A Vigil in the Mourning (Soulbound #4) - Hailey Turner Page 0,6
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.