Page 23 of Wings and Shadowthief

“That sounds like a terrible way to seal a bond. Shouldn’t there be an exchange of words? Blood? Paperwork?”

“Feelings suffice.”

She groaned. “So, who am I bonded to?”

Gwen decided she hated him when he smirked. “Isn’t that just the question?”

Choices

The huntsmen compound, situated in the heart of TriBeCa, looked like just about any other tall, glass and silver skyscraper in Manhattan from outside. Indeed, a great majority of the grim folk walking in or out of the sliding doors under the watchful eye of two armed guards wore smart suits and polished shoes.

A keen observer might have wondered why all seemed particularly muscular, or noticed the outlines of weapons cleverly concealed under their gaberdines.

In Oldcrest, the huntsmen didn’t need to blend in, but here, doing their job would have been considerably more difficult if they walked around dressed like video game adventurers.

Jack wore a royal purple velvet suit. Not his color of choice—it wouldn’t have made the cut for his top twenty—but the only man who wore his size in the Drake compound was the king himself. When the king lends a purple suit, one wears a purple suit. At least the shirt underneath was black.

He didn’t feel out of place because of the ridiculous accoutrement as much as the fact that the two guns usually on a holster were conspicuously absent. Walking in unarmed made him feel naked.

Jack nodded to the guards as he walked in. He couldn’t remember the name of the youngest one, though the butch brunette with an undercut showing off her huntsman ink seemed vaguely familiar.

The silver-haired, short guard smiled. “Good to see you home, sir.”

Was it?

Jack doubted every word of that statement. Being here, so far away from England, wasn’t good. And New York had long since stopped being his home.

“Thanks, Benedict. How’s your lady?”

“Still on my case about retirement, although I stopped active duty.” The man sighed.

Jack walked in to avoid responding. Benedict was pushing sixty. He ought to retire. Huntsmen were encouraged to quit the field in their forties, if not earlier—and many of them died young on duty. Like professional athletes, they were fitter in their youth, and the gods knew they needed to be fit to fight rogue sups.

But being a huntsman was a vocation, not a job. No one wanted to let it go.

The receptionist beamed as he appeared. “Jack!”

“Alice.” While his mouth formed his trademark flirty smile, his heart wasn’t in it.

He used to have a thing with Alice, back in the day. Neither of them had taken it seriously, but they hung out when he was in the city, and he’d taken her back to her place a time or two—never to the Hunter condo. If he ever brought a girl home, his mother would have locked them into a roomad vitam aeternam, or at least until she was sure he’d knocked her up.

His desire to revisit their fling was non-existent, though Alice wore the red lipstick he liked so much and one of her low necklines.

“How long are you sticking around?” she asked, her tongue wetting her pretty lips.

Nothing. He felt nothing except a faint sense of unease. “You know me. I’ll be on a plane back as soon as I can.”

The huntsman rolled her eyes. “You take planes now?”

He usually did for long distances. “Can you let my mother know I’m heading up?”

She frowned, hands typing away at her screen. “She’s seeing someone important. You might want to wait.”

Flirty as she was, Alice wasn’t about to reveal anything about her boss’s schedule—even to him.

“She’s expecting me,” he replied, heading toward the staircase, though there was an elevator available.

Jack never liked to be confined in a cage if could help it. And he certainly could use the few minutes it took him to scale the thirteen floors.

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