Chapter 20 #2
“And…got it!” Pru pushed her way out from under the desk, holding a yellow sticky note with tape on two sides, as if whoever had placed it down there had been worried that the original adhesive from the Post-It wouldn’t be up to the task.
“Jerk thought he was being cagey by taping it to the rear of the desk drawer instead of underneath, but it was there. Now let’s see what’s in this bad boy. ”
She settled herself in the oversized chair, looking very small and as if she had ended up sitting there because it was “bring your daughter to work” day.
Not that demons had daughters. At least, not that Caleb had ever heard of.
Delia and Ty moved closer, although they hung far enough back that they couldn’t be accused of crowding Prudence too closely. She didn’t look up, but instead typed a combination of letters and numbers and symbols on the login screen before her.
At once, the login disappeared and was replaced by pure black across all three screens.
“Cheerful,” she commented. “Some people like something a little more colorful for their desktops, but I suppose demons don’t go for that sort of thing.”
There was still some kind of menu bar along the top, and Pru clicked on it and opened the file explorer.
Caleb had always been a Mac guy, so he’d be the first to admit he didn’t really know much about how Windows worked.
Luckily, Prudence seemed to know what she was doing, because she opened a window that appeared to show all the files on the hard drive.
Leaning forward, she stared intently at the screen. Just a moment later, she said, “Gotcha.”
“What did you find?”
“Oh, just a little folder labeled ‘Styx.’”
“What?” Delia asked, moving forward. Her face was still pale, but she otherwise seemed recovered from her recent ordeal.
Caleb wished he could reach out to take her hand, but he wasn’t sure how she would receive such a gesture. Instead, he retreated to his usual safe sarcasm and said, “You’re really surprised there’s a connection between our friends in California and August Sellers?”
“I guess I am,” she said. “Especially since you just told us that demons aren’t usually linked.”
“Linked psychically,” he reminded her. “I never said some of them couldn’t be working together.”
Ty ignored all this and asked, “What’s in the folder?”
Pru clicked on it. Inside were a bunch of files with numbers for their names.
However, their subjects were clear enough — photo after photo of Delia, one of them obviously the professional headshot from the Dunne & Dunne website, but much more what appeared to be random snaps taken on the street, or in various places around town, whether they were of Delia emerging from Trader Joe’s with a laden shopping cart or her picking up her dry cleaning… or pulling into the garage of her home.
“He was tailing me?” she demanded.
“I doubt he would’ve gotten his hands dirty like that,” Pru responded. “I’m sure he just hired someone to follow you.”
“Oh, that makes me feel so much better.”
However, her tone was wry enough that Caleb could tell she was beginning to recover from the shock of seeing all those photos of herself.
The folder wasn’t all about Delia, though. There were also images of Alba Sanchez’s house and even a few of Aaron himself.
“Looks like Mr. Sellers had been planning this for a while,” Ty commented. “He was just waiting for all the pieces to line up.”
Caleb didn’t like the sound of that very much. “Even before that mess at the Desert Paradise?”
“Maybe,” Pru said as she studied the files on the screen in front of her. “Some of these are dated back to the end of February, which would definitely have been before the poker tournament.”
Delia had crossed her arms, almost as if she was hugging herself. The black top she’d borrowed from Prudence didn’t have any sleeves, and the A/C in the office was turned up pretty high, but Caleb didn’t think that was the real reason.
“So…was the ritual at the river sort of a backup plan?”
Of course. He didn’t know why he hadn’t seen it before, but then, it was kind of hard to detect a pattern when you only had one data point to work with.
“That’s exactly it,” he replied. “And it’s what Hank Bowers and the rest of those possessed goons at the tournament were trying to accomplish.
They wanted to open a gate to Hell with all the energies they were summoning, and when that fell apart, it was time for Sellers to step in and see if he could seal the deal. ”
“Those are some very determined demons,” Ty said, and Caleb shrugged.
“If you’d ever been to Hell, you’d know why they want to get out of there so badly.”
Delia glanced away from the computer screen at the lights of Laughlin, glittering across the surface of the river.
It didn’t seem as if the earth tremor they’d felt as the portal closed had traveled up through all those sublevels, because as far as he could tell, everything looked serene out there, thousands of mortals gambling and laughing and drinking and having absolutely no idea how close they’d come to utter destruction.
“But we beat them,” she said, her voice firm.
“Yes,” Caleb replied, “we beat them…this time.”