Page 8 of Devil in the Details

Come to think of it, he’d had a couple of nasty dreams last night. Maybe his subconscious had picked up on the intruder’s inherent nastiness, even though the disruption hadn’t been enough to wake him up all the way.

“Change of plans,” he said.

“No lunch?” Delia asked, looking resigned.

“Oh, we’ll get lunch,” Caleb promised. “It’s just going to be a late one.”

Delia understood why he wanted to move things out quietly and avoid tipping his hand. If she’d learned that demons had been creeping around her property while she was asleep, she probably would have wanted to bail as soon as possible, too.

Caleb opened the garage so she could back in, and then they proceeded to load their two vehicles with everything he appeared to deem valuable — his TV and Blu-Ray player and discs, clothing and toiletries, a few pieces of art. In a way, it was interesting to see what he wanted to save and what he was okay with leaving behind, just because it gave her a little extra insight into his character. The art surprised her, since she hadn’t thought he was the type to care about that sort of thing.

Or maybe it was just that he’d invested a lot in those modern, semi-abstract paintings and wasn’t about to leave them to the wolves.

She left first, and he followed about five minutes later. They’d already agreed to take a circuitous route to the house on Pueblo Street, even though Caleb had told her this wasn’t exactly like trying to avoid the CIA and that there was a good chance no one was watching at all.

“Better safe than sorry, though,” he’d said as he closed the Range Rover’s hatch, and she was inclined to believe him on that.

The entire drive over here, though, she hadn’t noticed any vehicles following her. Everyone had been busy running their Saturday errands, whether to Costco or soccer practice or the local garden center, and no one seemed to be paying any particular attention to her.

Then again, would demons even be driving?

She reminded herself that a demon had pretended to be an Uber driver and had done its best to kill off Caleb in an intentional car accident back in January, but she had a feeling that had been a special circumstance. After all, if you had the power to teleport, why would you waste time getting stuck in traffic?

But a demon still had to know where it was going, and if they didn’t have any idea that he planned to move into the newly remodeled house, then his disappearance from his current residence might stump them, at least for a little while.

Hopefully.

And there was Caleb, pulling up to the three-car garage of the new house and backing in. He rolled down one window and waved a hand in her general direction, which seemed to be the signal that he wanted her to do the same. That made sense. It would have been kind of stupid to drag all the stuff from the back of her little Hyundai SUV — mostly clothing and a few other odds and ends — into the house from her spot at the curb rather than simply going through the garage.

Once they were both situated and he’d closed the garage doors, they spent another half hour or so unloading everything. “Now we can have lunch,” he said as he leaned one of the paintings up against the side of the leather sofa in the living room. The wall above was conspicuously bare, telling Delia that he’d obviously intended that piece of art for that space all along.

By then it was past two, and she was famished. “Sounds good.”

They headed back to the garage, and he pulled out into the driveway, pausing for just a moment to press the button for the remote.

“In the mood for anything in particular?” he asked as they drove away.

“A cheeseburger as big as my head,” she replied. Most of the time, she tried to be careful about what she ate, but she figured all the manual labor she’d just performed had used up a decent amount of calories.

He grinned. “I think I can manage that.”

They went to a sports bar kind of place, not too crowded since the lunch hour was now long past. Sure, there were guys glued to the various TVs mounted all around, watching several different basketball and soccer games, but they weren’t so noisy that she and Caleb couldn’t hear each other speak.

All the same, they were careful to talk about neutral topics…at least until they were done with their meal and back out in their Range Rover.

“No sign of any demons,” he said cheerfully. “I think we gave them the slip.”

From your mouth to God’s ears, Delia thought. But she only said, “You don’t think they’ll be able to find your new house?”

“Oh, eventually,” he replied, still sounding way too peppy for the circumstances as he pulled out of the restaurant’s parking lot. “But now I know — or at least, now that I think I know — they’re surveilling me again, it’ll be easy to keep them out. A few squirts of holy water on the doors and windows will make them want to stay far, far away.”

Although on the surface that sounded much too easy, Delia knew Caleb wasn’t being overconfident. She’d seen how Calach’s face had begun to melt after getting hit with a couple of blasts of the blessed water, and she also knew that the demons who’d been harassing him had pretty much disappeared from the scene once she and Caleb had spritzed holy water all over his house.

Speaking of which….

“Do you think they came back because the holy water we sprayed everywhere finally wore off?”

His shoulders lifted. “Hard to say. To tell the truth, I’m not really sure how long the effects last. I suppose I just thought I was safe because there hadn’t been any disturbances since then. Getting sloppy, I guess.”

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