Behind them, Arianna knelt on the floor, white-faced and shaking, still holding the baby in her arms. The baby’s large, dark eyes looked at Patrick with a quiet intensity no human child her age would ever carry.
“Get it out of my home,” Margeaux said in a shaky voice, refusing to look at the daughter that wasn’t hers.
Patrick thought about pointing out the threshold hadn’t cast the baby girl out the way it’d done the Sluagh. He held his tongue instead, because that was an argument for when he wasn’t acting in his capacity as a special agent for the SOA while handling a missing child case from a prominent witch family.
Moving past the couple, Patrick knelt beside Arianna and held his hands out to the baby girl. He didn’t know what the Sluagh had wanted with the changeling, but until he knew why the Unseelie Court was after her, he would keep her safe.
“I’ll take her now,” Patrick said.
Arianna sniffled, her lower lip trembling as she stared at him. “It’s not her fault.”
“It never is.”
The fae took human children and left their own behind for different reasons—a whim, a debt, or a nightmarish gift. For all the Wisteria family’s money, Patrick knew it wouldn’t buy them any peace.
Children lost to Tír na nÓg rarely returned to the mortal world. When they did, they never came home sane.
3
Jono frownedat the water he could hear bubbling away in the kettle on the hob, drumming his fingers against the kitchen counter. He’d gone to sleep alone after Patrick texted about the case interview going long and to go to bed without him. Jono had woken up without Patrick, and with no new texts. It was his least favorite way to start a morning. His own texts had gone unanswered, and the single call he’d made had gone to voicemail after three rings.
The silence worried him, but Jono knew better than to blow up Patrick’s mobile for an answer. Besides, the soulbond was a quiet presence deep in his soul, which told Jono that Patrick wasn’t in any danger. It wasn’t like in August, when the sharp pull to find Patrick one night had been an almost painful need.
Coming back from that mess had taken time. Patrick had resorted to cigarettes for weeks after the assault he’d suffered through, drunk too much whiskey some nights, but he hadn’t shied away from Jono’s touch after they talked.
These days, Patrick had quit smoking completely, managed to only need a nicotine patch on his more stressful cases, and it took weeks for the whiskey bottle to run dry rather than days. He was still a work in progress—they both were—but they were getting better.
The kettle started to whistle, and Jono turned off the hob before pouring hot water over the tea bag in his mug. As he set the kettle aside, his preternatural hearing picked up the sound of voices and footsteps on the stairs several floors down. Jono left his tea on the counter to steep in favor of striding toward the front door to open it.
“Pat?” he called out.
“Yeah, not so loud. You’ll wake her.”
“Her?”
Jono took a deep breath, smelling Patrick’s bitter scent, Sage’s mix of desert and forest, and a strange one that reminded him of the time he’d gone into the Chislehurst Caves in Bromley as a teen. It hit his nose and the back of his throat like cold rock and chalky bone. He swallowed against the taste, committing it to memory despite how disagreeable it was. Individual scents were one thing Jono would never forget as a god pack alpha werewolf.
Fenrir wouldn’t either.
Jono could sense his animal-god patron waking up deep inside his soul, the immortal curious in a way that Jono always found led to trouble. Moments later, Patrick rounded the fourth-floor landing below with Sage right behind him. Jono’s gaze zeroed in on the small form Patrick carried in his arms, the blanket glowing at the edges with a heat charm hastily written into the cloth.
“I still think I should call my office,” Sage said as she dumped her long umbrella in the bin on the landing outside their door once they made it up the stairs.
“I don’t know what fae Court your bosses work for,” Patrick retorted, keeping his voice low.
“Not the one that calls down the Sluagh.”
“That’s not saying much. Both Courts have their own kind of Wild Hunt.”
“Which my bosses wouldn’t let loose on New York City without a damn good reason, and the one riding the storm last night wasn’t theirs.”
“You sure about that? That storm could’ve hidden anything in the clouds. It hid the Sluagh, remember?”
Jono closed the door behind them, the flat a bit cooler now with some of the heat let out. “Wild Hunt?”
“Have you seen the morning news?” Sage asked. She dropped her Birkin bag on the dining room table before divesting herself of the ankle-length winter wool coat she wore.
“Just woke up.” Jono watched as Patrick carefully laid a sleeping baby not even a year old on the sofa. “I thought you said the case was about a missing child? Did you find the sprog and steal it?”
