On the Wings of War (Soulbound Book 5)

by Hailey Turner

  The Catacombs were the resting place of more than six million dead, to say nothing of the aboveground graveyards in Paris, church crypts, and monuments that doubled as tombs. The only way to stop the dead was to get the Morrígan’s staff. They couldn’t do that stuck where they were.

  “How did you get here?” Patrick asked, looking at Lucien.

  The master vampire peeled his lips back in an annoyed snarl. “Rooftops. The streets were impassible.”

  “Any other Night Courts going to join the fight?”

  Lucien shrugged. “They’ll protect their territory first.”

  “Of course they will.”

  “They’ll still fight, just not here,” Carmen said.

  Lucien set the grenade launcher on the ground and took a moment to reload. “We can’t eat the dead, remember? The Night Courts here want Paris returned to the humans as much as you do.”

  The French ministry magic users eyed Lucien and his vampires with more than a little trepidation, but at least no one attempted to challenge their presence. Patrick really didn’t want to have to explain his relationship with Lucien to foreign allies, and he knew this would get back to people who weren’t Setsuna. Before anyone could start asking questions, the earth trembled in a way Patrick didn’t like.

  “Please tell me that’s more zombies and not an earthquake,” Spencer said as he scooped up Fatima into his arms.

  “Look,” Wade said, yanking on Patrick’s arm to turn him around.

  Patrick stared at where Wade pointed, right hand bypassing his rifle and straying to his dagger. The manhole cover behind them in the street between two abandoned cars vibrated in place for a few seconds before exploding upward, shattering from the force of its expulsion. Patrick expanded his personal shields to cover Wade, ensuring the teenager wasn’t hit by any stray shrapnel.

  Every single magic user had a spell ready at their fingertips when a wooden pestle thrust itself up out of the dark hole and knocked against its edges to force it wider. The earth obeyed the silent command, and the hole expanded with a grating crunch.

  “Hold fire!” Patrick yelled.

  Nadine repeated the order in French as the sewer entrance finished expanding, providing more than enough room for Baba Yaga to rise up from below on her floating mortar made of bones. The skulls that decorated it still glowed like they had in the Catacombs, but at least none of them moved as if they carried souls within them. Her face was just as ugly as Patrick remembered though.

  Someone—on the French side of the group, not the vampire side—retched loudly.

  Baba Yaga banged the pestle against bone in an absentminded way, staring at the zombies clawing against Nadine’s shield. “Is not good for business.”

  “Oh, you think?” Patrick couldn’t help but ask.

  Baba Yaga looked down her large nose at him, mouth twisting disdainfully. “Below is empty. Will take you through.”

  Spencer whistled. “Well, shit. The bastard emptied the Catacombs.”

  Jono settled by Patrick’s side, growling softly. Patrick didn’t think twice about clenching his fingers around Jono’s fur. He remembered the map Lisette had pulled out of her backpack, knew how twisted and convoluted the Catacombs were.

  “There’s no direct route from here to the Eiffel Tower,” he said.

  “Will make way as far as can go,” Baba Yaga retorted.

  “Not through the veil. There’s only what? Two hours left before midnight? It’s still summer solstice. We go through the veil and we risk Ilya completing whatever spell he’s trying to finalize tonight. We can’t afford to lose time like that.”

  “Think I not know risk?” The mortar drifted closer to the ground so she could lean forward, resting the pestle against the asphalt. “Dead are Peklabog domain. Earth? Mine. Will make way.”

  She banged the pestle against the ground for emphasis, cracking the asphalt. Patrick stared at the crack in the earth before sharing a long look with Jono, who only chuffed at him, incapable of human speech with a wolf’s mouth.

  “What the hell?” Patrick said. “We’re fighting with Lucien. She can’t be any worse.”

  The piece of bone that slammed into his hard helmet had Patrick looking over his shoulder, scowling at Lucien, who raised both middle fingers at him rather than rip out his throat. War always did make strange bedfellows.

  “We don’t have a choice. Staying here is a losing battle,” Nadine said tiredly.

  The fight at the foot of the Eiffel Tower wasn’t going to be much better, but it would be there, and that was all that mattered.

  “Let’s go,” Patrick said.

  Baba Yaga led the way, floating backward until her mortar hovered over the manhole. She descended into the sewer in one smooth motion, the hole enlarging in a way that made asphalt crack.

  Nadine pointed at her shield. “I’ll go last. I’ll draw my magic down after everyone is below.”

  “The dead will keep coming,” Spencer warned as he carried Fatima with him to the hole.

  Patrick conjured up a mageglobe, filling it with a raw magic that was little more than a grenade without a pin and a command trigger in the back of his mind. “I’ll buy us some time.”

  Nadine nodded, then raised her voice to give the order to the French magic users. The group didn’t hesitate before following Spencer into the sewer. Lucien and his Night Court went next, dropping down into the dark one at a time. Then it was Sage’s turn, followed by Wade, but Jono waited for Patrick.

  Patrick gripped his fur, sparing a second to lean over and brush his lips across the tip of one ear. “Go. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Jono blinked at him with bright blue eyes streaked through with white. Patrick wondered how much longer it would be until Fenrir joined the fight.

  Patrick watched Jono slide underground before crouching by the edge and staring into the dark. Far, far down below he could make out the pinpricks of witchlights. He didn’t think sewers went that deep, but there was only one way to find out.

  Patrick threw himself into the hole and skidded down a steeply slanted hill of cold earth to the bottom. Jono was there to stop him from tumbling any farther, a solid wall of muscle that didn’t move an inch. Patrick got to his feet, the chill below drying the sweat on his skin from the long hours fighting in the sun.

  Then Nadine came sliding down, body glimmering in violet magic as she pulled her shields down behind her. Beyond her, the lit-up skulls of zombies appeared in the dark, and he could hear the clattering of bone.

  “They’re coming!” Nadine shouted.

  She hit the bottom and pitched into his arms. Patrick hauled her up, and she went racing after the others, following Baba Yaga. Patrick took up the rearguard, sliding into the tunnel Baba Yaga had made and releasing his mageglobe behind him. The blast of raw magic brought down the earth above, the cave-in flattening the zombies hunting them.

  In the dark tunnel beneath Paris that spun and grated like bones twisting in a joint from an immortal’s magic, Patrick and the others ran from one hopeless fight to another.

  Baba Yaga stepped off her mortar as the earth trembled around them and split upward. The bones of its making rearranged themselves into a dome and pushed against the dirt falling down around them. The slant of earth was just as steep as their way in.

  Nadine pushed her way to the front and went first, a single violet mageglobe lighting the way, her shield a pressure in the air Patrick could almost touch. Everyone else followed after her, with Patrick taking up the rearguard.

  He paused at the bottom, long enough to look Baba Yaga in the eye. “Peklabog will know you helped us.”

  Baba Yaga smacked her pestle lightly against the back of his calves. “Is not problem. Am remembered more than him.”

  Patrick took Baba Yaga at her word and climbed out of the tunnel straight into a hellish fight.

  27

  Spencer offered his hand, and Patrick took it, getting hauled out of the hole Baba Yaga had carved right in the center of
the Champs de Mars. Nadine’s shield held strong between them and the horde of zombies that blanketed the park in front of the Eiffel Tower. What zombies that had been trapped inside her shield with them had been taken care of by Spencer judging by the lifeless bodies and skeletons strewn under everyone’s feet.

  Patrick looked over Spencer’s shoulder at where the Eiffel Tower stretched to the sky, lit up by magic rather than its normal evening light show. The area was saturated in so much black magic that it was all Patrick could sense, all he could taste in the back of his throat.

  “There is no way we’re getting through all of the dead that stand between us and where Ilya is,” Spencer said grimly.

  Patrick nodded, knowing Spencer had reached the limits of what his magic could do. With no weapon of the gods and a monument to amplify his magic like Ilya, they were left with a measly amount of power, no matter their ability to tap the ley lines fed by the nexus under Paris.

  “We have to hope if we get the staff and break his spell that will stop the zombies,” Patrick said.

  “We need to get to the fucker to do that,” Nadine said, arms outstretched above her as she poured magic into her shields. “How do you expect us to clear a path to him and whoever is protecting him if we’re buried under zombies?”

  Patrick looked at the dead massing beyond her shield and trying to climb it, searching for a way in. Then he looked back at their ragtag group of fighters who couldn’t do much fighting stuck behind her shield. They needed to clear a path to Ilya, but there was probably hundreds of thousands of zombies between them and the Patriarch of Souls. Fighting piecemeal wasn’t going to work.

  Patrick stared up at the Eiffel Tower and the magic surrounding it, fingers tightening on his Carbine. Then he unclipped the rifle from his vest, disengaged the magazine, and passed it over to Nadine.

  “It’s half-empty,” he told her. “Take it.”

  Nadine took it and clipped it to the front of her vest. “Plan?”

  “Expand the shield. We’re going to need the room.”

  Nadine didn’t argue, merely cupped her hands together above her head before wrenching them apart. Her shield pushed back against the dead, zombies falling over each other and getting trampled as she fought to get them space. Patrick curled his fingers at Wade, and the teenager hurried over.

  “You want me to breathe fire again?” Wade asked.

  “Yes, but first I want you to shift mass,” Patrick said.

  Wade glanced uneasily at the French magic users before squaring his shoulders. “All right.”

  Patrick gripped Wade’s shoulder, giving him a comforting squeeze. “Listen to me. I’m not going to let anyone come after you when this is over. If any government tries to put a claim on you, I’ll stonewall them until Lucien can get you home safely. He’s good at crossing borders unnoticed.”

  “Do you think the government here will do that? Try to keep me?”

  “No one is keeping you, Wade. Not if I have anything to say about it. But greedy people do stupid shit all the time, and I want you to know that you’re pack and we’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe.”

  Some of the tightness in his body eased beneath Patrick’s grip, and the blinding smile Wade gave him strangely didn’t seem out of place while surrounded by the dead.

  “I know you will. Why do you think I wanted to stay with you and not go with General Reed last summer?”

  Patrick couldn’t help but smile back. “After you shift, get high and burn the fuck out of the zombies between us and Ilya. We’ll make sure no spells knock you out of the sky. After that, burn whatever you can reach. Be careful of anyone on the ground fighting for our side.”

  As a dragon, Wade was immune to mortal magic. While getting hit by a barrage of spells might not hurt him, it could knock him out of the sky due to the sheer number of attacks the Orthodox Church of the Dead and the Dominion Sect might throw at him. It would be Patrick’s job to keep him safe.

  “I bet they’d think twice about throwing anything at me if I was on the Eiffel Tower,” Wade said.

  Patrick let him go with one last comforting smack on the shoulder. “Don’t break it. France will never forgive the United States if you knock it over.”

  “Well, if it gets broken, then I’ll just keep it.”

  “You aren’t keeping another country’s national monument.”

  Wade heaved out a put upon sigh. “Fine.”

  “Nadine,” Patrick called out. “Wade is going to shift. He’ll need room to fly out.”

  “I can’t shield him,” Nadine warned.

  “You won’t need to. Just tell everyone else we’re going to need to block any spells aimed at him.”

  “If I reduce my shield to half height, the zombies will climb over.”

  “I’ll keep them at bay until Wade is in the air,” Spencer said.

  Nadine turned her head and called out orders to the French magic users. Jono herded Patrick as far from Wade as they could get while Sage did the same for Nadine. Patrick tossed the body of his rifle aside and unsheathed his dagger. The matte-black blade flared up white with heavenly fire. The same sort of light began to burn through Jono’s eyes, washing out the familiar blue for something otherworldly.

  Patrick scowled down at Fenrir. “Don’t let Jono get hurt.”

  “Don’t waste your blessing,” Fenrir said, voice deep and cracking, sounding the way the dead did when Patrick walked over broken bones.

  Patrick readied a dozen mageglobes before looking over at where Wade stood in the center of the space Nadine had carved out for them. Wade looked him in the eye and nodded.

  Shiny red scales pushed through his skin in a rippling wave. His brown eyes turned gold, pupils elongating into slits. Pressure in the air shifted, and the mass of Wade’s dragon body he somehow kept contained in an earthly form came into existence. Wade’s human body shimmered, stretching into a larger one that grew and grew and grew.

  He stretched out his sinuous neck and powerful tail, snaking both over everyone’s heads. His wings cut through the air and scraped against the edges of Nadine’s shield as he tried to flap them. Wade’s wedge-shaped head angled down, one huge eye blinking at Patrick as he puffed out a hint of smoke between teeth that were half Patrick’s height.

  “Now, Nadine!” Patrick yelled.

  Her shield split above them, opening up to the sky. It shrank to half height, and Wade wasted no time in flinging himself into the sky, wings flapping hard enough that Patrick was pushed to his knees by the downdraft.

  Zombies spilled over the sides of Nadine’s shield, but every single body that fell quit moving before they hit the ground, Spencer’s magic breaking the souls free and putting them to rest. As soon as Wade was clear, Nadine snapped her shield back together again and layered it as thick as she could, knowing what was coming next.

  Magic cut through the air, aiming for Wade, but Patrick sent a volley of strike spells through Nadine’s shield to intercept them. His magic wasn’t the only one defending Wade, as the French magic users hit back as well.

  Wade gained altitude with a fierce roar, spitting a fireball at a spell that managed to slip past. The magic was broken and incinerated, never getting close to do any harm. He soared toward the Eiffel Tower, banking wide around the monument to dodge a flurry of attack spells, half of which exploded harmlessly in the air thanks to Patrick and the others.

  Patrick watched Wade turn on a wingtip, bringing him closer to the Eiffel Tower. The ochre-colored magic covering every last inch of iron didn’t seem to affect Wade when he landed on the monument. Wings flapping for balance, Wade curled his talons around the metal beams, one wing stretched all the way up toward the top of the tower, the other half folded against his back.

  He thrust his head forward toward the park below and roared loud enough to be heard across Paris. The dragon fire that exploded from his mouth could probably be seen from Sacré-Cœur.

  Nadine’s shields went opaque in defense of the ferocious heat o
f Wade’s dragon fire that rained down on the massed walking dead that stood between them and the Eiffel Tower. Patrick sweated from the heat even through Nadine’s defensive magic. He could see layers shear off from her shield, only to be replaced by more as she held steady.

  The smell of fire and sulfur burned away the stench of the dead. It took maybe just over a minute for Wade to clear the way, and Nadine didn’t waste any time once he finished and banked his fire. She split her shield down the middle and reshaped it into a defensive U-shaped wall. It left the charred park that had become a battlefield clear for them to fight in.

  The fencing that separated the grass from the pathway had melted beneath Wade’s dragon fire, giving them a clear shot forward. Squinting through the eerie light emanating from the Eiffel Tower, Patrick could sense a riot of black magic forming.

  “Move!” Patrick yelled.

  Patrick ran forward, Spencer keeping pace with him as Fenrir raced ahead in Jono’s body. Fatima was a tawny streak against the ground as she scouted ahead, the cold trailing in her wake a brief respite from the lingering heat.

  Wade kept spitting fire outside Nadine’s shields at zombies when he wasn’t trying to fry the magic users at the base of the Eiffel Tower. He scuttled over the monument to remain a moving target, shaking off the handful of spells directed his way. Most spells were now being aimed at Patrick’s group, and he got busy neutralizing as many as he could.

  Running toward oncoming fire was always a risk, and some spells got through, exploding on the ruined ground between them. Patrick ripped his personal shields out of his skin, strengthened them, and kept running, dagger burning bright in his right hand while Srecha’s blessing burned in his left.

  Spells crashed to the ground around him, three out of two dozen he hadn’t been quick enough to neutralize. The explosions sent him crashing to the ground, sliding through ash, tasting the dead on his tongue.

  Patrick shoved himself to his feet and kept going.

  Another burst of dragon flame aimed at the base of the Eiffel Tower bought them time, a handful of seconds to cover ground without being bombarded by magic. It got them closer, but not close enough.