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didn’t know. She didn’t think he did, either.
    She looked at Cynna. “No opinion?”
    “Plenty of them, but not about possession.” She reached the closed door, turned, and kept moving. “I don’t know much about that.”
    “I thought Dizzies were into demonology.”
    “Some are.” She paused by the window, frowning out at the darkness as if she disapproved of it. “But most of demonology is a matter of finding enough names for a demon to summon it and then control it if it shows up. Exorcism’s a whole ‘nother bag. That’s a job for religion.”
    Religion. The subject kept popping up lately. Most noticeably with the Church of the Redeemed, aka the Azá, and their former leader, the Most Reverend Patrick Harlowe. He’d tried to sacrifice Lily and Rule to the Azá‘s goddess. But there was Rule’s mysterious Lady, too—the one he believed had Gifted the two of them with the mate bond. The one who, his legends said, had created the lupi a few millennia ago to defeat the Azá’s goddess.
    It was enough to make Lily’s head pound. “I thought the Dizzies were a sort of religion. Ah—is it okay to call you that?” Belatedly she’d remembered that “Dizzies” was a mangling of the original Swahili.
    Cynna shrugged. “That’s what everyone called us. I’ll admit I dabbled a bit in demonology in my young and stupid days. That’s how I could recognize the traces left by your demon.”
    “Not my demon.”
    “Whatever. The point is, it’s gone.” She scowled at Karonski in his chair by the window. “This whole rigmarole is so not necessary. I picked up two of the demon’s names.”
    Karonski crumpled up his chip bag and tossed it in the general direction of the trash. He missed. “Not enough to Find it, you said.”
    “No, but I could sure enough tell if it was in the room with me!”
    “I believe you, already. But there are procedures for this sort of thing.”
    That was news to Lily. But she hadn’t made her way halfway through the pile of reading she’d been given on FBI and MCD resources, regulations, and procedures. “And yet you delayed your flight.”
    He looked at her, his eyes gentler than usual. “If I’d left, there wouldn’t be a senior agent to oversee the procedure. Can’t very well leave you in charge of a major investigation until you’ve been documented as clean.”
    Okay, that made sense. Lily drew a steadying breath. She wished Nettie would hurry up so they could get this over with.
    “At least,” Rule said, “we can make a guess about what they were up to.”
    She nodded. Her head was feeling better. At first she’d thought that was Nettie’s doing, but that was foolish. Magic—even the good stuff, like healing magic—couldn’t affect her, so it must be getting better on its own. ‘They sent a demon to possess me. That required privacy, so someone supplied a bolt for the door and the demon zapped it into place.“ The S.O.C. officers had confirmed that the bolt had been freshly installed.
    “Makes sense,” Cynna said. “The woman you followed was the demon, form-changed to look like Helen. It knocked you out and did… whatever.”
    Lily looked out the window. From fifty yards away two windows stared back, one lit, one dark. Like two great eyes frozen in mid-blink. What had the demon done while she was unconscious?
    She didn’t feel different. There was no sense of an alien presence in her body or her mind, none of the struggle she’d seen in Karonski when he’d fought against the mental tampering inflicted by Helen and her staff.
    And yet she’d felt something when she touched her shoulder. Something that shouldn’t have been possible. Lily’s fingers twitched in Rule’s grip as she thought of the odd, slick feel of her wound. Orangey.
    She looked at Karonski. “You know what’s required for a demon to take possession?”
    He was brushing crumbs off his shirt. “There are plenty of theories, most of ‘em contradictory. But because of an incident