“Doing so would have required an enormous amount of energy,” Ty replied. “Much easier for him to hire mortals to dig the tunnel.”
Fair enough. Caleb was still finding his way around what demons could or couldn’t do. He might have grown up around other quarter demons and had half demons like his father as part of the mix as well, but all of them had been focused on making sure no one would ever be able to tell they were anything more than regular mortals. They weren’t trying to do anything flashy, other than live the lives of wealth and privilege that had been set up by their progenitors, the demon princes who had come to this plane to serve Belial.
By that point, they’d reached the bottom of the vertical tunnel. There, it turned forty-five degrees and stretched out straight ahead of them before opening into a chamber about a hundred feet or so from where they stood.
That was the source of the illumination…but it didn’t come from any lights fastened to the walls or roof of the earthen room, one that was similar in dimension to the one beneath Alba Sanchez’s house.
No, the brilliant glow was coming from Delia Dunne.
She hung in midair, eyes closed, hair pulled up into the sort of carefully messy do that usually still took hours to accomplish. Her slim form was encased in a fabulous gown of shifting blue and green sequins, and long, glassy emerald earrings hung down to nearly her shoulders.
In short, she was absolutely spectacular…and completely terrifying.
“What’s going on?” Caleb whispered to Ty, who had also stopped in his tracks to stare at the spectacle in front of them.
“He’s using her as a power source,” Ty murmured in reply. “With her psychic abilities fueling the ritual, it will be very powerful.”
No shit. Caleb realized then that Delia wasn’t alone in the chamber. He couldn’t see August Sellers from where he and Ty stood, but he noticed that four other men were ranged along the walls, all of them wearing the same somehow stupefied yet beatific expression Aaron had plastered on his face before they snapped him out of his spell…and all of them with the same sigil of command inked onto their forearms.
“What about the army of goons?” Caleb asked next. “Am I going to have to bleed all over them, too?”
Maybe Ty’s mouth quirked just a fraction. “It’s an easy way to break them out of the spell. But since we’re not worried about alerting August Sellers as to what we’re up to — he’ll know we’re here to disrupt the ritual as soon as he spots us — I think holy water will be the easiest way to dispatch those men. It should break the hold those sigils have on them, and once they’ve woken up, they’ll be of little use to Sellers.”
All that sounded encouraging…up to a point. There were still a lot of them, and if they decided to stay and fight, they could be a real problem.
But they had to get Delia out of there before Sellers drained her dry…or opened his damn portal to the underworld. Luckily, her little SUV had had nearly a full case of holy water back in the cargo area, as though she’d loaded up before she headed down to Laughlin, not sure what she would find.
Now her forethought might be the thing that saved her. Well, along with an assist from Caleb and Ty, her otherworldly posse.
By unspoken agreement, they inched toward the chamber where Delia still hung suspended in the air, looking like a gorgeously oversized Christmas ornament. Caleb had never seen her like this before, and despite his worry that Sellers and his minions might outmatch them, he still thought she was the most beautiful thing in this world…or any other.
“I’ll go after August,” Ty said in an undertone. “You take care of those men and do what you can to snap Delia out of that trance.”
Would she awaken if he kissed her, like some latter-day version of Sleeping Beauty?
As appealing as that mental image was, Caleb knew better than to try anything like that. If he ever did have the luck to kiss Delia Dunne, he wanted to do it when she was in full possession of all her faculties.
And while he could have protested and said he’d take on August Sellers, the truth of the matter was that Ty probably had more experience with this sort of thing. Better to have an angel battle a demon…especially if that left Caleb free to rescue Delia.
“Got it,” he murmured.
With their plan in place, the two of them continued to move forward. Now they were only a few feet away, and Caleb could finally see August Sellers.
He stood at what was the northern compass point of the chamber. Just as in the one under Alba Sanchez’s house, this earthen room also had sigils carved into the walls in the four cardinal directions, only this time, they weren’t witch’s knots — designed to keep evil magic at bay — but copies of the same sigil of command that had been drawn on the forearms of all his minions.
Were those symbols exerting some sort of additional control? What if the holy water Caleb carried in a bag hastily purchased in the Aquarius’s gift shop wasn’t enough?
Too late to voice those worries to Ty, because the half angel’s body suddenly flared with light, and he stepped into the ritual chamber, blazing like a miniature supernova.
“You will not do this!” he thundered. “I command you with all the power of the Lord God Himself, and all the strength of the choirs of angels, and the voice of Christ Himself!”
And he raised a hand and threw what looked like a blob of pure energy at the demon.
However, August Sellers only lifted a hand in reply and smacked the glowing white orb to one side, rather like someone deftly deflecting a volleyball. “You’ll have to do better than that,” he sneered. “Do you think I care about the power of your God? I have tapped into the energy of the river that flows so near us, and amplified it with the gifts of the woman I now command. Tell your Jesus or your God — or your angels, I suppose — to come here and stop me, for there is no way you will ever be able to do such a thing yourself…half angel.”
Well, that answered one question. Caleb couldn’t do much with that interesting piece of information, though, because just as the demon stopped speaking, his minions seemed to awake from their stupor and came rushing toward the spot where Caleb stood.
Luckily, he already had a vial of holy water in each hand, their lids popped and the liquid inside ready to go. He splashed it into the faces of the first two who approached him and they recoiled, clawing at it as if it was acid.
