This spell wasn’t a tear in the veil, wasn’t ripping a hole to a forgotten hell, but there was only one way to end it. Fenrir turned to savage the nearest worshipper with vicious teeth, ignoring the screams that asked for mercy.
Patrick could’ve told them gods never offered mercy.
He pitched himself forward into the spaces between the concentric circles, gritting his teeth against the hellish magic seeking to suck his own dry. He kept his eyes on Ilya, the necromancer looking right at him over the top of the Morrígan’s staff the necromancer held in iron gauntlets.
The quartz crystal trapped beneath the carved knotwork shone like a star, white fire that pulsed in time to the magic burning around his dagger’s matte-black blade.
Patrick raised his dagger against the crashing wave of necromantic magic that erupted from the staff, carving a way through it with the only weapon he had. Every step he took between the concentric circles of magic was taken against a hurricane force that should’ve thrown him out of the spellcasting, and would have if not for his dagger.
One weapon of the gods against another should’ve been even odds, but Patrick knew war was anything but predictable.
Fenrir tore through the followers anchoring the spellcasting with a brutal ferocity that only left blood and bodies behind. Every death lessened the force trying to drive Patrick into the hands of the dead behind him. His left ankle kept wanting to buckle whenever he put weight on it, but he refused to go to his knees.
This altar wasn’t one he would ever pray at.
“Where is he!” Patrick shouted over the roar of magic and the supernatural wind spinning around them. “Where is Peklabog!”
Ilya’s face was washed out by the light coming from the Morrígan’s staff, the quartz crystal a white hole of magic that threatened to blind Patrick.
“I was made to serve a god,” Ilya snarled, his voice carrying on the wind.
“Fuck your god! I was made for war.”
Patrick crossed the inner circle, stumbling into the center of the spell. The icy coldness that suffused him made his breath puff out in a pale cloud.
It glittered like a soul.
The tug in his chest was like a hook behind his ribs, catching and pulling with inhuman strength. There wasn’t anything he could see, nothing for him to cut with his dagger. In the distance, Fenrir howled a warning he couldn’t listen to.
Chilled down to his bones, the only warmth Patrick could feel was the line of heat across his left palm, Srecha’s blessing a kiss of fate he’d never wanted.
Ilya raised the Morrígan’s staff over his head before slamming it down to the ground. Magic exploded away from it in a wave of power that rolled over Patrick like a tsunami. The only reason he didn’t drown was due to the hole his dagger carved through it as he planted his feet and refused to move.
The necromantic magic flowed up the four legs of the Eiffel Tower, powering the dead. Patrick’s soul peeled apart at the edges, the Morrígan’s staff eating away at what didn’t belong to it. The soulbond tightened somewhere deep inside his chest, an anchor bracketed by Persephone’s soul debt carved deeper than the tie that linked him to Hannah.
One step, then another, both arms stretched out in front of him, the dagger providing a shield and the blessing a promise.
Ilya screamed a wordless challenge as ravens and crows flew beneath the arched legs of the Eiffel Tower, cawing their defiance.
Patrick’s arms shook, his soul bleeding free at the edges of his aura, and there was a hunger in his gut that didn’t belong to him. Ilya raised the staff again, bringing it down like an axe on his enemy.
Patrick caught it in his left hand, Srecha’s blessing burning like a brand. The first contact with that notched wood ripped a scream from his lips that shredded his throat until all he tasted was blood.
Mortal flesh was never meant to touch a weapon like this.
Patrick gripped the head of the staff despite the agony, fingers curling between the carved knotwork of the raven, skin burning from the bright magic emanating from the quartz crystal.
Magic exploded around them, white-hot and catastrophically dangerous, not meant for mortals to touch. Death wasn’t Patrick’s affinity, wasn’t his kind of magic. It wasn’t his to own or control.
Please.
The word rattled through Patrick’s mind, the only command—the only prayer—he could stitch together in the face of a hunger that threatened to swallow him whole.
What lived in the Morrígan’s staff—sentience of a sort, but nowhere close to human—burrowed deep into his brain, into his soul, carving him up like a vivisection done without anesthesia as it searched for what he wanted most.
Forgiveness.
Absolution.
