Page 8 of Speak of the Devil
“I don’t know,” Delia replied, even as she wondered whether she would have told him if she actually knew his mother’s current address. It had to be somewhere in the listing paperwork, but Linda was the one who’d set all that up.
Honestly, considering the way the woman had ignored her son’s pleas for help, she deserved to be haunted by his vengeful spirit for all eternity.
But Delia knew that wasn’t why she was here. No, she’d come to the house to ascertain whether there was a ghost at all — which there certainly was — and help it…helphim…move on.
“She’s paying for what happened,” she said clearly. “Paying every day, knowing she should have listened and didn’t. And her blindness made her lose her only son. That’s her own hell, and she’s living in it. You, on the other hand — you told me your story. I see you, and I believe you. Now, though…now it’s time to let this place go. It’s time for you to go on to the next phase of your existence.”
The spirit cocked its head to one side, now looking confused.
“It’s okay,” Delia said, doing her best to sound confident and encouraging at the same time. “I’ve done this with lots of people. They get a little confused sometimes about where they need to go, but I know they go to a better place than this one.”
Well, that was what she wanted to tell herself. A self-described agnostic, she’d never believed in Heaven and Hell or any sort of biblical interpretation of the afterlife. Lots of reading on the subject — and talking to the mediums in town who were the real deal and not just fakes trying to bilk unsuspecting tourists out of their hard-earned dollars — told her that something waited on the other side, even if she couldn’t say for sure exactly what it might be.
A new life with new lessons to be learned, if the mediums were correct.
For a long moment, the spirit continued to float there, those blue eyes — the only thing about the apparition that had any real color — fixed on her face. However, Delia guessed something must have gotten through to it, because it lifted one hand, possibly in farewell, and then disappeared.
She continued to stand next to the island, though, partly because she’d had one or two instances where she thought a ghost had taken itself off, only to be startled when the phenomenon she was investigating started right back up again…and partly because she knew she still was a little off-balance from what the boy’s spirit had shown her.
Some things weren’t meant to be seen.
But after a minute or two passed, she realized it truly was gone.
Thank God.
Businesslike now, she snuffed the small white chime candle by lifting it and pressing the wick against the ashtray — a psychic had told her never to blow out candles used in rituals, since doing so would blow away any good juju she might have summoned — and turned on the water in the sink so she could safely douse the stick of palo santo.
“Peace be on this place,” she said simply. A while back, she’d started saying that after she was done cleaning a house, and although she didn’t know for sure whether it made any difference at all, she thought the words made a nice end cap for her rituals.
Just as she was returning her cleansing kit to her purse, her phone rang from somewhere inside. She scrabbled for it, fingers closing around the wallet case as the iPhone rang a third time.
“Delia Dunne, Dunne and Dunne Realty,” she said.
“Hello, Ms. Dunne.” It was a man’s voice, deep and friendly, although she didn’t think she’d ever heard it before. “A friend gave me your number. I heard that you handle certain…supernatural…problems?”
Well, she supposed that was one way of looking at it. No point in denying what he’d just said, not when her services were some of the Las Vegas real estate community’s worst-kept secrets.
“I do,” she said briskly. “Are you concerned about a particular property you’re interested in buying?”
“Not exactly,” the man replied. He hesitated, as if deciding how he should proceed, and then added, “Tell me — what do you know about demons?”
Chapter Three
The soundof slot machines and chattering voices surrounded him, but Caleb ignored it, instead focusing on the cards he currently held in his hand. After doing this for almost two months, he’d gotten pretty good at keeping his focus fixed on the here and now.
In this case, it was the casino at the Golden Gate, a small hotel off the Strip that he hadn’t yet visited. Ever since coming to Las Vegas immediately after he left Greencastle, he’d done his best to move from casino to casino, never winning too much at any one place, even as he took care to change his appearance every time.
Tonight he wore the face of a man he’d seen at Caesar’s Palace a few weeks back, a tourist in his late forties with thinning fair hair and the kind of tan that indicated he might be getting a visit from the melanoma fairy in the not-too-distant future. He preferred to use the appearances of other men, just because, while his demon blood allowed him to shapeshift, it was still much easier to copy the faces and bodies of those who were close to him in height and build. At almost six foot two and around 185 pounds — all this eating at casino buffets over the past couple ofmonths had helped him gain back the mass he’d lost in Hell — he knew there weren’t too many women who shared his physique.
The seed money his mother had given him was parlayed into more than ten times that amount within only a few days of his arrival in Las Vegas, allowing him to buy a house for cash and settle into this new life. His demonic powers gave him the ability to create a new identity complete with driver’s license and Social Security number, and because he liked his name but knew that “Caleb Lockwood” might have thrown up some red flags, he was now Caleb Lowe, a name he knew he’d answer to but was still enough different from the one he’d been born with that he didn’t think it would cause any problems.
Fifty grand here, forty there…maybe a hundred grand if he was feeling flush on a particular night and didn’t plan on returning to that casino any time soon. It was so easy to make the dice flip the way he needed, or to ensure that a dealer would only cause him to go bust in a game of blackjack when he wanted them to. Of course he needed to lose now and again, just so he wouldn’t rouse too much suspicion.
But he won more than he lost. Far, far more.
Right now, he had almost two million bucks stashed in various banks around town. Caleb honestly wasn’t sure what he planned to do with all of it, only that he felt much better having that much of a cushion. His home — which apparently had once been featured on some basic cable house-flipping show — he’d gotten for below asking because it had been on the market for a while, so that was one expense he didn’t need to worry about any longer. He’d also bought a big black Range Rover, a much better vehicle than the old Nissan pickup he’d driven in Los Angeles when he was pretending to be a lowly assistant in the television industry, but he didn’t even drive his new ride that much.
No, it just seemed safer to take taxis and Ubers and Lyfts, so that any cameras keeping watch outside the casinos wouldn’t see him driving away in the same vehicle over and over again.
