“Is that glamour?” he asked.

“It’s the power of suggestion,” I said with a smile. “Partner or not, I’m not taking you back to the ER if you get that pencil stuck in there.”

“I’ll take an Auto,” he said, eyes closed in scratching bliss. “And it will be worth it.”

“Back to the demon,” Petra said. “Weaknesses.”

“I’m guessing she doesn’t like ghosts,” I said, “given that’s the tool the Guardians decided to use first. And lightning, obvs.”

“Excellent thoughts,” Petra said, and added those to the list. “And the big thing: the sigil. Being controlled and sealed by it.”

“We have to find her damn sigil,” Roger said.

“Maybe we can trick her into it,” Theo said.

Petra snorted. “Like demon phishing?”

“That’s not a bad idea,” I said. “Except we’d have to lure her out, and we don’t know what she wants.”

Theo glanced at Roger. “If she has an anti-canine thing, can we adopt a pack of coyotes? Corgis? Wild dogs?”

“Not in the budget,” Roger said, gaze on his screen.

“I hate to pile on the good news,” Petra said, “but even if we figure out the stuff—the sigil, the spell, the chanting, whatever, we need serious power to make it work.”

Roger looked up. “Define ‘serious power.’ ”

“Permanently sealing a demon is no joke. Solomon had a lot of juju. Supposedly he got his magical strength directly from god, but I don’t think we have any of those connections?” She looked around the room. “Direct line to the universal font of power? No? Didn’t think so.”

“You don’t think Mallory could do it? Or Mallory and Catcher?”

Petra winced. “Do you think they’d want to dabble with demons?”

She had a point. “Is making a demon go away technically ‘dark magic’?”

“That’s a question for Catcher Bell. Isn’t he really into the divisions of magic?”

“That sounds vaguely familiar,” I said. But he was my friend’s dad—my friend who avoided magic. It’s not like we talked about it a lot. “I can add that to the dinner list. If I can figure out a way to make it not awkward.”

“You know what’s not awkward?” Theo said. “Coyotes.”

“No,” Roger said.

“Well,” Petra said, turning off the screen. “Here’s something positive: Ask me about the landowner.”

“What landowner?” I asked.

She paused, gave me a dry look. “The one who owns the machine building.”

“You found him?”

“I did. His name is Hugo Horner. He’s the current owner, and his mother before him, grandfather before her, great-grandfather before him, et cetera. The deed is traceable through multiple generations of Horners.”

“Back to 1872?” Theo asked, and Petra put a finger on her nose.

“Bingo.”

“Let’s go see him,” Theo said, and gestured to me. “Saddle up, partner.”

I swallowed the last of the doughnut. “Okay. But I’m taking another doughnut.”

TWELVE

Forty minutes later, because traffic was miserable, we pulled up in the Ombuds’ van in front of a tidy white house with a bare but tidy yard.