Page 17 of Cold Curses

“Are you okay? You look tired.” There was a mom look in her eyes.

“I’m fine.”

“Okay. Then I’ll get back to it. I’ll tell your mom we talked.”

“Okay. Thanks.” I put the screen away and looked at the others. “You get all that?”

“Live and in person,” Petra said. Then she looked ruefully at her spreadsheet. “Bummer if we fix the wards and don’t really get to use this.”

“But wouldn’t it be nice,” Roger said, “if we didn’t actually have a demon invasion?”

The office screen rang then, and we all looked at Roger.

“You jinxed it,” Theo said.

“Let’s answer the call first,” Roger said, and did so. “Ombudsman.”

“Gwen Robinson,” said the voice on the other end. Theo stood up a little straighter.

“More killer trees?” Petra asked.

“Not that have been reported to me. But we do have two dead humans in a warehouse.”

“Humans?” Roger asked. Purely human matters were outside our jurisdiction. But Gwen wouldn’t have called us without a reason.

“Yeah, and homicide thinks it might be an SIH.” That was the city’s new acronym for a supernatural-involved homicide. “Easier to show than tell,” she said. “Put me on-screen.”

Roger did the swiping this time, and the image on the overhead screen wobbled as Gwen shifted her screen to point it toward the ground.

“Damn,” I murmured at an image of death. Two humans. They were lying facedown and side by side, which was at least a small mercy. Appeared male. They wore no shirts, and their backs bore large circular marks that looked like burns, each at least ten inches across.

And worse, the woundssmoked. Thin, oily green-black curls rose from the center of each. I’d seen that smoke—or something close enough to it. I bet it would smell like brimstone and leave an uncomfortable tingle in the air. And it boded nothing good.

“Demon magic,” I said. “Send us the directions.”

* * *

We fueled up with coffee, naturally, and Theo and I drove to the Chicago Industrial Port. It was a complex of storage buildings and lots where the Calumet River met Lake Michigan. Barges docked at the port, and goods being moved across the lake could be unloaded and shipped by truck or rail.

We drove beneath the enormous block letters that identified the port, then drove past building-high stacks of cargo containers.Above us stretched rails bearing the pinchers that would take the containers on or off ships.

Outside the warehouse, we found Gwen with officers from two CPD cruisers. Two ambulances waited nearby.

We climbed out and walked toward Gwen, passing uniformed officers who were keeping a crowd of port employees several yards back from the taped-off crime scene. Gwen was in conversation with a pale-skinned man in a suit; he had short dark hair and a square jaw. Early fifties, I guessed, with a badge at his waist beside his holstered weapon.

As we approached, his hand went to the butt of his weapon. I disliked him immediately.

“Elisa Sullivan and Theo Martin,” Gwen said, gesturing in our direction, “this is Detective Robert Hansen.”

He managed a nod. “You sups?”

He knew the answer to that, as Gwen would have told him she’d called us. I didn’t like playing cutesy; it wasted time.

Theo, who was very human, simply ignored the question, moved around the man. “Where?” he asked.

“In there,” Gwen said, nodding toward the building.

It was big as an airplane hangar, its enormous doors open to reveal the cavernous space inside, where groups of boxes and containers were waiting to be moved somewhere. The building was clean and bright, the concrete floor marked with fluorescent tape to guide forklifts and trucks into position. The warehouse was deep, and a few employees still worked at the other end of it, well away from what had happened here.