Page 12 of Speak of the Devil

Robert Hendricks paused there, and Delia noticed how he also sent a quick look around them, as though to ascertain no one was close enough to be listening to their conversation.

Rather than answer her question directly, he said, “What do you know about demons?”

“Not a lot,” she replied, deciding it was better to be honest and allow him to determine whether he’d made a mistake in contacting her. “My specialty is earthbound spirits.”

A sip of coffee, and he asked, “You’ve never gone into a house where you could tell something was wrong but also somehow felt it wasn’t an ordinary ghost you were dealing with?”

Delia drank some of her coffee as well, mostly because she knew she could use another hit of caffeine before responding. “Once,” she said, and Robert nodded.

“What did it feel like?”

That experience had happened almost five years ago now, and she’d done her best to put it out of her mind — especially since she’d never had a repeat of that awful feeling of wrongness in the pit of her stomach, a sensation that told her something much worse than a simple disgruntled ghost had taken up residence in the gorgeous mid-century home in Paradise Palms, a listing her mother hadn’t wanted to let go because the place was selling for almost a million and a half.

Problem was, something awful had lived in that house, something that had sent her back to the days of her childhood when she’d played Bloody Mary in the Mirror with her friends during sleepovers and had run screaming from the bathroom. And sure, she’d retained enough presence of mind not to do the same thing when she walked into the foyer of the house, with its rock waterfall on one side and rock-surrounded planter on the other, but the deeper she’d gotten into the place, the worse she felt, finally turning back after she reached the kitchen and thought she might throw up.

Afterward, she’d told her mother something was horribly wrong with the house, and Linda, not one to be thrown off-balance by pretty much anything, had apparently made a few discreet calls, and not long afterward, someone else had come out and cleansed the place. Delia hadn’t asked who their savior was when it became clear her mother didn’t want to talk about it, and she’d done whatever she could to forget about the place.

“Just wrong,” she said, then added frankly, “Like it was going to make me vomit if I stayed in there for too much longer.”

“A common reaction, or so I’ve heard,” Robert replied. “Demon infestations can have a profound effect on people, especially if they’re already sensitive — which you must be, or you wouldn’t be in your line of work.”

Delia supposed he had a point there. Then again, she’d never tried to call herself an empath or a light-worker or any of the other phrases that got bandied around in New Age and spiritual circles. Maybe she had an interesting gift, but that was as far as she was willing to go when describing her talents.

“I suppose so,” she said, not wanting to say much more than that.

Her dubious tone didn’t seem to put off her companion, because he went on, “Anyway, demons are able to shapeshift, to put on faces that aren’t theirs in an attempt to hide their identities. They can also manipulate matter in a variety of ways…including making sure they win at the casinos.”

Delia didn’t bother to stop her eyebrows from lifting in disbelief. “What…demons come up from Hell just to play the slot machines?”

Robert gave her a gentle smile, one that seemed to acknowledge her reaction without agreeing with it. “Well, to be fair, we haven’t noticed much manipulation of the slot machines — probably not enough profit in it, unless you’re playing the really big ones. And when someone wins a high enough amounton one of those machines, then lights and sirens go off and it attracts a lot of attention. Someone manipulating a poker hand here and a throw of the dice there is going to be a lot more difficult to track down.”

All right, maybe he had a point. Still….

“So, you think a demon has come to Las Vegas and is messing with the cards and the dice so he can win a million and take it back to Hell with him?”

Another of those small smiles. “You can’t take money to Hell. But that doesn’t mean he can’t be banking it here in order to afford himself some creature comforts while he’s on Earth.”

“And when he’s done, he’ll just go back?”

Now Robert’s expression turned serious again, and he reached for his cup of coffee and had another sip. “That’s the problem. We just don’t know. The people we’ve consulted have told us that sometimes demons only come to this plane for a short time — to slum it, more or less — while others decide they’re comfortable here and do whatever they can to stay away from Hell for as long as is feasible.”

Since everything Delia had read about Hell made it sound like the sort of place where you’d want to spend as little time as possible, she could see why a demon might want to come to this plane and do a little partying…and then hang around rather than return to the proverbial pit of despair.

On the other hand, this all sounded like a big ball of crazy.

“Why a demon?” she asked, leaning against the back of her chair. “I mean, doesn’t it make more sense that a regular human is doing all this supposed cheating?”

Robert sipped some more coffee. “Of course it makes more sense. And our security teams analyzed all the security footage and couldn’t see any outright evidence of cheating. That doesn’t change our reality, which is that we’ve had many more big winners the past two months than usual. One of the other casinoowners brought in a psychic to check out his place, and she said she sensed something dark and left almost immediately. Two more tried the same thing, with similar results.”

“So you came to me because I’m the only person in town with a reputation for getting rid of ghosts,” I said, and he nodded.

“I — we — realized that this must be something of a jump for you. But no one else in the psychic community has been able to help us at all.”

Delia really didn’t like being lumped in with the rest of the town’s psychics, since it wasn’t like she read people’s palms or threw Tarot cards to tell someone’s future. Like it or not, though, she had some kind of special sixth sense when it came to this sort of thing, which she assumed was why Robert had reached out in the first place.

And yet….

“Why not contact the demon-hunter guy from thatProject Demon Huntersthingy?” she asked next. “Michael….”

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