Even with access to a ley line through the soulbond, Patrick’s magic was less than what it had been before lying on that spellwork in Salem. He really didn’t need to lose more than a pint of blood to whatever spell Ashanti was going to cast.
“As much as the spell needs.”
Patrick sighed and shrugged out of his leather jacket. It took some doing, with Jono needing to help on the final tug. Patrick’s shirt felt heavy from mud being ground into it after lying at the bottom of a grave.
“What happened to you?” Wade asked.
“They had me in a grave,” Patrick said, trying to wipe off streaks of mud on his bare arms, but it was a lost cause.
Jono’s gaze became flinty. “Theywhat?”
Patrick shrugged. “Gerard found me in time, and I killed Zachary. So, you know, revenge was had.”
“That fucker’s finally dead? Good riddance,” Nadine said.
She let her assault rifle hang from the strap connected to her Kevlar vest and pried open a pocket on the front. She pulled out a gold coin and tossed it through the air to him. Patrick caught it with one hand, the ancient Greek obal shining beneath the witchlights.
“I thought this was back home?” Patrick said, staring at the coin.
“I brought it with me and had Nadine carry it while I was shifted. I thought you might need it,” Jono said.
Patrick pocketed it. “I don’t think laying down a barrier using the cardinal points will work this time. We don’t have enough coins or time for that.”
“It would be a useless endeavor. There is nothing that will stop the veil from carving out a new plane if Ethan wins,” Ashanti said.
The spell book in her hand was opened near to the end, the spider-scrawl of the words and symbols written in faded blood. Patrick couldn’t read the language, nor did he recognize it. The lines flickered with magic, his soul recognizing the feel of it as dark and wrong. Blood magic wasn’t inherently evil, but the spells it powered usually were.
He’d just gotten off one spellwork only to willingly put himself in the middle of another. If it was anyone else other than the people in this room asking, he’d probably think twice about it.
Patrick sighed tiredly. “How do you want me?”
Ashanti blinked, a strange glint to her black eyes that couldn’t be explained by the witchlights. “Here is fine. Give me your arm.”
Patrick extended his left arm, fingers curled in a fist. Ashanti reached for him, sharp nails more like claws pricking the soft skin at the bend of his elbow. She stared at him, the godhead that sustained her crackling through her aura in a way no other vampire could ever duplicate. Her children were soulless beings, carrying a hole where their soul should have been, powered by blood magic that stemmed from Ashanti’s making.
They were starved things craving the blood that sustained them, and Ashanti was their god as much as their mother. She was his teacher, and if this was how he was to wield himself, then Patrick would do so with eyes wide open.
“Do you give of yourself freely?” Ashanti asked, voice low and edged in power.
“Yes,” Patrick said, tasting the truth of it on his tongue.
He winced when Ashanti’s nails pierced his skin, slicing downward the same way Cernunnos’ had. Blood dripped down his arm and fell to the hardwood floor below with soft little splats. He could feel—something—in the air around them before Ashanti began speaking.
It was a language he couldn’t understand, ancient in a way that called to the hindbrain terror of humanity’s ancestors, that gut instinct that warned of the horrors hidden in the dark. It pulled at his blood, at the tangled essence of who he was, gliding through every cell until it subsumed him down to his soul.
His heart beat, and then it didn’t.
Someone else’s beat in his chest instead.
The tie to Hannah’s soul, buried beneath the soulbond and walled off by damage, was peeled open through the blood that tied them together. Patrick wanted to scream, but all the air in his lungs was locked up tight as his consciousness plunged into magical chaos.
Focus, Ashanti told him somewhere in the roar of his mind.
She guided him with a strength he couldn’t break free of. It took effort to ground himself, to find his center, and the only way he could was by leaning into the soulbond. It pulled tight between him and Jono, an anchor in the inferno that was eating through his veins.
Find her for me.
Ashanti’s voice in his mind was a command he couldn’t ignore, the whole of who he was tuned to the threadbare connection tying Patrick to his twin sister. Ashanti’s magic burned through him, the heat of it driving out the chill from fighting in the reactionary storm.
