Page 4

Chapter Four

Demons?

Seriously?

But Delia had made herself listen to the pitch from the man on the phone, which was mainly that demons were just as real as the ghosts she banished from haunted tract homes, and that he’d like to meet her to discuss the matter further.

Despite her inner misgivings, she’d agreed to the meeting, saying she’d see him at Mothership Coffee Roasters downtown at ten o’clock, and that had seemed to be the end of that.

Except now she sat in her living room, nursing a glass of red wine as she watched the flames in her gas fireplace dance behind the glass enclosure, and wondered if she might have lost her damn mind.

It’s only a meeting, she reminded herself, and sipped some more pinot noir.

True, except she could have easily turned the man — Robert Hendricks — down and said that sorry, demons weren’t her field of expertise.

He hadn’t sounded crazy on the phone…but then, they rarely did.

And although he hadn’t mentioned any exact numbers, she’d gotten the impression that he was ready to lay a substantial amount on the line if he thought she could help him. Money wasn’t a problem anymore, not when she sold at least a house every month and also received ten percent of the commission whenever her mother sold a home that Delia had cleansed, but despite that, she wasn’t about to look an unexpected windfall in the mouth.

But still…demons?

There had been that crazy flap on the internet a few years ago, when footage from a show that had never aired — Project Demon Hunters? — flooded YouTube and other social media channels, but the hubbub had died down after a bunch of rumors circulated that the images of those horrible demonic creatures had been doctored somehow and the whole thing was a fake. In fact, she thought she remembered reading a story that said the footage had been leaked by the show’s creators in retaliation for the cable channel that had funded the show going in and adding special effects without their permission.

Anyway, she’d assumed it had all been a bunch of sound and fury that signified absolutely nothing at all.

But…what if it hadn’t been?

Although the room was warm enough, a shiver still inched its way down Delia’s spine. Maybe she should text Robert Hendricks and tell him sorry, she’d just checked her calendar and had a conflict and would need to cancel.

That was the coward’s way out, though. No, she’d agreed to this meeting, and she would see him tomorrow morning as they’d planned. If it turned out he was stark raving mad, well, that was the reason for setting up their meeting in such a public place.

And if he sounded plausible?

That, Delia reflected, might be even worse.

By ten o’clock, a lot of the early morning rush had already subsided, but Mothership was still busy enough that she was glad she’d arrived a few minutes early so she could grab a venti Americano and a relatively quiet table off to one side. The place had a great outdoor patio area, but on this particular January morning, it was still just a little too nippy to sit outside for any length of time.

However, the interior of the coffee shop was light and bright, with high ceilings and lots of windows and mid-toned wood, just about the opposite of the sort of location that would seem conducive to discussions about demons. Delia settled down at the table she’d found and blew on the surface of her coffee while she waited.

Which wasn’t for very long, because less than five minutes after she’d seated herself, a tall man with graying dark hair and wearing a gray sportcoat and jeans and loafers entered the shop and came immediately over to her table.

“Delia Dunne?” he asked, and she nodded. It wasn’t too surprising that he’d recognized her, considering how her photo was prominently displayed on the Dunne & Dunne website.

“Mr. Hendricks?” she responded.

He shook his head, smiling as he extended a hand. “Robert, please. Do you mind waiting a few more minutes while I get some coffee?”

“Not at all,” she said. “Take your time.”

“Thank you.”

The line at the counter was pretty much nonexistent by then, so he was able to place his order and come back to join her, coffee in hand, in only a couple of minutes. By that point, Delia’s Americano had cooled enough that she was able to take a sip, glad of the happy tingle of caffeine hitting her veins. Sure, she’d already had a cup at home earlier that morning, but she figured it was probably a good idea to get some extra coffee in her before they got into the whole demon thing.

“Thanks again for meeting me,” Robert told her as he sat down in the chair opposite hers. Up close, he looked like he was probably closer to fifty than forty, with laugh lines around his eyes and skin the warm tone of someone who was outside a lot.

And he definitely didn’t look like a crackpot who believed in demons. No, he seemed much more like someone who would approach her looking to buy a vacation home on a golf course.

She glanced around them, but neither of the two closest tables was occupied.

Might as well dive right into it.

“So, what makes you interested in demons?” she asked, hoping she sounded neutral and not at all judgey.

The laugh lines around Robert Hendricks’ eyes deepened as he smiled again. “Put like that, I suppose it does sound kind of crazy.”

“Well, I clean haunted houses,” she said. “So I probably have a different definition of ‘crazy’ than most people.”

Still looking amused, he picked up his cup of coffee — plain old black, as far as she could tell — and took a sip. “I suppose you have a point there. Anyway, I’m a member of a group of casino managers and owners, and lately we’ve been noticing some suspicious activity.”

“‘Suspicious’?” she echoed, wondering exactly where he was going with this. Surely if there were some sort of shenanigans going on at the local casinos, it would be a matter for their in-house security to handle, or maybe even the police if they thought some kind of actual fraud was occurring.

Robert Hendricks paused there, and Delia noticed how he also sent a quick look around them, as though to ascertain no one was close enough to be listening to their conversation.

Rather than answer her question directly, he said, “What do you know about demons?”

“Not a lot,” she replied, deciding it was better to be honest and allow him to determine whether he’d made a mistake in contacting her. “My specialty is earthbound spirits.”

A sip of coffee, and he asked, “You’ve never gone into a house where you could tell something was wrong but also somehow felt it wasn’t an ordinary ghost you were dealing with?”

Delia drank some of her coffee as well, mostly because she knew she could use another hit of caffeine before responding. “Once,” she said, and Robert nodded.

“What did it feel like?”

That experience had happened almost five years ago now, and she’d done her best to put it out of her mind — especially since she’d never had a repeat of that awful feeling of wrongness in the pit of her stomach, a sensation that told her something much worse than a simple disgruntled ghost had taken up residence in the gorgeous mid-century home in Paradise Palms, a listing her mother hadn’t wanted to let go because the place was selling for almost a million and a half.

Problem was, something awful had lived in that house, something that had sent her back to the days of her childhood when she’d played Bloody Mary in the Mirror with her friends during sleepovers and had run screaming from the bathroom. And sure, she’d retained enough presence of mind not to do the same thing when she walked into the foyer of the house, with its rock waterfall on one side and rock-surrounded planter on the other, but the deeper she’d gotten into the place, the worse she felt, finally turning back after she reached the kitchen and thought she might throw up.

Afterward, she’d told her mother something was horribly wrong with the house, and Linda, not one to be thrown off-balance by pretty much anything, had apparently made a few discreet calls, and not long afterward, someone else had come out and cleansed the place. Delia hadn’t asked who their savior was when it became clear her mother didn’t want to talk about it, and she’d done whatever she could to forget about the place.

“Just wrong,” she said, then added frankly, “Like it was going to make me vomit if I stayed in there for too much longer.”

“A common reaction, or so I’ve heard,” Robert replied. “Demon infestations can have a profound effect on people, especially if they’re already sensitive — which you must be, or you wouldn’t be in your line of work.”

Delia supposed he had a point there. Then again, she’d never tried to call herself an empath or a light-worker or any of the other phrases that got bandied around in New Age and spiritual circles. Maybe she had an interesting gift, but that was as far as she was willing to go when describing her talents.

“I suppose so,” she said, not wanting to say much more than that.

Her dubious tone didn’t seem to put off her companion, because he went on, “Anyway, demons are able to shapeshift, to put on faces that aren’t theirs in an attempt to hide their identities. They can also manipulate matter in a variety of ways…including making sure they win at the casinos.”

Delia didn’t bother to stop her eyebrows from lifting in disbelief. “What…demons come up from Hell just to play the slot machines?”

Robert gave her a gentle smile, one that seemed to acknowledge her reaction without agreeing with it. “Well, to be fair, we haven’t noticed much manipulation of the slot machines — probably not enough profit in it, unless you’re playing the really big ones. And when someone wins a high enough amount on one of those machines, then lights and sirens go off and it attracts a lot of attention. Someone manipulating a poker hand here and a throw of the dice there is going to be a lot more difficult to track down.”

All right, maybe he had a point. Still….

“So, you think a demon has come to Las Vegas and is messing with the cards and the dice so he can win a million and take it back to Hell with him?”

Another of those small smiles. “You can’t take money to Hell. But that doesn’t mean he can’t be banking it here in order to afford himself some creature comforts while he’s on Earth.”

“And when he’s done, he’ll just go back?”

Now Robert’s expression turned serious again, and he reached for his cup of coffee and had another sip. “That’s the problem. We just don’t know. The people we’ve consulted have told us that sometimes demons only come to this plane for a short time — to slum it, more or less — while others decide they’re comfortable here and do whatever they can to stay away from Hell for as long as is feasible.”

Since everything Delia had read about Hell made it sound like the sort of place where you’d want to spend as little time as possible, she could see why a demon might want to come to this plane and do a little partying…and then hang around rather than return to the proverbial pit of despair.

On the other hand, this all sounded like a big ball of crazy.

“Why a demon?” she asked, leaning against the back of her chair. “I mean, doesn’t it make more sense that a regular human is doing all this supposed cheating?”

Robert sipped some more coffee. “Of course it makes more sense. And our security teams analyzed all the security footage and couldn’t see any outright evidence of cheating. That doesn’t change our reality, which is that we’ve had many more big winners the past two months than usual. One of the other casino owners brought in a psychic to check out his place, and she said she sensed something dark and left almost immediately. Two more tried the same thing, with similar results.”

“So you came to me because I’m the only person in town with a reputation for getting rid of ghosts,” I said, and he nodded.

“I — we — realized that this must be something of a jump for you. But no one else in the psychic community has been able to help us at all.”

Delia really didn’t like being lumped in with the rest of the town’s psychics, since it wasn’t like she read people’s palms or threw Tarot cards to tell someone’s future. Like it or not, though, she had some kind of special sixth sense when it came to this sort of thing, which she assumed was why Robert had reached out in the first place.

And yet….

“Why not contact the demon-hunter guy from that Project Demon Hunters thingy?” she asked next. “Michael….”

She let the words trail off there because she honestly couldn’t remember his last name. Still, it would have been easy enough to look up.

“Michael Covenant,” Robert said smoothly. “And yes, we tried reaching out to him, but he told us that he wasn’t traveling to handle cases of infestation or possession while his wife was finishing up her doctorate in Tucson.”

“If that’s even what’s going on here,” Delia replied. “It doesn’t sound as if the demon you’re worried about has taken up residence anywhere in particular, so this wouldn’t be an infestation.”

“I suppose that’s true enough,” Robert said, looking unfazed. “But our problematic friend is still causing a good deal of trouble for the casinos, and we’d like it stopped sooner rather than later.”

Delia wasn’t sure exactly how she was supposed to accomplish that. Sure, she could send ghosts on to their next reward without too much trouble, but a demon? Would they expect her to fling holy water around and say things like, I cast you out, demon!

Somehow, the mental image made her want to chuckle, even as she guessed that Robert wouldn’t be too happy to hear she was somewhat amused by the situation.

“I’m not sure,” she said, each word slowed by reluctance. “This really sounds like something a priest should handle.”

“We plan to ask for the church’s intervention at some point if necessary,” Robert replied, clearly not put off by her comment. “But we don’t want to do that until we’re sure of what we’re dealing with. That’s where you come in. Once you can tell us definitively that you’ve sensed a demon’s presence in one or more of our casinos, then we’ll go to a priest for help.”

Well, that sounded a little better. It didn’t seem as if Robert and the other casino owners had any intention of putting her in harm’s way, only wanted her to use her talents to give them some confirmation that their current problem was much more than a single grifter who’d figured out how to cheat at both dice and cards. Once she’d ID’d the problem, then she could step aside and let the real experts handle it, much like a house inspector who might call out issues with the wiring and the plumbing but who would then have actual contractors come in to fix the problem.

“I can’t promise anything — ” she began.

“I don’t expect you to,” Robert cut in, his tone friendly enough that the interruption didn’t feel rude. “I know this isn’t an exact science. But to show you that we’re serious….”

He reached into the inner pocket of his sportcoat and pulled out an envelope, then set it on the tabletop and pushed it toward her.

Almost of its own accord, her hand reached for the envelope and she looked inside, expecting a cashier’s check or maybe even a check drawn on the casino Robert represented.

But no, the envelope contained several stacks of bills held in place with rubber bands.

“That’s ten thousand,” he said. “If you’re able to find traces of demonic activity in our casinos and we’re eventually able to catch our culprit, we’ll double it. But no matter what happens, you can keep the deposit.”

Ten grand, just for walking into a casino and taking a psychic sniff.

And let’s not forget the possibility of earning twice that amount.

Delia reached for her Americano. “Well, Mr. Hendricks,” she said. “It looks like you’ve hired yourself a demon whisperer.”