“Would she know where Ethan is right now?” Patrick asked.
“What say you, Tisiphone?” Hermes asked, shaking her how one would shake a dog.
“I have not been privy to his presence since before the summer solstice,” she rasped.
Patrick glanced at Jono. “Is she lying?”
“No,” he bit out, Fenrir gone from his voice.
“Fuck.”
There went that avenue of hope of finding Cernunnos.
“We’ll be going now,” Hermes said in a voice that would never be pleasant.
He dragged Tisiphone through the veil by the throat, her feet kicking in protest as she clawed at his hand. They disappeared, leaving Patrick and Jono alone with the Dagda in the wreckage of the reception area.
“We came here because Casale said the mayor wanted to enact a curfew. Are you still going to do it?” Jono asked.
“Are you still insisting on fighting the demons that have overrun the City?” the Dagda shot back.
“You already know the answer to that.”
“Then I will enact the curfew.”
“Great. While you’re at it, clear out Central Park. We’re going to need it.”
Patrick eyed Jono. “We are?”
“We don’t have a challenge ring, and I refuse to fight in the one Estelle controls. If we make Central Park neutral territory and designate it as the challenge ring, that will sort the problem.”
“The public won’t like it,” the Dagda said.
“I don’t bloody care.”
“Very well.” The Dagda’s eerie, otherworldly gaze landed on Patrick, and he tried not to flinch beneath the weight of it. “Your dagger is useful, but it will not be enough against what waits beyond the veil.”
Patrick thought of Ilya and the millions of dead the necromancer had stolen out of Paris when he retreated at the end of the fight beneath the Eiffel Tower. “Is that where the dead are hiding?”
“For now.”
Patrick really didn’t need that nightmare to become another reality, one ruled over by Ethan. “Duly noted.”
The Dagda gestured expansively at the reception room, magic spilling from his fingertips. The damage was undone in an eyeblink, everything pieced back together again so deftly one would be hard-pressed to find evidence of the brief fight they’d endured.
“You need to be ready for a reckoning,” the Dagda warned.
“I know.”
“You know nothing of worth. Our myths always end, in one way or another. Our lives ebb and flow with the prayers that sustain us and bury us. We are an echo of what we once were. Ethan will build his hell, but you must turn it into his Armageddon, his Ragnarök, his myth’s ending, because gods are never born or reborn easy, and dying is harder than you think.”
It was a warning, one Patrick had heard before, just spoken by different voices, using different words.
Jono turned his back on the Dagda and reached for Patrick to manhandle him around. “Sod your bloody talk of fate. Announce your curfew so I can put Estelle in a grave.”
Patrick allowed himself to be led out of the reception room, the door opening beneath Jono’s hand either because of Fenrir or the Dagda’s will, he didn’t know which.
“Bloodyfuckinggods,” Jono swore as they left the mayor’s office behind.
