Chapter 16
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.
“I’m good, thanks,” she said aloud, just in case her captor was eavesdropping on her.
She’d checked the room for any hidden cameras…
Pru had taught her how to do that a while back after she’d talked about getting an Airbnb in Tahoe for a long weekend at a time when horror stories about secret cameras in vacation rentals had been making the rounds on the internet…
but as far as Delia had been able to tell, the place was clean.
Then again, a demon or whoever her captor might be probably was someone who didn’t have to rely on something as mundane as spy cameras.
Trying not to inhale too deeply — she knew the scent of the French dip would linger in the air for a while, even with the cover in place — she headed back over to the bed, picked up the remote, and turned HGTV back on.
Caleb and Ty sent themselves back into the sublevel and to the same stairwell they’d used to descend to the room that had once held Delia.
They’d agreed on that location because they both knew it well enough, and also because the stairs had seemed pretty much deserted, and they didn’t think there was too high a risk of bumping into any Aquarius employees there.
That appeared to be the case now as well, since Caleb didn’t see anyone around when he and Ty appeared.
“All the way down to the bottom?” he asked, and Ty nodded.
“Yes. Any tunnels would have to branch off from the lowest level.”
They kept heading down, past the landing that would have allowed them access to Sublevel 3, and then past Sublevel 4, until the stairwell terminated at a final landing that opened onto the lowest level of the underground facilities.
Even though it looked exactly the same as the level where they’d found Aaron guarding Delia’s erstwhile prison, something about the place gave Caleb the creeps. He glanced over at Ty, who nodded.
“Yes, I feel it, too. It’s not quite the same energy as the portal near Alba Sanchez’s house, but it’s similar. I think we must be getting close.”
“Where do you think Sellers would have hidden the tunnel?” Caleb asked. “Walls…or floor?”
“It could be either,” Ty said. “But let’s walk the perimeter first, and then if we have to, we’ll start searching all the different hallways.”
Which could take a while. Then again, they had almost six hours until night fell, so it wasn’t as if there wasn’t plenty of time available for exploring.
Even though every passing minute felt like a century.
By unspoken agreement, they both headed to the right, moving slowly so they could absorb the energies of the space.
That was what would betray the location of the tunnel or passageway, not any visible evidence.
August Sellers would have made sure that the ordinary employees who came down here wouldn’t find anything of note…
well, unless they were psychic or something.
The whole time, Caleb could sense the way the portal’s energies pulsed in the background, although they weren’t slow and steady, but rather had an odd, almost staccato beat, as if their natural rhythm had been perverted somehow.
No big surprise, not when Sellers must have been meddling with those energy signatures to make them more suited for opening a gateway into Hell.
“Will it go back to normal after all this is over?” Caleb asked Ty in an undertone.
It sure didn’t seem as if anyone was observing them, and of course, Ty would be interfering with the security cameras to make sure there was no trace of their passage, but it still seemed wise to keep their voices down.
“I hope so,” the half angel replied, also speaking in a near-murmur. “I haven’t encountered anything like this before, so I can’t say for sure.”
While Caleb would have preferred a more definitive answer, at least Ty hadn’t said that the portal would be damaged forever.
Maybe the river’s energies weren’t in sync with his demonic blood, but the Colorado was still a source of natural beauty and vitality, and he would have hated to think it was permanently defiled by the demon’s meddling.
They fell into silence again as they continued their circuit. This wasn’t really the time for small talk, so even though the quiet felt a little uncomfortable, Caleb didn’t try to come up with a topic that might have kept the conversation going.
The wrongness in the background seemed to strengthen, that odd rhythm beginning to feel like the whining buzz of a fly trapped in a room, drilling into his eardrums. If their mission hadn’t been so urgent, he would have been tempted to tell Ty that they needed to get the hell out of there.
Of course, he didn’t.
Then the half angel stopped suddenly and pointed at the floor beneath their feet. “Here,” he said.
“You’re sure?” Caleb asked. As far as he could tell, this particular section of industrial carpet didn’t look any different from the rest of the sublevel they’d already surveyed.
“It feels wrong.”
Caleb couldn’t help lifting an eyebrow. “Dude, this whole place feels wrong.”
Ty gave a reluctant chuckle. “Okay, you’re right about that. But the wrongness feels concentrated here.”
He knelt and spread his hands over the section of carpet he’d indicated. A faint glow surrounded his fingers, not nearly as bright as the illumination he’d called to himself in the chamber where they’d found the map.
However, it appeared to be effective enough, because the outline of a square about a yard on each side began to glow in response.
“Help me pull it up,” the half angel said, and Caleb knelt as well so he could lift the square of flat carpet out of the way.
Sure enough, below the concealing square was a metal door with a recessed handle in the middle. If anyone had walked directly across it, they might have sensed a slight depression in the floor, and yet Caleb had the feeling that not many people even came to this level beneath the hotel.
He began to reach for the handle, but Ty laid warning fingers on his forearm.
“Not yet,” he said, and Caleb sent him an annoyed look.
“I thought the whole point of this little expedition was to locate the tunnel that leads to the energy point.”
“And we have,” Ty replied calmly.
Caleb wasn’t all that convinced. “We found a door in the floor. I wouldn’t exactly call that incontrovertible proof that it connects to the spot we’re looking for.”
“Oh, it is,” Ty said. “I can feel it. The tunnel heads east for about twenty or thirty feet and ends in an open space. I’m sure that’s where we’ll find Delia…when the time comes.”
“And you got all that from just touching a door handle?”
“I did.” He reached over and took hold of the square of carpet they’d just removed, then slid it back into place and ran a glowing finger all around its edges.
Once he was done, you couldn’t tell it was any different from the rest of the dark gray indoor/outdoor carpet that covered the floors in this sublevel.
“The more we tamper with this, the greater the chance that August Sellers might be able to detect that someone was here and found his secret passageway. Much better to go back to the hotel room and wait it out.”
That plan sounded awfully anticlimactic, but Caleb had to reluctantly agree that Ty was right. The longer they hung around here, the more risk they ran of someone coming along and discovering a couple of interlopers in a place where they had no business being.
And when he glanced down at his watch, he realized they’d spent more time down here than he’d thought, since it was now almost four o’clock. Still a good ways to go until nightfall, especially at this time of year, but it could have been worse.