A Ferry of Bones & Gold (Soulbound Book 1), page 25
Patrick resolutely kept his eyes trained on his food, heart pounding in his chest so hard he wasn’t sure he could take another bite. Jono’s hand settled on the back of his neck, startling him badly. Those long fingers squeezed his neck gently, and Patrick glanced at Jono, feeling pinned to the chair by those bright eyes.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” Jono said in a low voice.
“If Ethan is—” Emma argued.
Jono shook his head, his eyes never leaving Patrick’s. “Shut it, Em.”
Surprisingly, she listened. Emma let out an irritated huff, but kept quiet. Jono reached over and nudged at Patrick’s takeout box. “Eat. You need the calories.”
The sound of the warehouse side door opening again had Patrick looking over his shoulder. Lucien stepped inside, pulling off his motorcycle helmet. Carmen greeted him with a kiss that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a porn set. Lucien broke the kiss and started walking their way, his black eyes finding Patrick’s.
“You’re finally awake,” Lucien said.
Patrick made a face. “You sound so disappointed by that fact.”
Lucien’s regard was never friendly, and Patrick was all too aware of what had happened the last time they were in the same place. Jono let go of Patrick and stood up, putting himself between the two of them. Patrick had to lean to the side in order to watch their interaction.
“Keep your distance,” Jono warned.
“Or what?” Lucien said with a smirk. “This is not your territory.”
“Ginnungagap? Maybe not. But who’s to say it can’t be?”
“Is that a challenge, wolf?”
“More like a warning. You aren’t the only one mixing it up with gods.”
Lucien studied Jono with unblinking eyes, the stillness of his body when not speaking creepy. “Ah. You actually hear your kind’s patrons. You’d be one of the few these days.”
“It’s why they’re both targets,” Patrick said, turning around to pick up his hamburger again. “Him and Marek.”
“A wolf and a useless seer. They’d be better off dead.”
“Hey, now. I like living,” Marek protested. “I’ve been working hard all morning to keep doing that.”
Patrick blindly reached behind him to grab for Jono’s hand, tugging the other man back to his vacant seat. “By doing what?”
“Trying to come up with a plan. Nadine has been helping.” Marek searched for the last fry in his takeout box and ate it. “Skuld said she wasn’t the only Fate looking for a way to win. So did Hades. I’m pretty sure their conflicting futures localizing around you are why I can’t see a way out of this mess. Which means anything goes, really.”
“Is it too late to eat my gun?” Patrick asked no one in particular.
Nadine kicked him in the ankle. “Have you been talking to your therapist?”
“Have you?”
“Bloody hell,” Jono muttered under his breath.
Marek turned his MacBook around so everyone could see the screen. “I made a map of where all the murders happened because Nadine asked me to. Pretty sure I got the correct locations.”
Patrick wiped his hands on a paper napkin before reaching for the computer and dragging it closer. The downloaded map of Manhattan had little black X marks dotting the island. He checked the placements against his memory of the case files and ended up adjusting one or two of them.
“Crude circle,” Patrick said, tracing his finger through each murder location. “Hermes said the City itself was an altar. Ethan could’ve chosen to kill in any of the five boroughs, but he stayed in Manhattan.”
Carmen picked up the remaining Greek coins from the bed, then walked over and dumped them on the table. “We saw what you called down onto the beach. Is there any power left inside these ones?”
Patrick picked up a coin and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. He might have been drained dry of magic, but he could still sense the power inside that innocuous bit of gold. He looked at the map of Manhattan, eyes tracing the edges of the island where it met blue water.
They had ten coins left, and Patrick separated them out in pairs before marking the cardinal points on the map and drawing lines between them. The intersecting point was in Central Park.
“We need to contain the spell and choke off the nexus. We can use the coins to build a circle around Manhattan. The rivers will give us a natural barrier that can help shore up the borrowed magic,” he said slowly.
“You think that’s where the last sacrifice will happen?” Nadine asked, tapping at the spot in Central Park.
“I can guess, but nothing is certain where Ethan is concerned.”
“It’s a shame you didn’t kill him in Cairo like you were supposed to,” Lucien said bitingly. “I have shipments arriving today. We’ll have enough weapons to maybe dent a soultaker or two, but that’s only if the spell happens at night and my people can join the fight.”
“Youssef and Estelle still don’t want us or any other pack to have anything to do with you,” Emma said. The frustrated tone in her voice was a clear you have got to be fucking kidding me sort. “That’s an order I’m not following. You’ll have my pack for the fight, Patrick. Twenty werewolves and one weretiger.”
“And me,” Marek piped up.
“No” came a chorus of voices around the table.
Marek scowled, opening his mouth to argue. Emma promptly clamped her hand over his mouth.
“You’re staying here,” she told him firmly. “We’ve run around on the whims of your visions enough this week. I need to know you’re safe, and right now, Ginnungagap is the safest place you can be.”
Jono stared at Patrick with defiant eyes. “I’m not staying here. Where you go, I go.”
“Ethan is after you, and I have nothing left of my magic to keep you safe,” Patrick argued.
“All the more reason for me to stay with you. That’s what the Fates wanted, innit?”
“You’re a target, Jono.”
“Pot, kettle.”
“They’d sacrifice you to power the spell. They want me dead because I can break it,” Patrick said, breathing harshly through his nose. “Ethan is…he’s my father by blood. I can break any spell he creates because of that connection. Your only recourse would be to die, and I don’t want that on my conscience.”
Forcing the words out felt like a confession of his sins, but there was no absolution given in the silence that followed. Jono only looked at Patrick with an unreadable expression on his face before he leaned forward.
“I’m not letting you do this alone,” Jono told him, enunciating every word.
Then Jono kissed him, his words a vow that could’ve been binding if Patrick had any magic left to make it so. Except he didn’t, but he wondered if it even mattered considering Jono’s own connection to a god.
“We’ll figure it out,” Jono promised when he pulled away.
Patrick swallowed tightly, nodding a little at his words.
They had to, because if they didn’t, New York City would end up how the Middle East once was—a place ravaged by hell.
16
“I can’t believe Lucien smuggled a tank across the border on such short notice,” Patrick said as he pried open another crate.
Packed carefully inside was another spelled M32 MGL grenade launcher. Patrick ran a finger across the runes etched into the metal, watching as they flared up briefly at his touch. He grimaced at the scrape of the magic against the gaping emptiness in his soul, but the runes reacting to touch proved the spell was intact.
“It’s not military grade,” Nadine grunted as she set down a second crate near the first. “Lucien left Irena in Texas when they came over the border. She had orders to retrieve a Lenco BearCat G3. The police in some small town in West Texas weren’t using it.”
Patrick looked across the warehouse at the shiny assault vehicle currently being equipped for a fight by several vampires. He caught sight of Irena’s blonde head as the vampire conferred with Einar over a crate.
Irena was taller than Lucien even in the flat boots she wore and the youngest vampire he’d turned. Her age hadn’t stopped her from becoming one of his cruelest. Lucien had pulled Irena out of a sex-trafficking ring in Eastern Europe decades ago. Ashanti had told him the story once, how Lucien stuck around in some city long enough for Irena to murder all the local men who’d paid for her unwilling services in front of her pimp. Then Irena killed him slowly under Lucien’s guidance. Since then, Irena had been his most creative interrogator.
The story had been a lesson when he was younger, but all Patrick really took away from it was don’t mess with Lucien’s vampires. Unfortunately, they crossed paths more often than he liked these days.
Patrick closed the lid of the current crate and moved onto the one Nadine had carried over. It was smaller but still heavy, containing boxes of spelled bullets. He counted how many boxes were inside and matched the number to the list of supplies Lucien had given him. Lucien was only willing to allocate so much of his product to the fight ahead. The rest he intended to sell.
What they might lack in weaponry and artifacts, they made up for in brute strength. Emma and Leon had called in their pack hours ago, giving them Ginnungagap’s location and orders to take a roundabout way to the warehouse. Most of them had arrived before sunset, while Lucien’s vampires had come after. None of the Tempest pack were thrilled about working with vampires, but no one had argued. Their presence said a lot about how they felt where the New York City god pack was concerned.
Speaking of god packs, Patrick mused.
His attention returned to Jono, who was carrying two heavy crates their way without breaking a sweat. Jono hadn’t strayed far from Patrick’s side, especially when Lucien was present. It made Patrick feel safe, and that wasn’t something he experienced often.
“You’re drooling,” Nadine said.
“Liar,” Patrick said.
She just smirked at him before moving on to her next task. Jono set his crates down next to the others. Patrick watched the way his biceps flexed and then belatedly realized that his attraction was coming through his scent when Jono smirked at him. Patrick missed having his shields. Hell, he missed having his magic, but it would take days for it to fill his soul again.
Right now, they didn’t have time to wait.
He absently trailed his hand along the dagger strapped to his thigh. At least he still had borrowed magic to rely on.
“Too bad we can’t take a kip,” Jono teased, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the bed Patrick had woken up in earlier that afternoon.
“In that bed? With this audience? Hell no,” Patrick said.
“Suppose you’re right.” Jono ran a hand over the top of a crate. “How does the SOA feel about you palling around with Lucien? Him being a wanted fugitive and all.”
“Outside of the director, no one in the SOA is aware I know Lucien. Less than ten other people know about him, and more than half that number belongs to my old team in the Mage Corps. They all know how to keep a secret. Nadine and another PIA special agent out on the West Coast are the only other people who know, and I trust them.”
Jono rested his hip against the stack of crates and crossed his arms over his chest. “Were you lot all military?”
“Yeah.”
“No one will hear a word out of me.”
Patrick may have only known Jono for less than a week, but something told him the older man knew how to keep a promise. “I’d rather the SOA didn’t know anything about you at all.”
Jono raised one eyebrow. “Not keen on you hanging around with werecreatures?”
“Dealing with the supernatural and preternatural is part of the job. I don’t want the SOA to know about you because we’re still digging up Dominion Sect double agents within our ranks.”
“I’m not the one who needs looking after,” Jono said after a moment. “Pretty sure that’s you.”
Patrick sighed heavily and scratched the back of his head. “Normally my cases don’t have so many immortals running around.”
“Most people don’t have any running about because they don’t believe in them anymore.”
Patrick looked Jono in the eye when he said, “We’re not most people.”
Jono nodded slowly. “No, we aren’t.”
“So you’ll agree that since you’re a target you’ll keep Marek company here tonight?”
“Now I know you’re taking the piss,” Jono said, stepping closer. “Thought we had this plan of yours already sorted?”
“The plan consists of not dying. You’d accomplish that a lot better if you would—”
“I’m not leaving you.”
The conviction in Jono’s voice stopped Patrick’s argument cold. His mouth snapped shut, teeth clacking together. He didn’t know what to say in the face of Jono’s refusal to walk away. All he could think about was the way he’d lived his own life, bound by the needs of the gods he was indebted to, and what it had cost him over the years.
“Don’t let the Fates take control of your life, Jono. Marek doesn’t have a choice, but you do,” Patrick said quietly.
Jono reached out and trailed his fingers along the edge of Patrick’s jaw, his touch warm, like it always was. “Guess we’re just gonna have to murder the fuck out of the Dominion Sect bastards together, then, won’t we?”
While Patrick could get behind that any day, he knew war was never easy. “You know our chances are shit, right?”
“Can’t be much worse than waking up in hospital after a bad car crash with the werevirus running through your veins.”
“Didn’t take you for an optimist.”
“I can be with the right motivation.”
The filthy look Jono shot him made Patrick wish they were alone in his apartment with nothing to do tonight but fuck. Except there was a plan in the works that involved saving a city, and time wasn’t on their side. They needed to choke off the nexus, deny whatever mages the Dominion Sect put in the field an external power source, get to the center of the spell, and break it apart.
In other words, Patrick needed to stop thinking with his dick and start using his brain.
“Let’s get the go-bags put together,” he said.
The go-bags full of stolen weaponry were for Lucien’s vampires to use. The Tempest pack would shift into their animal forms once everyone was in position in Central Park tomorrow. The only problem was they didn’t know when Ethan would begin casting the spell. If it happened in daylight, Lucien’s vampires would be no help at all in the fight.
The NYPD was on alert, and the PCB had been notified that Central Park was the likely spell location. Patrick had argued with Casale about blocking access to the park. All that open green space was easier to fight in than an apartment building. It had taken pulling the federal card, but Patrick had gotten Casale to agree that they didn’t want the Dominion Sect to go to ground any more than they already had.
Patrick didn’t know what they’d find at the center of the spell, but he could guess. If it was anything like in Cairo, it wasn’t going to be pretty, and they’d need space to maneuver.
Patrick checked the time on his phone, glad to see he was getting signal again. Lucien had finally done something with an artifact that allowed radiofrequency waves to pass through the threshold surrounding Ginnungagap unhindered. The connection was weak, but they had one again. Right now, they needed to get the coins set before midnight hit and summer solstice began.
“Three hours,” Patrick said. “Maybe the go-bags can wait.”
He retrieved his black leather jacket from the duffel bag on the card table. It’d been buried at the bottom of his suitcase in the apartment, but Nadine had found it and brought it along with her. One of the first things he’d bought after joining the SOA, the weight of the jacket was comforting. Patrick hadn’t been wearing it recently due to the hot weather, but he always traveled with it.
The charms set into the jacket—heat and cold and durability—made him wince when he pulled it on. Without his shields, everything that had to do with magic felt a little rough on his soul.
It didn’t take long to gather the others in the middle of the warehouse. Emma, Leon, Sage, and Marek peeled away from their pack. Carmen and Lucien weren’t ones to be left out, and Jono was a shadow Patrick couldn’t shake if he tried.
“The coins need to be set at the cardinal points before midnight. It doesn’t matter that some of you don’t have magic,” Patrick said as he dug the coins out of his pocket.
“You sure about that?” Emma asked as she extended her hand.
Patrick handed out a pair of coins each to Nadine and Lucien, Emma and Leon, and Carmen and Sage. He kept four for himself, two for the cardinal point and two he’d carry with him into the fight.
“The gods on our side have a stake in this fight, and they can’t afford to lose. The coins carry some of the Greek pantheon’s magic, so odds are they’ll work how we need them to.”
“You hope,” Nadine said as she pocketed her coins. “We’ll take the west cardinal point.”
“South,” Carmen said.
Leon shrugged. “East, I guess.”
“I’m texting you all the coordinates so you can plug it into your GPS apps on your phones,” Marek said as he approached, staring intently at his own.
Phones beeped one after the other with incoming texts. Patrick checked their coordinates and the route they’d need to take. Their designated area north of here was the farthest away.
“Marek, can we borrow your car?” Jono asked.
“Sure.” Marek pulled his keys from his pocket and removed just the car key, keeping the rest. He tossed it to Jono. “Don’t scratch it.”
“Cheers.”
Nadine shrugged into her lightweight waterproof jacket and zipped it all the way to her throat. “Let’s go.”
Patrick zipped up his own leather jacket as everyone headed for the door. Lucien’s vampires would keep working under Einar’s guidance, and the rest of the Tempest pack would follow Marek’s orders.
The moment Lucien pushed open the door, the howling wind nearly slammed it shut again. Patrick ducked his head against the pounding rain coming down sideways when he finally stepped outside. He looked up at the sky out of reflex when lightning flashed through the storm clouds, followed by the rumble of thunder.
