“He would be better off with his own kind.”
“Kid is better off with his pack,” Jono said as he and Wade breached the silence ward, Patrick’s magic making room for them. “You aren’t taking him.”
Patrick winced at the antagonistic tone in Jono’s voice. “Jono.”
“Nah, Pat. We already discussed this. You want me to ring Sage and tell her to come down here to argue with this bloke?”
“He’s not somebloke, Jono,” Patrick said, pinching his now fully healed nose in aggravation. “He’s a three-star Army general.”
Wade unsubtly hid behind Jono as he scarfed down a hot dog while juggling three more. He didn’t stop eating. Jono stayed where he was and shoved his sunglasses on top of his head to glare at Reed.
“You aren’t taking the kid.”
“Not a kid,” Wade muttered from behind him.
Patrick covered his face with one hand before shaking his head in frustration. “Sir—”
Reed held up a hand and Patrick shut up. The general breathed out a curl of smoke, his cigarette half burned out between his thick fingers. “You can’t give the fledgling what he needs.”
“And you can?” Jono shot back. “I know your sort, all you blokes in uniform. They’d come around the block back home looking to recruit us. They’d promise a way out and a way off the dole. All we had to do was stand on the front lines and die.”
“I take it you didn’t accept their offer since you are here.”
“How I came here isn’t your business. Neither is Wade. You might be hiding as some hotshot general, but that doesn’t change your way of thinking. All you lot care about is winning.” Jono’s eyes cut to Patrick, the anger in his gaze tempered by concern. “You don’t care about what’s left behind when war gets peeled away.”
Patrick bit the inside of his cheek, chewing on skin rather than the words tumbling through his mind. This wasn’t how he expected the meeting to go.
“Mortal lives are short compared to ours. The fledgling will outlive you by ten lifetimes and more.”
Jono shrugged. “Wade will always be pack.”
Reed grunted loudly as he stood. “Walk with me, Collins.”
Patrick transferred the silence ward from the bench to a mageglobe and spun up a look-away ward as well before getting to his feet. He glanced at where Jono and Wade stood before facing Reed. “Sir?”
“Your pack may follow.”
Patrick wasn’t sure if the general included Wade in that count. He matched his stride to Reed’s as Jono and Wade fell in behind them. The pace was casual as they meandered down the pathway, heading east as the sun shined overhead.
“I wished you would have stayed with the Mage Corps,” Reed said after a couple of minutes. “This would be easier if you had.”
Patrick swallowed dryly. “Sir?”
“Back in June, Congress authorized another audit on the Repository once it was confirmed Ethan Greene and the Dominion Sect were behind the attack here in New York City.”
A chill went down Patrick’s spine, despite the summer heat. His fingertips brushed against the hilt of the dagger strapped to his right thigh, but it didn’t provide any comfort. “What did they find?”
“It’s what they didn’t find that is the problem.”
Patrick clenched his hands into fists. “Fuck. What did Ethan take?”
“Back in World War Two, the United States came into possession of a staff,” Reed said after a long pause. “It was recovered from the Nazis toward the end of the war. We found it at Auschwitz II–Birkenau.”
Patrick opened his mouth, then closed it with a snap, his stomach twisting. “Sir?”
“Hitler would never subject his own people to the atrocities the Nazis committed during the war, but he still needed souls to power the dead. At the time, Allied forces never publicly disclosed how he created the number of zombies he deployed, but we couldn’t hide from history where he procured the bodies.”
The Holocaust was a tragedy on a scale that was difficult to comprehend, even for those who had lived through that war. The horrific genocide committed by the Nazis was a reminder that monsters could be all too human in the worst way.
