The beast broken forth from his bones was a familiar shape he’d learned to find comfort in. Jono snarled weakly against the binding wards holding him down in the center of a pentagram. The expensive wooden floor beneath him had been ruined where his claws could reach, but it wasn’t enough to break himself free.
Be still.
The voice that echoed through Jono’s mind came from a distance, carrying a roughness to it that sounded how teeth biting into flesh felt. Jono could only obey, the connection in his soul that tied him to his patron tightening like a bowstring. Fenrir’s presence filled his body, filled his soul, as the immortal stared through Jono’s wolf eyes.
They were in someone’s living room, all the furniture removed to make space for the outline of the spell painted on the hardwood floor. Thirteen concentric circles extended away from the pentagram, five supporting radial lines slicing through each one of the star’s points. Magic flowed through the lines, heavy and powerful, keeping Jono trapped in one place.
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 justshift, 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.
