On The Wings Of War: Soulbound V Read online

  Franklin leaned forward and jabbed his finger in Patrick’s direction. “Not on my fucking watch.”

  “It’s all our watch, and I stand by this choice,” Setsuna said.

  “Your choices haven’t been the best,” Franklin snapped. “You want to let a mass murderer, one of the world’s most wanted monsters across more than a hundred countries, get unfettered access to an auction filled with artifacts? He’ll run off with anything he can get, including the staff.”

  “He won’t,” Patrick said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  Except Patrick did, because Lucien, the master vampire of the Manhattan Night Court and head of a worldwide criminal empire, owed him a promise of safety, one bound by Lucien’s oath to the mother of all vampires. If saving the world from the creation of a new god and a new hell didn’t fulfill that promise, Patrick didn’t know what would.

  “If we make it worth his while, he won’t,” Reed mused, blowing smoke out of his nose that was thicker than cigarettes alone could account for. “We’ve done it before.”

  Franklin leaned back in his chair, brows furrowed. “When?”

  “During the Thirty-Day War.”

  “I thought news of the vampires aiding our side were rumors at the time.”

  “They weren’t, but the classification level involved with that information meant the rumors could never be acknowledged as fact in a public setting.” Reed smiled thinly, but his gaze was hard when he looked at Franklin. “Lucien and his Night Court were one of the first to partner with us and our allies at the time. For whatever reason, the vampires have no love of the Dominion Sect.”

  “They can’t eat the dead or demons. Letting the Dominion Sect win means they’d starve,” Patrick said.

  Some days, he didn’t think that would be a bad thing if Lucien went first.

  “Do you honestly believe the president will let us strike a bargain with an international criminal?” Franklin asked.

  “She did it before and it didn’t cost her winning reelection. She’ll have nothing to lose this time if we ask,” Reed said.

  “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’s whiskey 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.”

  There weren’t millions of vampires in the world to bring her back the way Santa Muerte’s worshippers had prayed her into life. The mother of all vampires might have been loved by her children, but love had never saved anyone before. Patrick had carried Ashanti’s ashes off the battlefield beneath his fingernails after the Thirty-Day War was over. She’d died a sacrifice beneath the desert sun, lost to magic and hellish heat, only existing in memory now.

  And memory was a fickle beast, easily lost and forgotten.

  Lucien did his best to keep the memory of his mother alive. His price back in February to aid their god pack with an alliance of every Night Court in the five boroughs had seemed insignificant at the time. Setting up altars in every home of the packs under their protection had taken a week to finalize, but everyone prayed to a lost goddess now. Looking at the small altar in Setsuna’s home, Patrick wondered what Lucien hoped to gain from it.

  Patrick poured himself a glass of whiskey, carrying it with him back to the couch. He sat beside Setsuna and took a sip, not saying anything for a long few minutes. The silence that settled over them wasn’t easy, but he wasn’t going to break it.

  “Ashanti is worth whatever we give her,” Setsuna finally said, sounding tired. “She always will be.”

  Setsuna and Ashanti hadn’t been enemies during his formative years, when every
thing they each stood for meant they should be. Patrick had learned different lessons from each of them, but a few of Ashanti’s had cut deeper than all the others, sticking with him through the years. She’d been in favor of war over peace with humanity, but that was just the way of her making.

  The mother of all vampires had been a goddess born in West Africa long before borders drawn on a map were even a concept. She’d taken the form of an Asanbosam vampire, and that was the skin she’d lived in, walking the earth on bone hooks sheathed in iron caps and smiling with iron teeth. Her final steps had taken her to Patrick, and she’d died in sunlight that had never burned her until that day.

  He swallowed more whiskey, trying to stop thinking about one of his worst failures and the regret that came with it. It wasn’t the sort of prayer he wanted to place before the altar in Setsuna’s home.

  “Director Franklin doesn’t seem thrilled about giving the invitation to Lucien,” Patrick said.

  “Neither am I, but Lucien already has a vested interest in stopping Ethan and the Dominion Sect. I don’t trust Lucien, but I trust he’ll undermine Ethan first before he tries to undermine us.”

  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend?”

  Setsuna smiled slightly. “In this instance, yes.”

  Patrick knew Setsuna wasn’t above getting her hands dirty if it meant the job got done. She’d done it last year when she’d given up whatever favors she owed Lucien to bring him to New York City. He hadn’t left Manhattan after dragging Patrick’s ass out of the fire, choosing instead to hide out in the shadows and steer clear of the authorities while raking in money at his club in Chelsea.

  Despite the litigation the other New York City god pack was neck-deep in these days, they hadn’t yet disclosed to government officials the identity of the master vampire heading up the Manhattan Night Court. Patrick figured Estelle Walker and Youssef Khan were as good as dead if they ever opened their mouths on that subject. Some leverage wasn’t worth dying for.

  Setsuna sighed and leaned back on the couch. Patrick glanced at the old grandfather clock in the corner, noting how late it was. The military aide who had driven them to Setsuna’s home was still parked out front, waiting to take Patrick back to his hotel.

  “You need to fly out tomorrow,” Setsuna said.

  Patrick frowned at her. “I still have a couple of meetings with senators scheduled. You set them up, remember?”

  “Eloise Patterson is appearing before a subcommittee tomorrow to advocate for a stronger defense against the Dominion Sect.” Setsuna turned her head to look him in the eye. “You cannot be here.”

  Patrick’s fingers tightened on his glass before he dropped his gaze, staring into the amber-colored liquid. After a moment, he nodded silently to that order.

  Eloise Patterson was his grandmother on his mother’s side, and the high priestess of the Salem Coven. He only had dim memories of her from when he was a child, but he could never make any more. His ties to that side of his family had died in the basement of his childhood home, along with his mother, Clara Patterson.

  To stay alive and free from the Dominion Sect’s grasp as he grew up under a different name meant Patrick could not reach back into his past and reconnect with what family he had left. Patrick had, for all intents and purposes, become an orphan after the courts sealed away his true identity and granted him a name change to ensure his protection.

  No one in the Salem Coven knew he was alive. No one who had the power to interfere in his job as an SOA special agent knew he was Ethan’s son.

  That secret had to remain buried if he was going to pay back his soul debt.

  “Go home,” Setsuna said. “Get Lucien to agree to take the invitation on our behalf. I’ll make your excuses here.”

  Patrick ran a hand down his face before bringing the glass of whiskey to his mouth and tipping its contents down his throat. It burned all the way to his stomach. He set the glass on the coffee table with a steady hand. “You don’t ask for much.”

  Setsuna said nothing to that, merely got to her feet when he did. She didn’t reach for her cane because she didn’t need it for balance. The artifact was a weapon she could set aside behind the threshold of her home.

  Setsuna walked Patrick to the front door, holding it open as he stepped outside onto the dark porch. “Patrick.”

  He half turned to look back at her as the military aide in the town car on the street started the engine. “Yeah?”

  “Good luck.”

  They were outside the barriers of the silence ward and threshold wrapped around the walls of her home. Setsuna would never warn him to be careful of the threats dogging his heels, not out in the open like this. Patrick was thirty now, and had lived a life full of secrets and lies for the past twenty-two years. He’d learned to read between words spoken and stretched silences that were a language all their own.

  “Let’s not tempt the Fates,” Patrick said, facing the street again and heading for the car. “They hate me enough as it is.”

  2

  One of the things that had changed for Patrick since moving to New York City was someone from his pack was always there to greet him at the airport. It was a marked difference from the years of always finding his own way home to an empty apartment or a hotel room after finishing up a case and moving on to the next, or taking some much needed R&R back when he was with the Mage Corps.

  Jono was easy to spot in the crowd of people waiting to greet arriving passengers in LaGuardia. The tall Brit looked good in a pair of dark jeans, white T-shirt, and aviator sunglasses that hid his wolf-bright blue eyes, a trait that pegged him as a god pack alpha werewolf. Unlike many of the people around them, Jono wasn’t sweating through his shirt from the June heat beyond the sliding doors.

  “I checked my luggage. We need to grab it,” Patrick said in greeting.

  Jono leaned down and kissed him on the mouth. “That’s fine. Welcome back.”

  Patrick sighed against his lips. “Thanks for coming to get me.”

  “Always.” Jono pulled back, a smile tugging at his mouth. “Let’s get your things and be off.”

  Patrick’s carry-on consisted of his backpack that held his MacBook and the lockbox for his agency-issued semiautomatic HK USP 9mm tactical pistol. As a special agent, he was permitted to bring his gun onto the plane, but the only weapon he always carried on hand with him while traveling was his gods-given dagger. The look-away ward embedded in the leather sheath meant no one spared a second glance for the weapon strapped to his right thigh.

  The dagger was a powerful weapon that could break high-level magic in ways no magic user alone ever could. Patrick had used it in Chicago to save Odin, disrupting the spell Ethan and Hel had tied the Allfather to. Odin’s godhead had returned to him at the edge of the Bifröst between worlds, bringing life back to the immortal’s body.

  While they hadn’t lost Odin, they’d lost his spear to Loki. Gungnir wasn’t a weapon they could afford the other side to have, but the choice between saving Odin or stealing back the spear during the fight on Navy Pier had been an easy one to make. As far as Patrick knew, Thor was searching for Loki, but since the Norse trickster god could shapeshift, he had a feeling that hunt could take years, and that was time none of them had.

  “How’d everything go?” Jono asked.

  Patrick made a face. “We’ll talk about it in the car.”

  Jono nodded, and Patrick led the way to the baggage claim. Patrick’s time in DC had been stressful, but standing beside Jono as they waited for his luggage to arrive was enough to loosen his shoulders. He always felt better when Jono was close by, and that steadiness had nothing to do with the soulbond tying them together. Jono was Patrick’s safe harbor in the storm that was his life, one he never knew he needed. That would never change.

  Jono grabbed Patrick’s luggage when it finally appeared and led the way back to the Mustang. He’d parked in the hourly lot, and even though he probably hadn’t been waiting long, the interior was like a sauna in t
he summer heat. Patrick got in and immediately switched on the air-conditioning to full blast as soon as Jono started the engine. The air blowing out of the vents was hot, but it cooled off eventually.

  Patrick waited until they were past the pay gate to set a silence ward within the frame of the car. The wash of static drowned out the sound of traffic around them as Jono headed for Manhattan.

  “Any trouble while I was gone?” Patrick asked.

  “Bit of a scuffle in Brooklyn, but it got sorted before I arrived,” Jono said.

  “Werecreatures or hunters?”

  “Rival pack. I haven’t seen any hint of hunters for at least a week. ”

  Patrick frowned, thinking about the date night that had gotten interrupted because a pair of Krossed Knights looking to gain respect from their fellow hunters had tried to ambush them. Tried being the operative word, because the two hadn’t been prepared for a mage who could sense the demons from hell riding their souls and a werewolf who had no problem permanently taking out a threat.

  Estelle Walker and Youssef Khan were the alphas of the rival New York City god pack. Over the years, the pair had made horrific bargains with an old master vampire who’d been murdered by Lucien. Their latest bargain was with the Krossed Knights. The pair had placed a bounty on Jono’s head in February while Patrick had been in Chicago chasing a lead on the Morrígan’s staff.

  If Estelle and Youssef thought Jono and his pack would be easy prey, they had severely miscalculated. Jono, with Fenrir’s help and without consulting Patrick first, had made a bargain with Lucien. The alliance with the Night Courts meant Estelle and Youssef had been forced to reassess their position after Jono officially staked his claim on New York City.

  But neither side was backing down.

  So far, they were fighting block by block for territory that was expanding wider and wider with every pack that defected from Estelle and Youssef and came to them asking for protection. The bounty on Jono’s head from the Krossed Knights hadn’t gone away, and the packs they were responsible for were still in danger. Alliances with the fae and vampires gave them some breathing room, but Patrick had a feeling things would get worse before they got better.