Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
More than ever, Caleb wished he’d come to Laughlin with Delia for a little change of pace, maybe a chance to rent a boat and go out on the river — even though he knew spending an extended amount of time on the Colorado probably wasn’t a good idea for him — or just have dinner and catch a show.
Maybe finally gather his courage enough to tell her he was glad to be her friend but that he wanted a whole lot more.
Instead, he was back in the fifth sublevel below the Aquarius, watching as Ty pried up the section of carpet that concealed the tunnel leading to the chamber where August Sellers would be performing a ritual intended to open a portal to Hell.
Well, the tunnel that supposedly led there.
Ty seemed very sure about the whole thing, but because he hadn’t allowed them to explore when they came here earlier in the day, saying they needed to be careful not to tip their hands, Caleb had no idea whether the half angel’s assessment of the situation was correct.
This time, though, Ty actually did open the door, which revealed a pitch-black passageway with a metal ladder secured to one wall.
“Probably for the people who dug it out,” he said as he and Caleb began to make the descent. “Sellers would have hired workers to do the job and then either erased their memories…or simply erased them.”
“What, he couldn’t just snap his fingers and make it happen?” Caleb asked. Oddly, the lower they got, the more illumination he detected, as if there was a light source farther down the tunnel they currently couldn’t see.
“Doing so would have required an enormous amount of energy,” Ty replied. “Much easier for him to hire mortals to dig the tunnel.”
Fair enough. Caleb was still finding his way around what demons could or couldn’t do.
He might have grown up around other quarter demons and had half demons like his father as part of the mix as well, but all of them had been focused on making sure no one would ever be able to tell they were anything more than regular mortals.
They weren’t trying to do anything flashy, other than live the lives of wealth and privilege that had been set up by their progenitors, the demon princes who had come to this plane to serve Belial.
By that point, they’d reached the bottom of the vertical tunnel. There, it turned forty-five degrees and stretched out straight ahead of them before opening into a chamber about a hundred feet or so from where they stood.
That was the source of the illumination…but it didn’t come from any lights fastened to the walls or roof of the earthen room, one that was similar in dimension to the one beneath Alba Sanchez’s house.
No, the brilliant glow was coming from Delia Dunne.
She hung in midair, eyes closed, hair pulled up into the sort of carefully messy do that usually still took hours to accomplish. Her slim form was encased in a fabulous gown of shifting blue and green sequins, and long, glassy emerald earrings hung down to nearly her shoulders.
In short, she was absolutely spectacular…and completely terrifying.
“What’s going on?” Caleb whispered to Ty, who had also stopped in his tracks to stare at the spectacle in front of them.
“He’s using her as a power source,” Ty murmured in reply. “With her psychic abilities fueling the ritual, it will be very powerful.”
No shit. Caleb realized then that Delia wasn’t alone in the chamber.
He couldn’t see August Sellers from where he and Ty stood, but he noticed that four other men were ranged along the walls, all of them wearing the same somehow stupefied yet beatific expression Aaron had plastered on his face before they snapped him out of his spell…
and all of them with the same sigil of command inked onto their forearms.
“What about the army of goons?” Caleb asked next. “Am I going to have to bleed all over them, too?”
Maybe Ty’s mouth quirked just a fraction.
“It’s an easy way to break them out of the spell.
But since we’re not worried about alerting August Sellers as to what we’re up to — he’ll know we’re here to disrupt the ritual as soon as he spots us — I think holy water will be the easiest way to dispatch those men.
It should break the hold those sigils have on them, and once they’ve woken up, they’ll be of little use to Sellers. ”
All that sounded encouraging…up to a point. There were still a lot of them, and if they decided to stay and fight, they could be a real problem.
But they had to get Delia out of there before Sellers drained her dry…or opened his damn portal to the underworld. Luckily, her little SUV had had nearly a full case of holy water back in the cargo area, as though she’d loaded up before she headed down to Laughlin, not sure what she would find.
Now her forethought might be the thing that saved her. Well, along with an assist from Caleb and Ty, her otherworldly posse.
By unspoken agreement, they inched toward the chamber where Delia still hung suspended in the air, looking like a gorgeously oversized Christmas ornament.
Caleb had never seen her like this before, and despite his worry that Sellers and his minions might outmatch them, he still thought she was the most beautiful thing in this world… or any other.
“I’ll go after August,” Ty said in an undertone. “You take care of those men and do what you can to snap Delia out of that trance.”
Would she awaken if he kissed her, like some latter-day version of Sleeping Beauty?
As appealing as that mental image was, Caleb knew better than to try anything like that. If he ever did have the luck to kiss Delia Dunne, he wanted to do it when she was in full possession of all her faculties.
And while he could have protested and said he’d take on August Sellers, the truth of the matter was that Ty probably had more experience with this sort of thing. Better to have an angel battle a demon…especially if that left Caleb free to rescue Delia.
“Got it,” he murmured.
With their plan in place, the two of them continued to move forward. Now they were only a few feet away, and Caleb could finally see August Sellers.
He stood at what was the northern compass point of the chamber.
Just as in the one under Alba Sanchez’s house, this earthen room also had sigils carved into the walls in the four cardinal directions, only this time, they weren’t witch’s knots — designed to keep evil magic at bay — but copies of the same sigil of command that had been drawn on the forearms of all his minions.
Were those symbols exerting some sort of additional control? What if the holy water Caleb carried in a bag hastily purchased in the Aquarius’s gift shop wasn’t enough?
Too late to voice those worries to Ty, because the half angel’s body suddenly flared with light, and he stepped into the ritual chamber, blazing like a miniature supernova.
“You will not do this!” he thundered. “I command you with all the power of the Lord God Himself, and all the strength of the choirs of angels, and the voice of Christ Himself!”
And he raised a hand and threw what looked like a blob of pure energy at the demon.
However, August Sellers only lifted a hand in reply and smacked the glowing white orb to one side, rather like someone deftly deflecting a volleyball.
“You’ll have to do better than that,” he sneered.
“Do you think I care about the power of your God? I have tapped into the energy of the river that flows so near us, and amplified it with the gifts of the woman I now command. Tell your Jesus or your God — or your angels, I suppose — to come here and stop me, for there is no way you will ever be able to do such a thing yourself…half angel.”
Well, that answered one question. Caleb couldn’t do much with that interesting piece of information, though, because just as the demon stopped speaking, his minions seemed to awake from their stupor and came rushing toward the spot where Caleb stood.
Luckily, he already had a vial of holy water in each hand, their lids popped and the liquid inside ready to go. He splashed it into the faces of the first two who approached him and they recoiled, clawing at it as if it was acid.
After that first violent reaction, though, they both blinked and looked around as if they had no idea where they were.
To be fair, they probably didn’t.
“Exit’s that way,” he said, and inclined his head toward the tunnel that led to the fifth sublevel and the real world.
“Thanks, man,” the first guy said. He looked like he was barely old enough to drink, with the kind of muscles he would have gotten from long hours at the gym.
No wonder Sellers had wanted him for a lackey. He could probably put someone right through a wall.
“Don’t mention it,” Caleb replied, since two more of the minions were coming straight toward him.
The first pair made their escape down the tunnel. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Ty had apparently decided it wasn’t worth his time to waste any further words on the demon, and instead was hurling ball after ball of white light at Sellers.
However, each one seemed to bounce off an invisible barrier, one that shimmered like black glass. Was the disguised demon really that powerful? Caleb was pretty sure any one of those light balls would have knocked out any of the other demons he’d encountered.
But they hadn’t been drawing on the power of the river, amplified to crazy levels by Delia’s burgeoning gifts.
Which meant the connection between them — however August Sellers had brought it into being — must be destroyed as soon as possible.
First, though, Caleb needed to splash more water on the lackeys as they rushed toward him.
The next one reacted the same way the first guy had, which was to blink and look confused, and then run for the closest exit.
The last guy, though, didn’t seem to want to wake up from his trance. Eyes still blank, he went straight for Caleb with his arms outstretched, clearly intent on wrapping them around his throat.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen.
He brought his knee up straight into the man’s groin. That seemed to bring him out of his trance the way the holy water hadn’t, because he went down like a ton of bricks, moaning and doing his best to curl into a fetal position.
Okay, he was definitely awake now…and would probably follow the rest of his compatriots as soon as he was able to stand again.
Behind Caleb, Ty and August continued to battle it out, lobbing their respective energy weapons at each other, but it didn’t seem as if either one was gaining the upper hand.
Stalemate, unless Caleb could do something to tip the balance.
He moved closer to Delia, still suspended in midair, her oval face as serene and lovely as a Renaissance Madonna. There had to be something he could do to wake her up from her trance.
Throw holy water at her, the way he had with Sellers’ minions? No, she wasn’t a demon, but she appeared to be controlled by one, the same way those clueless men had been.
Caleb pulled another vial of holy water out of his bag, reflecting that if he was going to keep getting dragged into fights like this, he should probably have some kind of bandolier setup made for the things, maybe like one of those rigs he’d seen waitresses wear in a couple of bars he’d visited since his arrival in Las Vegas, where the women had bottles of their current pour hanging from their waists in holsters and a bunch of shot glasses loaded in leather straps that crossed over their chests.
It would be more efficient than what he was currently doing.
But since they hadn’t had the time to buy a specialized rig like that, he’d just have to make do with what he had.
“Sorry,” he murmured under his breath. Yes, this was necessary, but he still didn’t like the idea of splashing Delia full in the face with a bunch of water.
Desperate times and all that.
He removed the cap and threw the entire contents of the vial right at her. It should have hit her face and hair…and maybe some of the chest that was more exposed by the sequined gown than he’d ever seen before.
That was some seriously spectacular cleavage.
The water never reached her, though. Instead, it splashed onto some sort of barrier, sort of like the one that seemed to be shielding August Sellers from Ty’s attack, only this one shimmered white as the holy water hit the surface.
Shit.
Caleb stared at the barrier in consternation. If it had been created by the demon, then it should have shattered into nothingness the second the holy water made impact. That it didn’t…
…well, that seemed to tell him Delia herself was the one who’d created the barrier that currently protected her.
And that meant the usual methods weren’t going to work.
“Delia!” he shouted at her. “You have to drop the shield!”
From behind him, August Sellers released the kind of cackle that only a demon could produce.
“You’re wasting your time,” he called out as a crackle and hiss indicated that yet another of Ty’s energy blobs had been absorbed with the dark magic that appeared to have made him all but invulnerable.
“She can’t hear you. She can’t do anything except give me the power I need to make sure the portal opens. ”
“How are you going to manage that?” Ty countered.
He sounded breathless, and Caleb had to wonder how much this battle against the demon was taking out of the half angel.
No one had limitless stores of strength, and it appeared pretty clear that Sellers was trying to wear Ty down until he didn’t have any fight left.
“It seems like you’re a little distracted right now. ”
“Fool,” the demon shot back. “I’m not going to open the portal.”
He paused there, and his eyes glowed red and his teeth seemed to sharpen as he smiled.
“Delia is.”