All of that meant Patrick desperately wished for a cigarette for the first time in months as he drove to Ginnungagap during a late lunch break. He was taking the long way to the club, traffic making his time slower than usual, but considering he’d left the apartment that morning under a look-away ward because reporters were still camped outside the building, Patrick wasn’t taking any chances. Getting followed by a reporter wasn’t something he could afford right now.
By the time Patrick pulled into the small alley adjacent to Ginnungagap, he wasn’t in the best of moods. Lucien would probably make it worse. Dealing with the master vampire of the Manhattan Night Court was an exercise in bruises most of the time. That hadn’t changed, even with the mother of all vampires’ return.
He locked the Mustang with a push of a button as he approached the door to Ginnungagap. Testing the handle found the door unlocked, and he pushed it open, stepping over the threshold. Crossing through the primordial power that lived inside the walls made Patrick twitch as the world beyond became muffled.
With the air-conditioning off in the building, Patrick started sweating within seconds. He walked past the toilets into the club proper, finding everyone clustered at the bar on the ground floor. Carmen, dressed in a strapless minidress and high-heeled sandals with laces that wrapped up her calves to her knees, sat on the bar counter. Her long legs were crossed at the knees, and she held a martini glass full of a pink fruity drink in one hand, a smudge of gloss on the rim from her lipstick.
She’d dropped her glamour, the horns curling back over her skull and cutting through her thick, curly black hair a marker of her kind. Her red-pupiled eyes watched Patrick’s approach with something close to amusement in them. Carmen would always be beautiful and dangerous, and the sexual desire drifting about her like strong perfume was one more reason why Patrick always appeared before them with his shields locked down tight.
Naheed, Lucien’s favorite human servant and Carmen’s daytime protector, stood behind the bar, probably having been the one to serve up the drink. She was busy cleaning up, her ever-present pistol close at hand.
Lucien sat on a barstool, elbows resting on the counter behind him. He was dressed in ripped jeans and a dark T-shirt, the old leather jacket he wore cut through with spikes, the attire too hot for the summer day. The master vampire’s familiar black-eyed gaze never strayed from Patrick, the color a match for the mother of all vampires, who stood beside him.
Patrick’s attention never wavered from Ashanti. The goddess watched Patrick close the distance between them with an impassive expression. Her black eyes were holes in her dark face, no sclera showing, and her tightly curled hair was twisted into Bantu knots. Rather than black, her hair was a deep, bloody red which had never faded in all the time he’d known her, the myth of her making seeping into her physical form.
She wore a sleeveless blouse tucked into a floor-length skirt that hid legs which didn’t end in feet, but rather bone hooks sheathed in iron caps. Ashanti existed how she had always come into the world—beautiful and dangerous and monstrous in kind.
Ashanti was as much a predator as she was a goddess, and sleight of hand went a long way toward luring in her prey. She was never one to hide the truth of herself behind glamour, but clothes were something else entirely. Dressed like this, she could walk among humans, but the citizens of New York would never treat her kindly. Human instinct wouldn’t let them. Humanity might have carved out a life lived beside the monsters in the world, but they did so reluctantly.
Ashanti would always be a living horror in a world trying to forget her.
“I understand the Dominion Sect is making a mess of things,” Ashanti said, her rich voice echoing in the nearly empty club.
Patrick came to a stop within arm’s reach of her and shrugged. “When aren’t they?”
The words felt like an apology on his tongue—meaningless in the face of her return.
It’d been four years since the end of the Thirty-Day War. Four years since Ashanti had delivered the gods-given dagger into his hands and willingly sacrificed herself to break Ethan’s spell. The guilt Patrick had carried since then hadn’t faded with her resurrection by way of the Morrígan’s staff. Weeks wasn’t enough time to come to terms with the hidden details of Ashanti’s myth and a grief that had been ultimately misplaced.
Maybe he should’ve looked harder at her history, but he’d been a child when Ashanti came into his life, and gods were meddlesome and uncaring in the face of immortality. Ashanti was no different than Persephone and all the others who tore Patrick apart with their demands in that way. But in some ways, she was kinder. She had never treated him as anything but what he was—a weapon to be used until his soul debt was paid in full.
The lessons Patrick had learned at her hands had taken root in ways that would never die off. Ashanti had taught him to always question what was demanded of him and never put his faith in the gods, even her.
Her teachings had shaped him as surely as his soul debt had. Ashanti had honed him like the blade he eventually carried, and Patrick had always been cognizant of the way she’d carved him up in his younger years. Between her and Setsuna, they’d given him a foundation to survive on; it just wasn’t one conducive to living.
He had Jono for that.
“Here to beg for help?” Lucien asked, lips curling over jagged fangs.
“Here toask,” Patrick shot back. “Your Night Court holds a treaty with our god pack still. Joint defense of our territory borders is still ongoing.”
“Treaties don’t mean we’re obligated to save your ass every time you lose a fight.”
“The other god pack used hellfire in their attack Tuesday night, which means there’s a strong chance Hades is back in town. The attack yesterday proved Andras is here in New York. Jono said the demon was riding the soul of a hunter in the subway yesterday. Do you really want to face a Great Marquis of Hell allied with the Dominion Sect alone? Because we don’t.”
Lucien’s eyes narrowed. “You should’ve dealt with the hunter problem months ago.”
“You could’ve helped with that. They don’t just stick to hunting werecreatures, and now there are high-ranked demons in the mix.”
“Whose fault is that?”
Patrick opened his mouth to argue, but Ashanti lifted her hand in a commandingshut upgesture they both automatically obeyed.
“I had hoped the two of you would have outgrown this pettiness. I see I was wrong,” Ashanti said.
Lucien tilted his head at an arrogant angle, but he said nothing in the face of his mother’s chastisement. Patrick kept his mouth shut as well.
Ashanti raised an eyebrow at them both in supreme disapproval before gesturing imperiously at Patrick. “Ward us.”
