At least Patrick finally had a rifle. While it wasn’t his pistol, maybe he’d stop whinging now.
Nadine hooked the strap connected to her rifle to her vest. “Ready.”
“Ready,” the other two echoed.
They left the bedroom for the living room where Sage and Wade patiently waited. Sage noted their weapons before her gaze skipped to Jono. “Shall we leave our clothes here and shift outside?”
Jono nodded, and they both set about stripping off their clothes. No one cared that they were nude, and neither he nor Sage were body shy.
They left the flat as a group, with Nadine locking the door behind them and sending a pulse of magic through the threshold with a flick of her fingers. They took the stairs down to the ground floor and emerged onto the street in bright, early afternoon sunlight. Nadine set a shield over the door, sealing it shut.
Jono didn’t waste any time shifting forms, and neither did Sage. His body twisted, bones breaking while skin split as he shifted from human to wolf. The agony of the shift lasted only for a second before his pain receptors turned off. Colors bled into different shades, the world tilting on its axis as everything human about his body became wolf.
Everything but his mind and soul, and the patron god that resided deep inside him.
Fenrir rose up through the depths of his soul, a powerful presence that pressed against the back of Jono’s mind. He shook his massive wolf head to settle his vision, Fenrir clawing at his awareness.
Patrick looked at Jono, jaw tight, smelling of grim determination and a hint of fear for the fight ahead. “Ready?”
Jono growled deep in his throat, the sound echoed by Sage’s low snarl. Beneath the sound was the ghost of Fenrir’s voice in the back of his mind, sharp like teeth.
Let’s hunt.
They started down the street, the scent of death growing in the air as high above, the cries of ravens and crows drifted on the summer wind.
25
Patrick formed a mageglobe, filled it with a shock-wave spell, and lobbed it at the horde of zombies about to overrun a group of police and more than a dozen civilians standing their ground at the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. Whatever witch they had with them was barely holding up a shield, her magic flickering from lack of strength.
When the mageglobe exploded, the shock wave that followed slammed through the zombies, pushing them through the air and over the street, away from the boxed in police and civilians. Some got severed on abandoned cars, leaving limbs crawling about. With clear line of sight achieved, Nadine was able to raise a shield around the group to give them some breathing room.
Jono and Sage veered right, racing toward where a police unit had set up a barrier near the building to their right. Rather than weave through cars, the pair played hopscotch with the vehicles, their weight crushing the roofs. It still got them close to the fresher-looking zombies coming out of the Jardins des Champs-Élysées.
Violet magic followed Jono and Sage in their push forward—Nadine keeping them covered in case of any friendly fire incident from the police. Patrick hefted his rifle up higher, digging the butt against his shoulder.
“You’re up, Dead Boy,” Patrick said.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve had to tell you Hellraisers I’m not dead, Razzle Dazzle,” Spencer said.
“Stop arguing and clear us some space,” Nadine said, attention split between the two groups she was protecting.
Spencer jumped onto a car, climbing onto the roof. Fatima joined him, twining between his legs to sit between his feet. Her tail lashed against his ankles as Spencer conjured up two mageglobes, the summer heat fading around him.
Patrick shifted on his feet, moving so he could watch their six. Nadine’s shield around them was a protection no zombie could get through, but they still needed to know what threats were coming at them.
Spencer thrust one arm toward the small group near the obelisk and the other toward the park. His dark green mageglobes streaked through the air like heat-seeking missiles, exploding amidst the zombies. Bones and bodies went rigid, the malevolent magic sustaining them fading away as Spencer ripped the wandering souls out of the physical bodies. They hovered above the motionless dead like sticky fog, moving like nothing else in nature.
Fatima launched herself off the car, fog drifting around her small body. She opened her mouth wide, and the cold got a little worse. Patrick watched as the souls were drawn to her across the square, getting sucked in like a whirlpool, pulled by Spencer’s magic. His magic guided them home to rest, Fatima the transition point between the living world and the place beyond the veil where the souls should’ve never been disturbed.
The psychopomp’s form flickered, like a computer glitch, jaws snapping shut on the final bit of soul slipping past her teeth. Fatima stretched before giving herself a shake and looking back at Spencer. She made a small questioning sound Patrick couldn’t parse.
“Who’s a good girl?” Wade cooed, walking up to the car and holding out his arms to her.
Fatima chirped proudly before jumping into his arms. Wade cuddled her happily while Spencer only shook his head.
“You’re spoiling her. She has four feet and can walk on her own,” Spencer said as he jumped off the car.
“But I like carrying her.” Wade scratched behind Fatima’s ears, not bothered in the least by the fact she’d eaten at least a hundred souls just now. “She deserves to be spoiled.”
Spencer shook his head, finally giving up on the argument he’d been having with Wade since they left Nadine’s apartment.
“Let’s pull those people back while we have the chance,” Nadine said, lowering the shield around them.
Jono and Sage were standing guard some distance away from the police by the building, facing the park to give a warning at the first sight of the next wave of zombies. Patrick was under no illusions this horde was the only one in the area.
It had taken them five hours to make it from Nadine’s apartment to the square, each street put behind them a hard-fought battle. It hadn’t been a direct push, not with the amount of dead in the streets, people needing rescuing, and themselves needing to conserve their energy. The path had been winding and brutal. They’d lost Wade inside a boulangerie for half a block a couple of hours ago before anyone realized he wasn’t with them. He’d come away from that excursion with half a dozen premade sandwiches and a declaration of “I’m not dying hungry.”
“You’re not dying, period,” Patrick had retorted.
Lunch had been eaten on the run—fuel for their magic and to stop Wade from complaining—as they followed the makeshift lines of defense popping up on the Paris streets. From police to the army, locals and tourists alike, those with magic were standing their ground alongside some from the preternatural world. Pockets of safety were being defended against the walking dead, but Patrick didn’t know how long they would last. People needed to sleep, and communication was still down.
Summer solstice was the longest day of the year. They still had four hours of daylight left, and they weren’t anywhere close to the Eiffel Tower. The spell Ilya had cast wasn’t close to peaking yet, which made Patrick wonder if Peklabog had been given the Morrígan’s staff, or if the necromancer had kept it for himself.
Neither option was a good one.
Patrick weaved his way through the abandoned cars, keeping watch on their six as Nadine led the way across the square to the obelisk. She made a hole in her shield covering the small monument for them to step through before talking in rapid French with the nearest police officer.
Patrick made his way to the group of civilians, several of whom were standing over a teenaged girl who sat on the ground. She was holding on to her knees, head hanging down, breathing raggedly.
“Wade, give me one of your cookies,” Patrick said as he lowered his rifle.
“But they’re my cookies!” Wade protested, still holding Fatima.
“Wade.”
The teen grumbled as he put Fat
ima down and stuck his hand into his pocket, coming up with a folded napkin. Inside was a broken palmier, but the sweet was still edible. He grudgingly passed it to Patrick, who took it and knelt in front of the teenaged witch.
“Here.” He offered her the palmier, and the sugary scent got her to lift her head. “Eat this.”
“Danke,” she muttered.
She took a piece and popped it into her mouth. The second it touched her tongue, she yanked the napkin out of Patrick’s hand, stuffing the rest of the cookie into her mouth and chewing fast. The sugary pick-me-up would give her a quick burst of strength, enough to get her feet back under her.
Patrick looked over his shoulder. “Nadine?”
She turned away from the handful of police officers and approached him. “Let’s get them across the square. Some of the police are hunkering down in the buildings there. They have a sorceress who is warding all entrances and windows. They’re using it to house civilians who can’t make it home behind thresholds.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Patrick extended his hand to the teenaged witch and helped her to her feet. “Come on, let’s get you guys to safety.”
The second the words were out of his mouth, Jono howled a warning. Patrick snapped his head around, getting eyes on the zombies breaking free of the tree line across the way. They moved faster than the skeletons they’d just cleared, bloodied and newly dead, raised by magic. Between them cut a couple of darker, more demonic looking drekavacs.
“Oh, this feels like Cairo all over again,” Spencer mused, already raising both hands and conjuring up another set of mageglobes. “Could’ve done without reliving that time.”
“There aren’t any soultakers,” Patrick pointed out.
“Fuck, man. Don’t tempt fate.”
Considering the Fates had been the ones to keep prodding Patrick down this road, he thought it was a little late for that.
Jono and Sage surged across the square, blurred figures that twisted between cars as they charged the drekavacs. Movement out of the corner of his eye had Patrick looking left, squinting against the sunlight at the zombies coming from the direction of the bridge.
Patrick raised his rifle, conjuring up half a dozen mageglobes as he tapped a ley line through the soulbond. “We got incoming.”
Spencer nudged Fatima with his foot and pointed at the park. “Go.”
The psychopomp yowled before running off, trailing Spencer’s magic behind her, fog breaking in the air. Patrick reached out and grabbed Spencer by the back of his tactical vest, hauling the other mage with him as Nadine and the police corralled the civilians huddling around the obelisk and got them moving.
“Think Wade would share any more of his cookies?” Spencer muttered, not fighting Patrick’s pull as he was dragged between cars, just like old times.
“Yes,” Patrick said, lying through his teeth.
“Uh, no,” Wade protested.
Spencer kept conjuring, but his tone turned pleading. “I need a pick-me-up.”
“That sounds like a you problem and not a problem for my cookies.”
“Both of you, shut up. Spencer, focus on the zombies,” Patrick snapped.
Spencer snagged a mageglobe in one hand before throwing it toward the zombies coming from the bridge. “I am.”
Even as he spoke, Spencer’s magic ripped through the zombies they could see, separating the souls that animated bones and flesh. Patrick could sense the tearing as Spencer pulled the souls free, sending them to rest with Fatima to guide them. The twisting fog they created moved swiftly toward the psychopomp, who swallowed them whole.
But the zombies kept coming.
Jono and Sage stayed within the square, not chasing the zombies into the park. The zombies on the bridge coming from the Left Bank were skeletons filled with souls, bones that hadn’t seen the light of day in centuries suddenly called back to life.
“Shit,” Spencer swore as he stumbled over someone’s discarded bag.
Patrick kept him on his feet, hauling the other man along toward the police barrier. “No luck?”
“They just keep coming.”
He sounded aggravated. Hours of already breaking souls free nonstop were starting to catch up with him. Even with the ability to tap a ley line, mages weren’t inexhaustible. It still took concentration and power to do what Spencer did, and that wore on a person’s strength. Patrick knew Spencer needed a breather, so when they ushered everyone behind Nadine’s shield and the dragged-together cars in front of the building at the corner of the square, Patrick shoved Spencer down on the steps.
“Sit. Call Fatima back and take a break,” Patrick said.
Spencer scowled, nose scrunching up in distaste at that order. “I’m fine.”
“We need to stagger the use of your magic or you’ll be no good to us when we finally reach the Eiffel Tower. I have an idea that should get us across the bridge without needing to break souls this time around.”
“Is this one of your ideas that Gerard always said gave him a heart attack?”
“You think you’re funny, but you’re not.”
“So it is one of those ideas.”
Patrick ignored him. Nadine was talking in rapid French to several police officers, hopefully getting updates. Communication was still impossible with dead electronics across the city. Coordination was dangerously hit-or-miss.
Zombies broke through the tree line again, staggering toward them. Patrick’s mouth twisted as he took in their state—fresh bodies of the newly raised dead. The skeleton zombies and drekavacs Ilya had raised were hunting and killing Paris citizens for fresher bodies. Some of the souls animating the dead were from sacrifices, others from being killed, but the sheer number of zombies crawling out of the ground meant the Morrígan’s staff was more dangerous than any of them had thought.
“Jono!” Patrick yelled. “Sage! Fall back!”
Their snarls were confirmation they’d heard him, but they were in danger of being cut off in seconds as the zombies surged to cut them off. Patrick jumped onto the hood of a car, conjured up a mageglobe, and filled it with another shock-wave ward. He threw it at the zombies closest to their location, letting magic tear through the bodies.
The dead were blown backward, some bodies ripped apart from the force of the spell. It cleared a small area of the square, but Patrick could see more zombies moving in the park, the new group threatening to box in Jono and Sage.
“Jono!”
Patrick moved forward, calling up his magic even as he raised his rifle. Before he could pull the trigger, a multitude of howls ripped through the air. Patrick removed his finger from the trigger as a snarling group of werewolves raced around the far corner by the park. They hurtled themselves at the zombies, fangs and claws viciously tearing through bodies.
Jono and Sage took the opportunity to pull back, vaulting over parked cars to put distance between themselves and the zombies. Patrick waited until they had almost reached his position before flinging his mageglobes at the latest wave of zombies. The blast of raw magic erupted in the scrum, turning the bodies into miniscule pieces of bone and meat.
The other werecreatures retreated to their position at the building. As soon as they were close enough, Nadine expanded her shield over them, her magic giving the world a faintly violet cast to it. Patrick pulled back to the clear space behind the barrier of cars. Jono and Sage followed after him, along with a brown werewolf half the size of Jono. All three crouched nearby, but only Jono and the other werewolf shifted.
The grinding sound of bones breaking and reforming made Patrick wince. He never looked away from the twisting bodies of fur that became skin, limbs settling from wolf to human. Jono shook his head to clear it, remaining crouched on one knee, naked and streaked with blood that wasn’t all his.
The woman who knelt on the other side of Sage had skin so dark it looked glossy in the sunlight. Her hair was twisted into Bantu knots, and her dark brown eyes were locked on Jono. She said something in rapid French that ma
de Jono shake his head.
“Sorry, don’t speak French,” he said.
“You are not with our god pack,” the woman said in heavily accented French.
“Passing through.”
“What caused this?”
“Bloke with a god complex. We’re trying to get to the Eiffel Tower.”
She gave him a troubled look. “That way lies certain death. My pack and I had to swim across the Seine for safety. The Left Bank is overrun with zombies.”
Patrick looked across the square and the smudge of swarming zombies he could see beyond the obelisk where the Pont de la Concorde started. “So is the Right Bank. Nowhere in Paris will be safe until we take down the one responsible for all this. If you keep trying to run, you’ll be overwhelmed, and the last thing any of us need is a zombie werewolf.”
“We tried to help people to safety but the zombies were too much.”
“That’s probably going to happen on this side of the Seine. You can keep pushing through to your homes and risk getting boxed in and killed, or get behind the shields here in this building,” Patrick said.
The woman glanced at Jono, her full lips twisting. “Paris is our home. Hiding will not save it.”
“Everyone is without communications all across the city. If you’re willing to fight, do you think you and your pack could run relays between police headquarters on Île de la Cité and the Ministry of Magical Affairs?” Nadine asked.
The woman blinked before her expression hardened. “Oui. There are fifteen of us in my pack.”
“I’ll pull one of the police officers from their duties here, and they can act as a liaison once we get you to the Ministry.”
It was a risky endeavor, but connecting two major groups of first responders would be helpful in the long run. Patrick met Jono’s gaze and gave him a nod.
“I have a plan to get across the bridge,” Patrick said.
Jono sighed, resting both hands on the ground. “Will the bridge survive?”
On the Wings of War (Soulbound Book 5) Page 30