Page 37 of Speak of the Devil

Good thing Paige Loomis hadn’t come by to take off the lockbox. Delia assumed the other realtor wasn’t going to take that step before money had changed hands…and that wasn’t going to happen until the title search was wrapped up. She also guessed that Paige had set the wheels in motion as soon as she left the office, so it might be fairly soon.

Not soon enough, though.

“They’re not here,” Caleb said. If he was at all worried about being free with the property when it wasn’t even his yet, he didn’t show any sign of it.

Then again, would a quarter-demon even care about a minor transgression like trespassing?

Delia had no idea. All this was completely out of her area of expertise, despite all the experience she’d had sending the spirits of the restless dead into the next life.

Somehow she guessed that wasn’t quite the same as banishing a demon.

Could you even banish someone like Caleb, who was more human than not?

Obviously, you can,she told herself.Or he wouldn’t have been in Hell in the first place.

“You don’t sense anything?” she asked.

True, she hadn’t felt anything here, either — well, except the serial killer’s spectral hands trying to push her into the swimming pool — but Caleb obviously had, which meant his senses for this sort of thing might be even more attuned than hers.

She wasn’t quite sure what to think about that.

“No,” he said. “Those poor souls had every reason to hang around, considering what happened to them, but I think they’re long gone. Maybe they were here once but moved on after they realized their killer’s spirit was stuck here as well.”

A shiver moved down Delia’s spine. Sure, it was pretty chilly here on the home’s lower level, since the new HVAC system hadn’t even been installed yet and the day outside was gray and lowering, threatening some rare winter rain, but she didn’t think the icy sensation that had just inched its way down her back had anything to do with the temperature.

It was beyond horrible to think of those poor women’s souls being trapped here…and then being forced to flee when they realized their killer’s spirit had also gotten caught on this plane.

She’d much rather believe that their souls had never become earthbound at all and that they had moved on to the next plane the moment they’d been killed.

“We need to report this to the authorities,” she said, and at once, Caleb frowned.

“Who will do what, exactly? These women were murdered more than half a century ago. The man who killed them is dead. It’s not as if we’ll get any justice for them.”

A pat argument, but one she refused to accept without at least some pushback. “It would give closure to their families. Even if their parents or husbands have passed on as well, there still must be people who have spent all those decades wondering what happened to their mother or their aunt or their sister. Don’t you think they deserve a little peace?”

Caleb’s mouth thinned, and Delia could tell he wasn’t too thrilled with her right then. “How are you going to explain that we even knew the bodies were here? It seems pretty obvious that the original owner of the house buried them on this level because the floors hadn’t been installed yet and it was easy enough for him to hide the bodies and then pour the concrete on top. No one knew anything about it — and there’s no reason for us to have found them, either, because the floor is still intact. You really think the cops would be willing to listen to a hunch?”

If I talked to them…maybe,Delia thought, but even she knew she was reaching there. Sure, she had a minor reputation around town as the woman who could clear any troublesome spirits from your new home, but that wasn’t the same as being a full-blown psychic.

Especially when she wasn’t even the one who’d known the bodies were here.

“It doesn’t feel right to just let it go,” she said doubtfully.

“That’s not what I’m suggesting,” Caleb replied. “Look, even a quarter demon doesn’t want a bunch of skeletons in his basement. I can try to extract them, and then we can figure out what to do next.”

“You can do that?” Delia knew she still sounded skeptical, but that was probably because this whole situation felt utterly surreal. She didn’t have any clear idea of what Caleb could or couldn’t do, and that had thrown her off-balance.

One thing was for sure, though — she’d never look at him as a regular guy again.

“I don’t know,” he said. He didn’t look particularly embarrassed to admit he was unsure of his abilities, and Delia had to grudgingly respect that. It would have been a lot worse if he’d tried to blow a bunch of sunshine up her ass.

“Can I help?” she asked then, surprising herself a little. This whole thing was way outside the scope of her abilities, but still, she didn’t like the idea of just standing there and watching while Caleb tried to somehow extract the remains from underneath the concrete slab.

Now he grinned. “I doubt it. But thanks for the offer.”

He moved away from her, pacing back and forth across the floor, and she realized he was doing his best to determine where the bodies were hidden.

Some kind of demonic dousing, she supposed.

---