Patrick was going to take his lunch break early at this rate, whether she liked it or not.
He frowned at the low battery on his phone, realizing he’d been too tired to remember to charge his phone last night. Jono and their bed had overridden all other thoughts at the time. Patrick leaned over to yank open the bottom desk drawer, certain he had a spare charger in the mess hidden there. Who knew how much crap he’d managed to hoard over the last nine months?
I’m picking up Wade’s hoarding habits.
That was a terrifying thought.
Someone knocked on his office door and opened it without waiting for him to answer. “Collins. You have a visitor.”
Patrick peered over his desk at the receptionist from the floor’s front desk, still digging for a cell phone charger. “Is the director finally finished?”
The woman shook her head and stepped aside for someone else. “Not the director.”
The person who entered Patrick’s office was definitely not Setsuna.
One of the United States of America’s only true god-touched seers looked like he’d gone on a full weekend bender and hadn’t made it home. Marek’s hazel eyes were bloodshot, brown hair messy in a way that wasn’t stylish and had more to do with fingers running through it than anything else.
Patrick stared at Marek, noting the way his hands shook ever so slightly, the tightness around his mouth, and how hard he was clenching his jaw, as if he were trying not to throw up. Patrick abandoned his search for a charger in favor of helping Marek before the seer passed out.
“Sit down before you fall down,” Patrick ordered as he got to his feet. “Where’s your better half?”
Marek offered him a wan smile before sinking gingerly into one of the two chairs in front of Patrick’s desk. “Work. Where I’d be if I hadn’t gotten interrupted.”
Patrick knew Marek’s patrons were rarely kind when they forced a vision onto him. The Fates, in Patrick’s experience, didn’t care about anyone’s feelings, and he had a soulbond to prove it.
Patrick waved away the woman who had escorted Marek to him and closed the door behind her. He wrote out a silence ward on the door, pushing magic out of his damaged soul. Static washed through the office before settling into the walls around them. He might work for the government, but that didn’t mean he trusted everyone around him.
“Did you leave work?” Patrick asked as he went to the corner where one of the office administrators had installed a small minifridge for him one weekend last year. Magic users burned through a lot of energy, mages in particular, and Jono had gotten tired of Patrick coming home in a crappy mood because he hadn’t eaten enough. Patrick’s solution was useful.
“Never made it in,” Marek confessed.
Patrick pulled out a bottle of Gatorade and a protein bar. “Did you let Sage know?”
“I’ll call her after.”
Sage was Marek’s fiancée aside from being Patrick and Jono’s dire. She was a weretiger who worked as an attorney for the fae law firm Gentry & Thyme. She was not one either of them wanted to get on the bad side of.
Patrick opened the Gatorade and handed it to Marek. “Drink. Slowly, because if you puke in my office, the janitors will hate me.”
Marek stared at the bottle in his hand with a queasy look on his face. “I might puke anyway.”
“Tell me you didn’t drive here.”
“Took a cab.” Marek sipped carefully at the Gatorade. “No one was home to drive me, and the Norns wanted me to find you.”
Patrick would never get used to the way all the gods seemed to love fucking with his life. “You should’ve let someone know. You’re not safe when you’re like this and no one is around you.”
“I doubt Estelle and Youssef would try anything.”
“That’s you being a fucking idiot.” Patrick leaned back against his desk and crossed his arms over his chest. “They’re looking for weak spots, and you go down hard after a vision.”
Marek pressed the cold plastic bottle against the side of his face, blinking slowly. His hazel eyes weren’t washed out in the way they got when he was channeling the Norns. Patrick only hoped they’d leave Marek alone now that he was here.
“The government would arrest them.”
“The government is already trying to arrest them, but the shine case is still being investigated. I’m not in favor of making the attorney general’s job easier because you’re dead.”
Marek smiled tightly. “I knew you’d say that.”
Patrick dragged a hand over his face. “Fucking immortals. What do they want?”
Marek very carefully reached out to set the Gatorade down on Patrick’s desk. He wavered a little on the chair, and Patrick steadied him with a careful hand. Marek closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, the hazel coloring was gone, washed out into white. His aura cracked wide open and scraped against Patrick’s shields in a way that felt like a punch to the gut from old magic.
Shining through the strands of a human soul’s reach was the brighter, deeper presence of a god. Patrick sucked in a sharp breath and tasted ozone on his tongue. He knew it was no longer just him and Marek in the office now.
“The Allfather is in danger,” one of the Norns said, Marek’s voice a mix of his own and the goddess using him as a mouthpiece. “You must go to him.”
Ice replaced the blood in Patrick’s veins. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Marek’s body stood, the immortal controlling him trapping Patrick against the desk. Patrick held his ground, the edge of the desk digging into his upper thighs, but he refused to lean back as the immortal brought Marek uncomfortably close.
“He does not believe it so, but Muninn and Huginn have heard the thoughts that whisper in the minds of men who would harm him.”
“If Odin’s ravens can find the fucking bastards, then why do you need me?”
“Your family hides from us. They always have. Immortals aid their secrecy the way we aid you.”
Patrick’s lips curled. “I don’t call what you do for me aid.”
“You owe us. Which means you will save the Allfather. It was chance his ravens heard anything at all.” The immortal twisted Marek’s mouth into a hard smile. “Or fate.”
Really. Fuck the gods.
“I’m a little busy tracking down that staff you lost. Can’t you send someone else?”
Cold fingers grabbed his chin and dug into the skin over his jaw. The power shining out of Marek’s eyes left Patrick worried the seer was going to lose another color, putting Marek one step, one shade closer to blindness and insanity. Seeing the future came with the cost every seer had to pay.
“Go to Chicago. The Æsir will be waiting for you.”
The knowledge that Patrick would have to deal with the Norse gods left him wanting to punch something.
The immortal’s presence disappeared at the same moment the door to his office opened. Marek’s knees gave out, and Patrick caught him under the arms, holding him up. Swearing, Patrick shifted Marek back onto the chair.
“Patrick?” Setsuna asked after she had crossed through his silence ward.
Patrick ignored where Setsuna stood just inside his office, with SAIC Henry Ng blocking the doorway behind her. All of Patrick’s attention was on Marek, not liking how he looked. Patrick cradled Marek’s pale face in his hands, wincing at how cold Marek felt.