“People leave food at graves all the time. It feeds their ancestors.”
“You leave food on some altars. You leave flowers at graves in this place.”
Wade shrugged but didn’t seem put out that his idea had been shot down. “If you say so.”
He sounded cheerful enough, even as he constantly scanned their immediate area. Ever since Wade had been left behind when Patrick was kidnapped from the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York back in August, he’d made it a point to stick close in public. Patrick didn’t argue with Wade about staying behind anymore since it was a fight he always lost.
Their morning flight in had been uneventful. Patrick’s first meeting of the day with Supernatural Operations Agency Director Setsuna Abuku at the agency’s headquarters had run a little long. Patrick had been forced to stop for lunch to feed Wade before coming here. Their afternoon meeting at the Pentagon awaited them, and Setsuna had assured Patrick that Wade would be given a visitor’s pass that would enable him to remain close.
“Ugh,” Wade said suddenly, lengthening his stride so that he pulled ahead of Patrick. “It’s that asshole.”
Patrick narrowed his eyes at a figure in the distance, standing within the rows they were walking between. He glanced over at the asphalt road down the hill and the unmarked black car parked there, the only vehicle to be seen.
“Guess our ride is here,” Patrick said.
“Could’ve got a taxi instead,” Wade muttered, scowling at the man coming into sharper focus.
“Taxis can’t get past the Pentagon’s security gate.”
They came to a stop at the gravesite a minute later, and the man who waited for them there turned to look at them. Ever since his murder charge had been dismissed, Patrick had been dealing with the judgment of his peers by staring them down until they looked away first. He couldn’t do that with General Noah Reed. There was no winning a staring contest with a dragon in human form.
Unless it was Wade, and that was only if they threw food at him as a distraction.
“This isn’t where I thought you’d be when you requested a ride,” Reed said around the cigarette clamped between his teeth. His field uniform was hidden beneath an ankle-length black wool coat that didn’t appear to be military-issued.
Patrick’s jaw twitched. He fiddled with the last quarter in his jacket pocket, the metal warmed from being handled nonstop since he’d entered the hushed and warded grounds of the vast cemetery.
“Where did you think I’d be? A bar?” Patrick snorted. “I promised my pack I wouldn’t drink while out here.”
Reed removed the cigarette from between his lips, puffing out a long line of gray smoke. Patrick’s nose wrinkled slightly at the acrid scent that smelled nothing like nicotine which the cool breeze blew his way.
Wade glared at the three-star Army general, standing at an angle to keep an eye on both of them. Patrick could see his brown eyes flashing gold for a split second beneath his beanie. “Put that out. Don’t you know it’s rude to smoke in a cemetery?”
Considering he’d been contemplating starting up a hot dog cart business in the cemetery, Patrick thought Wade didn’t really have the right to complain about what was correct protocol when visiting the dead. He didn’t say as much though.
Patrick drew the front edges of his leather jacket closer together in the face of the cool October breeze. The sky was partly cloudy after a morning rainstorm that had thankfully not delayed their flight, the smell of damp earth thick in his nose.
“You didn’t have to be the one to come out and get me. You could’ve sent an aide,” Patrick said.
“I told you I wanted to talk to you before the meeting. There are other places in DC we could have had this conversation,” Reed said.
“Not comfortable seeing the results of your actions?” Reed narrowed his eyes at Patrick’s pointed question but didn’t respond. Patrick shifted on his feet, grass tearing beneath his combat boots. “The wards are better here than anywhere else you’d want to talk in public. Besides, we’re flying back to New York after the meeting. This is the only time I have to visit. I wasn’t going to miss it.”
Arlington was filled with the dead and surrounded by protective wards and anti-removal spells, the old magic a weight in the air to those who could sense it. Time was he’d come here and not feel a thing through the heavy personal shields he used to carry. With shield anchors set by a goddess, then removed by a god, the only remnants of the protection that had kept Patrick and the scars he carried in his soul hidden for years were marks on his bones that only showed up in X-rays.
Lack of permanent shield anchors wasn’t going to keep him away from here though. Patrick tried to come to Arlington at least once a year to pay his respects to the Hellraisers who’d never walked off the battlefield of the Thirty-Day War some years back. It had been easier before he was transferred to New York City last summer, but he didn’t regret that move.
Patrick slipped past Wade and walked over to the grave of his last fallen brother. He pulled the quarter from his jacket pocket, setting it carefully on top of the headstone. It stood out against the white marble, a mark that someone had been by who remembered the dead buried in the ground, who’d been there when they died. Patrick’s lips twisted as he stared blankly at the name on the headstone before turning away.
Patrick was one of only a handful of fighters on their old Hellraisers team who’d been alive at the end of the Thirty-Day War. Survivor’s guilt was never an easy thing to carry.
He tucked his hand back into his pocket and walked over to where Reed stood on the grass, staring out across the rows of headstones. As the general who had commanded the US forces amongst their allies in the Thirty-Day War, every grave in this section of Arlington was the result of his orders. Patrick wondered if that bothered him or if Reed was too old in dragon years, too inhuman, to care.
Reed didn’t put the cigarette out, letting it burn slowly between his fingertips. There’d been a time Patrick had missed the smell of cigarettes, craving the false sense of balance that nicotine offered. These days, he had other ways of dealing with stress.
“So what lies are we telling everyone when we get to the meeting?” Patrick asked.
Because that’s why he had come, to sit in on yet another meeting, planning on how to stop the end of the world when they all knew it wouldn’t be enough. Plans never were once the bullets started flying and the spells started exploding. The Fates couldn’t see the future, death in all its many aspects was nipping at their heels, and government paper pushers wanted to talk about thecost oflogistics.
