Maybe Patrick could believe that if the immortal hadn’t tried so hard to keep him when his soul was owned by Persephone.
“Didn’t you?” Patrick asked, lips numb, but smiling all the same.
Hands slammed into his back and he went tumbling down the stairs into a darkness that felt too alive to be anything but trouble. He scraped his chin raw on the way down before he managed to tuck his head and get an arm around his skull to protect it. Patrick bruised the hell out of his knees and elbows as he careened down the stairs, finally crashing to a stop on a cold landing. He sprawled there, ears ringing, body aching in a way that momentarily disrupted the encroaching sexual need building up beneath the terror.
Patrick forced his eyes open at the sound of footsteps on the stairs, trying to blink back the burning brightness that wouldn’t fade. A shadow loomed above him, the cool darkness saving his sight.
“You wasted your life on an animal. Lucien would be so disappointed,” Tremaine said as he hauled Patrick to his feet.
“Can’t waste what doesn’t belong to me,” Patrick muttered.
Tremaine dragged Patrick down another set of stairs. Shine dulled his reflexes and he stumbled against the wall on the way down. The lurch in his stomach was less vertigo and more the collapsing of one of his shields, his magic fracturing beneath his desperate, fading control.
Patrick grasped at the edges of the soulbond.Find me.
It was a false sort of comfort that stayed with him on the painful journey down below the club. The cement stairwell got colder as they descended. Patrick lost count of the steps before he reached the bottom, arriving into a cold, featureless tunnel that would never be inviting.
The place stank of iron, blood, and the musty, moldering smell of the long dead. He swallowed dryly, breathing through his mouth for a few seconds as Tremaine pressed up against his back.
“You shouldn’t have allied yourself with Lucien.”
Patrick dragged his fingernails down the stone wall. One caught on a crack and tore over the nailbed. “I know I can’t trust him, but you still think you can pull one over on Ethan. Between the two of us, I’m not the stupid one.”
Fingers tangled in his hair and Patrick was slammed face-first against the wall. His teeth clacked hard together, catching his tongue. Blood filled his mouth, and a familiar spike of pain in his nose told him he might have broken it again.
Shine made him not care, when he knew he needed to. But bridging that divide was something his brain just wouldn’t do.
“If this is how you like to feed, I don’t know why people take this shit,” Patrick said, face throbbing from the impact.
“Because it makes your kind beg.”
“I only get on my knees for one person, and you aren’t him.”
A cold tongue licked at the blood trickling from between Patrick’s lips. Patrick recoiled hard, body pressed up against the wall with nowhere to go. But even as he moved away, his cock twitched in his jeans, desire warring against the panicked refusal quietly dying in his mind.
“You’ll worship a different way for her,” Tremaine promised. “I’ll make sure of it.”
Patrick’s brain tripped overher, and his confusion loosened up his focus. His consciousness drifted, shine making his skin itch with the desire to just let go. They were halfway down the tunnel before he remembered to carve out a different bit of pain to rival the chemical-induced desire crawling through his body.
He bit down on his bottom lip hard enough to cut it, breathing harshly as the new pain hit. Patrick chewed into his own skin to give himself something else to focus on rather than the shine and shadows in his eyes. It was a last-gasp effort that wouldn’t hold up for long, but it let Patrick keep his feet underneath him when he wanted to let his body rest.
There was no rest to be found underground, in the fringes of the veil.
Patrick tried to keep track of their passage through the sprawling maze of tunnels, but he kept getting distracted. They passed rooms that would never see daylight, many of which had shadows moving in them, holes in his sight that held no souls.
He thought the earth trembled at the end of the final tunnel but chalked it up to a possible hallucination. Wavering on his feet, Patrick watched as a pair of vampires approached a steel door not unlike the one guarding the underground entrance back at the club. The only difference was this one had wards scrawled over its surface, some of which were broken and forcibly tied to newer ones.
Even to Patrick’s damaged vision, he could see the areas where the wards were joined together weren’t stable. Before he could try to make any sense of the magic, the vault-like door swung open, revealing a low-lit area beyond the rat-maze they’d just traversed.
Cool, musty air hit Patrick’s nose as Tremaine hauled him forward into a long-abandoned subway station. Old, rusted train tracks stretched down a forgotten tunnel into the dark. The wards that buttressed the entire subway system were missing completely down here, or broken so badly as to be remade into something sickeningly new. Patrick was too out of it to really appreciate howwrongit all was, but he knew the broken wards weren’t something he should forget.
What magic Patrick could see lining the tunnel entrance flickered with a gray, malevolent light that warred with the red-orange glow coming from hundreds of candles. Tiny votives, obnoxious candelabras, glass vases with pictures of the Virgin Mary painted on them—any kind of candle a person could buy or make surrounded an intricate shrine built on the old train platform.
In the center, seated within a large gold-leafed frame, was a life-sized skeleton clad in white robes, the cowl pulled up over long, brittle black hair that pooled in its lap. In one bony hand the skeleton held a long scythe; in the other, a golden globe. Dozens of gold necklaces were draped around its neck and shoulders, glinting on the white cloth in the candlelight. Marigolds filled the space near its legs and feet, the orange petals like bits of flame.
In the flickering candlelight, the skull of Santa Muerte seemed to grin.
Patrick dropped his gaze, eyes watering, and saw more bones than those found in a small graveyard between them and the shrine. Which meant it wasn’t only a shrine, but an altar.
