Page 79 of Speak of the Devil
“Which you knew,” she replied, knowing her voice sounded way too shaky.
“I did,” he said, and his dark eyes practically danced with mischief. “You spend a couple of years in Hell, you learn a few things.”
“Well, thank God for that,” Delia said.
They looked at each other for a few seconds, and then they both burst out laughing.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Caleb wasglad to see Delia hadn’t been so rattled by their encounter with the demon that she wasn’t willing to listen to his advice as to what they should do next.
“The security cameras would have seen you come in here,” he said, and she flicked a worried glance toward the double doors that led into Hendricks’ office. “So you need to go back out the same way.”
“Isn’t the Dunes’ security team going to have a few questions when they discover I was the last person to see their main man alive?”
She’d looked calm enough as she made that query, but he could see the way her hand shook as she lifted it to push back a stray lock of coppery hair.
“Probably,” he admitted. “But there’s nothing to show what actually went down in here, and I have a feeling it’s going to be a little while before they even realize Hendricks is missing.”
Her gaze moved past him to take in their surroundings. While there were a couple of wet blotches here and there on the floor from all the holy water that had been thrown around, that would dry soon enough, and because none of the furniture had gotten knocked over or even moved, you couldn’t tell that they’dhad an altercation with a demon in the office just a few minutes earlier.
There wasn’t a body, either, making it that much harder to figure out exactly what had happened to the erstwhile Mr. Hendricks.
“All right,” Delia said. “And then what…meet you in that same hallway where we first materialized?”
Caleb had already thought about that. Although there were cameras everywhere, they couldn’t pick up on every single person who came and went in the casino. It had been important for them to not be seen arriving together, but he didn’t think there would be a problem with her heading out the front door and grabbing a taxi.
When he explained this to her, though, she only frowned.
“You think someone isn’t going to ask why I didn’t take my own car?”
“They might,” he replied. “But you can just say it wouldn’t start or something, and that you took a taxi here because you didn’t want to miss your meeting. Unlike an Uber, you can’t be tracked in a taxi as long as you pay cash.”
“All right,” Delia said. She still looked a little reluctant, but she didn’t seem willing to argue the point any further. “And then what?”
“Then we have the post-mortem,” he said, and smiled. “Your place or mine?”
In the end, they decided it was smarter to have the taxi drop Delia off at her house, just because that was the logical place she would have headed after she met with Robert Hendricks. To make everything look on the up and up, Caleb blinked himselfhome first so he could get his Range Rover and drive to her place.
Nothing in the house had been disturbed…and he had a feeling he wouldn’t have to worry about that anymore, not with Calach banished. He’d been a higher order of demon than the ones he’d summoned to stick a crowbar into the safe existence Caleb had created for himself, so there wasn’t much chance of any further demonic interference now that the lead guy had been sent back to Hell where he belonged.
Well, no more demonic interference for now, anyway.
When he arrived at Delia’s house and knocked at the door, she answered wearing the same black leggings and big black sweatshirt she’d worn the night before, signaling that she’d been in a hurry to get out of the outfit she’d worn during the confrontation with the demon.
He couldn’t really blame her for that. Most likely, it would take a couple of dry cleanings to get all the stink out of those clothes.
An open bottle of a red blend from Trader Joe’s sat on the kitchen counter. “Want some?” she asked as he followed her inside.
“Hell, yeah.”
She grinned, then went over to the cupboard to fetch another wine glass. After pouring him a healthy measure of the red, she said, “Let’s go sit down.”
As he’d done the other times he’d visited her house, Caleb made sure to seat himself in one of the club chairs rather than next to Delia on the couch. While she’d been much friendlier these past couple of days, he knew he couldn’t push it…even if he also couldn’t quite forget the way it had felt to embrace her in that corridor off the kitchens at the Dunes.
Too bad that embrace had been all pretend.
At least on her part.
