Marek had proposed to Sage last year, and the wedding was scheduled for this August. Jono hadn’t been involved much in the preparations except to agree to walk Sage down the aisle.
Patrick looked up from his phone and gave Jono a half grimace, green-eyed gaze steady. Jono couldn’t stop himself from reaching out to smooth back some of Patrick’s wayward dark red hair.
“No news yet on what the task force has decided, but we should plan accordingly,” Patrick said.
“That doesn’t sound ominous at all,” Emma drawled.
Patrick slouched on the sofa until he was resting most of his weight against Jono. The silent request for contact had Jono shifting until he could wrap an arm around Patrick’s shoulders and hold him close. It was a public sort of comfort Patrick only allowed amidst their group of friends, and Jono knew none of them took that trust for granted.
“The Auction of Curiosities and Exceptional Items is going to be held somewhere in London this month,” Patrick said.
“How soon?” Sage asked.
“We won’t have an actual date, time, and precise location until the spell written into the invitation recognizes the owner. But the invitation is starting to get spelled ink lines in the instruction section. They haven’t formed words yet. I’m betting the words will show up within a week or so though, which is why the joint task force is finally making a decision about everything.”
Jono looked over at Marek, and he wasn’t the only one. As a seer, Marek’s ability to see the future came with a price—blindness, madness, and then death, usually by way of suicide. For the past year, his visions had become few and far between, mainly because of Patrick and the fight against the Dominion Sect. With various Fates working for the heavens and the hells, the future was ever-changing. No single Fate had a monopoly on a future set in stone, and Marek’s patrons had been curiously silent for months. It meant less migraines for Marek, less risk of losing color and bits of his sanity, but they all knew this break wouldn’t last forever.
“I haven’t seen anything,” Marek said, hazel eyes staring into the far distance.
Sage reached up to curl her fingers over his chin and turn his face toward her. “Don’t look if the Norns haven’t given you a reason to.”
Marek blinked and smiled wanly at her. Jono wasn’t sure how many shades of color Marek had lost since last summer, but he still felt guilty about every hint of gray seeping into his friend’s vision.
“Can you really trust Lucien to take this invitation to the auction?” Leon asked as he sat on the armrest of the chair Emma had claimed. He draped an arm over her shoulder, tangling his fingers in her fishtail plait. She didn’t seem to mind him messing up her hair.
Jono snorted. “Nah, mate. That’s why we’d have to go.”
“One of us needs to stay here,” Patrick said, tipping his head back a little to look at Jono. “We can’t cede New York City to Estelle and Youssef. I left for Chicago and they sent hunters after you. I don’t want to know what they’d use this time to claim back what territory they’ve lost if I go to another country.”
“I’m not letting you go to London alone.”
“You were exiled from that city.”
“Sage can talk our way into pass-through rights.”
Sage rolled her eyes. “No pressure.”
Patrick grew tense beside him, and Jono gently rubbed his fingers against Patrick’s arm. “We’ll work it out.”
Patrick said nothing to that promise.
“If you’re all going, then I’m going,” Wade said right before he burped.
“That leaves us without our god pack,” Emma pointed out. She didn’t look worried, but Jono could smell it on her, the sudden spike that cut through her scent. “None of us can afford that, not with the Krossed Knights still stalking the streets.”
“We have the fae and the Night Courts to aid us,” Leon reminded her.
“That aid was brokered through Patrick and Jono. Will it still hold if they don’t have a presence here?”
Jono frowned. “I don’t know.”
God packs always required a sustained presence in the cities they claimed territory in. If the entire pack left, that essentially gave up the city. But the idea of Patrick going off to Europe alone was unthinkable to him, and not just because of the soulbond.
London was an ache Jono would always carry with him—a home that had never wanted him before or after he was infected with the werevirus. Growing up in a council estate in Tottenham was worlds away from the wealthy parts of London he’d traipsed through as a lad. He was always made to feel like an outsider as a child because he and his family had been poor.
Once he was infected with the god strain of the werevirus, things got worse. The London god pack hadn’t wanted anything to do with him—either because he brought nothing to the pack, or his anger back then had been a problem. Jono never got an answer from the alphas at the time, and while he’d been allowed to stay in London, he hadn’t made many friends. He didn’t get a pack until moving here, and Jono wasn’t willing to lose his familyorhis territory.
“What if we have a proxy?” Jono asked slowly. “If we bring others into our god pack who don’t carry the god strain and designate them with the authority to lead in our absence, would that still keep our foothold in New York?”
