“No,” she replied, even as she set down her glass of iced tea and rose from the couch.“But we still get people going door to door here, even though there are ‘No Soliciting’ signs all over the neighborhood.Let me take care of it.”
She headed over to the door and opened it.A moment later, her startled voice traveled back to Caleb and Pru in the living room.
“Ty?”
Ty Carter, the half angel who’d first made an appearance during the Desert Paradise poker tournament and had proved to be a valuable ally during the mission to rescue Delia down in Laughlin.Although Caleb had warmed to the guy somewhat over the past few weeks, he still couldn’t prevent an unwelcome thought from passing through his mind.
Had Ty been surveilling them somehow, waiting for the right moment to appear?
Over in her club chair, Pru raised a hand to smooth her hair — an unconscious gesture, Caleb guessed.Still, he couldn’t help being a little amused.He hadn’t missed some of the glances she’d sent toward Ty during their adventure in Laughlin…or the way he’d seemed almost admiring of Delia’s best friend during a few stray moments.
Get a room, you crazy kids,Caleb thought then, although he knew the pair were a long way from getting there.
Or anywhere at all, to be honest.Fraternizing with green-haired cuties probably wasn’t part of the half angel’s mission.
Delia came back into the living room, with Ty a few feet behind her.As always, he wore a T-shirt and faded jeans and boots, his dark hair pulled back into a ponytail.His cover while living here in Las Vegas was supposedly as a tennis pro at the DragonRidge Country Club, but he dressed more like a motorcycle mechanic during his downtime.
“Ty,” Caleb said, his tone purposely wry, “what a lovely surprise.”
As usual, the man didn’t bother to take the bait.“It’s not a surprise, and you know it.I needed to talk to you once you were all together — and once some of my suspicions were confirmed.”
“Suspicions about the wedding chapel acquisitions?”Pru asked, and the half angel immediately looked over at her.
“Yes,” he said.“So, you already know about it.”
“We know a couple of things,” Delia said.“The rest is just guesswork.But please, go ahead and sit down.I’ll grab a glass from the kitchen so you can have some iced tea.”
For just a moment, Ty looked as if he might protest, to say he hadn’t come over here for a social call.But then he seemed to realize doing so would waste more time than simply going with the flow, so he nodded and said, “Thanks.I appreciate it.”
She headed into the kitchen while he took a seat in the empty club chair next to Prudence.The map she’d produced earlier was still laid out on the coffee table, probably a little too close to the tray of TJ’s goodies, now slowly getting lukewarm.
Ty’s gaze sharpened as he looked down at the map.“So…you’ve already tracked all of them.”
A slight hint of pink touched Pru’s cheeks.“Well, these were the ones whose sales I was able to locate.I wasn’t totally sure whether this was everything, though.”
“It is,” Ty said, then paused as Delia returned with a glass and handed it over to him.He thanked her and poured himself some iced tea from the pitcher before continuing.“There are some chapels here in Las Vegas that have so much history and are such landmarks that the owners weren’t willing to give them up at any price.”
Nice to hear that sometimes integrity won out over cold, hard cash.“We were talking about the chapels’ position on the ley lines that cross Las Vegas,” Caleb said.
“Yes, that’s why the buyers wanted them,” Ty replied.
By that point, Delia had sat back down next to Caleb.“So…the buyers are more demons?”
“Most likely,” Ty said.
“We’re pretty sure the Styx Group is behind all this,” Prudence remarked, and both Ty’s eyebrows lifted.
It seemed the all-knowing half angel didn’t know everything after all.
“You’re sure of that?”
She shifted in her chair so she was facing him a little more directly.“Yeah, it seems as if Styx has its fingers in all this.I haven’t been able to find out much more than that, though.They’re pretty good at covering their tracks.”
“Yes, they are,” Ty said, now looking grim.“They’ve hidden the information about who’s running things so well that we haven’t been able to learn very much, either.”
Not for the first time, Caleb wondered who that “we” referred to exactly.When Ty had first appeared at the Desert Paradise poker tournament, he’d been working with two other men, but they hadn’t been a factor during the rescue mission to Laughlin, or in the weeks since.Had they been reassigned, or had someone farther up the food chain decided that Ty could handle all this on his own?
He had a feeling that if he asked, he wouldn’t get a straight answer.The half angel only told them what he absolutely had to, and even then, getting information out of him could be like pulling teeth.
