Page 15 of Cold Curses

“Are you okay?” Gwen asked.

“Sore but alive. Demons suck.”

“Rich coming from a vampire.”

I looked up at her, managed a smile. “I know, right?”

She held out her coffee. “Want a pick-me-up?”

“No, thanks. I’ll get something on the way to the office.”

“Friendly suggestion? You might want to clean up a little, too.”

I looked down at my torn and sap-covered clothes. “Freaking demons,” I murmured, and stalked off to find an Auto.

* * *

I checked my screen and found a narrative in texts from Theo: Gwen was on the way; the Ombuds were also on the way; the Ombuds were still several miles away and stuck in the crosstown traffic pileup created by the demon’s antics; the CPD officers on duty refused to let them through the barrier around the neighborhood due to “orders”; and after confirming Gwen was on scene, they’d decided to return to the office to keep investigating rather than sitting in an idling car for another hour.

I couldn’t fault them for that. Not that there was much they could have done anyway.

When I reached the Ombuds’ campus, I detoured to a restroom to clean sap off my hands and clothes, and double-checked for hitchhiking gravel or leaves. Then it was into the main workroom, where Theo, Petra, and I shared desks.

Theo, Roger, and Petra stood in a cluster, eyes on the wall screen. Theo, who had dark brown skin and black hair, wore one of his signature button-down shirts, this time with tiny royal blue–and-white checks, with trim jeans and Oxford shoes. The cast on his arm was a necessary but mostly unstylish addition.

They all looked up when I walked in.

“I’m fine,” I said, tossing my jacket on my chair. I lifted my gaze to the screen, where a video of me swinging my sword against the demon was playing.

Theo looked me over, worry furrowing his brow. “Everything in one piece?”

“It is. You okay?”

“Damn traffic,” Theo said apologetically. “And damn CPD.”

“I imagine you’ve already had a chat with Gwen,” I said with a smile.

“Kid was just trying to do his job,” Theo said. “Which was a real kick in the ass.”

“It looks like you took down Poison Ivy,” Petra said, gesturing to the fight.

“It wasn’t actually poison ivy.”

“She means theBatmancharacter,” Theo said.

I put that fact away to surprise Connor with later. Like Theo, he was into the comics thing.

“It was definitely some kind of plant demon,” I said, and pointed to the screen. “If he hadn’t been trying to kill humans, I’d have appreciated his efforts to green up the city.”

“Right?” Petra said. “I was just telling Roger a demon like that could do some real good if it wasn’t set on villainy.” She did some swiping on a tablet screen, snagged a screenshot of the demon from the video, then shifted the wall-screen image to show a wide color-coded chart.

“What’s that?” Theo asked.

“Looks like a database?” I offered.

“Exactly,” Petra said. “We’re going to track our demons.” She gestured at Roger. “His idea to report the ones we came across, both for political and historical purposes, and I added the science and tech. I’ve already added Rosantine and the guy you found a few days ago.” She pulled the screenshot into a box on-screen, and it populated fields with height, weight, skin tone, and other information.

“Is baby diarrhea green really a color?” Roger asked.