“And the demons they shared their souls with?”
“I’m a vampire. We have no souls for the denizens of hell to lay claim to.”
“I’d say it’s a pity, but it’s not like that would change you much.”
“If you came here to ask for the same thing Estelle and Youssef offered Tremaine, you wasted your time.”
“I don’t think so. You made a promise to protect Patrick, remember? Acknowledging our god pack will help you keep your promise.”
“Don’t speak of things you know nothing about,” Lucien hissed, eyes narrowing.
Jono put both feet on the floor, staring Lucien down as Fenrir seeped through his soul in a way he remembered from Underhill and didn’t like but couldn’t fight. “You think I don’t know what happened during the Thirty-Day War?”
“You weren’t there.”
“Patrick was, same as you. Only he got to say goodbye to Ashanti and you never did.”
Distracted by the god clawing through his soul and the howls filling his mind louder than the club music, Jono never saw Lucien move. He only saw Sage, Emma, and Leon react to the threat at the last second, but they didn’t stand a chance in the face of Lucien’s fury.
Regret was always a bitter weight to carry, heavier than guilt some days.
Jono’s reflexes were a shade too slow to dodge Lucien when the master vampire launched himself across the table. Sage put herself between them, snarling with a voice that sounded more beast than human, but Lucien put her down with a vicious slice from one of his knives to her abdomen. Sage didn’t scream, merely tried to keep her guts from falling out as her rapid healing kicked in.
Emma tried to haul Jono out of the chair, but he wrenched free of her grip, nearly causing her to lose her balance as other vampires closed in. Leon fought to keep some of them at bay, but he wasn’t a match for them all.
Jono would apologize to his friends later for his decisions tonight.
The chair toppled backward from Lucien’s attack, crashing to the floor. When Lucien’s fingers wrapped around his throat, fingernails that felt like claws slicing through skin, Jono didn’t try to fight him. Lucien’s other hand dug into the half-healed knife wound, ripping it open all over again, fingers determined to break apart his ribs. Jono tilted his head back and let Fenrir speak, never looking away from Lucien’s murderous gaze.
“You should have asked for a different place to have this talk,” the god bit out around a laugh that sounded like breaking bones, Jono’s mouth shaping the words. “Ginnungagap is what birthed me and mine.”
Power burst through Jono’s soul, and the air became charged around them, the scent of burning ozone running across his tongue. Lucien’s fingers never loosened from around his throat, nor did they withdraw from the spaces between Jono’s ribs, as the veil tore open around them. The club, with its music and dance floor full of the living and undead, faded to nothing amidst gray fog.
The mundane world fell away in the face of a primordial void that was too vast for Jono to comprehend. It made him feel small and insignificant even as Fenrir basked in its presence.
“Jono!”
Sage’s voice echoed through the fog, as if coming from a great distance when he knew she should’ve been less than a meter away.
Don’t let them get lost, Jono told Fenrir.
Lucien hadn’t removed his hands from Jono’s body, but he paused in his attempt at murder. The fog drifting close to them wasn’t thick enough to obscure his face. The master vampire seemed more contemplative than afraid, and Jono could see, in that moment, how Lucien had survived the centuries when others of his kind had perished beneath the growth and spread of humanity.
Lucien never ran from any threat—he defeated it, or turned it into an opportunity to aid him.
“Here I thought you’d never show your face, Fenrir,” Lucien said in a silky voice.
The god moved Jono’s hand, claws shifting out of his fingers despite the distant sickly pain it caused him. They pressed threateningly against Lucien’s side. “Let us go.”
Maybe it was the threat from the god or the risk of being lost in the veil between worlds that had Lucien shoving himself off Jono. Either way, Lucien stood but didn’t offer Jono a helping hand. Jono disliked being a passenger in his own body, but considering it was Fenrir who had ripped open the veil, he had no choice. He watched through his own eyes as Fenrir stood as well, ignoring the blood staining Jono’s clothes. The parts of the wound not tainted from silver or aconite poison were already healing.
Fenrir threw back his head and howled with Jono’s voice, the sound an almost pulsating thing that pulled through the pack bonds tying him to the people Jono had come to Ginnungagap with.
The veil around them swirled and moved as dark shapes stumbled closer, materializing as Sage, Emma, and Leon. Jono couldn’t turn his head to look at them, but he could smell them, could hear their hearts beating. They were alive, and that was all Jono cared about.
“Jono, your eyes,” Emma said, staring at him in shock. “They’re glowing.”
Sage reached out with a bloody hand to grab Emma by the arm when the smaller woman would have stepped closer. “Don’t interfere.”
“If any of my Night Court are lost within the veil, you will find them and send them back to the mortal world, or this conversation you want will not happen,” Lucien threatened.
“I have no use for your children here. They remain where they are on the other side,” Fenrir said.
Lucien raised his hand to lick Jono’s blood off his fingers. “What do you want?”
“A bargain.”
“I bargain with no one.”
“You make promises with gods. You will make one with me and my chosen vessel.”
Lucien’s eyes never blinked, though his mouth curved up to reveal his jagged teeth in an angry snarl. “The only promise
