Resurrection of the dead and gone of past mistakes.
Patrick couldn’t see Ilya’s face through the sun-bright burn of death magic that sought his soul. He was only aware of a cold that threatened to freeze him from the inside out as the staff unwoundregretandguiltandwantfrom the depths of memory.
He thought of bone and blood and iron teeth stretched in a smile, the feel of ash beneath his fingernails, and a hideous desert heat of a hell Ethan never finished calling to Earth.
He thought of demon’s claws in his chest, his sister’s screams, and his mother’s sightless eyes staring at him from the darkest corner of his mind as Macaria lost her freedom.
A foreign awareness washed through him, distant and vast like the ocean, threatening to swallow him whole.
Choose.
Patrick had bled for many gods over the years, but he’d only ever prayed to one.
And in the presence of gods and monsters and weapons of war, what was one man’s prayers worth?
Nothing, he knew.
Srecha’s blessing, however, was worth everything.
Black dots ate through the brightness, melding together into a hazy distant figure Patrick had seen in a nightmare once—a woman wearing a hooded cloak made with a thousand black feathers, pale-skinned and starved-thin. She was nothing but a shadow in that light, but she still reached for him with fingers stained red with blood, grave dirt on her feet and the promise of death on her lips.
Only it wasn’t his mother’s face staring back at him this time, but that of a goddess.
And her staff—ithungered.
Made of iron and earth, notched with the memory of the brittle dead, the Morrígan’s staff required a sacrifice for its power.
It always had.
Patrick squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them again, all he saw was Ilya’s face contorted in fury, stripped of the mantle that he’d carried as the Patriarch of Souls for the Orthodox Church of the Dead. Patrick knew the staff could raise the dead from a battlefield and graves, but the amount of zombies in Paris seemed astronomical. To guide that many spirits from beyond to earthly anchors required a godly touch.
“You fed it Peklabog,” Patrick said through numb lips, tasting blood on his teeth.
The man on the Salle du Drapeau’s altar in the Catacombs had been no man after all.
“I’ve been promised a different way,” Ilya spat out. “I’ll pray to another.”
Patrick pressed the dagger edge against the base of the raven’s feet on the staff, and the prayers in its making cut through the wood as if it were made of nothing.
The raven broke free with a snap that could’ve caused an avalanche. Patrick curled his fingers tight around it, never letting go.
He left Srecha’s blessing behind—payment for the prayer the staff drew out of his soul.
Please, Patrick thought once more in the messy static of his mind as his soul ripped wider, tearing from his bones, barely knowing what he was asking for.
Praying for.
Magic exploded from the Morrígan’s staff, a shriek he couldn’t hear, only feel cutting through his skull. The force sent them flying apart. Patrick fell to the ground, the broken-off wooden raven clenched in one hand as the spell powering the summoning of the dead broke apart around him.
He didn’t see where Ilya went.
Looking up at the underside of the Eiffel Tower, Patrick watched the magic lighting it up fade into darkness. Then the only thing he could see was Jono’s wolf-bright blue eyes in a human face as the soulbond pulled tight between them, smoothing down the frayed edges of his battered soul with a permanency that made him choke.
“Patrick!” Jono said, sounding faraway to Patrick’s ears.
The hand framing his face burned, but it took Patrick several seconds to realize it was because he was so cold. His fingers spasmed, releasing his dagger and the piece of the Morrígan’s staff he’d managed to steal back in a moment he wasn’t sure was real.
Jono’s face faded into shadow as the magic that had sustained the dead walking through Paris was siphoned away, leaving the city in darkness and the bones of its past falling lifeless to the ground.
