A Vigil in the Mourning

by Hailey Turner

  The person who entered Patrick’s office was definitely not Setsuna.

  One of the United States of America’s only true god-touched seers looked like he’d gone on a full weekend bender and hadn’t made it home. Marek’s hazel eyes were bloodshot, brown hair messy in a way that wasn’t stylish and had more to do with fingers running through it than anything else.

  Patrick stared at Marek, noting the way his hands shook ever so slightly, the tightness around his mouth, and how hard he was clenching his jaw, as if he were trying not to throw up. Patrick abandoned his search for a charger in favor of helping Marek before the seer passed out.

  “Sit down before you fall down,” Patrick ordered as he got to his feet. “Where’s your better half?”

  Marek offered him a wan smile before sinking gingerly into one of the two chairs in front of Patrick’s desk. “Work. Where I’d be if I hadn’t gotten interrupted.”

  Patrick knew Marek’s patrons were rarely kind when they forced a vision onto him. The Fates, in Patrick’s experience, didn’t care about anyone’s feelings, and he had a soulbond to prove it.

  Patrick waved away the woman who had escorted Marek to him and closed the door behind her. He wrote out a silence ward on the door, pushing magic out of his damaged soul. Static washed through the office before settling into the walls around them. He might work for the government, but that didn’t mean he trusted everyone around him.

  “Did you leave work?” Patrick asked as he went to the corner where one of the office administrators had installed a small minifridge for him one weekend last year. Magic users burned through a lot of energy, mages in particular, and Jono had gotten tired of Patrick coming home in a crappy mood because he hadn’t eaten enough. Patrick’s solution was useful.

  “Never made it in,” Marek confessed.

  Patrick pulled out a bottle of Gatorade and a protein bar. “Did you let Sage know?”

  “I’ll call her after.”

  Sage was Marek’s fiancée aside from being Patrick and Jono’s dire. She was a weretiger who worked as an attorney for the fae law firm Gentry & Thyme. She was not one either of them wanted to get on the bad side of.

  Patrick opened the Gatorade and handed it to Marek. “Drink. Slowly, because if you puke in my office, the janitors will hate me.”

  Marek stared at the bottle in his hand with a queasy look on his face. “I might puke anyway.”

  “Tell me you didn’t drive here.”

  “Took a cab.” Marek sipped carefully at the Gatorade. “No one was home to drive me, and the Norns wanted me to find you.”

  Patrick would never get used to the way all the gods seemed to love fucking with his life. “You should’ve let someone know. You’re not safe when you’re like this and no one is around you.”

  “I doubt Estelle and Youssef would try anything.”

  “That’s you being a fucking idiot.” Patrick leaned back against his desk and crossed his arms over his chest. “They’re looking for weak spots, and you go down hard after a vision.”

  Marek pressed the cold plastic bottle against the side of his face, blinking slowly. His hazel eyes weren’t washed out in the way they got when he was channeling the Norns. Patrick only hoped they’d leave Marek alone now that he was here.

  “The government would arrest them.”

  “The government is already trying to arrest them, but the shine case is still being investigated. I’m not in favor of making the attorney general’s job easier because you’re dead.”

  Marek smiled tightly. “I knew you’d say that.”

  Patrick dragged a hand over his face. “Fucking immortals. What do they want?”

  Marek very carefully reached out to set the Gatorade down on Patrick’s desk. He wavered a little on the chair, and Patrick steadied him with a careful hand. Marek closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, the hazel coloring was gone, washed out into white. His aura cracked wide open and scraped against Patrick’s shields in a way that felt like a punch to the gut from old magic.

  Shining through the strands of a human soul’s reach was the brighter, deeper presence of a god. Patrick sucked in a sharp breath and tasted ozone on his tongue. He knew it was no longer just him and Marek in the office now.

  “The Allfather is in danger,” one of the Norns said, Marek’s voice a mix of his own and the goddess using him as a mouthpiece. “You must go to him.”

  Ice replaced the blood in Patrick’s veins. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Marek’s body stood, the immortal controlling him trapping Patrick against the desk. Patrick held his ground, the edge of the desk digging into his upper thighs, but he refused to lean back as the immortal brought Marek uncomfortably close.

  “He does not believe it so, but Muninn and Huginn have heard the thoughts that whisper in the minds of men who would harm him.”

  “If Odin’s ravens can find the fucking bastards, then why do you need me?”

  “Your family hides from us. They always have. Immortals aid their secrecy the way we aid you.”

  Patrick’s lips curled. “I don’t call what you do for me aid.”

  “You owe us. Which means you will save the Allfather. It was chance his ravens heard anything at all.” The immortal twisted Marek’s mouth into a hard smile. “Or fate.”

  Really. Fuck the gods.

  “I’m a little busy tracking down that staff you lost. Can’t you send someone else?”

  Cold fingers grabbed his chin and dug into the skin over his jaw. The power shining out of Marek’s eyes left Patrick worried the seer was going to lose another color, putting Marek one step, one shade closer to blindness and insanity. Seeing the future came with the cost every seer had to pay.

  “Go to Chicago. The Æsir will be waiting for you.”

  The knowledge that Patrick would have to deal with the Norse gods left him wanting to punch something.

  The immortal’s presence disappeared at the same moment the door to his office opened. Marek’s knees gave out, and Patrick caught him under the arms, holding him up. Swearing, Patrick shifted Marek back onto the chair.

  “Patrick?” Setsuna asked after she had crossed through his silence ward.

  Patrick ignored where Setsuna stood just inside his office, with SAIC Henry Ng blocking the doorway behind her. All of Patrick’s attention was on Marek, not liking how he looked. Patrick cradled Marek’s pale face in his hands, wincing at how cold Marek felt.

  “What do you need?” Patrick asked.

  When Marek didn’t respond, merely swallowed thickly, Patrick went to grab the plastic recycling bin under his desk and brought it around to shove it between Marek’s legs. Marek promptly leaned over and got sick. Patrick sighed as the smell of vomit filled his office.

  “I’ll handle this, Henry,” Setsuna said.

  Henry, unlike Patrick, knew better than to argue with the director. He murmured a quiet goodbye before leaving, closing the door behind him. Setsuna turned and tapped the tip of her intricately carved rosewood cane against the door, layering Patrick’s silence ward with her own.

  “I wasn’t aware you had a visitor,” Setsuna said.

  Patrick glanced away from Marek to meet Setsuna’s steady gaze, scowling at her. Patrick and Setsuna weren’t close. The secrets they shared ensured he would never trust her. She was still his superior, and still in charge, no matter what the Norns demanded he do.

  The woman who had been his guardian for ten years after he was delivered to her care at the age of eight didn’t look her age, despite turning fifty-two at the end of last year. Her black hair was still cut in the shoulder-skimming bob she favored, and what wrinkles she had were faint.

  The cane she carried was more a weapon than a need for balance. The carved Shinto shrine at the top and the winding steps leading up to it from the bottom tip were layered with kanji. Setsuna’s witch magic had turned the cane into an artifact, and she never went anywhere without it.

  “I didn’t know Marek was stopping
by until he did,” Patrick said.

  Setsuna’s expression didn’t change as she came forward. “What do the Fates want from you now?”

  Marek slowly sat up. Patrick handed him the box of tissues on the desk to wipe his mouth with. “They want me to go to Chicago to save Odin.”

  “How fortuitous.”

  Patrick scowled at her. “Is that what you’re here about?”

  “I have your orders, yes, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “You still owe me a trip to Maui. Next time, maybe order me to go there.”

  Before Setsuna could answer, Marek reached out with a shaky hand to grab Patrick’s shirt. He tipped his head back, eyes closed to mere slits, looking like every movement hurt. “What staff?”

  Patrick grimaced, knowing the months of keeping that mission out of their friends’ awareness was over. “A problem you don’t need to worry about.”

  “Urðr thinks otherwise.”

  Patrick passed Marek the Gatorade again, ignoring that statement. “Take small sips.”

  “Patrick.”

  “If the gods want me in Chicago, I guess I’m going to the Windy City. Seems you wasted a flight, Setsuna.”

  “Visiting you is never a waste of my time,” she replied, moving to stand by the other chair.

  Patrick turned so he could keep an eye on them both. “If you say so.”

  Setsuna pulled out a folded piece of paper from the inner pocket of her precisely tailored suit jacket and offered it to Patrick. “Eyes Only. The spell is curated to your magic. Lower your shields to read it.”

  Some days Patrick was terrible at following orders. Other days, he knew he didn’t have a choice. He lowered his personal shields, letting his tainted magic slip free. Patrick took the piece of paper with careful fingers, skin burning briefly as whatever spell was embedded in it brushed against his magic.

  When he unfolded it, all he saw was a swirl of black ink. Then the paper beneath his fingertips glowed briefly, the shine running along the edges of the paper. The ink started to move across the paper, orienting itself into lines of text. The Eyes Only warning sat below the header, which wasn’t the SOA seal like Patrick was expecting. Instead, the US Department of the Preternatural seal was stamped there, indicating the information had come from outside his agency. The internal designation was for the joint task force put together to find the Morrígan’s staff.

  “A courier brought it to me on Friday from the Pentagon,” Setsuna said.

  “Knew you didn’t come to New York because you missed me,” Patrick muttered.

  Patrick skimmed the memorandum, a cold feeling settling in his gut. No wonder it hadn’t been sent by electronic means, and instead written out with magic for personal delivery to only those the spell was keyed to. If anyone used magic to try to read it, the paper would go up in flames.

  As it was, he wished someone had burned the damned thing before it ever reached his hand.

  Patrick stared at the name slashed across the bottom of the paper with a heavy heart. “General Reed signed off on it. Has anyone else in the joint task force received the same information?”

  General Noah Reed was currently overseeing the US Department of the Preternatural, but he’d been the one to sign off on the missions Patrick’s old team were given. Reed was a fire dragon hiding in human form, who hoarded information the way banks hoarded money. The intelligence officers working under him almost always had information they could trust.

  If Reed said the Dominion Sect was actively working in Chicago, then it was probably true.

  Setsuna curled both hands over the top of her cane. “I explained to everyone involved that you would be the one best able to handle this problem.”

  Marek tugged at Patrick’s shirt, not having let go yet. The twist of his mouth was more scowl than frown. The pain he must have been feeling from channeling an immortal wouldn’t deter him from the information he’d suddenly become privy to. Patrick was well aware of the degrees of Marek’s stubbornness when he sought to get his way or get answers. Patrick wondered if that was a trait gained from being a CEO or a seer.

  “What staff are the Norns worried about?” Marek demanded.

  Patrick sighed and folded the paper into quarters before shoving it into his back pocket. “I hate Mondays.”

  2

  “When were you going to tell us?” Emma Zhang demanded in a low voice.

  Her brown eyes narrowed, but she didn’t move from her position on the couch because Marek was using her lap as a pillow. Emma was a tiny Chinese American alpha werewolf who co-led the Tempest pack, one of Marek’s oldest friends and business partners, and a woman Patrick never wanted to be on the wrong side of. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option right now.

  “Uh, we weren’t?” Patrick said.

  Jono snorted as he held up the potion Victoria Alvarez had dropped off on her way home to help with Marek’s migraine. She was a nurse and working nights this month, but luckily the timing had worked out.

  “We couldn’t,” Jono corrected, eyeing the handwritten label. “The mission came from a general, and the gods made it clear they didn’t want us to gossip about how they fucked up. Marek, you need to drink all of this.”

  “I’m not sitting up,” Marek mumbled.

  Leon Hernandez, who’d been standing behind the couch, turned and headed for the kitchen in Marek and Sage’s apartment. “I’ll get you a straw.”

  Emma didn’t watch her partner leave, more interested in burning a hole through Patrick’s head with her glare. “You should’ve told us you got another mission from the gods. How are we supposed to help you if we don’t know what’s going on?”

  “Technically, the mission came from the government,” Patrick said.

  “The Norns say otherwise.”

  Marek raised his hand and patted at Emma’s face. “Shh. Too loud.”

  Marek didn’t look much better since Patrick had half carried the seer out of his office. He’d called Emma and Leon to give them a heads-up because Marek belonged to their pack, and they were always overprotective of their friend when the Fates fucked with him.

  Patrick had told Setsuna he was taking a long lunch in order to bring Marek home. The Art Deco building—more an enormous mansion from a bygone era—that Marek had bought some years back had been sectioned off into individual apartments. He and Sage owned the top two floors while Emma and Leon lived in the level below. The rest of the space was rented out to certain members of the Tempest pack. Patrick and Jono still came over for pack nights when they could, though work had been getting in the way of a lot of things lately.

  The entire place felt like a home to Patrick’s senses, the threshold surrounding the building strong but easy for him to work with. Casting magic within the building was never a fight, not how it could be in some of the places he’d ended up in over the years.

  Leon came back and handed Jono the straw. Jono unscrewed the cap of the potion bottle, stuck the straw in, and passed it to Emma. She lowered the potion bottle and pushed the straw into Marek’s mouth.

  “Drink,” Emma ordered, and Marek obeyed. “Is Ethan after this staff?”

  Patrick rubbed at his mouth. “Yes.”

  “All right. So what’s the plan?”

  Before Patrick could answer, the front door opened, and Wade came inside, shoving the last bite of a candy bar into his mouth. Sage walked in behind him, her wool coat slung over one arm. She unceremoniously dropped her Birkin bag by the door, along with her coat. Patrick hadn’t heard them arrive because of the silence ward wrapped around the apartment.

  “Has he lost another color?” Sage asked.

  “Possibly a shade of blue,” Patrick told her apologetically.

  Sage patted his shoulder on the way over to her fiancé. “It’s not your fault.”

  “Kind of feels like it.”

  Sage knelt by Marek, smoothing his hair back and talking softly. She took the potion bottle from Emma and held it for Marek while he finished t
he medicine.

  Leon sat down on the other end of the couch and pulled Marek’s feet into his lap. Despite being engaged to Sage, Marek wasn’t part of Jono’s god pack. He remained a member of Emma’s Tempest pack, and whenever the Norns knocked him down like this, Emma and Leon were always extra touchy-feely with him.

  “What’s this staff do?” Leon asked. “And how can we help?”

  “We don’t know.” Patrick shrugged in the face of Emma’s disbelieving stare. “The government didn’t know what it was when they had it. Speculation is it’s within the realm of necromantic magic, but we can’t be certain because no one has seen it for years.”

  “Medb ended up stealing it and keeping it hidden in the mortal world. We couldn’t get a straight answer out of her on where it was located though,” Jono said.

  “Is that what the whole mess in December was about? Not just Gerard’s missing fiancée?” Emma asked.

  “Something like that.”

  “Who’s Aksel Sigfodr?” Wade wanted to know as he sat down on the arm of the couch next to Leon. “And why do you have to go to Chicago?”

  Patrick looked over in surprise at where Wade was squinting at the memorandum that had been in his back pocket. “Stop pickpocketing your pack leaders.”

  Wade snorted, a faint curl of smoke puffing out of his nostrils. “How else am I supposed to know what’s going on?”

  Leon reached up and swiped the piece of paper out of Wade’s hand. “There are Pop-Tarts in the pantry. Go eat a box.”

  “Hell yes,” Wade said, perking up.

  He made a beeline for the kitchen while everyone else stayed put. Leon frowned at the piece of paper before looking over at Patrick. “This looks like a Pollock painting, not a memo.”

  “Eyes Only and the spell is geared to my magic’s signature. You won’t be able to read it,” Patrick said, stepping forward to retrieve what Wade had momentarily stolen. “If you had magic and tried, it’d burn up.”

  “Wade can read it.”

  “Magic doesn’t work on dragons.”

  “Then tell us what it says and who Aksel Sigfodr is.”