“He was made the hero in a tale still being written before he was even born. That is a fate he can’t outrun, for all that he has tried. I was tasked with keeping him alive, and that is what I have done.”
“You’ve done fuck all if he dies by Ethan’s hand. I’ll never forgive you if that happens.”
“What use have I for forgiveness?”
Maybe she was too inhuman to understand it, but Jono knew Patrick would never forgive him if he killed Ashanti after her recent resurrection. That was the only reason he stayed his hand.
Jono stepped closer, pushing Fenrir to the back of his mind, staring down into Ashanti’s black eyes. Despite her diminutive stature, there was nothing fragile about the mother of all vampires. Her games were different than the fae, than Persephone’s, than even the Fates. She hadn’t lived this long by giving in.
But she’d die a death more permanent than dust if she didn’t.
“You won’t help us save Patrick out of the goodness of your heart, because you haven’t got one. You won’t do it out of love, because you’ve lived so long you’ve forgotten what love means,” Jono said, choosing his words carefully. “I’ll love Patrick because you can’t, but you’ll save him if it means you win in the end.”
When it came down to it, the gods couldn’t afford to give up on Patrick.
The thing was, Jono never had, and he never would.
“Some battles never last long enough to become a war. Others merely need a spark.” Ashanti smiled at him, beautiful and cold, but it wasn’t Jono she spoke to as she gestured at the walls surrounding them. “Would you like it back?”
Deep in his soul, Fenrir howled.
26
It tookeverything Patrick had to open his eyes.
They felt like sandpaper when he finally blinked up at the ceiling of the underground challenge ring, gritty and rough. The view hadn’t changed, neither had the binding spell that kept him pinned spread-eagle on the floor. He tried to move his arms and legs and found that he couldn’t. The hissing burn of hellfire flickered around his body. Judging by his position and from what he could see, Patrick figured he was lying in a pentagram with hellfire burning along the spellwork lines.
The pressure in his chest felt as if something was sitting on him, but when he dragged his gaze away from the ceiling, he found no one and nothing else inside the pentagram with him. There were people in the seats that rose around the challenge ring, too many eyes staring right at him as if he were their singular entertainment.
He’d had nightmares like this over the years. All that was missing was a soultaker and Ethan. Their absence didn’t make Patrick feel any better about his predicament.
The scrape of shoes against dirt had him trying to move his head, but he couldn’t. Patrick had to wait for the person standing just out of sight to come around within his field of vision. When the tall, sharply dressed figure came into view, the nausea in his belly threatened to slide up his throat and choke him.
“We need to stop meeting like this,” Patrick rasped as Hades stared down at him here the same way the god had done in Salem all those years ago.
“If you would lie down and die for once, we’d never need to meet again,” Hades said coldly.
Patrick would’ve flinched, but his body didn’t obey. “Well, I’m lying down, just not dead yet. Are you here to change that?”
If Jono had been present, he’d tell Patrick not to antagonize the bastard holding him hostage. But it was only Patrick in this nightmare, the soulbond muffled inside him when he tried to reach for it. For a sickly moment, he thought it had been severed, but he could sense the metaphysical wall that had been erected around his soul over the hollowed-out areas where Persephone’s anchors had once rested in his bones.
Hades had somehow blocked the soulbond, and Patrick wanted very much to kill him for that.
“I am here to see a future made,” Hades said.
Patrick blinked slowly, knowing there were so many ways that statement could be taken. “Where’s Hannah? Where’s Ethan?”
Hades didn’t answer him.
Someone else did.
“Not here,” a rough voice said.
Patrick couldn’t see them approach, as the entrance to the underground stadium had to be beyond his head. He could smell the creeping hint of ozone in the air though, could hear the scrape of feet on dirt. The instinct to run crawled through him, but Patrick remained trapped on the pentagram, staring at Hades and wondering if this was how he died.
The god that rounded the hellfire outlining the pentagram was taller than Hades, than most of the gods Patrick had met over the years. A loincloth was belted around his waist, the rich green fabric falling between legs that were covered in brown fur and ended not in feet, but in hooves. He was bare-chested, with a golden torque gleaming around his neck.
His eyes were a rich hazel, framed by dark brown hair that fell to his shoulders in a tangle of curls, and his face would’ve been handsome if he didn’t have half his skull exposed. His skin stretched to nothing along the edge of white bone that protruded from the god’s forehead. The bone branched out into a dark brown rack of antlers that acted like a crown which stretched wider than his shoulders.
