Page 34 of The Devil Went Down to Laughlin
“Maybe he’s not even here,” Prudence said, and Caleb lifted an eyebrow. “What?” she shot back. “Delia left her car behind, so maybe Aaron did, too. For all we know, those weird angel Watcher things are disappearing people.”
“That’s not what they do,” Ty told her.
“Oh, right…they just watch. My bad.”
Rather than look offended at her retort, an amused light danced in Ty’s clear blue eyes. “It’s possible Aaron was ‘disappeared,’ as you put it,” he said. “But it wouldn’t have been angels who did such a thing.”
“Let me see if the door’s open,” Caleb said, figuring it was time to put a stop to the bickering. He knew they were all on edge, but this wasn’t getting them anywhere.
As soon as he laid his fingers on the latch, it gave way, and the door swung inward.
“Well, that answers that question.”
“I’m not sure we should be trespassing,” Pru told him, her tone now openly doubtful, but he only shrugged.
“Aaron knows we’re coming,” he said, which was only half a lie. The guy definitely knew he’d been headed down to Laughlin, although it wasn’t as if he’d given Caleb an invitation to go inside the house.
Both her well-arched brows lifted. However, Ty interceded, saying, “Caleb’s right. Also, I think we need to go in there.”
“Some angelic flash of insight?” Caleb asked dryly.
“Something like that.”
Even after he opened the door wide and stepped into the foyer, Pru hung back for a moment, clearly reluctant to do anything that might appear remotely illegal. Although he was kind of hazy on how such things worked, he guessed that anyone with a P.I. license needed to be squeaky clean or risk having their credentials revoked.
Well, he’d do whatever he had to in order to smooth out the consequences of their unlawful entry. At least he could claim there hadn’t been any “breaking” involved, not when the front door had been left unlocked.
But then she must have realized it was silly for her to have remained standing out on the porch when her two companions had already gone inside the house, because she released an exasperated breath and followed them in.
Caleb shut the door behind them. The house didn’t look all that different from some he’d seen back home in Greencastle — typical farmhouse with a staircase right in front of them, hugging one wall, and a dining room on one side and a fussy living room or front parlor on the other. As far as he could tell, all the furniture seemed to be in place.
Had Aaron sold it along with the house? If that was the case, Caleb could see why the buyers would have wanted to back out. That stuff was butt ugly.
“Aaron?” he called out. “It’s Caleb and a couple of Delia’s friends. We didn’t find her at the park, so we thought we’d come by and see if you had anything else to tell us that might help us find her.”
Absolute silence. Pru had crossed her arms, seeming to signal that she was less than thrilled to be here, and he could see why. Even if you left out the part where they were totally trespassing, something in the house just felt wrong.
Was that the spirit of Aaron’s grandmother?
“The energy here is…odd,” Ty said, which felt like the understatement of the year.
“That’s for sure,” Pru replied. “I’ve been in a couple of Delia’s haunted houses over the years, and they were kind of creepy, but something about this place makes the hair on the back of my neck want to stand on end.”
“It’s definitely psychically charged,” Ty agreed. He looked away from them down the hall that appeared to bisect the ground floor of the house. “I need to look at the kitchen.”
Without waiting for them to respond, he headed down the hallway. Pru shot Caleb a helpless little glance and then followed their half-angel companion, giving Caleb no choice but to bring up the rear.
At least the wood floors underfoot were nice, although the kitchen itself was an ugly mishmash of nineties-vintage wood cabinets and some truly hideous imitation marble Formica on the countertops.
Pru looked around, a half smile on her lips. “I hope they were selling this place as a fixer-upper,” she remarked.
Ty didn’t seem to be paying any heed to her words, because he went straight to the cabinets to the left of the sink and opened one of the doors so he could peer inside. “I thought so,” he said after a moment. “I could sense it as soon as we entered the house.”
“Sense what?” Pru asked. She’d moved closer and had gone on her tiptoes to look inside the cupboard, but because she probably scraped five foot four on a good day, Caleb doubted she could see very much.
“Someone has carved a symbol of protection into the cabinet,” Ty replied. “Some call it a witch’s knot, but it’s actually a form of protection that wards off all evil, not merely those who use magic for evil ends.”
Once again, Pru’s hands planted on her hips. “So…what…we’re dealing with witches now, too?”
