A Ferry of Bones & Gold (Soulbound Book 1), page 27
Fucking Dominion Sect, Jono mused darkly to himself.
He could feel the slithering, ropy twists of his intestines twitching outside his body between his belly and the floor. The savage wound to the underside of his body had occurred when Jono had tried to get to Patrick. One of Cerberus’ claws had caught him midlunge, eviscerating him with an agonizing swipe before Jono could reach the mage.
Jono didn’t remember much after that aside from the feel of Cerberus’ teeth at his throat, the threat impossible to miss. In his half-conscious state, unable to shift, Jono hadn’t been in any condition to fight back.
Cerberus had dragged Jono through the veil after Hades, mud and blood and his own organs trailing behind him. Werecreatures were capable of rapid healing, but to heal a wound like this required a full shift back to human. The binding ward wrapped around Jono’s damaged wolf body prevented him from shifting. The blood loss left him woozier than he would’ve liked, but at least some healing was happening on the inside.
If he could just shift, then he’d feel better about his chances of surviving.
Jono’s ears pricked forward as he felt vibrations through the floor, indicating the arrival of people. Someone had set a silence ward around the living room. He couldn’t hear anything beyond the walls, which meant people wouldn’t hear him screaming.
Lovely, Jono thought.
He lifted his head, tongue sliding out of his mouth to lick his nose, watching as Ethan Greene entered the living room with a cadre of magic users. Ethan was as tall as his son, but a bit stockier. Where Jono expected red hair, Ethan sported a dark blond quiff going a bit gray with a close-shaved beard to match. His rugged, tanned face spoke of years out in the sun, the wrinkles at the corners of his green eyes carved deep.
Jono had seen those same eyes in Patrick’s face, dark with passion or light with sarcastic humor. He must get his hair from his mum.
Ethan stepped over the lines of the concentric circles and came to stand in the space between two points of the pentagram. Feet splayed wide, hands on his hips, Ethan looked down his nose at Jono with a thoughtful expression on his face that made Jono snarl.
He’d honestly expected brashness from a man of Ethan’s reputation, but Jono supposed one didn’t have ambitions like the mage did without being a calculating bastard.
Ethan lifted one hand, flattening his palm outward in Jono’s direction. A sickly, red-orange mageglobe twisted into existence against his hand. “Change.”
Jono would have liked to believe he could withstand the magical command that tugged at his soul, but he had a vested interest in shifting for his own reasons. So he didn’t fight the black magic pulling at the werevirus that ran through his veins.
The initial break of the shift was white-hot agony that cascaded through his body before his central nervous system switched off the pain. Jono could feel his body changing from wolf back to human, but his brain processed it at a distance.
In moments, Jono found himself kneeling naked in the center of the pentagram, panting for breath, his body whole once more. Sweat slid down his skin, the exertion from the forced change making him feel a little light-headed. He fought to lift his head, the binding ward still twisted around his body and keeping him in place.
He blinked hard, thinking for one second it was Patrick standing beside Ethan. Then his vision steadied, and he could only stare uneasily at the woman who looked back at him with Patrick’s eyes.
Hannah Greene was shorter than her twin brother, skinny in an unhealthy way that spoke of overuse of magic and not enough nourishment. She looked starved of life, and Jono’s mouth curled at the scent of her—a rancid bitterness that was nothing like the taint of Patrick’s magic. Hannah smelled like death underneath the ozone burn emanating from her aura.
Jono knew what that particular charged scent meant now. Having seen Marek during his visions and being in Patrick’s presence since Thursday night, Jono could recognize the presence of a god even if all he saw was insanity in the depths of Hannah’s dead-eyed gaze.
Jono wondered, staring at Patrick’s twin, what their lives would have looked like if Ethan hadn’t been such a fucking awful father. But none of them could change the past, only live the future it created.
“It seems the Moirai failed me,” Ethan said, breaking the silence. “You crossed paths with my son after all.”
Jono swallowed dryly, wishing for some water to unstick his throat. “I don’t know what the bloody hell you’re on about.”
“There are very few god packs in existence who are truly guided by the patrons their kind once worshipped. Are you going to insist you know nothing of the god that resonates in your soul?”
Jono tilted his head and attempted to shrug beneath the binding ward. “I’m an atheist.”
Ethan smiled thinly. “I sincerely doubt that.”
Jono watched in horror as Ethan pulled magic out of Hannah’s soul rather than his own, the near-celestial brightness shining through her pale skin. He poured it into the circles of the pentagram, the lines a flash-fire of magic that flowed outward before slamming back to the center like a tsunami.
The wave of magic hit Jono with all the force of a lorry. All the air was punched out of his lungs, and he couldn’t find breath enough to scream. Ugly tendrils of magic pierced his skin, reaching for his soul without care for his own well-being. That foreign touch spread through the very essence of who Jono was and refused to leave.
Deep inside, Jono felt his soul rip at the edges, the pain of it worse than the first moment of the preternatural shift, when his nerves still worked.
Then the tugging stopped, his soul held fast to his body by the ephemeral teeth and claws of a god.
“Yes, I think you’ll be of more use to me than the seer when it comes to killing Zeus,” Ethan decided with a covetous look in his eyes.
He stepped closer, mindful of the circles and lines of the pentagram, until he stood in the center with Jono. Ethan’s shiny wingtips came into view, and Jono watched as the older man crouched down in front of him. Strong fingers gripped his chin and shoved his head back, forcing Jono to look Ethan in the eyes.
“This isn’t your war. You should never have come to these shores,” Ethan said.
Somehow, Jono didn’t think the words were directed at him.
“Wasn’t my war before this week. It is now,” Jono said with a snarl more reminiscent of his wolf. “I’ll fight you until my last bloody breath.”
Jono expected the blow that punched through him like a silver bullet, foreign magic slicing across his naked body once again. The pentagram turned molten with reddish-orange power when Ethan’s magic crashed through the circles for a second time. Jono locked his scream behind his teeth, cracking a molar or two in his struggle to not give in.
Swearing, Jono glared at Ethan through the haze of magic between them, forcing back the pain with long practice.
“Then it will be my absolute pleasure to break you,” Ethan said silkily as he stood up.
Jono laughed, baring his flat human teeth at the whole bloody lot of them. “Brilliant. You sodding well do that. Good fucking luck.”
Because Jono knew something they didn’t, even with their magic keeping him bound—his body would break before his word.
Ethan wouldn’t get all of Jono, but he’d get pieces, and Jono could live with that.
Jono had a lifetime of experience in tearing himself apart. Before as the lad from Tottenham who’d tried to fit in with any numerous groups of people and never quite could. After as a werewolf with no pack to call home and still yearning to belong.
Maybe all those years of hardship were just practice for this moment. He had no doubt Ethan would try to break him. For all the trauma Jono had endured in his life, in the end, he knew he wasn’t up to surviving the level of torture he could see promised in Ethan’s eyes.
Not alone, at least.
Fenrir’s growl in his mind made Jono shiver, fingers digging into the grooves his claws had made in the hardwood floor earlier.
They cannot have you, the immortal promised.
Fenrir’s regard was a blessing, or maybe a curse. Jono couldn’t decide which when Ethan pulled a long silver stake from the inside pocket of his suit jacket, a chemical sheen glistening at the point. The smell of aconite and silver hit Jono’s nose, and he had to force aside the panic clawing at the back of his mind.
He couldn’t force back the scream when Ethan drove the stake through his left shoulder. The acidic burn of aconite seared Jono from the inside out like fire, skin and muscle ripping beneath the sharp point of the stake. Pain tripped his nerves in a way the shift from human to wolf never did, and he couldn’t stop the tears that gathered in the corner of his eyes from falling.
“You are not the predator here,” Ethan said as he ground the stake through Jono’s shoulder. “You never will be again.”
In Jono’s mind, Fenrir howled, but there was nothing the god could do as aconite ravaged his system. Between the silver stake, aconite poisoning, and magic, Jono’s ability to change forms was lost to him. Warm blood flowed out of the wound, dripping down his chest and arm. The wound throbbed in time with every heartbeat, the metal grating against tissue and bone, the aconite burn a painful heat deep inside.
Unclenching his jaw, Jono sucked in a ragged breath, never taking his eyes off Ethan and the magic sliding into the shape of a mageglobe between them once more. Behind the mage, Hannah’s broken soul that somehow carried the power of an immortal began to shine through her skin with a sickening light. Around him, the acolytes started to pray in a language Jono wasn’t familiar with.
This was a nightmare he couldn’t escape.
In the end, the only thing Jono would get to choose out of this whole fucked-up situation was when he would break. Because Ethan would break him—that’s what men like him did—but Jono would get to choose, and that was a win they could never take from him.
Running out the clock to summer solstice was the only chance he had at seeing Patrick again because Jono refused to believe the other man was gone. If he paid that price in blood, then so be it.
I’m not dying here, Jono thought fiercely.
If there was one lesson Jono had learned on the streets of London as a child that had followed him through the years, it was this: you didn’t get to keep the things you wouldn’t fight for.
18
Patrick’s feet connected with the ground, and his knees took the impact hard. Persephone kept him upright as they came out onto the dark banks of a river flowing beneath a gray sky. The wind howled over the water and across the gray wasteland that surrounded them. It chilled him worse than his mostly soaked clothes. Not even Persephone’s warm touch could drive the cold away.
The goddess pulled away and circled around to face him. Patrick’s fuzzy memory of her sharpened into focus. Persephone hadn’t changed at all, not in the years since he’d seen her when he was a child. Immortals never aged, not really, but that didn’t stop him from trying to find some differences in her face, some hint of the years he’d lived reflected back at him. But the immortal was as ageless and untouched as she had been when she’d saved him from dying beneath his father’s hands all those years ago.
In hindsight, it hadn’t been much of a rescue.
Patrick flashed back to that night in Salem, to the dark, bloody basement Persephone had pulled him out of. The memory only lasted the length of a heartbeat, but it felt like a lifetime.
He took a step toward her, ignoring the aches in his body from Cerberus’ hit. “Take me back right the fuck now. I can’t leave Jono behind. He’s supposed to stay with me.”
Persephone arched one dark eyebrow. “I am aware of what the Norns decreed, but I could not reach the wolf through Cerberus.”
“Bullshit. That mutt would’ve listened to you.”
She shrugged in the face of his anger. The wind tugged at the T-shirt she wore, the ragged threads of her denim cutoff shorts fluttering in the air. She wore sandals, but unlike Patrick, her feet weren’t sinking into the wet ground. Persephone’s golden-brown skin seemed to glow against the darkness surrounding them, as if she were the only bright spot in the realm of the dead.
Freckles dotted the bridge of her nose and cheeks, her curly, dark brown hair like a halo around her face. She didn’t seem bothered at all by the wind or the bone-deep chill that called this place home.
“You are who I wish to speak with, and only you,” Persephone said.
Patrick tried to still the rabbit-fast beating of his heart, but the rage and fear he felt wasn’t dying down anytime soon. “Take me back.”
“In due time.”
Which was a fucking riot of a joke because immortals had more time to spare than anyone. Patrick was stuck here behind the veil in the Greek Underworld where time ran slower than it did on Earth. Depending on the plane, time could also run faster, as in Underhill. Either way, Patrick couldn’t afford to lose even a single second. The quicker he got this reunion over with, the sooner he could get back to the mortal plane and the fight waiting for him.
The quicker he’d get back to Jono.
“Just let me go back. Please.”
“I see you still desire the same thing as when you were here as a child. Do you think this time you will find something different on the mortal plane when you return?”
Patrick flinched, thinking of Jono, thinking bleakly, Don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead.
He’d begged for the same result when it came to his twin sister years ago. Only when he came out of the veil into Ashanti’s waiting arms in Washington, DC, his life in Salem was forever lost to him.
“You don’t care about what I think, Persephone. Say what you want to say so I can get out of here.”
Persephone’s gaze was heavy-lidded and knowing. “My husband has always been a single-minded bastard. I love him, I always will, but I do not appreciate him attempting to do to me what he allowed to happen to his daughter. Zeus will not forgive him this time.”
“It wasn’t just your husband last time.”
“And it is not him alone now.”
Patrick chewed on his bottom lip until he tasted blood. Persephone’s statement was all the confirmation he needed to know that when he made it back through the veil, Ethan would be waiting for him.
And so would Hannah.
Persephone settled her hands on her hips, cocking her head to the side as she studied him. “I will not apologize for saving you.”
“I was eight,” Patrick bit out. “I was dying.”
“I healed you.”
He let out a bitter laugh. “You offered life to a dying child, but you never said you would own me when I begged for your help. That’s not healing, Persephone. That’s enslavement.”
“Your father and his ilk stole Macaria’s godhead when they had no right to take what they can never own.”
“Owning me won’t bring her back as she was.”
Persephone stepped closer and pressed her hands to his chest, right over the scars. “Who better to stop your father than his own son? The magic the Dominion Sect covets is old, Patrick. It is primordial. It is ours, but they use it against us when they can find us. So we will use you to break the ones perpetuating this blasphemy through blood.”
“Killing one won’t stop them all. There is no stopping a group like that by taking out a single person, even if that person comes from a founding family.”
“Your father is attempting to turn himself into a god who will head up a new pantheon, build a new myth, and rule over a new hell. He failed in Salem with Macaria. He nearly succeeded in Cairo with Ra. He tries again in New York City with Zeus. Ethan is too prideful to ever share that glory with someone else.”
Deep down, Patrick knew she was right. Ethan had always been ambitious during his years rising in the ranks of the SOA until his true allegiance was brought to light. That ambition had proven useful to the Dominion Sect.
It took a mix of blood magic, necromancy, and soultakers to carve a godhead from an immortal’s body and soul. The essence of a god was too powerful for mortals to carry alone, but Ethan had been determined to try. Both Patrick and Hannah were supposed to die for their father’s ambitions the same way their mother had.
Except he hadn’t died because Persephone had found him and stolen him away to the Underworld. Her interference had broken the spell his father had sought to complete, taking Patrick’s soul and blood out of the sacrificial circle. In the end, Macaria’s godhead had been transferred into Hannah’s soul instead of Ethan’s, and his twin was now forever bound to their father. The feedback loop between their souls and the siphoning off of her power to Dominion Sect acolytes kept Hannah’s body from dying. As for Macaria, she wasn’t dead and gone, but she might as well be in the eyes of the Greek pantheon.
When it came down to it, Patrick had never truly escaped that basement. Part of him was still standing in a grave.
“Then maybe you gods should get rid of the problem yourselves,” Patrick finally said, shoving old memories aside.
“Your father has immortal allies the same way you do.”
“Ethan is not my father, and you are no ally.”
Persephone gave him a derisive look, her gold-brown eyes burning straight through him. “That is what you take away from this conversation? Half his blood runs through your veins.”
Patrick took a step back, putting distance between them. Pebbles shifted around his feet, and the wind snaked its way beneath his jacket, icy and sharp. “A father is more than blood. You immortals never seem to understand that.”
“We understand family and the trials that come with them far more than you mortals do.”
Persephone reached for him again, her fingers brushing against his cold cheek before he turned his face away. Looking out over the River Styx, Patrick could just make out a hazy, bobbing light coming closer out of the gloom.
“You wanted the arms of your mother when you were a child bleeding at my feet. You wanted kindness,” Persephone said with all the gentleness of an iron brand searing skin. “Nothing in war is ever kind, Patrick.”
