Wade dragged the coat off his head and scowled at Jono. “I’m fine.”
“Wear it, or you’re staying put.”
Wade yanked it on with a stubborn look in his eyes. “Like hell I’m staying put. I go where you go.”
Jono withheld a sigh. He’d stopped fighting Wade on that since well before the Thanksgiving holiday. Patrick’s absence was still keenly felt by the entire pack, but Wade had internalized the separation to the point of codependency with Jono. They were still paying rent on his flat elsewhere in the city, but Wade had effectively moved in before the holidays. If he wasn’t with Jono, he was with Sage, but he slept in the spare bedroom every night.
Jono, used to falling asleep beside Patrick and having someone else’s heart beat in his ear, appreciated Wade’s presence, even if he ached for the one he wanted. It had been two and a half months since Patrick had walked away from Jono and into the veil, holding Hermes’ hand, and Jono was still waiting.
He would keep waiting and doing their duty as alpha of the New York City god pack until Patrick came back to him, when they could do it together. That didn’t mean it was easy waking up every day and going on with his life with half his heart missing.
“Let’s go,” Jono said.
Wade tucked his hands into his coat pockets and followed Jono out of the flat. Jono had the keys to the Mustang in his hand, the car having been found and towed from near the Brooklyn Bridge at the beginning of December. Jono had been put on the title after Patrick was cleared of murder, so at least there’d been no trouble in retrieving it.
The snowplows had been out, and Jono could smell salt on the air from its use on the road. At least the streets were drivable these days. The last of the zombies had been cleared from them by the end of December, with bodies taken to crematoriums all down the Eastern Seaboard. Of the skeletons commanded by Andras through Ilya, what could be recovered were being repatriated back to Paris for reinternment in the Catacombs. Cargo ships had been commandeered to transport the bones, but it was a lengthy and ongoing process.
Jono wasn’t involved with any of that, for which he was glad. He had enough to deal with when it came to the packs under his protection. Thankfully, Sage was a steady presence shoring him up on the days when he could do everything alone and on the days when he didn’t want to. Pack was family, and he was grateful for Sage’s and Wade’s support.
He wasn’t quite as grateful for Sage’s gentle, pointed needling of what they needed to do as a pack—together—when Patrick wasn’t with them.
“We need to expand,” Sage said, handing him a coffee from Starbucks. He got a whiff of her scent as she leaned in close, muddled by a new perfume, he supposed.
Jono squinted at the brownstone that belonged to their god pack in Hamilton Heights and hid his frown behind the coffee cup. “You know how I feel about that.”
Sage nodded as she pulled a ring of keys out of her purse and easily flipped through them for the correct one. “I know you want to wait for Patrick to return, but politics won’t allow us that reprieve for much longer. We have five boroughs and over a hundred packs to rule over. We need more bodies to help us with that. If I’m getting stretched thin, I know you must be feeling worse.”
Jono wasn’t about to admit to that, but Sage just gave him a pointed look before letting them into a place that still stank of horror beneath the musty air. Oh, the stench wasn’t as strong as it had been after Estelle had lost in the challenge ring and they’d claimed the spoils as due their right, but it still lingered. Jono rather thought it always would, or maybe it was the memories for everyone that would never leave.
The brownstones filled the entire block, having stood empty before they’d used the buildings as overflow housing for the packs who’d flown in for the fight and couldn’t find decent hotels. Sage had handled all of that, but Jono could reluctantly admit that this was a problem he’d pushed off long enough.
Dust had fallen in a thin layer over everything, the months of disuse showing in the grime and the quiet. They’d closed the buildings up after everyone had left once the fight was over. Jono wasn’t sure how the pipes were doing in the cold, but he couldn’t smell a water leak anywhere.
Wade lightly kicked the door shut behind him, looking around with curious eyes. “This is a lot of space.”
“There’s more underground,” Sage said.
Jono grimaced at the memory of the challenge ring with its stone seats and blood-soaked floor carved out of the earth below. “We could always turn it into storage.”
“You know we can’t.”
“Right. Just a thought.”
They had needs now as the New York City god pack, and that included a place to handle challenges, both to their rule and to the rightful, legal requests that cropped up between packs. For all that Jono wished they could mediate everything to an easy conclusion, he knew that wasn’t possible. Not every problem could be solved with words, and sometimes knocking people about until they saw reason was the only answer within their community.
“I don’t want to live here. I like my apartment,” Wade said.
“You haven’t slept in your apartment for months,” Sage reminded him.
“I’ll sleep there when Patrick comes back.”
He said it with a surety that made Jono’s mouth twitch into a bittersweet smile of agreement. Wade’s belief in Patrick’s return rivaled Jono’s, and he knew Sage felt the same, but she was also the logical member of their pack, when sometimes, all Jono wanted to do was let his heart rule.
“There are quite a few god pack members who fought with us that have reached out and asked to return to the city and be considered as potential members of our god pack,” Sage said as she gazed about the foyer they were in.
“How do their alphas feel about that?” Jono asked.
“As none of them are dires, and none of them are on the outs with their god packs in any way, there’s some reluctance, but not outright anger.”
