A Veiled & Hallowed Eve

by Hailey Turner

  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 the cost of logistics.

  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 pack
s 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.

  It was a far cry from the last time Patrick had been summoned to Washington, DC, for a joint task force meeting. He rather preferred the tension he’d sat through back then with a handful of people than the suffocating accusatory pressure filling the room now.

  “Ethan hasn’t tripped any red flags outside the country, nor has anyone else in his inner circle,” CIA Director Erin Batey said, her voice echoing slightly through the speakers.

  The screen flickered slightly at the edges. The amount of magic encircling the room here and in other locations meant the electronic connection was on the fritz. Patrick wondered if they should’ve brought out the scrying crystals.

  “That doesn’t mean he’s inside our borders,” FBI Director David Morrison said.

  “Disregarding what happened in London and Paris, the Dominion Sect has focused their efforts here in the United States over the last few years.” Reed glanced at Patrick, who stared stonily at him. “We have reason to believe whatever they ultimately have planned will happen here.”

  “Here being millions of square miles with no definitive location in mind. That’s a lot of ground to cover.”

  “Considering Ethan’s past history and desires, we believe the Dominion Sect will focus on the Atlantic Seaboard, most likely in the Northeast. New York City is a strong contender for confrontation,” Setsuna said.

  “And you came about that information how?”

  The SOA’s in-house problems with Dominion Sect sympathizers had put the agency on the outside looking in for too many years. Even with Setsuna working hard to clean up that mess, trust wasn’t easy to come by in the intelligence community.

  “The same way all of you come to conclusions. By studying the information at hand.”

  Morrison wasn’t the only person to glance at Patrick. His shoulders tightened beneath their attention, but he kept his face impassive in the wake of their silent suspicions. Being the son of a terrorist wasn’t ever a forgivable offense, despite the fact Patrick carried the scars on his body and soul that showed just how little Ethan thought of him.

  Patrick was a means to an end for a lot of people—Ethan, government officials, gods, take your pick. Patrick had a soul debt to pay, and what he owed filtered into every aspect of his life. There was no escaping that truth, even after he cast off the lie he’d lived under for so many years back in August.

  The people in the room with him saw Ethan as a threat, driven by delusions of grandeur. Of them all, only Setsuna and Reed believed in the truth of Ethan’s actions—that he vowed to finish what his family had sought for generations. Turning himself into a god was the stuff of myths, but all myths had been history of a kind at some point in the past, whether humanity deigned to remember them as such or not.

  Patrick didn’t have a choice in being part of Ethan’s story. His soul debt was owned by a goddess whose daughter was dying in Hannah’s soul and body. The people sitting in for this meeting might know his history, but they still didn’t know all his secrets, and he wasn’t about to confess to any of what he’d carried with him over the years.

  Reed was right in that they wouldn’t believe in myths and legends as fact. Patrick doubted that would change even if they witnessed the presence of gods with their own eyes.

  “Your agency’s information over the years hasn’t been the best, as evidenced by the way you kept your agent’s identity a secret,” Erin stated coolly.

  Setsuna finally set down the report she was reading, turning her head to stare at Erin’s face in a square on the television screen. “The SOA isn’t the only agency in this room who has made excuses for agents under their command. Don’t throw stones in glass houses. Yours will shatter just as surely as ours.”

  “We brought all of you on board on orders from the president,” Reed said, drawing everyone’s attention before the argument could devolve. “Your assistance is needed, but not your attitudes. Most of you deal with mundane problems, not magical or preternatural ones. We’re the experts here in terms of knowing what the threats boil down to. When we tell you our best bet to winning is sitting at this table, then accept that as fact. Collins isn’t going anywhere, and the president is in agreement with that.”

  “Who asked the president for that clearance?” Franklin demanded.

  Reed glared at him. “I did.”

  Setsuna glanced at Patrick before letting her gaze sweep the room. “We’re on the same side here. Our number one priority is the safety and security of our nation. Ethan and the Dominion Sect are a threat that requires support from all agencies. Whatever they are planning, it will end on October thirty-first. That’s two and a half weeks away, and we need to be ready.”

  “For what?” Erin asked.

  Patrick thought saying the end of the world was a little ridiculous, even if true, so he settled for “To fight.”

  His words drew everyone’s attention. At any other point in his life, he might have wilted beneath the stares of so many powerful people in government, but that was before he’d spent the last sixteen months standing his ground with the support of his pack.

  “Ethan cast a sacrificial spell at the end of the Thirty-Day War. Odds are he’ll do it again until he gets what he wants. Ilya Nazarov has in his possession a powerful artifact that can raise the dead, as witnessed in Paris. I know what Ethan is capable of. I’ve fought against him for years. If ground zero happens this time on American soil, then we need to be ready. That means pooling our resources, guarding every nexus, and being ready to move at a moment’s notice,” Patrick continued.

  “And what do you bring to the table?” Franklin asked, shades of derision in his tone. “Your god pack?”

  Patrick had to consciously unclench his jaw. “Mine, and others. Werecreatures are better equipped to fight the dead and demons. I saw that when I was in the Mage Corps, and it was a hard fact on the streets of Paris. We’ve asked god packs across the nation for volunteers to help support our efforts. Reed is aware of the request.”

  “We’re stationing those packs in New York City,” Reed said before anyone else could protest. “They’re in the process of arriving within the next week or two. We want them in place before the end of the month. Collins will be our liaison with them.”

  “Of course he will be. And what does he get out of it?” Morrison asked, not bothering to keep the contempt out
of his voice.

  Patrick brushed his fingers against the hilt of the gods-given dagger strapped to his right thigh, the self-soothing gesture hidden by the table. He opted to ignore the barb directed at his pack and answer broadly. “My life back.”

  The declaration was meaningless to almost everyone in the room, but it was the truth, and it’s what drove Patrick to endure the rest of the meeting where Reed and Setsuna fought to drag support from fellow federal agencies. In the end, communication between everyone would remain open, quick-response teams would be on standby in various cities in the Northeast, with a focus on New York City, but Patrick knew deep down it wouldn’t be enough.

  Not against the gods and demons of every hell.

  When the meeting ended and people started leaving, Wade slipped through the door, walking through the wards Setsuna had set around the room as if they didn’t exist. He ignored the frown Franklin gave him on the way out, the PIA director more aware of Wade’s background than some of the others. Wade proved immune to Franklin’s dissatisfaction.

  “You ready to go?” Wade asked. He crumpled up a bag of chips he’d purloined from a vending machine somewhere, proof he hadn’t stayed in the empty conference room Patrick had put him in at Reed’s order. He must’ve slipped his military minder as well.

  Patrick checked the time on his phone, calculating how long it would take to get to the airport. “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Patrick,” Setsuna said.

  He sighed as he stood, looking over at where she sat, her carved rosewood cane already in hand. “What?”

  “Have you heard from Eloise?”

  It was just the three of them in the conference room now, which was probably for the best. Discussing Ethan openly among strangers was something he had no choice in doing. Discussing his mother’s family was far more personal.

  Eloise Patterson was the high priestess of the Salem Coven and his grandmother. The matriarch of a powerful and old family of magic users, Eloise was an activist who hadn’t sat back and let life pass her by after her daughter’s death and the supposed death of her two oldest grandchildren. She’d spent weeks since the revelation that Patrick and Hannah were alive trying to reach him.