And texting.

  And calling again.

  Nothing seemed to get through.

  What the hell was going on down there?

  In desperation, he picked up the phone again and called Aaron. Delia had given him the guy’s number just in case, but Caleb had never imagined he’d be calling the other man to check up on her like some kind of jealous boyfriend.

  He wished he could play that role in her life…well, without the “jealous” part.

  At least Aaron answered, and said in response to Caleb’s question, “She was at the house, but I had to leave for an interview, so she stayed behind.”

  An interview? Was he serious?

  “You left her alone there?” Caleb demanded.

  Too bad his demonic powers weren’t strong enough for him to reach through the phone and slap the jerk upside the head.

  A pause. When Aaron replied, his tone sounded distinctly defensive. “Yeah, I did,” he said. “She said it wasn’t a problem, that she’d done this plenty of times.”

  As much as he hated to admit it to himself, Caleb knew that part was true enough. Delia had never given him an exact number, but he knew she’d been ghost whispering for around ten years. Even if she only had to cleanse six or seven houses in any given year — and he’d gotten the impression it was often much more — that still added up to a lot of ghosts.

  But that had been before a bunch of demons had decided to start appearing in Las Vegas and causing all sorts of havoc. The supernatural world Delia inhabited now was very different from the one she’d lived in before he’d entered her life.

  “Maybe so,” Caleb said. “But I can’t get hold of her, and she told me she’d check in regularly.”

  “It’s probably not a big deal,” Aaron replied at once. His tone was almost too smooth. Possibly, he was just trying to sound reassuring, but he came across as more condescending than anything else.

  Of course, that could have simply been because Caleb still didn’t like the guy and didn’t trust him, no matter what sort of trauma he might or might not have suffered recently.

  “The cell reception at the house isn’t so great,” Aaron continued. “I’m sure that’s why you can’t get through.”

  “I got a text from her earlier this afternoon,” Caleb pointed out.

  Although he couldn’t see his face, he got the impression that Aaron had only shrugged. “Sometimes stuff gets through, and sometimes it doesn’t. Tell you what — I just finished up here, and I was about to swing by the house and check on Delia anyway. As soon as I know something, I’ll call you back.”

  “I thought you just said you don’t have cell service at the property,” Caleb returned, knowing a definite rasp had entered his voice.

  However, Aaron still didn’t sound too concerned. “I said it was iffy. But if it’s acting up, I’ll drive to a place I know that has good service, and I’ll call you from there. Just give me about ten minutes.”

  Most of the time, that would have sounded like an adequate solution. Now even ten minutes felt far too long.

  If Caleb had known where he was going, he could have simply teleported himself onto the property and searched for Delia himself. However, he’d never been there, and while there might have still been some photos of it online — even though Aaron had intimated that the house was currently off the market — it seemed simpler to wait and hear what he’d found.

  If nothing else, Delia might get seriously annoyed with him if he appeared out of nowhere to check up on her. Caleb knew she didn’t appreciate that kind of babysitting.

  “All right,” he said, not bothering to sound gracious. “I’ll wait to hear back from you.”

  They ended the call there. For just a moment, he thought about opening up another beer but immediately shot down that notion. Although alcohol didn’t affect him the same way it did people without a drop of demon blood in their veins, he still wanted to be as sharp as possible.

  Just in case.

  Instead, he poured himself a glass of water and took it and his phone with him into the living room, where he sat down on the couch to wait. Although he was generally very happy with the setup in his house, right then he thought it was sort of stupid that he’d put his big TV downstairs in the bonus room rather than here, where it would be more easily accessible.

  But since he wasn’t about to start rearranging the decor, he looked up a few stocks on his phone, read a couple of articles on Apple News, and checked his email.

  To his surprise, he’d won the auction for the house in Wyeth Ranch. Since he’d already put down a deposit before he could bid, he now had forty-five days to come up with the rest of the money.

  Well, that was something. Thank God for the time buffer, because right now, he had more important things on his mind than running over to the auction house’s offices and handing over a cashier’s check, the only form of payment they accepted.

  About twelve minutes after he and Aaron had hung up, his phone rang.

  “What did you find?” he asked.

  Okay, sure, it could have been someone else, but Caleb didn’t get a lot of phone calls, so he couldn’t think who else would be contacting him. The auction house had already stated that all its communications would be via email, so he knew it wasn’t them.

  “Well, it looks like she left,” Aaron replied, still in that just slightly too upbeat tone. “I gave her the keys, and everything was locked back up, and the keys were under the doormat, just like I asked her to do when she was done at the house. As far as I can tell, she did what she needed to do and got back on the road, because her car isn’t here.”

  Delia was always careful with other people’s property — how could she not be, when showing houses was part of her job? — so all this sounded pretty much exactly like the way she would have handled such a situation.

  Except….

  “If she managed to banish the ghost, why didn’t she call you to let you know the house was cleared?”

  “Well, she knew I was in a meeting. She probably didn’t want to bug me.”

  Again, that didn’t sound too off base for Delia, but the other man’s blithe tone still grated. “Did you go inside? Was there a note?”

  “I didn’t see anything. But I don’t know if she even would have had something to write with. There’s not a whole lot left in the house.”

  Most people probably wouldn’t have a pen and paper available. Delia, on the other hand, usually carried a small notebook and a pen with her for those times when she wanted to write something down but didn’t want to use her phone’s notepad function.

  But maybe she didn’t have her note-taking tools with her this time, for whatever reason. If that were the case, then she might have just gotten on the road and figured she’d call Aaron later to let him know what had happened with the ghost.

  However, that didn’t explain why she hadn’t reached out to Caleb. She’d promised him she would check in, and it seemed as if she had…at first. The crappy cell reception could have been the real culprit here, but even so, there shouldn’t have been anything stopping her from calling him once she was away from the house and out someplace where she got a decent signal.

  The more he thought about it, the more suspicious the whole situation sounded.

  Aaron spoke again. “Tell you what. I told her she should drive up to Heritage Park and make her calls from there, since that’s my go-to place when I’ve been at my grandmother’s house and needed to call or text someone and couldn’t get a message out. The park is only a couple of minutes away. Let me go up there and see if I can spot her car. Delia might have already headed back to Vegas, but if she left the house only a few minutes ago, she could still be there.”

  That sounded like a long shot to Caleb, but he wasn’t going to abandon any possibility, no matter how slim. “That could work. Thanks.”

  “Just give me a couple of minutes.”

  The call ended, and Caleb set his phone down on the coffee table to wait again. This time, though, it was a much shorter span before Aaron called back.

  “I’m at the park. Her car is here.”

  Thank God. “What did she say about the house?”

  A pause. Then Aaron replied, “Sorry, I think you misunderstood. Her car is here…but there’s no sign of Delia.”

  Shit. Shit.

  By some miracle, Caleb’s voice was nearly even as he asked, “Any sign of a struggle?”

  “No. The car’s locked, and nothing seems to have been disturbed. She just…isn’t here.”

  Goddamn it. All his instincts had been screaming at him that Delia should never have gone down to Laughlin unaccompanied, but she’d insisted that she could take care of herself.

  Most of the time, she could.

  Only now, it seemed as if the worst must have happened.

  He couldn’t say any of this to Aaron, of course. The guy didn’t know anything about who he was — or what, more to the point — so Caleb knew he couldn’t explain that his demonic gut had told him that going to Laughlin had been a spectacularly bad idea.

  No, now all he could do was try to figure out what had happened and what he could do to discover where Delia had gone.

  “I’m coming down there,” he said.

  “Why…are you a P.I. or something?” Aaron replied.

  Good thing he was ninety miles away, or Caleb would have been sorely tempted to sock the jerk in the jaw.

  “No,” he gritted. “I’m her friend. And I’m going to find out what happened to her.”

  Even as he spoke, though, he thought of someone in Delia’s life who actually was a private detective.

  Pru Nelson. She might be a good person to bring along, especially since, although she didn’t know the whole truth about him, she at least understood that some pretty crazy shit had gone down in Las Vegas over the past few months. Most likely, she wouldn’t bat an eye at any possible supernatural involvement, since she already knew about Delia’s ghost-whispering sideline and had dipped her toe into some of the freakier stuff like ley lines and energy convergence during the demon-fueled tournament at the Desert Paradise casino.

  Also, Pru was Delia’s best friend, and Caleb knew she’d want to be involved in tracking her down.

  “What’s the name of this park again?” he asked.

  “Heritage Park. I guess the formal name is the Colorado River Heritage Greenway Park, but no one really calls it that.”

  Not too surprising. The name was kind of a mouthful.

  “Okay. I’ll be down there as fast as I can.”

  “Do you need me to wait here?” Aaron asked, and now he sounded especially reluctant.

  “No point,” Caleb said shortly. “Delia’s already gone. I suppose you can go back to wherever you’re staying. You’ve done enough.”

  “Hey, I didn’t have anything to do with this — ”

  Caleb lifted the phone away from his ear and pressed the red button to disconnect the call.

  Asshole. As far as he was concerned, Aaron Sanchez had everything to do with this. If he hadn’t begged Delia to go to Laughlin and try clearing the ghost from his grandmother’s house, none of this would have happened.

  Delia would still be safe.

  Caleb made himself drink some water, and then he picked up the phone again and went to his contacts list. Luckily, he’d put Pru’s information in there a while back, so it would be easy enough to reach her…especially since it was now the middle of the afternoon and there was no way even a night owl like Prudence Nelson wouldn’t be awake and ready to go.

  Sure enough, she picked up the phone on the second ring. “Hi, Caleb,” she said, sounding friendly enough…but also puzzled, as though she couldn’t quite figure out why he’d be calling her, rather than Delia.

  “Hello, Pru,” he responded. “I have a bit of bad news.”

  “What is it?” she asked, her tone sharpening at once.

  “Delia’s missing.”

  “What?”

  Pretty much the same response he’d had when he’d gotten the unwelcome news from Aaron. “I guess she went to Laughlin to try to clear a house. The cell reception there isn’t very good, so she headed over to a local park to make some calls. Except…her car is at the park, but she doesn’t seem to be anywhere around.”

  “What kind of park is it? Is it someplace where she might have gone for a walk or something?”

  “I suppose so,” Caleb replied, irritation stirring. Not at Prudence — she’d asked a logical enough question — but at himself for not thinking of that possibility. “I don’t know why she’d do that, though. It’s pretty hot out right now for a casual stroll.”

  “And you can’t reach her on her phone?”

  At least he could answer that query easily enough. “No. I tried multiple times. Texts don’t go through, and calls go straight to voicemail.”

  “Okay, that doesn’t sound much like Delia,” Pru agreed. “She never ignores calls during work hours.”

  No, she didn’t. In fact, he’d been a little irritated now and then when she’d taken a call while they were together, even though he understood that was part of her business and she needed to be there for her clients.

  Which was why he knew she would have picked up her phone this afternoon if she could.

  “So you see why I’m worried. I want to go down to Laughlin to look for her…and I was kind of hoping you’d come with me.”

  Not even a second of hesitation.

  “Absolutely,” Pru said. “Should I meet you at your house?”

  That would probably be the easiest thing. “Do you mind?” he asked. “Or I could come get you — ”

  “No, it’s fine,” she broke in. “Just give me a couple of minutes to close out a few things here, and then I’ll head right over. Pueblo Street, right?”

  “Yes,” Caleb replied. He didn’t recall ever giving her his address, but Pru was a private detective, after all. It was pretty easy for her to lay hands on information like that.

  “I’m going to call an Uber, but I’ll be over as fast as I can.” A small pause, and she added, “It’s going to be okay. We’ll find her.”

  “I know.”

  They ended the call, and he slid his phone into his jeans pocket, then headed into the kitchen to put a few things together for their road trip. Maybe not the full-on junk food extravaganza he’d first proposed to Delia, but a small cooling bag filled with bottled water, and then a tote from Trader Joe’s that he supplied with a bag of chips, some protein bars, and a package of teriyaki beef jerky. They probably wouldn’t need most of it, and yet he didn’t want to head out without knowing they’d brought some supplies along.

  Oh, who was he kidding? He knew he was doing all this so he’d have something to occupy his mind as he waited for Pru and wouldn’t keep dwelling on what might be happening to Delia while he was screwing around in the kitchen.

  The doorbell rang, and he looked up from the Trader Joe’s bag, a little startled. He didn’t know exactly where Pru Nelson lived, but he hadn’t thought she’d be able to get over here this quickly, especially when she had to wait for an Uber.

  He hurried out of the kitchen and went to the front door. When he opened it, though, he saw someone else entirely standing outside.

  Ty Carter, the tennis pro and maybe angel. Or half angel. Or whatever.

  What the hell?

  “What do you want?” Caleb demanded.

  “We need to talk,” Ty replied, apparently not put off at all by his rough tone.

  Well, that was par for the course. Even when all hell was breaking loose inside a casino, the guy never seemed to lose his cool.

  Because Caleb already had an idea what all this was about, he didn’t bother to argue, but instead stepped out of the way so Ty could come inside.

  “Your seer has gone missing,” Ty said, and Caleb cocked an eyebrow.

  “Is that what we’re calling her now?”

  “Her powers will continue to grow in strength,” the half angel replied. “She doesn’t think of herself as a seer, but just as she has begun to see into others’ minds, she’ll also begin to look into the future.”

  Too bad she hadn’t looked far enough ahead to learn that going to Laughlin had been a very bad idea.

  “And I suppose you’ve shown up here to lend a hand?” Caleb asked.

  “Yes,” Ty replied. “To be honest, I hadn’t thought we’d arrive at this juncture quite so soon. But she’s put herself in a place where our adversaries thought it best to move against her.”

  Caleb didn’t bother to ask how Ty knew all this. When you were dealing with angels or part angels or whatever, you had to learn to expect the unexpected.

  At least it seemed as if they were on the same side. Never in a million years had Caleb ever thought he’d be fighting on the side of the angels, but he’d been to Hell and knew all too well that throwing in your lot with a bunch of demons was a recipe for disaster.

  Mostly, he wished he could have stayed somewhere in the middle and been allowed to live his life without a bunch of complications, but it didn’t seem as if the universe was going to grant him that grace.

  “Well, I can probably use the help,” he said. “In fact, I was getting ready to head down to Laughlin. I’m just waiting for Pru.”

  “‘Pru’?” Ty repeated, even though Caleb had a feeling the guy knew perfectly well who she was.

  “Delia’s friend, Prudence Nelson,” he explained. “I thought it couldn’t hurt to have a private investigator along.”

  Ty didn’t reply right away, and something in his expression was almost thoughtful, as if he was pondering this latest development and trying to decide whether he should argue or just let it be.

  Apparently, it was the latter, because he nodded.

  “She could be of some help.”

  The doorbell rang again. Since they’d remained in the foyer while they talked, Caleb didn’t have to go very far to open the door and let Prudence Nelson in. The last time he’d seen her, she’d had ombre purple hair that was almost inky violet at the roots and had faded to pale lavender at the ends, which had just barely brushed her collarbones. Now, though, it had been dyed a deep forest green, striking against her pale skin and dark eyes. As far as he could tell, she didn’t seem to wear anything except black, maybe because that way her clothes would always go with her hair, no matter what color it was that month…or maybe week. He didn’t see her enough to know for sure how often she changed her hair. The only thing he did know was that she must either have iron tresses or the world’s best colorist, because her shoulder-length locks didn’t look fried despite all the torture she must put them through.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26