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.
Jonolaughed, baring his flat human teeth at the whole bloody lot of them. “Brilliant. You sodding well do that. Goodfuckingluck.”
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.Beforeas the lad from Tottenham who’d tried to fit in with any numerous groups of people and never quite could.Afteras 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, Fenrirhowled, 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 waswhenhe would break. Because Ethan would break him—that’s what men like him did—but Jono would get tochoose, 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 feetconnected 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.
