“Doesn’t mean more might not come.” Marek stood, gaze raking up and down Jono’s naked, bloody body. He made a face. “You ruined your wedding suit. Sage is going to be so mad.”
“She’s going to be bloody pissed about the hunters.”
“Well, yeah, that too, but you aren’t the one responsible for organizing a wedding.”
“You have a wedding planner for that.”
“And who do you think oversees the wedding planner?”
Considering Sage ran herd over the pack the same way she ran her cases at Gentry & Thyme, Jono wasn’t surprised.
“I need a belt,” Jono repeated.
Marek immediately undid his and handed it over. “You need some clothes, too. Both of you do.”
“I can…find you some,” Terry said hesitantly, looking a little glassy-eyed as he stared around his destroyed and bloodied fitting room.
His assistants were all huddled on the floor crying, none of them moving. Jono tossed the belt to Leon, who used it to create a tourniquet around the hunter’s arm to stop the bleeding. He screamed when Leon tightened it down, and Leon growled a warning that sounded more wolf than human to Jono’s ears.
The cops arrived a few minutes later. In that time before their arrival, Terry managed to locate a pair of trousers and shirts for both Jono and Leon from one of the adjacent workrooms. He’d even come up with a pair of shoes for each of them before he finally took a seat with his back to the room and started to shake.
Jono couldn’t help him, not when faced with police entering the fitting room. He’d ordered Leon off the hunter and to stand with Marek behind him. Jono kept his hands loose to his sides as the police came in, weapons drawn, stepping around the dead hunter and the savaged one.
“Hands where I can see them,” the first cop into the room barked out, his gun never moving from Jono’s chest.
“They attacked us,” Marek said loudly before Jono could speak up. “I’m allocated personal protection by the United States government. My friends performed that function in lieu of a security detail.”
The moments following the police officers’ arrival were tense and loud as the officers cleared the floor and called for an ambulance for the wounded hunter. Marek’s statement of federal protection was ignored by the police, and Jono allowed himself to be separated from the group and ordered up against the other wall. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t dealt with before, but the anger and embarrassment churning in his stomach was difficult to ignore.
His eyes, along with the firsthand account from Terry and his assistants, eventually required the officers on the scene to radio the PCB and request their presence. The crime was preternatural in nature, and the NYPD as a whole was aware of the hunter problem in the city. Any crime that dealt with magic or the preternatural community was run through the PCB.
Jono was glad for the change in officers because it meant people stopped pointing guns at him.
The pair of detectives out of the PCB who arrived first managed to diffuse the tension in the fitting room between the other officers and everyone else. It wasn’t the first time Jono had dealt with the police after a hunter attack, but the dead body probably wasn’t helpful.
“I’m told it was self-defense,” the older detective from the PCB said. His badge listed his last name as Sanderson.
“My mates and I were here for our wedding suit fittings when the hunters attacked us. What was I supposed to do? Let the bloody arseholes shoot us?” Jono asked, not bothering to keep the anger out of his voice.
“I wasn’t suggesting that. It’s clear they were the aggressors in this incident. It’s the why we’re after.”
Jono glanced over at the body that was still on the ground. The hunter’s partner had already been taken off to a hospital with an officer in tow since he was under arrest. The body had yet to be removed because the ones to process the scene had arrived with the officers out of the PCB and weren’t done gathering evidence. He wished Patrick had come with them.
“I’m the alpha of the New York City god pack. There’s your reason,” Jono said.
“My understanding is there are two god packs.”
“Mine is the only one that matters. Why do you think they keep trying to murder me?”
“Is that what you think this was about?”
Jono resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “Why else go where they weren’t supposed to be, armed to the bloody teeth, and open fire on innocent people?”
“I don’t need your attitude when I’m trying to get all the facts.”
Jono’s mobile started to ring from somewhere on the floor. He’d had it out on the side table before things all went to shit and was glad to discover it hadn’t been damaged. “That’s my mobile. Mind if I retrieve it?”
“I still have questions for you.”
