Act of Mercy (PSI-Ops / Immortal Ops) Read Free Page A

to track down Jinx, a madam who headed up underground paranormal brothels out in Seattle, and see what kinds of girls she had available. It had been too long since he’d last had sex and soon enough the wolf in him would demand it as well.
    It liked sex as much as he did.
    Maybe more.
    Horny animal.
    “It is what it is,” he grumbled, pecking at the keyboard once more, his mindset slightly on work. A lot of crap had been going on. More than normal.
    Until a few months ago , PSI and I-Op division stayed very separate. He didn’t know why, only that they’d been tight-lipped on both sides about the matter. All that had changed. They now had to work together.
    And that meant even more paperwork.
    Damn I-Ops.
    He focused on his reports. While they may be done, they still needed to be emailed. Damn, he hated computers. Everyone around him loved them but he liked putting pen to paper, not fingertips to keyboard. He took a lot of grief at the office about his aversion to certain technologies. He wasn’t a luddite, but the others in PSI enjoyed calling him one.
    He wasn ’t fond of technology and he wasn’t a fan of being lifted thousands of feet above sea level by a hunk of metal. People should protest it more. He came from a time when you worked with your hands and steam-powered locomotives were impressive. People used to actually talk face to face. Not like it was now, where everyone had their noses pressed to their phones.
    He missed the old days.
    While he would forever look to be in his mid-thirties, he was considerably older. With that age came the reluctance to accept change with ease. Plus, he was stubborn by nature. And truth of the matter was, most of what he was given technology-wise ended up breaking. In his opinion it was shit. The quality of it all kept going down but the prices seemed to jump.
    Rip off.
    He’d seen a lot during his lifespan. Some good. Some not so good. And some downright horrifying.
    An auburn-haired, bearded giant poked his head into the room. Striker McCracken was there, grinning a grin that said he was ready to be up to no good. The man was larger than Duke muscle-wise and in height. That was damn impressive, considering just how big Duke was.
    Striker was Dougal only to his momma, who had been buried over a century. Duke knew his real name because he’d actually met the man’s mother way back when. She’d been a sweet woman half her son’s size, yet still managed to keep him in line nicely. Her death still hit Striker hard. No one ever brought her up because of it.
    “ You almost done?” asked Striker, traces of the Scottish accent showing through. Striker’s accent had been so bad at one point that barely anyone could understand him. He might as well have been speaking Gaelic for all the good it had done him. “I’m positive the bar at the corner has beers with our names on ’em. What do you say we go and fill ourselves full of cheap alcohol?”
    With a groan, Duke emailed off his reports. “I fucking hate this thing,” he said, as he tried to get the computer to go to sleep, but it kept instantly waking up. The thing was cursed. That or it had it in for him. One or the other.
    “ Name one thing you do like,” Striker mused.
    Duke flashed a wide smile. “Women. I like women.”
    “ That you do.” Striker eased up next to Duke and held out his cell phone.
    Duke looked at the small screen and tipped his head. “What the fuck is that?”
    Striker beamed. “Picture of me in my kilt.”
    “ Where are the rest of your clothes and why are you standing in front of a mirror? What are you holding?”
    Sighing, Striker shook his head as if he was going to need to speak to a child. “I’m holdin’ my phone to take the picture and the ladies like it when I post pictures of myself shirtless on my profile page.”
    Duke stiffened. “You took a picture of yourself and put it on the internet?”
    “ Aye.”
    Duke seriously conside red getting a new best friend. His current one