Oh, dear God.
He wasn’t a man.
He was a demon in disguise, just like Robert Hendricks had been…just like some of the players in the Desert Paradise poker tournament. And the ritual the blond man had been conducting was designed to tap into her powers.
That was why she’d been caught here. So he could milk her brain whenever he liked.
But for what purpose? She’d told Caleb it was because of the river, but she still didn’t understand exactly why.
The man went to the window and looked out. Across from the building where he stood was a tall white tower with hundreds of windows, their mirrored glass blinding in the sun.
However, not so blinding that she couldn’t see the logo spelled out in what would probably be garish neon at night.
Aquarius.
The hotel had two towers, so the blond man — demon, she reminded herself — must be standing in one of them.
And although she couldn’t say for sure how she knew, Delia understood that was where she was imprisoned now. Not in a hotel room, but in some secret chamber below the casino floor. Possibly a vault, or maybe just a storage space. That would explain why it didn’t have any windows, why it was so utterly black in here.
Gritting her teeth, she pushed against the rubbery membrane that had kept her trapped on the bed. It seemed to stretch and stretch — and then it broke with a rebound that somehow made her ears ring, even though everything had remained utterly silent inside her prison.
One foot touched the floor, and then another. It was cool under her bare feet, definitely not carpet. Some kind of linoleum, though, because it didn’t feel hard enough to be tile.
As soon as she stood up, the room seemed to spin around her, and she put a hand down on the bed to steady herself. A few breaths, and the dizziness was gone.
Her fingers trailed along the daybed until they found the wall. It was cool and smooth but definitely seemed to be drywall, again affirming her suspicion that this was an interior room on one of the hotel’s sublevels.
She walked about ten paces and then hit a corner. That was fine — if nothing else, it seemed as if the room was about the size she’d thought it would be.
Just as she was about to start measuring the next wall, a flood of images hit her brain — an older woman falling to her knees and gasping, hands at her throat as if something was choking her. Another woman, but much younger, maybe around Delia’s age, hurrying out of an apartment with suitcases in both hands, throwing frightened looks over her shoulder as she went.
A horrible accident on a lonely highway, one vehicle looking as if it had somehow managed to wedge itself under a semi.
No one in the car could have survived that impact.
They needed us gone, rang through her mind, and Delia looked around in horror, even though there was nothing to see in that black, black room.
Who needed you gone? she wanted to ask, but she knew she wouldn’t get an answer to that question. What she’d just experienced had been echoes of trauma, stray energy that had hung in the air around Laughlin, even though the people she’d glimpsed were now long gone.
But she’d seen those echoes…and she thought she knew what they meant.
Or at least partially. She couldn’t say for sure why the river was so important to the blond demon in her vision, but she guessed that he or his minions had driven out or killed anyone who’d been trying to protect it.
And she knew without knowing how she knew that the older woman must have been Alba Sanchez, the river’s last guardian.
House…stays.
Those words had been utterly cryptic when Alba’s ghost had uttered them. Now, though, they’d taken on a new meaning.
The house was crucial in all this, but again, Delia couldn’t quite grasp that piece of the puzzle. Why could her gift show her some things and not others?
Because she wasn’t a god or an angel or a demon. She was a human woman with a strange talent, and that meant it didn’t always do what she wanted it to do.
But even if she wasn’t an angel or a demon, she knew that Ty and Caleb were…or at least, possessed enough supernatural heritage that they could do things she couldn’t.
And they were looking for her.
They had to know about the blond man.
