a werewolf, a mage, a weretiger, and a fledgling fire dragon, even if most people thought Wade Espinoza was just an annoying teenager.
“See you tonight?” Jono asked as he walked Patrick to the front door.
Patrick slapped his hand against the doorframe, strengthening the threshold wrapped around their apartment with a quick burst of focused magic. “Monday nights at the bar are always my favorite.”
“We won’t stay late. I know you need to sleep.”
“Just because I need to sleep doesn’t mean I can let pack duty slide.” Patrick rose on his tiptoes to kiss Jono goodbye. “I’ll be there.”
Jono pressed a hand to the small of Patrick’s back, keeping Patrick close as he deepened the kiss just enough to be a tease. Patrick groaned, hating that he had to go to work.
“Be safe,” Jono said when he finally pulled back. “I love you.”
“I will.”
Patrick didn’t say the other words back—hadn’t said them since Jono first confessed his love on Christmas Eve. They were buried down deep, spread through actions and touches, but never voiced. Some part of Patrick was too scared to say them and then lose what mattered most in his life these days.
The gods had given Jono to him as a weapon after all, and what the gods gave, they could take away.
“See you tonight,” Patrick said as he left the apartment.
The door didn’t close until he rounded the landing below. Patrick went to work with a smile on his face, Jono’s care warming him better than the fae-given heat charms embedded in his leather jacket.
The coffee in the SOA’s New York field office tasted like burned sludge, but Patrick drank it anyway. Fueling his bad mood with shitty coffee was just par for the course some days. He checked the time on his cell phone again, but the numbers still showed that his meeting with Setsuna—which was supposed to start at 0900—was delayed. It was nearing 1000 and she was still ensconced with SAIC Henry Ng on a different floor.
Patrick was going to take his lunch break early at this rate, whether she liked it or not.
He frowned at the low battery on his phone, realizing he’d been too tired to remember to charge his phone last night. Jono and their bed had overridden all other thoughts at the time. Patrick leaned over to yank open the bottom desk drawer, certain he had a spare charger in the mess hidden there. Who knew how much crap he’d managed to hoard over the last nine months?
I’m picking up Wade’s hoarding habits.
That was a terrifying thought.
Someone knocked on his office door and opened it without waiting for him to answer. “Collins. You have a visitor.”
Patrick peered over his desk at the receptionist from the floor’s front desk, still digging for a cell phone charger. “Is the director finally finished?”
The woman shook her head and stepped aside for someone else. “Not the director.”
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