstone.

“I told them that Aaron Sanchez collapsed, and it seems Hank Bowers had a heart attack from the excitement.”

Under other circumstances, Caleb might have given Ty some grief for appearing out of nowhere like that, especially when he’d been polite enough to knock when he came over to Delia’s place.

Now, though, he figured he should just let it slide.

“What about the tremors and all the people fleeing the casino?”

Ty looked imperturbable as ever. “The entire valley experienced a small earthquake,” he replied. “Nothing large, only a 4.0, but since people here aren’t used to that sort of thing, it makes sense that the spectators would panic and run outside.”

Delia spoke up then, her expression puzzled. “And no one was recording the event or streaming it?”

“Funny thing about that,” Ty replied. “All the footage appears to have been erased. Some kind of weird magnetic resonance that interfered with the area in and around the casino.”

Magnetic resonance, his ass. Caleb was pretty sure that wasn’t anything close to what had actually happened, but he wasn’t going to worry about it.

The important thing was that it seemed as if all the bases had been covered, which of course they had been. That was the whole point of Ty staying behind and acting as a sort of supernatural “cleaner.”

Caleb glanced over at Delia, and her shoulders lifted almost imperceptibly.

“Oh,” Ty went on, “because of the general confusion, there wasn’t an awards ceremony. However, you can expect the casino to reach out to you in the next couple of days to give you your winnings.”

Right. Caleb had been so wrapped up in making sure the supernatural circuit was destroyed that he’d completely forgotten that the winner of the competition would get a cool fifty thousand bucks.

Sure, he had a pretty decent war chest right now, but he wasn’t about to turn down a hefty chunk of cash.

He figured he’d earned it.

“And we really beat them?” Delia asked then, voicing a worry that Caleb hadn’t been able to entirely ignore. “They’re not going to come back and try this again?”

“Doubtful,” Ty said. “I’d keep a watch on all those Aegis properties — I have a feeling they’re going to be sold off very soon. Turns out most of their vacation rentals were operating illegally in neighborhoods where the HOAs don’t allow them.”

Caleb wasn’t surprised that the demons running things at Aegis hadn’t cared much about breaking the rules. However, with all the horror stories he’d heard about HOAs over the years, he was a little surprised no one had ratted them out before now.

Most likely, a good number of palms on various association boards had been greased well to make sure no one complained too loudly.

Or maybe some of them had been placed under demonic compulsion to ensure they stayed quiet. Either way, it sounded as if Aegis’s Vegas holdings were about to collapse.

“That’s good news,” he said. “Maybe some of those houses will be good candidates for flips.”

“Possibly,” Ty allowed. “That’s not my area of concern. We only wanted to make sure the demons’ plan failed and that the entire episode could be written off as a series of unfortunate events.”

Put together, they probably would have seemed downright crazy to anyone paying attention.

But Caleb knew all too well that regular people didn’t like to allow even the slightest notion that something supernatural might have gone down in their immediate vicinity, so he guessed no one was going to ask too many questions or examine this afternoon’s events too closely.

But it seemed Delia had a few questions of her own.

“And who is ‘we,’ exactly?” she inquired. “Are you part of some angelic A-Team or something?”

Ty actually smiled. “Nothing that showy. We go where we’re needed, that’s all. But if you want to assign us a label, I suppose you could call us the Guardians.”

Guardian angels. Very funny.

Delia didn’t smile, though. No, she looked thoughtful, absorbing what Ty had just told her.

“I suppose that makes sense,” she said. “And thank you for intervening today. I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t been there.”

Caleb wanted to protest that he’d been the one doing most of the heavy lifting.

However, since he’d been absorbed in holding his own at the poker table, he hadn’t been able to protect Delia from Aaron Sanchez.

It rankled a little that Ty had been the one to come to her rescue, although he understood that the most important thing was her safety, not who had been the person to run interference with the possessed man.

The doorbell rang then, and she startled a little.

“Pizza,” she said briefly, and got up from the sofa.

“I’ll leave you to your meal,” Ty said as she headed toward the door. “I just wanted to let you know that Aegis is no more, and the local authorities don’t suspect any kind of foul play.”

“You don’t want to stay for pizza?” Caleb asked, more out of courtesy than because he really wanted Ty Carter hanging around.

“Thank you, but no. I have other matters to attend to.”

And then he disappeared just as Delia opened the front door.

If nothing else, angels seemed to have pretty good timing.

It seemed she’d heard enough of the exchange that she didn’t ask where Ty had gone. Instead, she set the oversized pizza box down on the coffee table, which wouldn’t suffer any damage from the hot cardboard because the tabletop was glass.

Sounding deliberately cheerful, she said, “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”

“Me too,” Caleb responded. “But I wouldn’t mind having some of that chianti I’ve got in the wine rack to drink with this pizza.”

She surveyed him for a moment, expression openly skeptical. “Are you sure that’s such a good idea?”

“I’ll be fine,” he assured her. “That water I just drank perked me right up.”

“Like a wilting flower,” she said, and he laughed.

“Sure.”

“Then I’ll go get it.”

Because she’d been to the house multiple times, she knew where he stored the corkscrew. After pausing to grab the bottle of chianti in question, she returned to the living room, then went back for a couple of glasses.

Somewhat clumsily, she opened the bottle and poured a measure of chianti into each glass.

“Want to toast to anything?” she asked as Caleb lifted his.

He didn’t even have to stop and think about it.

“To beating the bad guys.”

They clinked glasses and took a sip.

“You really think they’re gone?”