Connor rose, and I could see the fight in his eyes—concern for my safety and frustration that he hadn’t known I’d be taking the risk.

“Are you all right?” he asked, voice deadly serious.

“We’re all fine. It was a last-minute plan, and I just came by to change and recharge. Let me do that, and I’ll tell you everything.”

I threw my hair into a very untidy topknot and changed clothes, then came back down for blood of the drinking variety. I’d had enough fighting for the night.

I took a seat at the table while I drank, pushing aside a book of old prints of demonic creatures, and told them the whole story.

In the chair beside me, Connor rubbed a hand over his face, then leaned over to put an arm around me, kiss my temple. “Sometimes I wonder about your job.”

“Sometimes I wonder about it, too,” I said. “But I’m okay.”

“I can’t believe you arranged to meet her,” Lulu said.

“No other choice,” I said. “We’re running out of time. We managed to identify the hot spots, and we had to take a chance. We also had CPD backup and very shitty weather, which is very good weather where Petra is concerned. That had no effect on Rosantine. But we got a hand flick,” I said, and told them what we’d figured out.

Lulu just stared. “It sounds really freaking obvious when you say it out loud—sure, they need to have a connection to their magical key in order to do the magic.”

“But also counterintuitive,” I said. “It’s her weakness—her true name in symbolic form. Superman didn’t wear kryptonite on a chain around his neck. Anyway,” I said, moving on from superheroes before Connor tried to correct me about a story in issue something or other from this or that series, “we’ve got a video search underway. Hopefully, we’ll find shots of her and can use that to sketch out the sigil.”

“You’re getting close,” Connor said.

“Yeah.” I checked the clock automatically. “I just wish we’d do it a little faster. What’s been going on here?”

“Books,” Alexei said. “Humans have very weird beliefs about supernaturals.”

I smiled. “Yeah, they do.”

“Per my assignment,” Lulu said, gesturing to the books, “I’ve been trying on how to seal the demon once you find her sigil.”

“Thank you again for helping,” I said.

“Yeah, well.” She pushed hair behind her ears, the movement almost bashful. “Sometimes you have to claw your way outside your comfort zone because a demon has sent your parents into another dimension.”

“Put that on a motivational poster,” Connor said, and she smiled a little.

“I thought I was helping protect me and my mom—and the city—by avoiding it altogether. But now there’s a demon in Chicago, so I’m stepping up.” She shifted in her seat. “Anyway, I reviewed the spells created to seal the seventy-two demons Solomon identified. Each demon has a different spell, but chunks of the spell are similar across all of them. Each chunk is correlated with a certain skill or attribute. So, for example, demons who can predict the future always have obsidian in the spellworking. Demons that are fast need laurel and certain chanted words.”