the surface.
“Hinon, take my worshippers to safety,” Thor said, his blue eyes glowing white-hot in the glare of hellfire.
Hinon snapped his wings close to his back, bits of lightning trailing across the ground like electric pinion feathers. “Keep your wits about you, cousin.”
Hinon gathered the three women into his arms, holding them with ease. He spread his wings with a snap that nearly deafened Patrick. Thunder echoed in the air, a sound so deep Patrick felt it in his bones as Hinon flung himself into the sky on massive wings that trailed lightning in his wake.
Patrick only watched him go for a second before his gaze snapped back to Zachary and the Dominion Sect mercenary magic users the mage had brought with him. Zachary watched him with a smile on his face Patrick didn’t like at fucking all.
“Don’t leave my side, Wade,” Patrick said.
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Wade replied, inching closer.
Hel came to a stop halfway up the path leading to Eiketre’s entrance, hellfire curling around her body like serpents. “I offered you a better way than plying prayers out of the bottom of a glass, Thor. You declined.”
“You want to bring Ragnarök to a world not ready for the end. The Allfather is the one who keeps us relevant in mortals’ memories. You will kill us all with the worship of new gods,” Thor said.
Hel laughed, the sound dry and hollow, stolen by the storm winds rising over the city. “I offered you life, not this faithless existence you have resigned yourself to. You declined to join me.”
“Death does not give a life, it only ever takes one.”
A lightning bolt careened down from the sky in front of Thor, half blinding Patrick when it hit. Blinking rapidly, trying to clear his vision, Patrick stared at the charred, split ground in front of the god and the ball lightning that crackled and burned in the air between the two immortals.
Thor reached for the ball lightning, fingers tearing into the electricity. They folded over a carved wooden handle that pushed through the electric sphere with ease. Drawn from the crackling, heated lightning, Mjölnir took shape in Thor’s fist, the ancient weapon filled with enough magic it could level mountains if he so chose.
Since Chicago wasn’t anywhere close to a mountain range, Patrick hoped Thor wouldn’t level a skyscraper or two. That was property damage he really didn’t want to have to explain to the SOA.
Mjölnir burned with the power of a god, but Hel wasn’t fazed by it in the least. The goddess spread her arms wide, hellfire dripping from her fingers. “You chose the wrong side, Thor. The past can’t keep us alive.”
Thor strode forward. “The past is what makes us. I will take what is owed to me for the damage to my altar out of your skin.”
“Oh, but yours isn’t the only altar I’ve come to ruin.”
She thrust both hands toward them, hellfire exploding away from her fingers. Patrick grabbed Wade’s wrist and hauled them out of the way, hoping to all the gods his shields would hold. The hellfire crashed into the bar, doubling the conflagration already eating its way through Thor’s altar.
“Enough of your desecration,” Thor snarled, raising Mjölnir high over his head.
Hel ripped open the veil between them, gray fog spiraling out from the tear between worlds. “Odin will never see Valhalla again. My Hel is all he will ever know.”
Thor hesitated in the face of that threat, the lightning cutting through the clouds above never striking earth. “What have you done?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
As taunts went, it was enough to make Thor race after her through the veil, the tear sealing up behind him. It left Patrick and Wade to face off against the Dominion Sect while hellfire burned the bar to the ground.
“I hear sirens,” Wade said.
Patrick couldn’t hear a thing over the crackling roar of the fire, but Wade’s hearing was better than his. While they really needed the Chicago Fire Department on the scene, he didn’t want to risk the lives of first responders. Zachary, Patrick knew from previous experience, was all about collateral damage. Patrick didn’t need the Dominion Sect to take potshots at fire fighters.
Patrick conjured up another mageglobe and filled it with a shock wave spell. He was hampered from casting higher-level offensive spells by the scars in his soul and his inability to tap a ley line, which would’ve come in real handy right about then. The shock wave spell was pushing his abilities, but he