Patrick wondered, distantly, where they’d bury him if he couldn’t pay his soul debt—here in Arlington or somewhere else. Maybe it wouldn’t matter if the world burned into a new hell.
“What makes you think we’re telling lies?” Reed replied mildly.
Patrick slanted his former commander a disbelieving look. “My past might be an open book these days, but the gods are still myths to everyone in the government who matters.”
Reed hummed thoughtfully before flicking ash off his cigarette. The ground was wet enough that any trace embers wouldn’t be a problem. “The Department of the Preternatural’s job isn’t to make people believe. It’s to keep them alive.”
Patrick had always wondered just how many secrets Reed knew and kept, because the general hoarded information the way the uber-wealthy hoarded wealth in offshore accounts. “I’m done being everyone’s scapegoat.”
He’d had enough of it since his case was dismissed and he and Jono claimed the entirety of New York City as their territory. He couldn’t help the family he’d been born into, but he was proud of the one he’d chosen as his pack. Patrick had no problems fighting for them, but he refused to duck his head and toe the line for anyone else these days. Not with so much at stake.
“Setsuna has lost standing and support, whether she likes to believe that or not. I’ll do what I can to keep you in play, but there are those in the government who want you removed from the Dominion Sect investigation because of your familial ties to Ethan,” Reed said.
“And which god gave you that order?”
Reed brought the cigarette to his mouth and blew a little bit of flame onto it, burning what remained to ash that he brushed off his fingers. “No god.”
“Just you being altruistic, hm?”
Reed nodded in the direction of the asphalt pathway, where his car and driver waited. “Let’s get going.”
The nonanswer made Patrick roll his eyes. “Sure.”
He’d laid all the quarters he had wanted to at Arlington, paid his respects in heavy silence. Time to deal with the living. Patrick waved for Wade to follow him to the car, Reed steps ahead of them.
Patrick left his past mistakes resting in the cold autumn ground, hoping he didn’t make any more in the month ahead.
* * *
“Put it out,”Setsuna said, not looking up from the file she was reviewing at the large conference table in the heavily warded room they all sat in.
Reed blew smoke out of his nose before dropping his latest cigarette into his water glass. Preternatural Intelligence Agency Director Cornell Franklin made a disgusted face, and he wasn’t the only one, but everyone seated around the table wasn’t about to call Reed out.
Every agency head present for the meeting might be aware of the danger the Dominion Sect presented, but Reed was the one who’d put the joint task force together in the first place. Created to locate the Morrígan’s staff, there was no keeping that godly weapon a secret anymore, not after Paris, not after the threat bearing down on home soil that had become apparent with the surge of hunters and demons in American cities. Now, the joint task force had expanded to outright hunting down and stopping Ethan Greene.
So far, they hadn’t had any luck in finding him.
Reed had a better idea of what they could expect on the ground than any of the other heads of federal agencies present except possibly Setsuna. Faced with people in power who didn’t trust him, and if Setsuna’s damaged standing was true, Patrick hoped Reed had enough clout to keep him in the fight with government backing.
“So you’ve had no contact with the Dominion Sect since August?” Franklin asked, staring at Patrick.
“If he had, Collins would’ve reported in about it,” Setsuna answered for Patrick.
That had been one of the many dubious requirements set upon him when he’d taken back his badge and gun after the whole mess in August when he’d been framed for murder and his identity had been revealed. Regaining his status as an SOA agent meant being bound by far more rules than he was used to. The restrictions were meant to placate people in government, but the publicity of the action hadn’t been accepted easily by the public.
Cries of double standards because he was a federal agent were rife on social media, and Patrick couldn’t really disagree. Their nascent god pack had taken some hits due to his job, hits they could ill afford, but so far the damage to their reputation wasn’t critical. The contacts they’d kept with other god packs and that support had helped shore them up, but it wasn’t a lasting solution. Patrick knew he and Jono would have to prove themselves as fair leaders to the masses, but they couldn’t start on that process until they dealt with Ethan.
Most of the restrictions Setsuna had handed down to Patrick were in place to keep him legally in the clear when it came to the cases given him. Others were for his own safety since it had become clear the Dominion Sect wanted him captured alive rather than outright killed. All of them made it exceedingly difficult to follow the orders of the gods who felt they had a stake in the soul debt he owed Persephone.
He didn’t have faith in the gods to keep him safe and had even less faith in the government to do the same. Patrick flexed his left hand, remembering the long cut Cernunnos had carved into his skin from elbow to wrist while he’d lain motionless on a pentagram, before a demon took away his bodily autonomy.
It had given him a taste of what his twin sister had suffered through, suffocated by a godhead in her soul. Only Hannah had lived with that horror for over two decades, and Patrick’s hours of suffering, locked away in a corner of his mind while a demon controlled his body, didn’t compare.
Franklin’s expression remained flat. “Are you certain of that, Setsuna?”
“I haven’t had any recent incidents,” Patrick confirmed, keeping the bite from his tone through hard practice.
A few other people around the table shifted in their seats. Franklin sighed heavily, gaze locked on the large flat-screen television attached to the wall. The digital squares of those videoconferencing in filled the entire screen. Patrick knew all of them by name and rank but not by association.
