“Oh, just a little folder labeled ‘Styx.’”
“What?” Delia asked, moving forward. Her face was still pale, but she otherwise seemed recovered from her recent ordeal.
Caleb wished he could reach out to take her hand, but he wasn’t sure how she would receive such a gesture. Instead, he retreated to his usual safe sarcasm and said, “You’re really surprised there’s a connection between our friends in California and August Sellers?”
“I guess I am,” she said. “Especially since you just told us that demons aren’t usually linked.”
“Linked psychically,” he reminded her. “I never said some of them couldn’t be working together.”
Ty ignored all this and asked, “What’s in the folder?”
Pru clicked on it. Inside were a bunch of files with numbers for their names. However, their subjects were clear enough — photo after photo of Delia, one of them obviously the professional headshot from the Dunne & Dunne website, but much more what appeared to be random snaps taken on the street, or in various places around town, whether they were of Delia emerging from Trader Joe’s with a laden shopping cart or her picking up her dry cleaning…or pulling into the garage of her home.
“He was tailing me?” she demanded.
“I doubt he would’ve gotten his hands dirty like that,” Pru responded. “I’m sure he just hired someone to follow you.”
“Oh, that makes me feel so much better.”
However, her tone was wry enough that Caleb could tell she was beginning to recover from the shock of seeing all those photos of herself.
The folder wasn’t all about Delia, though. There were also images of Alba Sanchez’s house and even a few of Aaron himself.
“Looks like Mr. Sellers had been planning this for a while,” Ty commented. “He was just waiting for all the pieces to line up.”
Caleb didn’t like the sound of that very much. “Even before that mess at the Desert Paradise?”
“Maybe,” Pru said as she studied the files on the screen in front of her. “Some of these are dated back to the end of February, which would definitely have been before the poker tournament.”
Delia had crossed her arms, almost as if she was hugging herself. The black top she’d borrowed from Prudence didn’t have any sleeves, and the A/C in the office was turned up pretty high, but Caleb didn’t think that was the real reason.
“So…was the ritual at the river sort of a backup plan?”
Of course. He didn’t know why he hadn’t seen it before, but then, it was kind of hard to detect a pattern when you only had one data point to work with.
“That’s exactly it,” he replied. “And it’s what Hank Bowers and the rest of those possessed goons at the tournament were trying to accomplish. They wanted to open a gate to Hell with all the energies they were summoning, and when that fell apart, it was time for Sellers to step in and see if he could seal the deal.”
“Those are some very determined demons,” Ty said, and Caleb shrugged.
“If you’d ever been to Hell, you’d know why they want to get out of there so badly.”
Delia glanced away from the computer screen at the lights of Laughlin, glittering across the surface of the river. It didn’t seem as if the earth tremor they’d felt as the portal closed had traveled up through all those sublevels, because as far as he could tell, everything looked serene out there, thousands of mortals gambling and laughing and drinking and having absolutely no idea how close they’d come to utter destruction.
“But we beat them,” she said, her voice firm.
“Yes,” Caleb replied, “we beat them…this time.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Delia and Pru drove back to Las Vegas in Delia’s Hyundai SUV, while Caleb followed behind in his big Range Rover. She wondered briefly why he hadn’t taken his Mercedes, since it surely got better gas mileage, and then guessed he’d driven the bigger vehicle because he had passengers riding with him.
Ty, on the other hand, had said that it looked as if their work was done — for now, at least — and had promptly vanished. It was a handy way of getting around when you didn’t have to worry about luggage.
But Caleb and Delia had needed to go back to Harrah’s and pack up their things, among which were, miraculously, Delia’s missing purse and sandals.
“Where on earth did you find these?” she asked. She wanted to hug the purse, with all of its necessities of life, like her ID and cell phone and favorite MAC lipstick, but settled for slipping it over her shoulder.
“In the room where Sellers was holding you,” Caleb told her.
