Nadine took it and clipped it to the front of her vest. “Plan?”
“Expand the shield. We’re going to need the room.”
Nadine didn’t argue, merely cupped her hands together above her head before wrenching them apart. Her shield pushed back against the dead, zombies falling over each other and getting trampled as she fought to get them space. Patrick curled his fingers at Wade, and the teenager hurried over.
“You want me to breathe fire again?” Wade asked.
“Yes, but first I want you to shift mass,” Patrick said.
Wade glanced uneasily at the French magic users before squaring his shoulders. “All right.”
Patrick gripped Wade’s shoulder, giving him a comforting squeeze. “Listen to me. I’m not going to let anyone come after you when this is over. If any government tries to put a claim on you, I’ll stonewall them until Lucien can get you home safely. He’s good at crossing borders unnoticed.”
“Do you think the government here will do that? Try to keep me?”
“No one is keeping you, Wade. Not if I have anything to say about it. But greedy people do stupid shit all the time, and I want you to know that you’re pack and we’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe.”
Some of the tightness in his body eased beneath Patrick’s grip, and the blinding smile Wade gave him strangely didn’t seem out of place while surrounded by the dead.
“I know you will. Why do you think I wanted to stay with you and not go with General Reed last summer?”
Patrick couldn’t help but smile back. “After you shift, get high and burn the fuck out of the zombies between us and Ilya. We’ll make sure no spells knock you out of the sky. After that, burn whatever you can reach. Be careful of anyone on the ground fighting for our side.”
As a dragon, Wade was immune to mortal magic. While getting hit by a barrage of spells might not hurt him, it could knock him out of the sky due to the sheer number of attacks the Orthodox Church of the Dead and the Dominion Sect might throw at him. It would be Patrick’s job to keep him safe.
“I bet they’d think twice about throwing anything at me if I was on the Eiffel Tower,” Wade said.
Patrick let him go with one last comforting smack on the shoulder. “Don’t break it. France will never forgive the United States if you knock it over.”
“Well, if it gets broken, then I’ll just keep it.”
“You aren’t keeping another country’s national monument.”
Wade heaved out a put upon sigh. “Fine.”
“Nadine,” Patrick called out. “Wade is going to shift. He’ll need room to fly out.”
“I can’t shield him,” Nadine warned.
“You won’t need to. Just tell everyone else we’re going to need to block any spells aimed at him.”
“If I reduce my shield to half height, the zombies will climb over.”
“I’ll keep them at bay until Wade is in the air,” Spencer said.
Nadine turned her head and called out orders to the French magic users. Jono herded Patrick as far from Wade as they could get while Sage did the same for Nadine. Patrick tossed the body of his rifle aside and unsheathed his dagger. The matte-black blade flared up white with heavenly fire. The same sort of light began to burn through Jono’s eyes, washing out the familiar blue for something otherworldly.
Patrick scowled down at Fenrir. “Don’t let Jono get hurt.”
“Don’t waste your blessing,” Fenrir said, voice deep and cracking, sounding the way the dead did when Patrick walked over broken bones.
Patrick readied a dozen mageglobes before looking over at where Wade stood in the center of the space Nadine had carved out for them. Wade looked him in the eye and nodded.
Shiny red scales pushed through his skin in a rippling wave. His brown eyes turned gold, pupils elongating into slits. Pressure in the airshifted, and the mass of Wade’s dragon body he somehow kept contained in an earthly form came into existence. Wade’s human body shimmered, stretching into a larger one that grew and grew andgrew.
He stretched out his sinuous neck and powerful tail, snaking both over everyone’s heads. His wings cut through the air and scraped against the edges of Nadine’s shield as he tried to flap them. Wade’s wedge-shaped head angled down, one huge eye blinking at Patrick as he puffed out a hint of smoke between teeth that were half Patrick’s height.
“Now, Nadine!” Patrick yelled.
