He didn’t want to think what would happen to Hannah and her unborn child if that came to pass.
“I still need to go.” Patrick rose up to brush his lips over Jono’s. “I’ll come back.”
He still couldn’t bring himself to say what he felt in his heart—not yet—not with Ethan still out there. Patrick had learned hard lessons young about losing those you cared about, and the scars on his chest couldn’t match the ones in his memories. The only way this familial dispute and war of beliefs would end was with one of them dead.
Patrick wanted to spare Jono what pain he could in the face of an uncertain future.
He stepped back and turned to face Lisette. “I’ll go.”
Lisette nodded. “Follow me.”
Jono, Sage, and Wade stayed close as Lisette led them down unfamiliar streets. It wasn’t long until they were forced to separate as Patrick followed Lisette through a rusted door in a wall with the wordsInterdit d’entrerpainted over it.
Patrick looked over his shoulder only once, seeing his pack watching worriedly before the door swung shut between them.
Lisette led him through the narrow space between buildings, through a hole in a fence, until they reached a railway line. Patrick’s boots crunched over gravel between the tracks as they walked toward the brick archway of a tunnel hunkered between towering apartment blocks.
Patrick could sense the protective wards that ran the length of the Metro and rail lines before they reached the entrance, pooling in that opening. Layers of old magic saturated the area, twisted and anchored to the tracks themselves before stretching into the tunnel walls.
They paused there, long enough for Lisette to pull two sets of chest-high green waders out of her backpack, along with a headlamp. She passed a set of waders to Patrick, who yanked them on over his boots and jeans, shrugging his arms through the shoulder straps. He hitched the belt tighter so they would fit better, wrinkling his nose at the musty smell of old water and mold coming from them. Lisette did the same, donning the headlamp.
“This way,” she said, gesturing for him to follow.
Magic glimmered at the edge of Patrick’s vision as they walked into shadows so deep even light from the emergency bulbs could barely penetrate it. Since Lisette didn’t turn on her headlamp yet or ask Patrick to light the way, he swallowed his offer of casting some witchlights to see by.
“What do you think is causing people to go missing down here?” Patrick asked quietly as they walked.
“Paris below has always been a different world. What the government believes is the problem could be anything. During World War Two, the Nazis tried to break the Resistance with ghouls and hellhounds. We fought back with magic and ghosts. Some say none of either side ever left the quarries.”
“You cataphiles aren’t the only ones who come down here. Have you run into any other groups?”
Lisette made a vaguely annoyed sound. “Only cataflics, as always. They use magic and concrete to seal the entrances, but Paris belongs to all its citizens, aboveground and below.”
Patrick frowned, thinking of Ilya and the Orthodox Church of the Dead who called Paris home after being forced from Odessa and the catacombs there. “No one else?”
“There are only bones down here,mon ami. All they do is sleep.”
He very much doubted that.
They walked, the tracks staying level until they started to rise on a slow incline. That’s when Lisette turned on her headlamp, the shine of it making Patrick flinch at the brightness. She drifted to one side of the tunnel, pointing at a hole in the ground with three layers of concentric circles dug around it and filled in with colorful pebbles.
“We’ll go through here,” Lisette said.
Patrick eyed the hole warily, sensing how the subway’s protective wards warped around the way underground. The wards weren’t broken but had been forcibly shunted aside to allow the hole to exist. That made the wards less stable over time and capable of breaking when people could least afford it, allowing for creatures at the edge of the preternatural world to slip through.
“Take the lead for now, and I’ll tell you what direction we’ll need to take once we’re underground,” Patrick said.
“How will you know?”
Patrick shrugged, not wanting to get into the specifics about his damaged magic. “Trust me. I’ll know.”
Lisette dropped down into darkness feet first, and Patrick could only follow. The landing jarred his knees, and he winced. He couldn’t see beyond where Lisette’s headlamp pointed, and he needed more light than that. Patrick pushed magic out of his soul, flicking witchlights off his fingertips to light the dark around him.
The limestone walls on either side of the tunnel they found themselves in were filled with graffiti—words and pictures and tags he couldn’t decipher. Sigils of spells and wards were spray-painted on the walls near the ceiling, but their magic had long since faded away. He knew their shapes though, and what they had been set down for—protection against all manner of things.
Lisette wasted no time in pitching herself down the tunnels, and since she was heading in the direction where the hellish taint was stronger, he let her go. Patrick stayed close on her heels, the route down twisting tunnels dry for a long while until it wasn’t. The dirt beneath his feet eventually turned to mud, then to water, and Patrick was glad for the waders she’d shoved into his hands aboveground.
The water got deeper and deeper until it hit his chest. The cold seeped through the waders and his clothes, making him shiver. The only thing that kept him warm was the soulbond, the tie to Jono a comforting link between them. Patrick could vaguely feel where Jono was above, but not knowing the Paris streets, he couldn’t begin to figure out their location on a map.
