“Our government kept the staff?”
“We didn’t know what it was back then. Neither did any of the Nazi war criminals hunted down in Brazil. Those who were captured after the war and extradited back to Germany for trial said Josef Mengele was never seen without it beyond the range of most cameras.”
“Mengele,” Patrick echoed hollowly. “The necromancer?”
“The bastard died a free man before he could be brought to justice to pay for his war crimes. We know he used the staff, we just don’t know how. He carried the answers we needed to his grave, and no one has been able to raise his soul.” Reed pulled his phone out of his pocket and unlocked it. He tapped at the screen a couple of times before passing it over. “For decades we thought it was an artifact, not a weapon. We were wrong.”
Patrick took the phone and stared at the screen. The picture was of a grainy, black-and-white archival photograph, torn and yellowed at the edges. Faded pencil marks listed out a serial number on an old tag pinned beneath it. Patrick zoomed in on the man in the center of a group of SS officers. His face wasn’t looking at the camera but at someone else, the wooden staff gripped in one hand.
Reed took another drag of his cigarette. “Look at the next one.”
Patrick dutifully swiped to the next picture, this one crisper and clearer than the other one. Taken in color, the wooden staff was long, the tip shod in iron and the head a twist of Celtic knotwork depicting leaves, ravens, and three phases of the moon linked together. It all wrapped around a dull quartz crystal that could barely be seen between the open spaces of the knotwork. The wood itself seemed rough rather than sanded smooth. Patrick assumed it was the quality of the picture before he zoomed in and saw that hundreds of tiny marks were notched into the staff.
He stared at the picture for a few seconds longer before passing the phone back to Reed. “This is what’s missing?”
“Yes. Since June.”
“What is it?”
Reed put his phone away, staring straight ahead. “Research back in the nineteen-nineties finally pinpointed a possible origin. We believe it belongs to the Morrígan.”
Patrick bit down on the inside of his bottom lip until it bled. He remembered what Huginn and Muninn had warned him about before the attack in June, and again last week. Some nightmares took time to form, but when they did, they were all-consuming.
“War is owed what was stolen from her,” Patrick said in a hollow voice.
Reed glanced at him, seemingly unsurprised at Patrick’s words. “Ethan has a couple of months’ lead on us—”
“Try a couple of years.” Patrick breathed in sharply, fingers itching for another cigarette. “Odin’s ravens warned me back in June before things went FUBAR about something being stolen. I didn’t know what they were talking about back then.”
He did now.
“You think Ethan and the Dominion Sect stole it during the Thirty-Day War and not this summer?”
“Better double-check the audit report back then and find out who was in charge of confirming the staff’s placement in the Repository.”
Reed let out a heavy breath that smelled like sulfur. “I’ll adjust the time frame of when it went missing. I have people and teams I trust searching for the staff, as does the PIA. Setsuna has kept the SOA in the dark for obvious reasons.”
Because Ethan and the Dominion Sect had corrupted Patrick’s agency to the bones in the past, and cleaning house was a monumental task no one person could complete in a single directorship. Trust was hard to come by in something like this, and Patrick knew very few people would have made the general’s list for the search. That Setsuna hadn’t told Patrick of the problem was a conversation he intended to have with her later.
“You sent the Hellraisers after the staff, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Reed said, abruptly stopping so he could face Patrick and look him in the eye. “And now I am sending you.”
“I haven’t worn a uniform in three years, sir. I’m no longer under your command.”
“What I and the US government want aligns with what the gods you serve want—Ethan dead and the Dominion Sect crippled. We don’t know who got into the Repository to steal the staff, or how they went about doing so, but we need to locate it before they learn how to use it.”
“I can’t leave my post.”
“Setsuna is willing to look the other way and cover for you when the need arises.”
“How helpful of her.”
Reed didn’t blink, his eyes gold instead of brown with slit-black pupils in a too-human face. “You know what is at stake more than anyone else. I wouldn’t ask this of you if we weren’t desperate, Collins.”
Patrick didn’t speak until the coppery tang of blood on his tongue was just an aftertaste. “Off the record, sir?”
“For now.”
