“Do you even know where Lucien is?”
“The SOA has a way of contacting him,” Setsuna said.
Franklin snorted, eyeing Patrick. “Through your agent, I presume?”
“I fought with Lucien during the Thirty-Day War. Under General Reed’s orders, if you were curious,” Patrick said evenly. “I know how to get in touch with him.”
“He won’t help for free. Monsters never do.”
“Paying whatever price he wants will be cheap compared to the Dominion Sect getting control of the Morrígan’s staff,” Setsuna said.
“We need someone with black market criminal bona fides. Lucien fits that criteria,” Patrick added.
Franklin grimaced at that reminder. “And if he says no?”
Patrick shook his head. “He won’t.”
“You seem pretty damn sure about that. You don’t even know what price he’d demand in exchange for helping us. What if we can’t pay it?”
“Then we try it your way,” Setsuna said.
“You’re still trying it my way, because one of my agents will work with yours on this. The PIA refuses to be left out.”
Patrick knew the PIA, for all their skill at handling clandestine missions, didn’t have an agent with a strong enough identity that would be believed at the Auction of Curiosities and Exceptional Items. But everyone who was anyone in the worldwide criminal underworld knew who Lucien was.
Now all Patrick had to do was get Lucien to agree.
* * *
“There’swhiskey and scotch in the wet bar,” Setsuna said.
Patrick undid the knot on his tie and yanked it off. “You don’t drink.”
Setsuna set her cane on top of the coffee table in the downstairs living room. “Others who come here do. Some prefer alcohol over water for hospitality purposes.”
The home in Dupont Circle that Setsuna had lived in long before Patrick was dropped into her life had belonged to her parents before they passed it on to her. He remembered coming here on school breaks from the Academy he’d boarded in and the two of them not knowing how to live in each other’s spaces.
Setsuna hadn’t been a mother. Patrick hadn’t been her son. He’d been her ward though, and she’d done her best to make sure he got the training he needed to survive. The gods had required it of her, and Patrick had always felt like an obligation to her. But that was in the past, and neither of them could change the events that had brought them together.
Patrick took in the living room with its drawn curtains, leather couch, and years-old television set. An old-fashioned record player sat on a table beside a bookcase filled with a collection of records. They were dusty, which spoke of long days in the office for her.
There was no hint of his time lived in this house anywhere within its walls. The threshold still remembered him though, and it was an easy weight against his shields as he made his way over to the wet bar. He came to a halt beside it, staring at the small altar Setsuna had set up on a wall shelf above it.
Setsuna was a powerful witch and member of a diminished family coven. She prayed to ancestral kami and the sun goddess Amaterasu in her home, not to the goddess enshrined on the shelf before him. As an only child, with no children of her own, when Setsuna died, her kami would die with her, and her coven would cease to exist.
All covens worshipped spirits, ancestors, or even gods, depending on what they were formed around. Some covens were better about growing, but the ones that remained within families sometimes died out as people found other ways to worship, or ceased worshipping at all. Their altars were all different, where and when they prayed dependent on their individual traditions, but Setsuna had never prayed outside her coven in all the time he’d known her.
This altar was not dedicated to her kami.
Scattered bits of bone shards surrounded a tiny white dish coated in old blood that had built up on the bottom. Two gold rings sat beside the dish, and a white candle was half-burned behind it. It looked similar to the altar Patrick had set up in his apartment in New York City, but he hadn’t expected Setsuna to have one as well.
“You pray to her,” Patrick said, running his thumb against the edge of a bone shard, wondering if it was human or animal.
Probably human.
“It seemed only fair, considering the bargain you struck with Lucien,” Setsuna said.
Patrick set the bone back on the altar. “I don’t know what our prayers are worth. Ashanti is dead, and the only people who have ever worshipped her before now have been vampires and their human servants.”
