“I was counting on that.”
Maybe it was a little underhanded playing into pack politics like that, but Patrick had a dead werejackal lying on a slab back at the morgue and a recalcitrant pair of god pack alphas annoying the shit out of him. He’d use what avenues he had to move this case along, and if that meant leaning hard into Jono’s status? Then he would do it, and the guilt could go fuck itself.
Patrick felt bad about not letting Jono get some rest that morning. He’d taken a closing shift last night, which meant taking last call at 0345 and locking the doors at Tempest at 0400. Cleanup had taken another hour, and Jono had caught an Uber cross-town to get home rather than take public transit. Jono had arrived in time to lie down with Patrick for thirty minutes before his alarm had gone off.
Late-night bar hours and the weird hours cases took meant sometimes they didn’t see each other awake for more than a few minutes at a time. Despite their schedules, they still knew the other was close by through the soulbond—at least, when Patrick was in town. Distance was never easy to navigate, and Patrick was half-tempted to bring Jono along the next time he went away on a case. He doubted Emma and Leon would mind, but he didn’t want to mess with Jono’s job too much.
Friday morning traffic from uptown, the tunnels, and the bridges meant it took a while to get downtown. Gentry & Thyme, the law firm Sage worked at as a senior associate, was located in Lower Manhattan. The firm had been founded by a group of Seelie fae in 1850, years before the five boroughs were consolidated into a single city.
Patrick hated dealing with the fae. Most were lawyers, plying their trade in words with the courts and whoever was stupid enough to sign a contract with them. You always had to watch your words with the fae, and Patrick had no desire to find himself owing a debt to the descendants of the Tuatha Dé Danann. He owed too much already.
Sage was waiting for them outside her work building when Patrick finally pulled up to the curb behind a yellow taxi discharging its passenger. Jono opened the door and got out to push the seat forward so he could climb into the back.
She tossed her Birkin bag onto the floorboard and took the front seat. Birkin bags were his best friend’s favorite style of purse, which was the only reason Patrick knew what they were called and what they looked like. And like Special Agent Nadine Mulroney, a mage out of the Preternatural Intelligence Agency, Sage was a coffee thief.
“That’s mine,” Patrick said as he pulled into the street.
“Guess what? You’re sharing now,” Sage replied curtly before gulping down a mouthful of hot, whiskey-laced coffee. “I have a ten-o’clock meeting I can’t miss, so I need to be back at the office before then.”
Patrick glanced at her and decided his coffee was a lost cause. “You look tired.”
“Long night dealing with a client’s case. I didn’t leave the office.”
“I know what that’s like.”
The turquoise pendant artifact hanging from a slender platinum chain around her neck sifted through Patrick’s magic as an afterthought. The recognition of the artifact’s fae magic was a normal feeling to him these days. The fae magic embedded in the stone masked Sage’s true nature. As a mage, Patrick could pick out magic better than most, but even he couldn’t sense Sage was a werecreature through that spell.
The drive to the PCB didn’t take long, and Patrick parked in the adjacent warded garage when they arrived.
“So Estelle and Youssef didn’t want to come?” Sage said on the walk to the elevators.
“They’d make time Monday. I need the kid IDed today,” Patrick said. “If that means I keep them out of the loop longer, so much the better.”
Sage side-eyed him but said nothing. There wasn’t much shecouldsay. Patrick knew she hated the god pack alphas just as much as he did.
The sergeant on desk duty buzzed them through the security door once they made it into the PCB, and they took the elevator down to the basement. The morgue was located in the lower levels and had protective wards etched into every wall. The intake assistant at the receiving desk jumped to his feet when they arrived, wiping crumbs from his breakfast pastry off his mouth.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
“Body from the homicide in the subway Wednesday night. We’re here to ID it,” Patrick said.
“Dr. Margolin isn’t in, but Geoffrey Davis is in workroom three talking with the chief. I can take you to them.”
“Great.”
The intake assistant led them down a sparse hallway to a warded door. He unlocked it with a scan card to the sensor pad and a press of his hand to a pentagram carved in the metal of the door itself.
The dead had to be handled differently than the living, especially those that died by way of magic or worse. The morgue was a place of death despite its white hospital-grade sterile walls, floors, and brightly lit workrooms, one of which they found themselves entering. The room smelled strongly of bleach and ammonia, with a deeper scent of formaldehyde and rot. The preservation process didn’t matter; death would always find a way to stick around.
Casale and Geoffrey, the medical examiner on duty, were standing on either side of a metal slab that had been rolled out of a refrigeration wall unit used to store the dead. Casale looked up at their arrival, his brown eyes narrowing as he took in Jono and Sage. Geoffrey was a tall, almost too-thin man who kept his brown hair buzzed short and was currently wearing scrubs.
The body lying between them had his chest stitched up in the quintessential Y-incision from an autopsy. Patrick eyed the runes painted on the dead teenager’s chest. The runes were standard procedure in murder investigations to keep the dead from being raised. Nothing ruined a case more than having a body reanimated through necromancy and the zombie walk out the front door.
“Different company than I thought you’d bring, Collins,” Casale said.
“Jono’s god pack and I need the victim identified,” Patrick replied.
Casale’s gaze flickered to Sage, but he didn’t say anything about her status. “All right. I take it Estelle and Youssef weren’t available?”
