“What about you?” Jono asked, forcefully steering the conversation away from himself.
Patrick took another bite of his bagel. “What about me?”
“Nah, Pat. Don’t be like that. Fair’s fair. You asked, I answered. Now it’s your turn. How long have you been with the SOA?”
Patrick wasn’t fond of nicknames outside the Hellraisers, his old Special Operations Forces team with a preternatural bent to it. Right now, he didn’t feel like arguing with Jono about it. At least it was better than Pattycakes.
“Three years,” Patrick said, because that was technically public record and it wasn’t a lie.
“And before that?”
“Classified.”
“Bollocks.”
Patrick slouched in his chair and shook his head. “Nope.”
“Are you taking the piss?”
“Does it smell like I’m joking?”
“I can’t smell a bloody thing about you,” Jono said, sounding deeply annoyed about that fact.
Patrick drained his coffee before getting to his feet, leaning across the table a little. “Good.”
He could see the brightness of Jono’s eyes, even through the dark sunglasses. Jono glared at him but didn’t demand answers Patrick wouldn’t—and in some cases,couldn’t—give. Instead, he followed Patrick out of the little coffee shop. They headed to where Patrick had parked the car on the street and got in. Patrick let Jono mess with the radio until he found a station playing alternative music in between what felt like thirty minutes of commercials and radio DJ conversation. Patrick hadn’t splurged for satellite radio when he got the rental, and he wasn’t going to drain his phone battery to use Spotify.
“I’m not taking you into the SOA building,” Patrick said when the GPS on his phone showed they were halfway there. “You can wait for me at the Starbucks a block away.”
“What am I? Your dirty little secret?” Jono asked, sounding surprisingly not bitter.
Patrick jerked the steering wheel to the left and cut off a taxi so he didn’t get stuck behind a bus. He ignored the loud sound of an aggressively honked horn behind them. “No. The agency office here doesn’t need to know about you. It’s not their business what a seer dictates me to do.”
“You work for the Supernatural Operations Agency. How is Marek’s vision not their business?”
“It’s not,” Patrick said cuttingly.
Jono dropped the subject, but the tense silence from his side of the car didn’t go away. When Patrick pulled over quickly in a bus stop zone near the Starbucks, Jono didn’t immediately get out.
“I’m supposed to stay with you,” he said.
“If a soultaker eats its way through the veil in the middle of an SOA building, it won’t just have to deal with me, but everyone else who wears the badge and is magically inclined.”
“And if it comes after me?”
“Run.”
Jono shook his head before getting out of the car. “In that case, I could’ve had a lie-in back at your flat.”
The car door slammed shut with enough force to shake the entire vehicle. Patrick watched Jono walk away for a few seconds, gaze lingering on his ass, before he hit the gas pedal again and pulled into traffic.
It didn’t take long to reach the SOA building. This time he parked in the adjacent garage and went inside, getting cleared by security through both machine and magical means. Patrick was waved over to the front desk beyond the security gates. It was manned by a couple of secretarial staff members who handled the flow of visitors who weren’t employed by the federal government and those just passing through.
“I’m here to see Rachel Andrita,” Patrick said in greeting.
The woman didn’t look away from her computer screen. “ID, please.”
Patrick handed over his badge in the folded wallet. Her eyes flicked from the picture on his ID card and agent number on the metal badge itself to his face twice before she seemed satisfied. “Thirtieth floor. Her assistant will be waiting to receive you.”
