A Vigil in the Mourning (Soulbound #4) - Hailey Turner Page 0,55
his dagger free with the other. Heavenly fire crackled around the matte-black blade, the prayers in its making reacting to the presence of the hells.
“Get outside!” Patrick yelled.
He glanced over his shoulder at where Thor had jumped the bar and was coming to the rescue of the handful of employees who had stayed behind to close up. One of the women was unconscious and looked badly burned as he picked her up off the floor.
Patrick strengthened his shields and filled his mageglobe with raw magic, ready to form any offensive spell he might need. He took point on the way out of the bar, leaving warmth for freezing cold and a shock wave spell that caused his shield to ripple and bend from the force of it. Patrick layered his shields, channeling magic through his soul to shore up a defense a goddess had anchored in his bones.
Every window in the bar shattered from the hit, glass flying everywhere. The building shook on its foundations but remained standing. Patrick thrust out his arm and sent his mageglobe careening forward to test boundaries. Raw magic exploded against the shield surrounding two SUVs on the street, both vehicles ready to drive away from the scene of the crime. That they hadn’t already meant trouble.
A handful of people stood on the street, magic sparking at their fingertips and in some of the focus circles drawn around their feet on the cold asphalt. Of the four magic users, the only one who mattered to Patrick was the man surrounded by a ring of red-black mageglobes, the concentric circles tattooed on his palms dripping blood.
“Isn’t that the same guy we fought on the Skellig Islands?” Wade asked.
Patrick spun the hilt of his dagger between his fingers, getting a better grip on the blade. “Yeah.”
“What if I eat him?”
“You know, I wouldn’t stop you, but you might get food poisoning.” Patrick raised his voice. “Hell of a way to knock, asshole.”
The last time Patrick had seen Ethan’s right-hand acolyte, they’d been fighting over Órlaith’s life in Ireland. Back then, Patrick had support in the way of his entire pack and the Hellraisers. Here, in Chicago, all he had was Wade, but he couldn’t let a dragon loose in the Windy City. That was attention they couldn’t afford.
Which left Patrick backed into a corner, and he never liked being in that position.
“You dare defile a place of worship?” Thor shouted, his voice echoing through the air.
High above in the cloudy sky, thunder rumbled menacingly. The wind picked up, blowing bitterly cold and making Patrick’s lungs burn with every breath he took. Even as Thor called up a storm, the wind carried something else to them—the unforgettable scent of death.
“Really now, you used to have class,” a throaty voice called out as one of the SUV doors opened. “Is this what you have been reduced to, Thor? Finding prayers in a modern-day drinking hall? Drunken promises never amount to anything. I thought you would have learned that lesson after all these centuries.”
The goddess who appeared was as tall as Thor, her generous curves filling out the all-white pantsuit she wore, which seemed to be missing a blouse beneath the suit jacket. The gold chain necklaces that lay over her cleavage matched the color of her high heels. Long white hair was braided back in an intricate style, with the braids tied off at the base of her neck. The loose hair beyond the ties whipped away from her body like a banner in the wind.
She looked like her perfume of choice would be Chanel No. 5, but the smell coming off her was that of a grave with a body rotting away inside it.
“Hel,” Thor snarled, his voice at odds with the gentle way he handed over the unconscious woman he carried to another of his employees. “You dare show your face after being exiled from Chicago?”
“This city is no Asgard. I can come and go as I please,” Hel hissed.
“You can go right back to the hole you crawled out of,” Patrick said.
Hel walked forward, hellfire crawling away from every footstep she left behind. The sickly crimson glow wrapped itself around the low iron fence, melting the metal with a level of heat Patrick could feel through his shields. Her bony fingers curled into fists. The skin over her hands didn’t match the youthful look of her face, and Patrick wasn’t sure he wanted to know what was hiding beneath