Sage sighed, clearly still not happy about the baby’s status but no longer arguing. “Yes, that’s not a problem.”
Jono let Patrick go so he could scoop up the baby, his mageglobe disappearing as he did so. Jono followed him out of the flat but didn’t leave the building when they made it to the ground floor. Patrick went outside alone in the rain, the changeling baby wrapped up in the blanket still, but now she was awake.
She stared at Jono over Patrick’s shoulder, her dark gaze eerie in its intensity. Jono took a deep breath, scenting her all over again through the rain and city smells that poured inside before the door shut between them.
Definitely a fae child.
The agent getting out of a nondescript rental car on the street was petite and blonde. She opened a heavy black umbrella and met Patrick halfway, using it to shield them all from the pouring rain. Jono waited inside the front landing, peering out the side glass window. They got the baby strapped into the borrowed car seat and then spent five minutes chatting on the sidewalk before Patrick returned.
“Where is she taking the baby?” Jono asked once Patrick made it inside again and the agent had driven off.
“Safe house,” Patrick said as he headed for the stairs that led back up to their flat. “The SOA runs a couple across the country for children who aren’t human and come into the agency’s care.”
“Like the Academy you went to?”
“No, those are only for magic users.”
“Why wouldn’t you keep her with you?”
“Can’t run a case if I’m babysitting. Besides, if the Sluagh are hunting her, then she needs to stay behind wards that will keep her safe. I can’t provide her with that sort of protection.”
They climbed back up to the fifth floor, finding Sage texting away on her mobile while Wade shoved his MacBook and textbooks into his backpack. Jono stopped by the thermostat and turned up the heat a bit, not liking the way Patrick looked chilled. Werecreatures all had higher body temperatures, and Wade was a fire dragon who never felt the cold these days. Patrick had been out in cold winter weather for days already. The least Jono could do was keep him warm.
“I’ll let you know if anyone at my firm is affected by this mess,” Sage said, glancing up.
Her brown-eyed gaze was steady as she looked at them, the firmness in her voice that of an attorney who never backed down from a challenge. Jono hadn’t regretted making Sage his dire, and he knew he never would. Sage was the rock their pack needed—calm, cool, and collected in the face of any threat. She balanced Patrick’s hotheadedness and self-sacrificing tendencies, and Jono’s own questionable decisions when it came to keeping Patrick safe, better than anyone else he could think of.
Trust didn’t come easy in any of their lives, but Jono knew his small four-person god pack was better than Estelle and Youssef’s any day of the week.
“I need to call Henry,” Patrick said.
Jono watched him grab his coffee mug and retreat to the master bedroom. Sage tucked her mobile away in her Birkin and pulled out her turquoise pendant necklace. The piece of jewelry was a small artifact filled with fae magic to hide her scent. She never wore it in their pack territory unless she was leaving, and the second she slipped it around her neck, she smelled human to Jono’s nose.
“I’ll see you tonight?” Sage said as she adjusted the platinum chain.
Jono nodded. “Yeah.”
Friday nights at Tempest had turned into an unofficial therapy night for the few packs who still risked coming around. Estelle and Youssef hadn’t been able to ban Jono from New York City, nor keep him from his job thanks to Marek’s status as a seer that came with federal oversight, but they’d made it explicitly clear that Tempest was off-limits to all the packs.
If Emma Zhang and Leon Hernandez weren’t multi-millionaires in their own right, the bar would’ve been struggling. It wasn’t quite publicly known as a werecreature hangout, but the majority of its patrons definitely weren’t mundane human. Over the past few months, werecreatures coming in for a drink had slowed to a trickle while others with ties to the preternatural world had taken up bar space when they stopped by at all.
Estelle had hinted she would lift her edict if Emma and Leon fired Jono. They had both dug their heels in deep behind Marek’s order to keep Jono employed. Disobeying a seer went against the law, and the pair were happy to obey the government over the god pack in this instance.
As for Jono, he refused to be cowed. So long as his presence at the bar didn’t hurt Emma’s pack, he’d keep working for them.
“Can you drop me off at the bodega near campus?” Wade said as he stood. “I wanna get—”
“Snacks,” Jono finished for him.
Sage chuckled as she headed for the door. “We know.”
Wade made a face at them, scrunching up his nose. “Nothing wrong with snacks.”
“There is when people think we don’t feed you. Come on, let’s go. Traffic is ugly and I have a ten-o’clock conference call I can’t miss.”
They left, and Jono retrieved his mug from the coffee table before heading for the master bedroom. He found Patrick seated on the bed, still talking on his mobile. He’d managed to remove his jacket, but that was as far as he got.
Jono set his mug on the nightstand, then knelt in front of Patrick. He unlaced Patrick’s boots and pulled them off, along with his damp socks, setting both aside. He stayed where he was, warm hands stroking Patrick’s thighs while he listened in on the conversation.
