Patrick skidded to a halt, facing the thick trees and greenery the wall partially obscured. “Nadine!”
She thudded to a stop, toes flexing against the asphalt, breathing fast. “We need tokeep going!”
A demonic zombie threw itself over the wall with surprising agility, showing off the blood on its teeth with a snarl. Its form was familiar from London and the Catacombs as the drekavac launched itself at them, screaming all the while.
“Fuckingzombies,” Nadine swore as she raised a shield around them, a single violet mageglobe spinning near her shoulder. “Ilya’s raising the dead.”
“You think?” Patrick spat out as he conjured up half a dozen mageglobes.
More drekavacs threw themselves over the wall, but not all attempted to attack Patrick and Nadine. More than half went after easier targets—the citizens of and visitors to Paris.
People screamed in terror as the drekavacs chased after them, fleeing down the street between stopped cars. One person tripped and didn’t get up, frozen in terror at the death hunting her down. Patrick filled his mageglobes with raw magic and sent them careening through the air, releasing them in the midst of the horde before the zombies reached their prey.
They exploded like bombs, ripping through the drekavacs with brutal intensity. Body parts flew through the air, and a head slammed on top of Nadine’s shield, sliding down with a smear of blackness that might’ve been blood at one point.
Not surrounded by underground walls that could cave in and crush him, in the middle of a citywide emergency, Patrick figured the French government wouldn’t mind much if he got a little defensive in an offensive way.
His attack didn’t remove all of the drekavacs from the fight. More were flinging themselves over the wall, choosing to go after easier targets than the two mages safe behind near-impenetrable shields.
“Patrick, we need to go,” Nadine said harshly.
He knew that, but it was still difficult to accept the retreat. “If Ilya is using the Morrígan’s staff, we’re going to be fighting zombies all the way to your apartment.”
“We’re going to be fighting them all the way to the Eiffel Tower, but I’ll feel better about doing that with a Carbine in my hands. So let’s fuckinggo.”
“Who gave you a Carbine?”
“Who do you think?”
At least Lucien was good for something after all.
Patrick hated to turn his back on the drekavacs and the people the demonic zombies were hunting, but he had no choice. They couldn’t stand their ground and fight for this one small corner of Paris when the bigger threat was still out there.
Because all around them the dead were rising, and Patrick’s side couldn’t stop a zombie invasion until Ilya and Peklabog were stopped first.
24
Jono liftedthe car with a snarl and heaved it toward the intersection where a horde of rotten bones animated by lost souls were clawing at a family trapped on top of a vehicle. The car he’d tossed slammed into the zombies, shattering some of them.
The ones left turned glowing skulls their way and started shambling forward.
“Oh, wonderful,” Sage sighed irritably. “More zombies.”
“We’re almost to the flat,” Jono grunted.
He could sense Patrick’s general location through the soulbond, the connection wide open between them. The sluice of burning magic from tapping a ley line hadn’t yet hit him, which made Jono hopeful Patrick wasn’t cornered by the dead.
The streets they’d run through were still filled with people, but the crowds were starting to thin out as the threat became readily apparent. Nothing like the dead clawing their way out of manholes in the middle of the street to make people scream and run for cover. Some people weren’t fast enough, and that was the family’s problem on top of the car.
Jono squinted against the sunlight, having lost his sunglasses somewhere in the streets behind him on their run from the Arc de Triomphe. “Let’s get them out of danger first.”
“I don’t know where you think there’s no danger in Paris right now.”
Sage still stayed right by his side as they ran toward the zombie, preternatural speed enabling them to vault over the horde, missing getting caught in bony, clawing hands. Despite being bone stitched together by magic, Jono had seen what damage they could do. He and Sage had passed numerous people who hadn’t been quick enough to escape the dead. Their bodies had lain on the street with torn-open guts and gouged-out eyes and throats, magic already crawling over their corpses to make them rise and walk again.
Jono had faced plenty of nightmares in his life, but a never-ending army of the dead was definitely one he could’ve done without.
They reached the car with the family on it—Sage grabbed the mum and toddler, while Jono went for the dad—and then launched themselves over the remaining zombies. Jono grunted when he landed on the street amidst old broken bones, the man screaming in his ear not helping his concentration any. They set the humans on the ground, and Jono pointed down the street that didn’t have any zombies in it at the moment.
