The fight at the foot of the Eiffel Tower wasn’t going to be much better, but it would bethere, and that was all that mattered.
“Let’s go,” Patrick said.
Baba Yaga led the way, floating backward until her mortar hovered over the manhole. She descended into the sewer in one smooth motion, the hole enlarging in a way that made asphalt crack.
Nadine pointed at her shield. “I’ll go last. I’ll draw my magic down after everyone is below.”
“The dead will keep coming,” Spencer warned as he carried Fatima with him to the hole.
Patrick conjured up a mageglobe, filling it with a raw magic that was little more than a grenade without a pin and a command trigger in the back of his mind. “I’ll buy us some time.”
Nadine nodded, then raised her voice to give the order to the French magic users. The group didn’t hesitate before following Spencer into the sewer. Lucien and his Night Court went next, dropping down into the dark one at a time. Then it was Sage’s turn, followed by Wade, but Jono waited for Patrick.
Patrick gripped his fur, sparing a second to lean over and brush his lips across the tip of one ear. “Go. I’ll be right behind you.”
Jono blinked at him with bright blue eyes streaked through with white. Patrick wondered how much longer it would be until Fenrir joined the fight.
Patrick watched Jono slide underground before crouching by the edge and staring into the dark. Far, far down below he could make out the pinpricks of witchlights. He didn’t think sewers went that deep, but there was only one way to find out.
Patrick threw himself into the hole and skidded down a steeply slanted hill of cold earth to the bottom. Jono was there to stop him from tumbling any farther, a solid wall of muscle that didn’t move an inch. Patrick got to his feet, the chill below drying the sweat on his skin from the long hours fighting in the sun.
Then Nadine came sliding down, body glimmering in violet magic as she pulled her shields down behind her. Beyond her, the lit-up skulls of zombies appeared in the dark, and he could hear the clattering of bone.
“They’re coming!” Nadine shouted.
She hit the bottom and pitched into his arms. Patrick hauled her up, and she went racing after the others, following Baba Yaga. Patrick took up the rearguard, sliding into the tunnel Baba Yaga had made and releasing his mageglobe behind him. The blast of raw magic brought down the earth above, the cave-in flattening the zombies hunting them.
In the dark tunnel beneath Paris that spun and grated like bones twisting in a joint from an immortal’s magic, Patrick and the others ran from one hopeless fight to another.
Baba Yaga stepped off her mortar as the earth trembled around them and split upward. The bones of its making rearranged themselves into a dome and pushed against the dirt falling down around them. The slant of earth was just as steep as their way in.
Nadine pushed her way to the front and went first, a single violet mageglobe lighting the way, her shield a pressure in the air Patrick could almost touch. Everyone else followed after her, with Patrick taking up the rearguard.
He paused at the bottom, long enough to look Baba Yaga in the eye. “Peklabog will know you helped us.”
Baba Yaga smacked her pestle lightly against the back of his calves. “Is not problem. Am remembered more than him.”
Patrick took Baba Yaga at her word and climbed out of the tunnel straight into a hellish fight.
27
Spencer offered his hand,and Patrick took it, getting hauled out of the hole Baba Yaga had carved right in the center of the Champs de Mars. Nadine’s shield held strong between them and the horde of zombies that blanketed the park in front of the Eiffel Tower. What zombies that had been trapped inside her shield with them had been taken care of by Spencer judging by the lifeless bodies and skeletons strewn under everyone’s feet.
Patrick looked over Spencer’s shoulder at where the Eiffel Tower stretched to the sky, lit up by magic rather than its normal evening light show. The area was saturated in so much black magic that it was all Patrick could sense, all he could taste in the back of his throat.
“There is no way we’re getting through all of the dead that stand between us and where Ilya is,” Spencer said grimly.
Patrick nodded, knowing Spencer had reached the limits of what his magic could do. With no weapon of the gods and a monument to amplify his magic like Ilya, they were left with a measly amount of power, no matter their ability to tap the ley lines fed by the nexus under Paris.
“We have to hope if we get the staff and break his spell that will stop the zombies,” Patrick said.
“We need to get to the fucker to do that,” Nadine said, arms outstretched above her as she poured magic into her shields. “How do you expect us to clear a path to him and whoever is protecting him if we’re buried under zombies?”
Patrick looked at the dead massing beyond her shield and trying to climb it, searching for a way in. Then he looked back at their ragtag group of fighters who couldn’t do much fighting stuck behind her shield. They needed to clear a path to Ilya, but there was probably hundreds of thousands of zombies between them and the Patriarch of Souls. Fighting piecemeal wasn’t going to work.
Patrick stared up at the Eiffel Tower and the magic surrounding it, fingers tightening on his Carbine. Then he unclipped the rifle from his vest, disengaged the magazine, and passed it over to Nadine.
“It’s half-empty,” he told her. “Take it.”
