He pointed toward a closed door on the opposite wall, and Aaron got up from the couch, and went inside, although he didn’t shut the door behind him.
Delia had halfway expected Ty to protest — he probably needed to lie down and rest — but he didn’t say anything. In fact, the wound on his forehead already looked mostly healed, and when he pulled away the bag of ice, the puffiness and discoloration around his eye had diminished by at least half, maybe more.
His angelic blood speeding along the healing process?
It seemed as good an explanation as any.
He put the bag of ice down on the coffee table. Since it seemed to be made of some kind of plastic, the droplets of condensation that had formed on the bag weren’t too big a deal.
“There’s something that’s been bothering me, though,” he said, and Delia couldn’t help smiling.
“Only one?”
“Well, it’s the biggest one.” He gave an experimental stretch of his shoulders, as if to gauge how his muscle soreness was healing, and then continued. “I want to know how August Sellers — whatever his real name was — knew about your powers, Delia, and how they could help him with his ritual. It’s not the sort of thing that’s common knowledge, after all.”
No, it wasn’t. Sure, people in the Las Vegas real estate community knew about her ghost-whispering talent, but absolutely no one other than the people sitting in this hotel suite had any idea that her gifts…powers, whatever you wanted to call them…had recently expanded far beyond talking to ghosts.
“I have no idea,” she said. “I haven’t told anyone anything.”
Pru had been watching Ty as he spoke, her expression half perplexed. It seemed obvious enough that she’d also noticed his accelerated healing, although it didn’t look as though she planned to comment on it.
“Don’t demons just…know stuff?” she asked.
“Not necessarily,” Caleb replied, even though Pru had directed the question at Ty. “It’s not as if they’re all linked psychically or anything close to it. In fact, most demons are all about chaos. They like causing trouble, but they’re not masterminds.”
“Except a few at the top,” Ty put in. “They’re capable of much higher-level thinking. So my best guess is that the demon calling himself August Sellers was in league with someone else even higher on the food chain, someone who must have been passing information along to him.”
None of that sounded very good. The last thing Delia wanted to believe was that there was a network of executive demons — for lack of a better word — who’d decided she was a target simply because she’d gone up a few steps of the psychic ladder over the past couple of months.
For some reason, she thought of the dream she’d had not long after the battle at the Desert Paradise casino, of the man with the cold blue eyes. She’d mostly forgotten it since then…or, more to the point, done her best to put it out of her mind…but now she wondered if he had something to do with this.
No, that was ridiculous. It had been a dream and nothing else.
All the same, she couldn’t quite stop herself from shivering, and at once Caleb sent her a concerned glance.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just the A/C is turned up really high in here, and I’m freezing in this dress.”
“Well,” Pru said as she set her laptop down on the coffee table, “I can help you with that. Good thing we’re the same size. I’ve got some new clothes in my room — let’s get you something a little more practical to wear.”
That sounded like a great idea. She was taller than Pru, so any pants would be a little short on her, but high-water pants were a small price to pay in exchange for getting out of this damn dress.
Although…was that a flicker of regret in Caleb’s eyes as she left the room to get changed?
Doubtful. It seemed more likely that he was annoyed they were wasting time on something as frivolous as a change of clothing when what they really needed to do was figure out how August Sellers had known she was a little more than your average Las Vegas real estate agent.
All the clothing Pru set out had tags from Kohl’s still on them.
“We weren’t expecting to stay overnight when we left Las Vegas,” Prudence said as Delia adjourned to the bathroom to climb out of the sequined gown August Sellers had made her wear. “And we also didn’t know how long we were going to be here, so I bought stuff for a couple of days.”
Thank God for that — and also thank God for the new underwear. Delia supposed she could have stayed in the same panties if she had to, but it felt much better to pull on a new pair and a new bra, and then put the new clothes on top of everything. The pants were capri style, so the length didn’t matter as much, and when she topped them with a sleeveless blouse that had some tonal embroidery on it, she felt almost human again.
True, everything was black, which Delia thought tended to wash her out, but she wasn’t going to worry about the palette of her new outfit when the important thing was that she had one at all.
Her hair was a mess, but she removed all the pins and shook it out as best she could, and she thought it would pass. Luckily, it was naturally straight, so there was a limit to how destroyed it could actually get.
When they returned to the living room, she saw that Aaron was already there, although he didn’t look terribly happy.
