Chapter 3 #2
Caleb would have preferred a pitcher of beer or maybe margaritas, although he also understood that it probably wasn’t a good idea to muddle his wits too much if they had serious topics they needed to discuss.
He followed Delia into the living room, where Prudence Nelson was sitting in one of the club chairs.
Her hair was still the same dark emerald green it had been during their adventures in Laughlin a few weeks earlier, which surprised him a little.
From what he’d been able to tell, she tended to change it with almost bewildering frequency.
Maybe her hairstylist had told her to cool her jets for a while to avoid damaging her shoulder-length locks beyond repair.
“Hi, Pru,” he said as he settled himself on the sofa.
“Hi, Caleb,” she responded. She had a glass of iced tea and a plate of munchies — stuff he thought was from Trader Joe’s, mini quiches and a section of a small pepperoni pizza — sitting on the coffee table in front of her. “Glad you could make it.”
Something in her tone almost made it sound as if they’d been waiting on him to get started. In a way, he supposed that was true…although only because Pru had been early, and not because he was running late or anything.
“Well, my calendar had an opening,” he quipped.
Delia grinned, although Pru only shook her head.
Caleb went ahead and got himself some iced tea and a few snacks as Delia sat down next to him on the couch.
He wondered if she’d put something together that was a little more substantial than just chips or cheese and crackers because she intended this to substitute for their dinner, and thought they’d probably still need to order some takeout after they were done talking with Prudence.
“Okay, so Delia asked me to look into the Angel’s Dream Wedding Chapel,” she said, obviously deciding there had been enough chitchat and now it was time to get down to business. “And almost at once, I found some kind of sketchy stuff.”
“Such as?” Caleb asked, then drank some iced tea.
Next to him, Delia sat up a little straighter, her expression immediately concerned. “What, is it owned by the Mob or something?”
Pru shot her a crooked smile. In contrast to the green hair, she had dark eyes and pale skin, and was pretty enough in a sort of French street urchin sort of way.
“No, not as far as I’ve been able to tell.
But it was purchased recently by a shell company that looks like it’s the same outfit that has been buying a bunch of other wedding chapels across Las Vegas. ”
Delia was frowning, although that didn’t stop her from putting a few morsels on one of the plates she’d stacked on the coffee table. “Why would anyone want to buy a bunch of Vegas wedding chapels?”
“I have a theory.” Pru set down her iced tea and then reached for the satchel she had sitting on the floor next to the club chair she currently occupied.
Caleb knew she carried her laptop and various other odds and ends in the thing — and that she never seemed to leave the house without it — but this time, rather than her computer, she pulled out a large paper map of Las Vegas, one that had circles around what he assumed were the properties in question, along with a series of lines connecting them.
Lines whose pattern looked ominously familiar.
Delia asked the question first. “Are those…?”
“Yep,” Pru responded. “Ley lines. We already knew that they crisscross the city, and it turns out all the recently purchased chapels are arranged along them…except for Angel’s Dream. That place sits right where two of the lines intersect.”
Making its location extremely powerful. Two such ley lines had connected under Rubel Castle in Glendora, where Caleb’s father and the rest of the part demons had attempted to open a gate that would allow their master Belial to return to this world.
The plan had been foiled, which was why Caleb had spent two endless years cooling his heels in Hell before he had a chance to return to the mortal plane…
and why all the other members of the Greencastle group were still stuck down there.
“No wonder it felt so off,” Delia murmured. She’d paled a little, and Caleb reached over to give her fingers a reassuring squeeze.
Pru sat up a little straighter. “You went there?”
“Yes,” Delia replied. “Caleb thought we should check it out, so we popped in there yesterday. And when we were there, we experienced weirdnesses like the temperature dropping and hearing voices that shouldn’t have been there, so we thought something must be up.”
“Although we went back a little while later, and everything seemed quiet enough,” Caleb put in. “So we weren’t sure what to think.”
Pru listened to all this with narrowed eyes. Although she’d been around plenty of supernatural activity when they went on their rescue mission to Laughlin only a few weeks earlier, he got the impression that she would still prefer to take all this with a grain of salt.
Even though the evidence of her eyes and ears was kind of hard to ignore.
“Why do you think you didn’t notice anything during your second visit?” she asked then, and he shrugged.
“I have no idea,” he said. “Just because I’m part demon doesn’t mean I have the answers to all this stuff. It’s not like I took a class called ‘Paranormal Activity 101’ or something.”
That comment made Prudence chuckle, although he thought he detected something almost uneasy about the sound, as if she knew deep down there wasn’t anything remotely funny about any of this.
“Point taken,” she replied. “I was also able to trace a couple of the Styx Group’s financials. Maybe they’re getting sloppy. Anyway, I’m about ninety percent sure they’re the ones behind the shell company that’s buying the wedding chapels.”
“First investment properties when masquerading as the Aegis Group, and now chapels,” Delia murmured. Her slender form seemed very tense as she sat upright next to him on the couch, and Caleb wished he could pull her close and give her some much-needed comfort.
With Pru Nelson sitting across the coffee table from them, he guessed that probably wasn’t a very wise thing to do. Not that she would say anything, of course, but he guessed an eye roll would be all she needed to communicate her annoyance with such public displays of emotion.
“Everything under the guise of some other company making those deals,” Prudence said. “I’m not sure what Styx’s game is, though.”
Delia’s fingers tightened on the knees of her jeans.
However, she sounded calm enough as she responded, “Well, in Laughlin, the demon August Sellers was clearly trying to use my power and the power of the Colorado River to open a gate to the underworld. And even though we still don’t have all the details of what was going on during that tournament at the Desert Paradise casino, it sure looks like they were trying to do about the same thing. ”
“That’s what demons always try to do,” Caleb said frankly, and both women fastened him with gazes that were a little too sharp.
“I mean, besides the ones who come here just to indulge in some petty mischief. But higher-level demons — the ones who can plan this kind of stuff and attempt to carry it out — they’re always looking for a way to unleash Hell on Earth.
They’re still angry about being cast out of Heaven millennia ago. ”
“That’s a long time to hold a grudge,” Pru said, and he couldn’t help smiling a little.
“True, but that’s how demons are. So when they fail with one scheme, they move on to the next.
” He kind of thought Prudence had buried the lede on this one, considering how they’d been spending months trying to get more information about the Styx Group.
Then again, he supposed he could see why she thought the issue with the wedding chapels was a little more pressing, since Delia’s cousin was supposed to get married at one in just a couple of days.
“So…they’re going to try to do something with ley line energy again?” Delia asked. A faint crease had appeared between her brows, the one that told Caleb she was wrestling with a problem she didn’t quite understand. “It didn’t work last time, so what’s the point?”
No, it hadn’t, thanks to his intervention.
True, he hadn’t even known exactly what he was doing at the time, only that the demons controlling things during the tournament were summoning up the kind of dark magic that could have laid Las Vegas waste.
The only thing he’d truly understood was that it needed to be stopped.
And it had, thank God.
“Demons don’t really follow that whole idea of the definition of insanity being something you do over and over again, expecting to get a different result.
” Caleb knew he sounded dry, but doing what he could to detach himself from the situation was the easiest way for him to focus and attempt to discover what was really going on here.
“And, to be honest, ley lines are the best way to summon the kind of energy they need for that kind of massive magic. They don’t possess it themselves, which is why they have to work with the natural energies in this world. ”
“And the wedding chapels?” Pru asked. She also seemed a little puzzled, and he couldn’t blame her. “What’s the point of using those?”
“They’re places where a lot of emotional energy has been focused,” he replied.
“So I suppose if you put that on top of the energy already in place from the ley lines, then they’re going to pack an additional punch.
The wedding vows and commitment ceremonies create a specific type of emotional resonance — hope mixed with permanence — that demons can twist into binding energy for their rituals.
Other emotional nodes, like funeral homes or hospitals, have strong energy, but it’s the wrong ‘flavor’ for creating stable gateways.
These are all just educated guesses, though — it’s not as if there’s any real science to back it up. ”