Page 79 of Devil in the Details

“How are we supposed to do that?” Delia asked. While she probably didn’t want to hear the answer, she also knew that they’d started down this road, and now the only thing they could do was finish what they’d begun…and hope like hell they safely emerged on the other side.

“It all comes down to the final game,” Ty replied. His gaze flickered over to Caleb and then back to her, keen and cool, blue as the sky she’d seen out her bedroom window earlier that morning. “Hank Bowers has been coordinating the whole thing to make sure one of his minions is in the last round.”

“None of the people I’m playing against is new to this,” Caleb argued. “I saw their names pop up all over the place when I was studying the local poker scene.”

Ty didn’t even blink. “Yes, they’re well known around here. But that doesn’t make any difference. One of them will either be possessed, as they’ve done to Aaron Sanchez, or they will at the very least be subjugated by a sigil of control, the way Paul Reeves and several of the other players have been.”

So that’s what that strange little mark was. Delia wondered who had put it on Paul Reeves’ arm. Hank Bowers, or someone higher up the food chain?

It probably didn’t matter. What mattered was that someone in the final four was under either demonic possession or compulsion…and the only person standing in the way was Caleb Lockwood.

His jaw had set, signaling that he understood the assignment. “So I have to win, or the circuit will be complete and all hell will break loose.”

Ty gave a satisfied nod. “That’s exactly it. But we all have confidence in you — you’ve acquitted yourself very well so far.”

Yes, he had. Still, this was a lot of pressure on someone who’d never even competed in a poker tournament before…let alone been tasked with destroying a supernatural circuit.

“There’s no other way?” Delia asked.

“Unfortunately, no,” Ty responded. “Caleb must be the one to interrupt the energy and ensure the circuit isn’t completed.”

“No pressure, huh?” he quipped, but Ty didn’t even smile.

“It’s a great deal of pressure, and we understand that. But it falls on you to thwart them. Best of luck to you.”

Before either Caleb or Delia could respond, he winked out of existence, leaving them standing alone in the living room.

She set her hands on her hips. “Why even bother to knock on the front door if he’s going to come and go like that anyway?”

“Because suddenly appearing in your house wouldn’t have been very polite.” Now Caleb did crack a grin, looking much more like himself. “I suppose that’s something angels would care about.”

He had a point there. “Now what?” Delia asked.

His smile didn’t flicker for a second. “We have lunch. And after that?” A pause, and then he added,

“Well, I suppose I have a tournament to win.”

Chapter Twenty

From her vantage point near the back of the tournament area, Delia could feel the wrongness in the air. The energy pulsed and swirled, making her skin prickle as though she’d just walked through an electrical field. She’d experienced similar sensations before when cleansing haunted houses, but this was different — stronger, more purposeful.

And growing by the minute.

Her phone buzzed, and she hastily dug it out of her purse. Prudence.

“Tell me you haven’t started the final round yet,” she said.

“They’re still getting set up, but I think things will be starting in a few minutes.” Delia paused there and let her gaze sweep the crowd. A chill worked its way down her spine as she spied Aaron Sanchez’s familiar form lurking near one of the support pillars on the other side of the gaming space. It didn’t look as if he was even trying to blend in anymore, his normally friendly expression now cold and predatory. She glanced away quickly, praying that he hadn’t noticed her looking at him. “What did you find?”

“A whole bunch, and none of it’s good.” Keyboard clicks rattled through the phone, telling Delia that her friend probably had her own cell phone pressed against her ear while she continued to type away on her big iMac. “I mapped all the Aegis Holdings properties in Las Vegas and started to realize they weren’t purchased at random. At first, I couldn’t really figure out what I was looking at, but then when I started researching grid patterns, something I found online explained what was going on.” She paused there, then added, “Every place they’ve bought sits on a ley line.”

Delia frowned. “What the hell is a ley line?”

“They’re patterns of energy that supposedly crisscross the Earth’s surface,” Pru replied. “A property positioned on one of those lines would have access to those powers. If you have enough properties like that, then you can tap into a whole lot of energy.”

A few months ago, Delia would have said this was all hocus pocus. With what she knew now, though, she understood they were in a whole lot of trouble. And it seemed Prudence did as well, because normally, she was about the least woo-woo person Delia had ever met. “Okay,” she said, knowing how terse she sounded. “Anything else?”

“Just that all this confirms what I found yesterday, even though then I wasn’t all that sure what I was looking at. The casino is the convergence point of all the local ley lines.”

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