“The bar could be an outlier attack, but who knows. Better safe than sorry.”
Patrick spent the next two hours or so monitoring the scene and quietly tagging the people who would need to have their souls scrubbed of the taint by himself or one of the witches employed by the PCB. Jono stayed out of the way on the living room couch, attention on his phone. He did let Patrick know Marek was home and that nothing had tripped the barrier ward during a lull moment.
“That’s good, innit?” Jono asked, looking up from the string of text messages.
Patrick shrugged. “We’ll see.”
He wouldn’t put anything past Ethan and whoever else was aligned with the Dominion Sect helping to commit murder in this city. Patrick stayed until the body was wheeled out on a gurney in a black body bag, overseen by a PCB-affiliated witch. The body would be taken on a one-way trip to the ME’s warded incinerator. People who died by way of demons or black magic were always burned. Fire permanently cleansed anything, even the dead. There could be no burial for a body ruined by hell.
“This won’t look good in the press,” Casale said before they left the apartment.
“I know. Just keep them at bay,” Patrick replied.
“That’s going to be difficult after today considering we have two more bodies in less than a week. Talk of a serial killer is making everyone uneasy and the commissioner wants answers. So find me some.”
“He does know I took the case over, right? I’m not at his beck and call.”
Casale nodded. “He knows. That doesn’t change the fact we’re doing all the legwork for you.”
Patrick didn’t say anything to that, attributing Casale’s annoyance to the early-morning wake-up call they’d all been subjected to. He waved at Jono to follow him to the elevator while Casale coordinated with the PR representative out of DCPI on how best to handle the press down on the street. Jono kept his sunglasses on as they left the building. Outside, the sky was lightening from the encroaching sunrise.
Patrick pulled out his phone as they walked down the pavement toward his car. He scrolled through his contacts for Setsuna’s cell phone number, not her direct office line, and called her. It rang five times, but she didn’t pick up, the call going to voicemail.
His message was short and to the point. “Ninth body. Call me.”
“You’re going to get more bodies, won’t you?” Jono asked quietly as they ducked under the police tape.
“Yeah,” Patrick said, mouth twisting at that admission.
“How many more, you think?”
“I don’t know.”
He didn’t; not really. The number of people the Dominion Sect had sacrificed to the hells in order to call forth enough soultakers to rip open the veil at the start of the Thirty-Day War had never been finalized. A spell like that required a range of different magic, and the mages who had performed it were wanted all over the world.
That spell was finding its bones in New York City.
Somehow, Patrick needed to stop what was happening.
He pulled out his keys and unlocked the car with a push of a button when they were only a few feet away. Before he even lifted his thumb off the key fob, the car exploded.
Patrick felt it spark at the very edge of his awareness, a quicksilver heat that jerked him out of the calm city street to the uncertainty of the front lines he thought he’d left by the wayside three years ago. He grabbed blindly for a weapon he no longer carried, the weight of his rifle an absence only replaced in his nightmares. Patrick’s instinct to fight would never die.
You could take a soldier out of war, but you couldn’t take the war out of the soldier.
Even as he ripped his shields out of his body, hands grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him backward with preternatural strength and speed. Patrick’s feet left the ground, partly from Jono’s efforts to get them clear and partly from the concussive force of the explosion ripping through the air. The scorching heat of hellfire burst outward from the car, licking at his shields as it sent a plume of toxic smoke into the sun-kissed sky. Glass and metal cut through the air like deadly shrapnel.
Jono’s preternatural speed got them meters away, just not completely in the clear. They crashed to the pavement two cars away from the epicenter of someone’s attempt to murder Patrick. Strong arms wrapped around his body as he landed on top of Jono rather than hard concrete. Jono grunted in his ear from the impact, holding him tightly as the leading edge of the hellfire explosion burned against Patrick’s shields.
Patrick thrust both his arms into the air, a mageglobe spinning rapidly in the space between his hands. In war, even seconds could be too long to guarantee survival, but the shield ward had already formed in his mind the moment his subconscious recognized what was happening. His personal shields would keep them safe, but everyone else on the street needed cover.
Patrick poured his magic into a tall, curved shield between the street and the hellfire raining down like metaphysical napalm. This defensive ward wasn’t one that came easily to him, but it formed and it held, and that was all that mattered.
Screams filled the air, cutting through the ringing in his ears. Jono shoved them both to a sitting position, one of his hands having slipped underneath Patrick’s shirt during their mad scramble to get clear. The heat emanating from Jono’s touch seared through Patrick even as all his concentration focused on the shield ward.
He dragged his magic higher, wider, covering the street around them and forcing it up the sides of buildings. Patrick put his magic between everyone and the terrifying destruction of a hellfire bomb usually only found in a war zone. He spread his fingers, palms pressed flat against the distant sky as he shored up the structure of the shield with as much magic as he could spare.
The shield wavered, not nearly as strong as he needed it to be, and he could feel his magic leaving his soul faster than usual. Patrick gritted his teeth and concentrated on holding it up the way he’d done countless times on the front lines—by ignoring the pain and pushing through his limitations as much as he could.
