Andras clenched Patrick’s hand around the mageglobe, black eyes narrowing. “I picked apart this meatsuit’s memories. I was expecting you well before now, Fenrir.”
“You’ve been after the souls that belong to me,” Fenrir bit out in a voice that shredded Jono’s throat, power bleeding past his teeth. It tasted like ozone. “You took what doesn’t belong to you.”
“Souls are my currency.” Andras tossed the mageglobe into the air so that it hovered directly in front of Patrick’s chest before spreading Patrick’s arms. “Your people don’t pray to you. Why do you think it was so easy for me to take them?”
“Do you think I’ll let you keep them?”
“You’re half-forgotten, reduced to a spirit rather than flesh. There’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
Fenrir laughed, the sound horrific enough to give Jono nightmares if he hadn’t heard it before. “Your kind always believes that, and you are always wrong.”
The shift came hard and fast, ripping through Jono’s body, breaking bones and splitting skin with brutal speed, until he stood on four legs in the challenge ring, buried beneath the weight of Fenrir. He didn’t fight it, riding the god’s awareness with practiced ease.
Except this time was different than all the rest. This time, when his soul cracked open, it mirrored how the rush of magic felt passing through the soulbond and into Patrick’s soul, only so much more than that trickle.
Power unlike anything Jono had felt before rushed through him—a deep, unending void that poured out of him like a tsunami, driving everyone but Hades and Andras in Patrick’s body to their knees.
The power reminded Jono of every instance he’d stepped inside Ginnungagap, and what lived inside those walls pressed against his awareness—the yawning abyss. The primordial power of one pantheon’s birth that was within shockingly easy reach, cradled in a city of skyscrapers that were altars in and of themselves in some ways, built by countless hands that had prayed to a myriad of gods.
Fenrir threw back his head and howled, the sound calling every pack member in the five boroughs and demanding they acknowledge him—and calling forth something else.
Something from the heavens.
Ginnungagap was a point of creation, abeginningthat could be found in every myth the gods grew out of.
But a beginning could be anything, to anyone, and when Ginnungagap poured out of Fenrir and filled Central Park, what came through—furiously bright and impossible to look at if one wasn’t a god—was a great spinning wheel made up of many eyes.
An angel come down from on high.
28
No no no no no!
The mantra floated through Patrick’s buried, locked down thoughts as Andras hurled the mageglobe at Jono using his own hand. There was nothing he could do, only capable of watching through eyes he couldn’t control as the spell exploded directly in front of Jono, taking off half his arm and burning his face.
Patrick’s scream was lost in the tiny corner of his mind he had been relegated to, unable to control his body or his magic. Andras was wrapped all around him, a sickening, hideous presence that caged him in andlaughed.
Didn’t I say I was going to break you? He’ll die by your hand, and you’ll watch it happen, Andras said, the words an echo felt more than heard in the space Patrick was trapped in.
I’m not the one hurting him, Patrick protested.
Yes, you are. In the end, they always think it’s their loved one killing them. He will be no different.
It was a nightmare Patrick wanted to wake up from, to stop, but the horror of it all was that he couldn’t. Possession was about control, and Patrick had lost his in the pentagram when Andras had left Estelle’s soul for his. Nothing had prepared him for drowning in his own body, with not even the soulbond capable of acting as a lifeline.
His body was a coffin he couldn’t escape, buried alive in flesh and bone.
Patrick hated feeling helpless. The worst things happened when he could do nothing, when no amount of fighting would change things.
And he so desperately wanted to change the course of this fight, to save Jono, but he couldn’t evenspeak.
Patrick could only watch as Wade appeared by Jono’s side, frantic and angry. He could only watch as Jono pushed him aside and stood, Fenrir staring out of eyes gone burning white as his aura exploded with the power of a god. It cracked open, shining like a halo around him. Patrick was distantly aware of the reactions of the pack members behind Jono and within his field of vision, the shock that hit them all as Fenrir finally revealed himself.
Andras had known before then that Fenrir resided in Jono. The Great Marquis had slid through Patrick’s mind and memories, looking where the demon had no right to go, sliding through Patrick’s life as if Andras belonged when it never would.
Being possessed wasn’t something Patrick wanted to ever experience again, and he could’ve gone the rest of his life, however short or long it might be, knowing what a demon felt like riding his soul.
And then a voice he never wanted to hear again sang through the air—deep, unearthly, and not meant for mortals to listen to and survive sane.
