“Maybe he thinks the fucker has a chance at keeping the spellwork going with some other person in your mother’s family.”
Patrick scowled. “We aren’t leaving until Zachary is dead.”
“You want that kill?”
Patrick gestured with his dagger, dragging heavenly fire through the rain. “You’re the one with the long-range weapon.”
Gerard grunted wordlessly before shaking off Patrick’s hand. “Stay here.”
Patrick didn’t want to obey the order, but he’d spent years following Gerard in and out of battlefields. With his aunt and cousin behind him, Patrick watched as Gerard signaled whoever was holding up the shield to let him pass through.
Keith sidled up to Patrick, knocking him on the shoulder with a gentle fist. “Give him a minute. He’s been wanting to murder someone for days now.”
The Night Marchers swarmed the space between where the two sides fought, and Patrick lost sight of Gerard in the midst of those ghostly warriors. The SOA agents kept their focus on the fight with Dominion Sect magic users while the Hellraisers and werecreatures handled the zombies.
Beyond the graveyard, the little area of Salem’s historical center should’ve been empty, but Patrick could see figures racing through the dark in the aftermath of every lightning strike. He couldn’t tell if they were friendlies or not.
“Anyone call for reinforcements?” Patrick asked.
“We got backup coming from Boston,” one SOA agent said without looking away from the spell she was casting.
Patrick’s attention turned from the people coming toward them to the man Gerard tossed with ease into their midst as they broke free of the Night Marchers.
“Now you’re close range,” Gerard said, wiping someone else’s blood off his face.
Zachary was missing both hands, blood pouring from the stumps of his wrists, pale in a way that spoke of bad blood loss. TheGáe Bulg’s spearpoint was smeared with red along the edge, and Gerard’s face was etched in fury in the glow of magic.
Out of the corner of his eye, Patrick saw Brittany turn her face into her mother’s shoulder, but Madelyn never looked away.
“I didn’t think you were allowed to interfere in the payment of my soul debt,” Patrick said.
Gerard looked at Patrick, his aura a crackling thing to Patrick’s senses. “I told you once before that you are part of my story. The same can be said of me in yours. There is no point in adhering to the restrictions set upon myself and those like me that prevent interference during the creation of something new when what may result is our own eradication.”
Patrick knelt, keeping one knee on Zachary’s chest as he settled all his weight onto the wounded mage. No hands meant the tattoos Zachary had used as permanent anchors for his magic were gone, and command triggers were difficult to hold in one’s mind when you were in the amount of pain he had to be in at the moment. The sputtering flicker of magic that never formed into a mageglobe proved Zachary’s concentration was gone.
Patrick settled his dagger against Zachary’s throat, the glow of heavenly white fire washing the other man out, or maybe it was the blood loss.
“Where is Ethan performing the spellwork to turn himself into a god?” Patrick asked.
Zachary’s lips peeled back from his teeth, eyes almost too bright in his face but losing focus. “He will rise and be remembered.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it.”
There wasn’t any point in saving Zachary for further questioning. He was too much of a zealot, held too much adherence to Ethan’s dreams of godhood. Patrick didn’t wait for Zachary to bleed out on the ground beneath him. He slit Zachary’s throat with his dagger in a single movement, the matte-black blade cutting deep. Zachary heaved beneath him, the stumps of his arms pushing at Patrick’s body, but it didn’t matter.
He was never getting up again.
“That’s for Hannah,” Patrick said, his words quiet beneath the roar of the storm, but he knew Zachary heard him before death stole the mage away.
When Patrick looked up, Madelyn was staring right at him, but there was no judgment in his aunt’s face, no disgust or horror. She looked at him with a fierce sort of grief in her eyes as she held Brittany close, keeping her daughter’s face tucked close to her shoulder to keep from seeing what Patrick had done.
“Thank you,” Madelyn said in a raw voice.
Patrick might have lost his mother, but Madelyn and everyone else had lost a sister and daughter and, later, an aunt. Nothing would bring her back, but closure was still something the Patterson family could get.
That Patrick could get.
Gerard helped Patrick to his feet. The Dominion Sect magic users were faltering beneath the attack now that Andras was gone and Zachary was dead.
