Page 83 of Devil in the Details

How had she known the exact kind of pizza he needed?

Because she was Delia, of course.

Call completed, she set the phone down on the coffee table rather than returning it to her purse. “It’ll be here in about twenty minutes.” She paused there and sent him a searching look. “How’re you doing?”

“I feel like shit,” he said frankly. “But it’ll pass.”

She sat down on the couch next to him. “That was really something. Want to tell me exactly what you did?”

Caleb summoned a weak smile. “As soon as I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”

Delia chuckled. “You just…played it by ear?”

“More or less.” He shifted so he could look at her directly and saw nothing but concern in her face. No fear or awe, nothing to signal that what she’d witnessed earlier had changed her opinion of him.

Then again, he supposed that once you accepted someone was a quarter demon, you kind of had to roll with the punches going forward.

“What do you think Ty told the cops?” he asked.

Before she could reply, the man himself…whatever he was…appeared a few feet away, standing next to the floor-to-ceiling fireplace with its impressive slabs of white-veined black soapstone.

“I told them that Aaron Sanchez collapsed, and it seems Hank Bowers had a heart attack from the excitement.”

Under other circumstances, Caleb might have given Ty some grief for appearing out of nowhere like that, especially when he’d been polite enough to knock when he came over to Delia’s place.

Now, though, he figured he should just let it slide.

“What about the tremors and all the people fleeing the casino?”

Ty looked imperturbable as ever. “The entire valley experienced a small earthquake,” he replied. “Nothing large, only a 4.0, but since people here aren’t used to that sort of thing, it makes sense that the spectators would panic and run outside.”

Delia spoke up then, her expression puzzled. “And no one was recording the event or streaming it?”

“Funny thing about that,” Ty replied. “All the footage appears to have been erased. Some kind of weird magnetic resonance that interfered with the area in and around the casino.”

Magnetic resonance, his ass. Caleb was pretty sure that wasn’t anything close to what had actually happened, but he wasn’t going to worry about it.

The important thing was that it seemed as if all the bases had been covered, which of course they had been. That was the whole point of Ty staying behind and acting as a sort of supernatural “cleaner.”

Caleb glanced over at Delia, and her shoulders lifted almost imperceptibly.

“Oh,” Ty went on, “because of the general confusion, there wasn’t an awards ceremony. However, you can expect the casino to reach out to you in the next couple of days to give you your winnings.”

Right. Caleb had been so wrapped up in making sure the supernatural circuit was destroyed that he’d completely forgotten that the winner of the competition would get a cool fifty thousand bucks. Sure, he had a pretty decent war chest right now, but he wasn’t about to turn down a hefty chunk of cash.

He figured he’d earned it.

“And we really beat them?” Delia asked then, voicing a worry that Caleb hadn’t been able to entirely ignore. “They’re not going to come back and try this again?”

“Doubtful,” Ty said. “I’d keep a watch on all those Aegis properties — I have a feeling they’re going to be sold off very soon. Turns out most of their vacation rentals were operating illegally in neighborhoods where the HOAs don’t allow them.”

Caleb wasn’t surprised that the demons running things at Aegis hadn’t cared much about breaking the rules. However, with all the horror stories he’d heard about HOAs over the years, he was a little surprised no one had ratted them out before now.

Most likely, a good number of palms on various association boards had been greased well to make sure no one complained too loudly.

Or maybe some of them had been placed under demonic compulsion to ensure they stayed quiet. Either way, it sounded as if Aegis’s Vegas holdings were about to collapse.

“That’s good news,” he said. “Maybe some of those houses will be good candidates for flips.”

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