1
Special Agent Patrick Collins crouched down and glared at the offending bag of chips hanging by a corner from the vending machine’s metal shelf. He smacked his fist against the glass, only half listening to what Sage Beacot, his god pack’s dire, had to say on the phone. The chips didn’t move.
“You have the time off at the end of the month, right?” Sage asked.
“For what?” Patrick asked as he hit the glass again, trying to shake the chips loose.
“My wedding.”
“Oh, yeah. I have that day off. I put in my request back in spring.”
Sage and her fiancé, Marek Taylor, were due to get married at the end of August. The preparations for the event had steadily increased, and Patrick had done his level best to escape them whenever possible. Sage wasn’t a bridezilla by any stretch of the imagination, but she was meticulous when it came to details and expected everyone around her to be the same when it came to wedding decisions—whether making them or obeying them.
“What do you keep hitting?”
Patrick gripped the top edge of the vending machine and tried to shake it with one hand, which didn’t really work. “Break room vending machine ate my money and won’t give me my chips.”
Sage laughed in his ear. “You sound like Wade.”
“Unlike Wade, I’m not going to vandalize the damn thing.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Wade Espinoza was a nineteen-year-old fledgling fire dragon they’d rescued a year ago from vampires and brought into their god pack. Keeping him fed definitely put a dent in their pack tithes. He was known to buy out the snack aisle in Target on the regular when he wasn’t hoarding the latest shiny object to catch his eye.
Patrick hit the vending machine one more time, and the bag of chips finally fell into the catch tray. “Ha! Got it.”
“I’ll leave you to your lunch. Don’t forget you have a suit fitting tomorrow.”
He retrieved his bag of chips. “I should be able to make that.”
Someone cleared their throat behind him. “Collins?”
Patrick straightened up and looked over his shoulder. The executive assistant to Henry Ng, the Supernatural Operations Agency’s Special Agent in Charge for New York, stood in the entrance to the break room on his work floor. Tiana Martin raised an eyebrow at him, and Patrick sighed. The fact that she’d come down to locate him rather than wait for him to get back to his office and return a voicemail or email didn’t bode well for the rest of his afternoon.
“Uh, I may have to postpone that fitting,” Patrick said.
Sage sighed. “We’ll work around you. But you will go to a fitting. I’ll talk to you later.”
She ended the call, and Patrick shoved his phone into his back pocket. “What does the SAIC need?”
“You,” Tiana said.
Patrick looked down at his chips, knowing he wouldn’t get to eat them anytime soon. “Lead the way.”
He followed her out of the break room and to the bank of elevators, taking the first one to arrive up to the thirtieth floor. Henry’s corner office was guarded by Tiana’s desk. Patrick discreetly left his bag of chips on her desk, intent on retrieving them afterward. He waited while she knocked on Henry’s door, then poked her head inside for a quick check-in with him.
“I found Special Agent Collins,” Tiana said.
“Let him in,” Henry replied.
Patrick slipped past Tiana, who closed the door behind him with a quiet click. He crossed the office to stand in front of Henry’s wide wooden desk. The furniture was still the same as when Henry had taken over the office and SAIC position last summer, but there were a couple of new commendations hanging on the wall.
“You wanted to see me, sir?” Patrick asked.
Henry was a warlock in his late thirties who had an affinity for elemental magic. Pulled out of the San Francisco field office last year to head up the New York City one, he’d eased into the role well enough. Henry was stern but fair, and his loyalty was to the SOA, not the Dominion Sect like his predecessor. What’s more, he generally had no problem with how Patrick ran his cases, a position which had earned Henry SOA Director Setsuna Abuku’s backing in other areas of his job as SAIC.
Henry gestured at the pair of leather chairs in front of his desk. “Take a seat.”
Patrick sat, the cross-guards of his gods-given dagger pressing into the soft cushion. He wasn’t wearing a suit, despite being desk-bound since returning from Paris in early July. Henry had yet to remark on his break from business casual.
The reason Patrick’s caseload had lightened considerably was due to the focus of the media into his actions in London and Paris. He and his pack had followed intelligence leads to London, where the Morrígan’s staff had been up for sale at the Auction of Curiosities and Exceptional Items. Lucien had been the one to go undercover at the request of the federal government and help retrieve the staff. In exchange, the master vampire had received a century of what basically constituted diplomatic immunity while within the United States.
The trouble Lucien could cause in one hundred years made Patrick want to drink, but ultimately, it wasn’t his problem. He wasn’t the one who had signed off on the agreement, and he’d most likely be dead by the time Lucien’s future actions—whatever they might be—required intervention.
But Lucien had gotten them into the auction, even if the master vampire hadn’t retrieved the Morrígan’s staff. It had subsequently been stolen in a fight where most of the auction attendees had ended up dead and then become the walking dead due to necromancy.
Ilya Nazarov, a necromancer who was the Patriarch of Souls for the Orthodox Church of the Dead, had run off with it. Patrick and the others had followed Ilya to Paris, where the necromancer had forsaken his position in the end, sacrificing the god he’d worshipped to the Morrígan’s staff’s hunger in order to raise millions of Parisian dead. Patrick still wasn’t sure if Peklabog’s godhead had managed to escape the sacrifice, even if his body had not, or if his worshippers would be enough to undo what Ilya had wrought.
Again, not his problem.
Ilya had ultimately emptied the Paris Catacombs and sent the walking dead to attack the City of Lights. Fighting zombies on summer solstice had been a nightmare, and only the blessing of a goddess of fate enabled them to stop Ilya.
They’d won the fight but not the war, coming away with a broken-off piece of the Morrígan’s staff while Ilya got away with the rest of it and half an army of the undead. Ilya and his zombies had disappeared through the veil, carried away by the weapon’s magic to some allied hell most likely. His loyalty no longer resided with the god the Orthodox Church of the Dead had worshipped, but with the Dominion Sect and Patrick’s father, Ethan Greene.
It was an alliance no government was happy about.
Patrick clenched his left hand into a fist, remembering how Srecha’s blessing had burned him, though it didn’t compare to the way the Morrígan’s staff had hungered for his soul. Her blessing had turned into a prayer, one the Morrígan’s staff had answered with the resurrection of the mother of all vampires.
The carved raven Patrick had broken off from it was currently hidden away in his nightstand drawer, along with the last Greek coin from the ones Hermes had given him last summer as payment for the dead. It wasn’t the best hiding spot by far, but both artifacts remained quiescent.