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“Let me do that,” I said. “I’m sorry I scared you. I didn’t know you were listening to music.”
“It’s okay,” she said, and took the cup I handed back to her. “What secret are you talking about?”
“How many do you have? Never mind,” I said, waving that away. “I meant the mural one.”
She looked at me for a second. “The mural one. Oh! For Clint Howard. Yeah. It’s this.” She gestured to the canvas.
“Yeah, Connor said you were coming back here to work on something. Did he already request something from you? Because: amazing.”
“We batted around some ideas. I’m still playing with them.” She stepped back a few feet, gave it a look. “He wants big and bold, and different, but in my style. I’m trying to figure out how to do what I do without doing what I do.”
“I like what you’ve got there.”
“Thanks.” She dipped a paintbrush in something to clean it, then slapped it on the side of the container. “I think I’m going to take a break. Want some wine? There’s a bottle of rosé on the counter.”
I walked over to it, picked up the bottle. “It says ‘strawberry wine-drink.’ I don’t think that counts as rosé.”
“It’s close enough,” she said.
Since I tended to agree, especially on nights like this, I poured some into two glasses and carried them over to the couch. I handed her one and took a seat with the other, sipped.
It had the complexity of a melted red popsicle. “I’m not even sure that’s wine-drink,” I said, smacking my lips together.
She took a very long drink, then nodded. “Melted cherry popsicle.”
“Right?”
“You said something about the devil?”
“The demon is, in fact, in Chicago. And it’s Rose, of ‘Hi, we’re coming to rescue you’ fame.”
Lulu blinked. “I—she. She’s a demon?”
“She is,” I said, and gave her the overview. “So be careful out there, Lulu. The damage she did was... overwhelming. You’d have to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but—”
“But chaos demon,” she finished.
“But chaos demon. So be careful out there,” I said again.
“I will,” she promised.
***
She went to sleep before I did. When I opened the door, I found her sprawled on her bed like a four-legged starfish. She’d started leaving on a radio during the day as white noise, and someone with a deep voice crooned softly while she snored.
Part of me wanted to watch her sleep—creepy as that sounded—as if that might ensure she was sleeping well and I could rest easily, too. And part of me wished the sun wouldn’t rise, that I could sit in the quiet and the dark and just... be.
I left Lulu to sleep and went to my room next door, closed the door against the rising sun, and wished peace for usall.
ELEVEN
Dinner, we were informed by my mother, would be at 10:00 p.m. Fortunately, sorcerers, vampires, and shifters all kept the same hours. Connor and I would bring wine, which made me feel very adult. Lulu offered to bring a side. Since she didn’t cook, I was betting on potato salad from the deli down the street. But she’d surprised us before.
Unfortunately, they hadn’t found anything else in the archives, nor had Paige had much luck with the old documents they’d located. She thought the writers had used alchemy as a sort of magical cipher, but she hadn’t been able to decipher much yet. I had to pin that hope on Mallory and Catcher. Paige had contacted the Order, but they’d burned any materials relating to Chicago’s sorcerers and had no records from any other supernaturals in the city at that time. Uncle Malik was trying to track down two vampires he’d known in Chicago, but vampires historically changed their identities every few decades to avoid detection, so he hadn’t yet had luck.
So I had basically nothing to offer the team as I badged my way into the former brick factory that served as the Ombuds’ headquarters, nodding at Mr.Pettiway, the guard who’d done his duty at the door for years, and heading down to our administrative offices. Theo, Petra, and I shared an office between Roger’s and a conference room. Where the conference room was sleek, thedesigners had kept some of the original features of the building—brick walls and hardwood floors—for our office. We had a couple of long work tables with screen stations, a large overhead wall screen, and a couple of tables that held snacks and equipment—usually gadgets Petra was working on.
“Good evening,” Roger said. He leaned a hip on the edge of Theo’s desk.
