“None you know of that the police have been monitoring more closely as of late?”
“I don’t know. I am sorry.”
Jono opened his mouth to tell her not to apologize when a deep, sonorous hum cut through the air. It sounded like a distant roar, making the nerves in his teeth ache. Helene gripped her rifle and called out to her partner, hurrying away from them.
“What the hellisthat?” Sage asked, turning quickly on her feet to get eyes on their area.
“I don’t know, but it can’t be good,” Jono said.
Everyone around them had stopped taking pictures and were now looking around in equal confusion. Some people had their mobiles up to record, but the general ease of the crowd was rapidly fading as the hum kept going, never rising or falling, remaining a continuous sound that buzzed in Jono’s ears.
Over the tops of the trees and roofs of buildings surrounding the roundabout, Jono could just make out the very top of the Eiffel Tower in the distance.
It glowed a sickly, malevolent ochre color.
Jono pulled out his mobile and dialed Patrick, who picked up almost immediately.
“Tell me you’re back at Nadine’s apartment,” Patrick said.
“Finished that chat with the Paris god pack. Went to the Arc de Triomphe to speak to a policewoman married to one of their members. Got interrupted by that bloody noise. You should know the Eiffel Tower is covered in magic,” Jono said.
“Fuck. We need to regroup. Head back to Nadine’s apartment. INTERPOL got a hit on Zachary Myers last night. He’s in Paris.”
“Ethan?”
“No hits, but we can’t rule out his presence.”
Some of the police pushed through the crowd, heading toward the stairs that led to the tunnel, shouting orders in French and English. The crowd wasn’t moving very quickly, not yet starting to panic.
That changed when magic rolled like a wave across Paris, pushing outward from the Eiffel Tower.
The force of it bent the air like a mirage, pushing through buildings, trees, and people as if they didn’t exist. Jono grabbed Sage by the shoulder and braced them both against something they couldn’t outrun. The hit was like getting shocked by static electricity all over his body, making every single nerve in his body burn as if he were going to shift.
Then it was gone, rolling past them out to the edge of the city. The scent that lingered in the air in its wake smelled more like rotten garbage than the air after a thunderstorm.
Cars slammed into each other in the roundabout as they careened to a hard stop, their engines suddenly gone dead all at once. When Jono looked at his mobile, the screen was black. Sage held up her own, a grim slant to her mouth.
“Dead,” she said.
Jono tucked his now bricked mobile into his back pocket. “Patrick wants us to meet at the flat.”
“I heard. We should—”
A deep, heavybangechoed through the air, coming from the ground under the Arc de Triomphe. Jono looked over at the area directly beneath the monument’s arches where ropes outlined the memorial inlaid on the floor above the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
The sound came from the grave.
The police had already turned their attention toward the noise, which hadn’t stopped and only gotten louder. Ochre-colored magic flickered to life over the memorial, setting fire to the flowers that surrounded the edge of it.
People screamed, the crowd rushing toward the exit that would take them under the roundabout in a dangerous crush. Jono and Sage stayed put, staring at the grave.
“You smell that?” Sage asked, nostrils flaring.
Jono nodded. “Yeah.”
Like garbage that had sat on the curb for weeks, meat gone rotten and moldy in the sun, the foul stench of somethingdeadclung to the sluggish breeze.
Magic, and not the good kind.
