Page 66 of The Devil Went Down to Laughlin
“You use this,” Ty said calmly, and set a small plastic bottle down on the table in front of her.
Caleb recognized it all too well. He and Delia had deployed the same bottles in their previous confrontations with demons.
Holy water.
It seemed Pru knew what it was as well — probably since Delia had been using the stuff in her ghost-whispering business long before she got tangled up with demons — because she released a breath and then reached out and deposited it in her satchel.
“If I use that, won’t the boss demon know the gig is up?”
“He’ll already know that,” Caleb said, “because we’ll be in his face, trying to rescue Delia and stop him from completing the ritual. This is just insurance to keep Aaron from joining the party.”
Again, Prudence was silent for a moment, most likely because she was trying to come up with a convincing argument as to why she should stick with them and not get left behind. It didn’t seem as if she was successful, since she replied, “Okay, I get it. I don’t like it…but I get it.”
“We’ll have lunch,” Ty said. “And then you should probably take Aaron back with you to our suite at Harrah’s — to keep him out of the line of fire,” he added hastily, since her eyes had begun to glint with annoyance again. “It’s neutral ground, and you should be safe there.”
Again with the “should.”
But Caleb understood that even Ty was trodding on some unfamiliar ground here, and he was just doing his best to make sure everyone involved made it out of this alive.
“And we’ll reconnoiter,” he said, and the half angel nodded.
“We need to locate the portal before nightfall so we have enough time to make a real plan of attack. But whenever we do find it, we’ll need to stand back and wait until the ritual begins.”
Now it was Caleb’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Don’t you think we should block the guy before he gets up a good head of steam?”
Unfazed, Ty stared back at Caleb and said, “If we do that, then we might miss our chance to rescue Delia. Until she’s actively participating in the ritual, August Sellers will keep her elsewhere. Moving too soon only lessens our chances of getting her away from him.”
Man, Caleb hated it when Ty Carter made sense.
“I don’t like it,” Caleb replied.
“You don’t have to like it,” Ty said. “You just have to be willing to do whatever’s going to result in August Sellers being taken out of the equation and Delia rescued. This isn’t about us. It’s about her.”
And that, Caleb realized, was a fact he couldn’t really dispute.
Chapter Sixteen
Sometime around two-thirty, a room service cart appeared in the middle of the hotel room where Delia was trapped. She’d been sitting on the bed, watching TV — it wasn’t as if there was anything else she could do to pass the time, although she’d taken the world’s shortest shower to freshen up after reassuring herself that she was utterly alone in the room — when the cart suddenly materialized.
She’d been startled, of course, although she also told herself she should be used to this sort of thing by now. Or rather, even though she’d never seen a room service cart show up out of nowhere before, it was pretty far down the list of crazy shit she’d had to deal with lately.
After she paused the show she was watching, she got up from the bed and walked toward the cart, knowing she probably looked like someone approaching a wild animal, not sure whether it would attack.
However, the thing looked completely ordinary…and she swore she could smell the rich, beefy aroma of a French dip drifting out from under the silver dome that covered the food.
She reminded herself that her captor would have had plenty of opportunity to do all sorts of terrible things to her before this, and she sort of doubted he would have used room service as the means of her destruction.
Or maybe he’d decided she wasn’t so useful after all, and he thought that poisoning her with some kind of tempting meal was the most amusing way to dispatch her.
Quickly, she lifted the cover from the plate. Sure enough, a French dip sandwich and a little bowl of au jus sat there, accompanied by a pile of delectable-looking shoestring fries lightly dusted with parmesan and parsley.
Her stomach rumbled. Maybe the macadamia nuts and the Wheat Thins had shut it up for a while, but her body seemed to think it could really use a good helping of protein.
And she’d eaten the stuff out of the minibar and hadn’t suffered any ill effects.
For a second, she stood there, inhaling the sweet, sweet aroma of the sandwich and fries…and then she resolutely set the cover back in place.
As good as it all smelled — and as hungry as she was for some real food — she didn’t dare take the chance. The stuff from the minibar had still been in its factory packaging, while the late lunch that had appeared out of nowhere could have been tampered with by almost anyone.
