A Vigil in the Mourning (Soulbound Book 4)

by Hailey Turner

  “Let’s—” Jono began but was cut off by his mobile ringing with the set tone that only meant Patrick. He pulled it out of his pocket and answered.

  Patrick spoke first. “I need you in Chicago.”

  Jono stiffened, all his instincts immediately primed at the tone in Patrick’s voice—flat and distant, as if he were in shock.

  “Pat?” Jono asked.

  Jono heard him swallow over the line, the wind on both their sides echoing badly through the speaker. “Where are you?”

  Jono glanced at Rajesh, who seemed far too interested in the conversation. “Nowhere secure. When do you need me to be in Chicago?”

  Emma already had her mobile out, rapidly texting someone. Jono hoped it was Sage.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be there,” Jono promised. “Are you all right?”

  Patrick laughed, the sound ruined and bitter in the worst way. “Sure.”

  Bollocks. Jono bit his tongue, unwilling to call Patrick out on that lie in the midst of people he didn’t trust. “I’m coming to you.”

  The sound of Patrick taking a deep breath wasn’t comforting in the least. “Good. Call me when you’re in a secured location. If I don’t pick up, it’s because I’m working.”

  Patrick ended the call, and Jono had to remember to loosen his grip on his mobile so he didn’t break it. He looked over at Rajesh, wanting nothing more than to have Emma drive him to LaGuardia so he could get on the first flight out to Chicago to be by Patrick’s side, but knew he had to finish this first.

  “Let’s chat.”

  12

  O’Hare was a cacophony of noise Jono was glad to leave behind when he got into the taxi. He tossed his leather duffel bag beside him in the back seat and didn’t look at the driver when he said, “Marriott Downtown.”

  He hadn’t taken off his sunglasses since leaving the private jet Marek had provided him for his early flight west. He wasn’t about to risk getting thrown out of the taxi because he was god pack.

  Jono checked his mobile again, hoping to see another text from Patrick, but the last five filling his queue were from Wade. Patrick had been working all night on a crime scene, though what exactly happened Jono still didn’t know. Jono hadn’t gotten home until around midnight, and Patrick hadn’t been able to find time for a secured call.

  Jono didn’t like not knowing what was going on, but at least they were in the same city now. He pressed a hand to his chest as he stared out the window. The distant ache he’d blamed on the knife wound, but which hadn’t been cured by Victoria’s potions, was finally gone now. Jono figured it was the soulbond, no longer stretched so thin over almost half a country, settling back into place.

  After the shit week he’d had, Jono would take the little things.

  The drive into downtown Chicago was slower than he would’ve liked, but it was absolutely sleeting out. Jono could understand the driver’s caution, but he really just wanted to get to where the rest of his pack was. That took some time, and when the taxi driver finally pulled in front of the hotel, Jono threw a wad of bills at him, letting the driver keep the change.

  The doorman was wielding an umbrella like a professional, and while the bloke was shorter than Jono, he still held the umbrella high enough that Jono didn’t bump his head.

  “Thanks, mate,” Jono said as he was led to the hotel’s entrance.

  He entered the hotel mostly dry and smelled the usual mix of travelers and bleach. Underneath that were distinct, overlapping pack scents that made him grind his teeth. The hotel seemed to have an overabundance of werecreatures working or visiting, and he chalked that up to Patrick’s presence.

  Jono pegged at least five of the people in the too-colorful lobby as werecreatures, but the only one who mattered was the tall, slim African American woman who stood from one of the leather sofas. He could see her bright amber eyes clear as day, and Jono reached up to take off his sunglasses, never looking away from her face.

  Her stride never wavered as she approached, and she had a calmness around her that reminded him of Sage. She put herself between him and the lifts, which he didn’t much care for.

  “Get out of my way,” Jono said in a low voice.

  “Jonothon de Vere, I presume?” she asked slowly, her gaze flicking up and down to take his measure. “I heard you were British, so it must be you.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Monica Woodard. Dire to the Chicago god pack.”

  Jono stared her down for a couple of seconds before he let his gaze lazily track every other werecreature in the large lobby. “I’m not here for your territory.”

  “That’s what Patrick said, too.”

  “Then you should’ve taken it as truth.” Jono stepped around her, but Monica moved smoothly to intercept him again. Jono went still, trying to get a grip on his rising temper. The lack of sleep and his worry over Patrick meant he wasn’t in the mood for anyone’s bullshit. “Get the fuck out of my way.”

  He had to give Monica credit. She didn’t back down, refusing to lower her gaze. “Your pack member is safe.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  This time she didn’t try to stop him when Jono walked around her, striding toward the lifts. Wade had texted him their room number while he’d been en route. He could feel people’s eyes on him, and it made his skin crawl and his temper worse. Jono shoved his anger down, trying to shake it off. He didn’t want Wade to think Jono was angry at him.

  Jono took the lift up and wasn’t at all surprised to find Wade waiting for him literally right outside the doors when they opened on the twelfth floor. Wade blinked at him before darting in for a quick, hard hug, nearly bowling Jono over.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” Wade mumbled into his chest.

  Jono wrapped his free arm around the teenager, hugging him tight and breathing in his scent. “Where’s Pat?”

  Wade pulled back and stepped out of the way so Jono could exit the lift. “Working still. He’s been out all night. The only time he wasn’t working was when he came to drop me off back here and told me to wait for you.”

  Jono jerked his head in the direction of the hallway for Wade to follow him. “You eat yet?”

  “I ordered room service earlier.”

  “Right, then. Let’s get my things in your room so we can be off.”

  “Patrick said not to leave the hotel. He said he’d call us when he was free.”

  Jono smiled tightly as he waited for Wade to unlock the door with the key card. “Yeah, that’s not happening.”

  “Do you know what happened? Did he tell you?”

  “No, and keep your gob shut about it. Too many ears about.”

  Wade made a face, his nose scrunching up. “Yeah, okay. Who’s down there?”

  “Met the Chicago god pack’s dire.” Jono tossed his duffel bag on the half-made bed, assuming it was Patrick’s considering the other bed was unmade and filled with empty snack wrappers. “Clean up your mess, Wade. Don’t be rude to housekeeping.”

  Wade grumbled but did as he was told while Jono texted Patrick that he was with Wade. He stared at the screen, hoping for a quick response, but none came. It was barely eight in the morning, and he knew from experience that cases could swallow Patrick for days at a time. Despite whatever had happened last night, Jono didn’t want that to happen.

  He needed answers, and he had to find some way to break it to Patrick about what was going on in New York.

  “Did you rent a car?” Wade asked.

  “No. Patrick has one. Figured that should be enough.”

  Jono’s mobile buzzed in his hand, and he quickly unlocked it to check the text. He breathed a quiet sigh of relief to see it was from Patrick.

  Meet at Eiketre at 1000.

  Beneath it was a link to a web page, and Jono clicked on it. “He wants us to meet him at a bar called Eiketre in two hours.”

  “That’s the place that burned last night.”

  Jono glanced at him and
frowned. “Should you be chatting about that?”

  Wade shrugged. “It’s on the news.”

  Jono weighed their options, stared at the two empty room service trays dumped on the dresser, and decided he could sort the news out on his mobile somewhere else that wasn’t crawling with werecreatures.

  “Let’s get you breakfast,” Jono said.

  Wade perked up, scrambling for his hoodie. Jono didn’t know where his jacket had gone. “There’s a café nearby we can walk to.”

  “It’s bloody pouring out, mate. We’re taking a taxi.”

  Killing time by feeding Wade seemed like the best course of action. It wouldn’t ease Jono’s nerves any, not until he had eyes on Patrick, but it would at least keep Wade occupied.

  It hadn’t stopped raining by the time they reached the bar by the cemetery a couple of hours later, but at least it had let up some. It was more a heavy sprinkle rather than a deluge, but the wind still blew hard and cold, shaking the bare branches of nearby trees. Jono paid the taxi driver in cash before getting out, holding the borrowed hotel umbrella over both himself and Wade.

  The melted iron fencing around the front patio of the bar was wrapped in yellow crime scene tape still. Perhaps as a warning to pedestrians until the whole lot could be removed and replaced. The building itself seemed badly scorched, but the damage didn’t seem destructive to the point the whole building needed to undergo construction.

  “I thought you said it was a hellfire bomb?” Jono asked as they walked toward the bar.

  “It was, and then we ran into the cemetery over there,” Wade replied.

  Jono followed where he pointed, seeing the blown-open fence across the street crisscrossed with yellow Police Line – Do Not Cross tape that moved rapidly in the wind. Considering the weather, he had a feeling it would be torn off before the day was over.

  Jono breathed in deep, catching some of Patrick’s scent beneath the underlying smell of wet cement and embedded smoke. The soulbond tugged in his chest, and Jono lengthened his stride. They reached the sidewalk in front of the bar right as the damaged door opened up. All the tension seeped out of Jono’s body once he got eyes on Patrick.

  “Pat,” Jono breathed out, handing the umbrella to Wade.

  He closed the distance between them, not caring about the rain. Jono framed Patrick’s face with both hands, kissing him with a fierceness that had Wade groaning behind them.

  “Oh my god, get a room,” Wade told them.

  Jono pulled back, smoothing his thumbs over the dark circles beneath Patrick’s green eyes. “You look knackered.”

  Patrick shrugged tiredly. “I’ve been overseeing the processing of the crime scene, and I have a meeting with the SAIC this afternoon. The press finally left here about thirty minutes ago.”

  “What happened?”

  Patrick waved tiredly at the entrance to the bar. “I’ll tell you inside. Let’s—”

  He broke off as the sound of heavy, rumbling engines filled the air. Jono looked down the street in time to see the first of many motorcycles turn the corner and drive toward them. The riders were all women. The motorcycles ranged from Harley Davidsons to Indians to Suzukis, the sound of the engines like thunder in the air. They brought with them an overwhelming ozone scent that had Jono putting himself between his pack and the new arrivals, who parked in a line on the street in front of the bar.

  The engines cut off, but none of the women immediately got off their bikes. Then the lead rider took off her helmet, gloved hands wet from the rain. Blonde hair tumbled out, falling down her back. A too-beautiful face was revealed, dominated by eyes the color of the fog that lived in the veil between worlds.

  “I see you’ve finally come crawling home, wolf,” the woman said.

  Fenrir howled a name through Jono’s mind, and he stared at the immortal—the valkyrie—in shock as he repeated it. “Brynhildr.”

  The valkyrie commander offered Jono a cold smile he couldn’t be sure was meant for him or his animal-god patron, or both.

  “I want one,” Wade said, staring avidly at the motorcycles with a covetous look on his face.

  “No,” Patrick told him. “You don’t even know how to drive a car yet.”

  “Those are winged horses. They can drive themselves.”

  “You already have wings. You don’t need a pegasus in order to fly.”

  Jono eyed the motorcycles with a hefty dose of wariness. Rather than carrying the scent of oil and metal, the various motorcycles carried the same ozone burn as the valkyries who rode them. Glamour, maybe, or some other kind of magic to hide or change their form.

  Brynhildr dismounted from her Harley, leaving her helmet on the seat. The other valkyries followed her lead, none of them bothered by the rain. Jono’s gaze skipped from one to the next, taking in their different faces that all had the same strange gray eyes. All of them wore some combination of leather trousers, jacket, and gloves, though the styles were different. Each valkyrie wore a pendant of a carved wooden spear on a leather cord around their throats.

  Fenrir howled restlessly in his soul, and Jono couldn’t tell whether the god wanted to greet the valkyries or maim them a little. He turned to look at Patrick, raising an eyebrow. “Norse gods this time?”

  Patrick grimaced, mouth pressing into a hard white line. “Not just them.”

  “Hel attempted to burn my altar down as a distraction while the Dominion Sect kidnapped the Allfather. I summoned the valkyries to aid us in his place,” a deep voice said from behind them. “Well met, Brynhildr.”

  “Thor,” the valkyrie in charge replied. “I wish it was under better circumstances.”

  Jono looked at the tall, broad-shouldered god who filled the charred doorway and had to bite back the instinctive growl that didn’t come from him. Jono focused on the god’s words through Fenrir’s annoyance. “Odin was taken?”

  Patrick sighed. “Ethan is like a one-trick pony with this stupid shit of his. Let’s get out of the rain and behind some wards before we start talking.”

  Jono ran a hand through his wet hair, shivering a little in the face of the cold wind howling over the street. Thor stepped aside and Jono followed Patrick into the scorched bar. He curled his lip at the smell of smoke and the bitterness of hell that stung his nose. Fenrir didn’t seem bothered by it at all, but then, if Hel was the one who had spearheaded the attack, this probably felt like home to the wolf right about now.

  When Fenrir first started to speak to him and Jono realized he wasn’t going insane, he’d dived headfirst into Norse mythology. Dry and half-forgotten as it was, he knew those stories better than the others he’d started to learn once Patrick came into his life.

  “Hel did this?” Jono asked. “The place is still standing. Is she just that weak or have bad aim?”

  The bar, for all that it was badly scorched and had lost many tables, chairs, and barstools, was mostly intact. The strange animal antlers on the wall were dirtied by smoke but not charred. If Jono squinted, he could see rune lines carved into the walls, bits of magic crackling through them here and there like electric sparks. Considering which god owned this place, that wasn’t surprising.

  Magic made Jono’s ears pop as someone set a ward around the place. It wasn’t Patrick, because Jono knew what his magic smelled like.

  “Eir, I would have you see to the ones Hel harmed,” Thor said.

  A young-looking valkyrie took a seat at the bar, her dark hair twisted around her head in a crown braid. She’d been the one with cat ears on her motorcycle helmet. Her gray eyes were ringed by black eyeliner that ended in a cat-eye flick.

  “It’s what I’m here for,” Eir said. Her gaze flickered Jono’s way, and she nodded at him. “I can heal you, too, if you want.”

  Patrick’s head snapped around, pinning Jono with a sharp, worried look. “What the fuck happened?”

  Jono grimaced, figuring he was fine after Victoria’s potions. He hadn’t felt any symptoms for a while now. “Nothing.”

  �
�It’s not nothing if Eir is offering to heal you.”

  “Later, okay? Let’s deal with your problem first.”

  Patrick gave him a look that promised a row later on. Jono inwardly winced but pressed on with the gathering at hand.

  A thunderous boom high overhead outside rattled the plyboard nailed over the broken windows. A man who smelled like electricity sauntered into the bar a few seconds later, brushing rainwater off his beaded and fringed leather jacket and smelling of ozone.

  “My favorite wing mates,” the man said with a pleased smile. “Any of you seen a serpent in the lake during your travels?”

  “We came from the west, Hinon. Oniare would not be there,” a red-haired valkyrie with a pixie cut said.

  “A pity. He makes for a good hunt, Skuld.”

  The god joined them at the bar, taking the beer Thor offered him with a pleased smile on his face. The valkyries all received glasses of mead, Jono and Patrick declined anything but water, and Wade got an entire bowl full of strangely colored apples. He grabbed an apple in each hand and methodically started to eat them.

  “They aren’t fae fruit as far as I know,” Patrick said with a shrug when Jono shot him a questioning look. “Not that the fae food he ate before did anything to him.”

  Wade stared at them both and deliberately took a bite of one apple, chewing loudly.

  Thor crossed his arms over his broad chest, his gaze sweeping over everyone assembled before him. “Dominion Sect mercenaries attacked the Allfather as he was leaving Au Hall and took him captive.”

  “Have Muninn and Huginn found him yet?” Brynhildr asked.

  Thor shook his head. “He is hidden from their power, and Heimdallr has not seen him.”

  “What of Frigg?”

  “She is ensconced with the authorities today, as she was last night.” Thor stared at Patrick. “Your people best treat her well.”

  “This isn’t my field office, but no one will find out what Frigg is so long as she keeps up the deception that she’s nothing more than human. You guys have been doing that for centuries. She’ll be fine. We have bigger things to worry about with Odin missing and Ethan in town,” Patrick replied.