She regarded me for a moment. Then began to lick her butt.

“Yeah,” I said, rising again. “That checks out. Good to see you, too.”

Lulu was in the main living area, using a small brush to put flicks of color on a wide canvas. It was a rainbow of joy—bodies dancing among rising flowers.

I sidled up beside her. “I hear you’ve got a big secret.”

Lulu screamed so loudly I thought my eardrums might burst, and an outflung hand sent a cup of paintbrushes scattering across the floor.

“Damn, Lis,” she said, then pulled music buds from her ears. “What the hell are you doing here? You scared the devil out of me.”

“Funny you should say that,” I said, and helped her gather up the paintbrushes.

“Is it?” she asked, and nearly spilled the paintbrushes again.

“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.