Page 64 of Speak of the Devil

“Looks like they took off,” he remarked as he led her into the living room. “I don’t even see any blood anywhere, and I know I was bleeding all over the place.”

True, the house looked immaculate. “Demon housekeepers?” she quipped feebly, and one of his dark, level brows quirked.

“More like making sure they didn’t leave any evidence behind,” he said. “Demons don’t like anything that can be traced back to them.”

Apparently not. “Well, at least they’re gone.”

“For now,” Caleb said darkly. “Just because it looks as if nothing weird happened here, that doesn’t mean I’m still not going to splash the hell out of this place with that holy water.”

Which she’d brought along in the Trader Joe’s bag that hung from one arm. “Well, we’ve got plenty of that. Do you want to work together, or should one of us take the upstairs and one the downstairs?”

“I’ll do upstairs,” he said at once. “You can get the downstairs. Let me do this first, though.”

He reached into the TJ’s bag and pulled out one of the little plastic vials of holy water, then marched over to the fireplace and sprinkled it liberally all over the hearth, then bent down so he could dab it on the stone surround as well.

“It’s weird, though,” he remarked, and Delia sent him a quizzical look.

“Weirder than demons coming down your chimney?”

White teeth flashed at her. “Yeah, weirder than that. Gas fireplace, right? So how the hell did they get past the glass? It should have been smashed all over the place.”

She supposed she should have thought of that. There weren’t many wood-burning fireplaces left in Las Vegas, and, like most — well, aside from those who’d gone to electric models — his was a gas setup with a handsome set of faux logs inside the firebox. Those logs were protected by glass, just like her own fireplace at home.

If demons really had come down the chimney and attacked him, wouldn’t there be glass everywhere?

Maybe. She still didn’t have a very good handle on demonic powers, but she supposed they might have somehow managed to blink their way past that glassy barrier without leaving any trace of their passing.

“I have no idea,” she said. Some people might have thought the lack of any physical evidence left behind was a sure sign that Caleb had somehow set up all of this, but she didn’t think so. She’d seen the way he was bleeding the night before.

Those hadn’t been self-inflicted wounds.

“Anyway,” he said, now sounding much more cheerful, “they’ll probably think twice before they try coming in that way again. I’ll just go take care of the upstairs.”

A quick wave with the hand that held the bottle of holy water, and then he headed up the staircase. For a second or two, Delia wondered if he’d left her to do the lower level so she wouldn’t find anything incriminating upstairs — for all she knew, he had a massive collection of vintage porn or something — but then she told herself it wasn’t any of her business.

For now, she needed to focus on making sure the ground floor was safe from any further demon intrusions…and hope like hell that their countermeasures worked.

Chapter Nineteen

It felta little weird to be up here when he knew Delia was downstairs, diligently splashing holy water everywhere so the demons wouldn’t be able to come back inside without inflicting a world of pain upon themselves.

Possibly, they’d think that was a decent trade-off for being able to really get their claws into him, but he didn’t think so.

He just wasn’t that important.

No, he focused on splashing the water on as many surfaces as possible, especially the window frames in all the upstairs rooms, being extra careful in the main suite so it would be the very last place in the house where they’d want to set foot. Right then, he was just thankful that he’d decided against having a second gas fireplace installed in his bedroom, since that would have given the demons an additional point of entry.

At least nothing seemed to have been disturbed up here, as if the demons had disappeared right after he did. With their prey gone, they probably wouldn’t have had much reason to stick around. Also, while they were bigger than the imps that had attacked him at the Bellagio and in his Uber the other evening, they were still from the lower orders of demons and wouldn’thave had the native intelligence to dig through his things to see if they could find any clues as to where he could have disappeared.

Satisfied that all the important surfaces upstairs had been rendered inimical to demon-kind, he went downstairs to find Delia finishing up with the windowsill in the living room.

“I think that’s about it,” she said. “Everything okay upstairs?”

“Looks like it,” he replied. “I don’t think they even went up there. So I suppose now we need to decide what to do next. Do you have any appointments today?”

He didn’t think she did, or otherwise she wouldn’t have been so leisurely about breakfast…or about coming over to his house to help. Also, unlike the other times he’d seen her during business hours, she wore skinny jeans and boots and a close-fitting sweater in a deep shade of green that only served to set off the lustrous copper of her long hair.

While he liked the understated sexiness of her business attire, he had to admit this was even better.

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