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Gwen emerged from the building, looked around, spotted us.
“Wow,” Hugo said quietly. “She is really pretty.”
“Yeah,” Theo said, chest puffing out a little. “She is.”
Gwen reached us, nodded. “You must be Mr.Horner. I’m Detective Robinson.” She tapped her badge. “I’ll take you inside, and you can take a look.”
“Sure, sure.”
She looked at us. “Plainclothes officers, a few Sups who keep their magic under the radar, are on their way to the spot you identified. They’ll let us know if they see anything even potentially odd.”
“Thank you,” I said, and looked at Hugo. “And thanks to you, too. You’ve been a real help, and you’re going to help us nail her.”
And maybe that would help him exorcise the guilt.
***
We left Hugo in Gwen’s capable hands and looked around for a spot to discuss. There was an old-school coffeehouse a block away—scuffed floors, raggedy furniture, burned-in coffee smell, and demon-undamaged—and we walked over for a cup.
It was mostly artists and students that filled the tables, studying over screens or working together on projects. And the inevitable guy in the corner with glasses and a dog-eared paperback, reading as he sipped from an enormous mug. There was one in every coffeehouse.
“Cornerstones,” Petra whispered as we took rickety seats at a small round table. “We got that, at least.”
“Patience didn’t mention them,” Theo said. “So she didn’t even know that much.”
“There had to be so much coordination to get this done,” I said. “It’s an entire system of defenses—levels of wards. How could the Guardians have done it all without talking to each other? Without writing anything down?”
“Maybe that’s what’s on the documents they found at Cadogan House.”
“I don’t know,” I said, and glanced at Petra. “I think you were right about the memory spell. I think they knew Rosantine was manipulative and might try to make her way in again, so they gave Patience only just enough information to explain the reason why they built the defenses.”
“The ward makers might have been separated while they worked,” Petra said, “or spelled afterward so they couldn’t talk about what they’d done.”
“And Rosantine couldn’t find them, force them to tell.”
We all needed a moment of quiet sipping after that.
“So what is on the documents at Cadogan House?” Theo wondered.
“I have no idea,” I said, “or who wrote them. I’m hoping Mallory can shed some light on that tonight.”
“We need to find the Cornerstones,” Petra said. “Find them and secure them.”
“The first one will probably be near South Gate,” I said. “Maybe there are property records that would help?”
“I’ll get Gwen on it,” Theo said. “If she finds anything, the CPD can send out uniforms to check the site and secure it.”
I smiled at Theo. “Is that just a convenient excuse to talk to Gwen again?”
“It doesn’t hurt,” he said with a sly smile.
“The problem is finding the rest of the wards before she finds a Cornerstone or triggers a ward and hurts more people,” I said. “We need the sigil. We have to find the damned sigil and seal her.” I rubbed my temples at the brewing headache.
“We’ll have to find her first,” Petra said. “At this rate, that’s the only way we’re going to find the sigil.”
“Then we assume she’ll go for another ward, and we figure out where the wards are. But the locations so far don’t make sense to me.”
I pulled sweetener packets from the dish on the table, put one near the table’s bottom edge, another near the middle. “South Gate,” I said, pointing at the lower one. “And lightning machine,” I said, pointing to the other. “We know there’s a Cornerstone near the lightning machine. We’re checking to see if there’s a Cornerstone at the gate, and probably there is. Rose said she found South Gate because she could feel the magic. She was sniffing around the lightning machine for magic, too. So even if she couldn’t detect the Cornerstone, she could detect the wards.”
