Keith let out a distracted, happy sound as he took potshots at zombies. “Dead Boy is in the field? I’d say great, but why are there so many zombies?”
“They’re leftover from Paris,” Patrick said, pouring more magic into his shields that covered them.
“That’s—” Keith broke off with a curse as his rifle clicked empty and he had to reload. “—a lot of zombies.”
“We need to take back the Morrígan’s staff to get rid of them, but Andras has taken over Ilya.”
Wade’s eyes got huge in his face. “Oh, that rat bastard. I’m going to eat him.”
Patrick opened his mouth to tell Wadenobut then thought better of it. “Go for it. Just don’t complain about the taste afterward.”
Thunder crashed so loudly Patrick instinctively ducked his head. He stared at where Thor and Gerard had Ares pinned between them. The three gods fought each other amidst the rubble of the Park Avenue Viaduct with a viciousness that would’ve been deadly for a mortal.
“Radios don’t work, so I don’t know how you want to spread the word to move out,” Keith said, weapon locked and loaded once more.
“My children will gather those who need to come with us,” Ashanti said before flinging herself back into the fray.
“That’s great, but where the fuck is this library?”
“About five blocks away,” Wade said with the sureness of someone who’d been there before.
Patrick shot him a look. “Wade.”
“What? You can’t prove anything is missing from their collections.”
“I’m sure we could if we checked your apartment.”
Wade belched out a stream of fire at a drekavac crawling across the façade of the building they were backed up against, burning it to crispy bits of bone and ash. “Not if I clean it first.”
Patrick decided the best way to win that argument was to fight zombies.
It was easier.
He conjured up some more mageglobes, filling them with strike spells, and sent them careening at the Dominion Sect magic users hunkered down behind concrete rubble and cars. Some of them had shields up, but a couple were in the midst of moving and got caught in the blast radius of Patrick’s combat spells.
Even coming late to the fight, Patrick knew the area around Grand Central Station was a lost cause at this point. The soldiers and police he’d spotted upon arrival were pulling back, giving up ground. The mess of rubble they’d come out on top of and the pile behind them now surrounding Grand Central Station indicated a salt-and-burn type of approach he remembered from Cairo.
Leave the enemy nothing.
Ethan already wanted to rip the world apart, and here inside the veil, this was where Patrick’s side tore it up first. It was a lesson learned late during the Thirty-Day War, but they’d learned it.
“Let’s go,” Patrick said, calling up more of his magic, powering it through the soulbond. “We have a wannabe god to kill.”
They pushed forward with the help of the Night Marchers, the ghostly warriors going after the hunters and the demons riding their souls. Ku let out a furious war cry as he took aim at a particular group of Dominion Sect magic users working together on what Patrick thought was an earth-based spell. The last thing they needed was an earthquake.
Jono never left his side, and Patrick was grateful for that down to his bones. Not knowing the status of his pack while he’d been trapped on the sacrificial spell in Salem had been a horror he never wanted to go through again.
Sage and Leon guarded Marek while the Hellraisers ranged around them, picking off targets with spelled bullets. The screaming cries of the Sluagh and the crackling snap of lightning above was a continuous sound that became background noise as they fought their way down Park Avenue.
Nadine arrived at some point, watched over by Einar and Irena as Lucien and Carmen gave orders to what remained of their Night Court. She took over shielding their group from Patrick, who was more than happy to hand off that task. She knocked a fist against his shoulder as she came up to his position, attention on the street ahead.
“Glad to have you back,” Nadine said.
Patrick aimed another mageglobe at an embedded group of hunters behind a cluster of abandoned cars at the intersection ahead. “Could’ve done without the world ending.”
“You and me both.”
Staggering through the fog behind the hunters came a horde of zombies. Patrick conjured up a couple of mageglobes and filled them with a strike spell. Before he could throw them at the hunters and zombies, a black-and-tawny blur streaked past them, slipping through Nadine’s shields as if they didn’t exist.
