The kid sat up and nodded, all business. “This one is going to be hard to track. I think she’s incarnate and, oddly, that’s harder. They can change who and what they look like. Conduct your investigation as you would any other. Check for all the normal evidence, interview all the regular sources. A pattern will emerge. But she might look like two, three, or four different people. Chris will be here in a few hours. Bring him into it immediately. Stacia and Holly will be here a bit later. We’ll have most of the team here. With your help, we’ll do what we do and track this bitch down.”

“And then?” Schulz asked.

“Chris will send her back to Hell.”

“Why do you think it’s a female?”

A flicker of something across the kid’s face. He hadn’t meant to reveal that. Slipped up.

“Call it a feeling,” Declan said.

Schulz called it bullshit, but he didn’t say that out loud. This witch was hiding something. The deputy’s face was carefully blank.

“So you feel it’s a female and it’s incarnate? What’s that mean?”

“I don’t know about the female part, but the incarnate is super bad news. The one in Washington was incarnate. The only incarnate demon to step on Earth in like forever. Now this one is here, and Chris feels she has a mission.”

“What kind of mission? Why here? Why Burlington, Vermont?” Schulz asked, feeling his throat go dry as he recalled the scenes of extreme violence that he had seen on video. Armed cops and paramilitary forces had been almost helpless against the demon lord. Armored soldiers torn apart like tissue.

The kid was looking down at his large hands, which he had flattened on the tabletop. “We have some ideas. Nothing for certain. Probably nothing to do with Burlington itself,” he said.

Schulz sat there looking at the kid, carefully not looking at the deputy but feeling the tension and worry radiating from her.

“What’s the dentist got to do with a demon?” he asked.

“Nothing other than his patient list. We think,” Declan said, adding the last a bit too fast.

“Patients or patient?”

“Patient.”

“Who?”

He was quiet, visibly wrestling with something. “Middle school kid, Toni Velasquez. Mother is Gina Velasquez. Director of Arcane.”

“She wants to do what to the child?”

Declan looked up at him and Schulz felt himself pinned by blue eyes. Suddenly this kid wasn’t very kid-like. Suddenly, he had the slightest inkling that this person in front of him was more dangerous than he had first surmised.

“Toni is Chris’s goddaughter.”

Schulz could feel his blood pressure drop, a pit in his stomach, his face going white.

“The kid that caused New Hampshire to get bombed?”