All Souls Near & Nigh (Soulbound Book 2)

by Hailey Turner

  “The interrogation hasn’t begun,” Tremaine said, pulling Patrick uncomfortably close.

  Patrick forced his eyes open, the master vampire limned in light that burned. The body he was pressed against had no warmth, no heartbeat, nothing of substance that Patrick should want—but he did.

  The pull of forced desire was an unwanted curl of heat in his gut that made bile crawl up his throat. Patrick’s shields wavered against his bones, and it took every bit of his rapidly fading concentration to keep them up.

  “You won’t win this fight,” Patrick promised. “Lucien looks forward to a change of ownership and bringing you to heel.”

  Tremaine laughed, harsh and low. “He will take nothing from me. I learned the bitter lessons of laying waste to my world from him, and I learned them well.”

  “Not well enough.”

  “Lucien turned his back on Tremaine, and I showed him a new way forward. Do you know what you mortals used to sacrifice to me?” Tezcatlipoca asked as he pressed himself up against Patrick’s back, the gold chest plate digging into his spine. One heavy hand reached around to press over Patrick’s heart, fingers digging into the scar tissue there through his shirt. “Your life. Your heart. Your very soul.”

  Trapped between heat and cold, with unwanted hands sliding over his body without his permission, all Patrick could think about was how much he wanted to say no—but how some part of him kept thinking yes.

  The push of Tremaine’s mind against his own didn’t help. Persuasion was a power all vampires had, though the degree to which they could manipulate a person was different. Patrick squeezed his eyes shut, falling deep into half-remembered SERE training to help keep his focus for as long as he could. He retreated behind his personal shields, though he knew they were a stop-gap only.

  “Get your hands off me,” he ground out.

  He needed to say it, not just think it, but no wasn’t always respected. Tremaine laughed, his hand sliding down Patrick’s chest to cup his cock through his jeans.

  “You’ll see how we worship now,” Tremaine said.

  The cruel promise in his voice was a nightmare Patrick wanted no part of. His fingers twitched with the need to call his magic, but he knew if he did, it would count as breaking his word and only make the high worse. Shine was eating away at his sight, at his concentration, chipping away at his resolve with every minute that passed. The drug was hitting hard and fast, buoyed by the black magic that lived inside the stagnant blood that sat in vampire veins.

  Magic which Patrick’s body did not like at fucking all.

  Tremaine let go of Patrick’s clothed cock after a hard squeeze, only to grab him by the upper arm and drag him toward the heavy double doors past the dance floor that led to the back of the club. Two vampires darted ahead to hold the doors open. Patrick couldn’t quite keep his footing, and he stumbled, both from the brightness and the speed at which Tremaine hauled him forward.

  They bypassed storage rooms and a break room, heading for a heavily warded door at the end of the short hallway. Tremaine opened it, the door swinging wide on its hinges. Inside was a heavily barricaded and reinforced steel vault that wouldn’t look out of place in a bank. Vampires didn’t use coffins to sleep these days, despite what the stories said. Instead, they used what could pass as bomb shelters.

  Even in his altered state, Patrick knew this would lead to the heart of the Manhattan Night Court.

  “We had a bargain with the Dominion Sect,” someone said from behind them.

  Patrick laughed, shaking his head at the sheer stupidity of some people and how they thought they could outsmart a god. The back room grew brighter in sections, washing out the halogen glare from above. The vampires who blurred through the room to open the vault door and stand guard were bits of dark respite in Patrick’s vision he didn’t trust.

  “Kill him,” Tezcatlipoca said with the casual disdain of a god who expected to be obeyed.

  Loyalty was either bought or earned; that had been true for millennia. Tonight was no different. Patrick sluggishly craned his head around, watching from a drugged distance as the warlock with the concentric circles tattooed on his hands had his throat torn out by a vampire eager to obey. Magic sputtered and died around the warlock as blood splattered across the floor. Patrick blinked, the body seemingly falling in slow degrees to the ground.

  “Killing their mouthpiece won’t stop you from owing them,” Patrick slurred.

  Tezcatlipoca’s aura burned like the sun when the god stepped into view. Patrick had to cover his eyes with one hand, but that didn’t stop them from watering.

  “I promised them nothing.”

  Maybe Patrick could believe that if the immortal hadn’t tried so hard to keep him when his soul was owned by Persephone.

  “Didn’t you?” Patrick asked, lips numb, but smiling all the same.

  Hands slammed into his back and he went tumbling down the stairs into a darkness that felt too alive to be anything but trouble. He scraped his chin raw on the way down before he managed to tuck his head and get an arm around his skull to protect it. Patrick bruised the hell out of his knees and elbows as he careened down the stairs, finally crashing to a stop on a cold landing. He sprawled there, ears ringing, body aching in a way that momentarily disrupted the encroaching sexual need building up beneath the terror.

  Patrick forced his eyes open at the sound of footsteps on the stairs, trying to blink back the burning brightness that wouldn’t fade. A shadow loomed above him, the cool darkness saving his sight.

  “You wasted your life on an animal. Lucien would be so disappointed,” Tremaine said as he hauled Patrick to his feet.

  “Can’t waste what doesn’t belong to me,” Patrick muttered.

  Tremaine dragged Patrick down another set of stairs. Shine dulled his reflexes and he stumbled against the wall on the way down. The lurch in his stomach was less vertigo and more the collapsing of one of his shields, his magic fracturing beneath his desperate, fading control.

  Patrick grasped at the edges of the soulbond. Find me.

  It was a false sort of comfort that stayed with him on the painful journey down below the club. The cement stairwell got colder as they descended. Patrick lost count of the steps before he reached the bottom, arriving into a cold, featureless tunnel that would never be inviting.

  The place stank of iron, blood, and the musty, moldering smell of the long dead. He swallowed dryly, breathing through his mouth for a few seconds as Tremaine pressed up against his back.

  “You shouldn’t have allied yourself with Lucien.”

  Patrick dragged his fingernails down the stone wall. One caught on a crack and tore over the nailbed. “I know I can’t trust him, but you still think you can pull one over on Ethan. Between the two of us, I’m not the stupid one.”

  Fingers tangled in his hair and Patrick was slammed face-first against the wall. His teeth clacked hard together, catching his tongue. Blood filled his mouth, and a familiar spike of pain in his nose told him he might have broken it again.

  Shine made him not care, when he knew he needed to. But bridging that divide was something his brain just wouldn’t do.

  “If this is how you like to feed, I don’t know why people take this shit,” Patrick said, face throbbing from the impact.

  “Because it makes your kind beg.”

  “I only get on my knees for one person, and you aren’t him.”

  A cold tongue licked at the blood trickling from between Patrick’s lips. Patrick recoiled hard, body pressed up against the wall with nowhere to go. But even as he moved away, his cock twitched in his jeans, desire warring against the panicked refusal quietly dying in his mind.

  “You’ll worship a different way for her,” Tremaine promised. “I’ll make sure of it.”

  Patrick’s brain tripped over her, and his confusion loosened up his focus. His consciousness drifted, shine making his skin itch with the desire to just let go. They were halfway down the tunnel before he remembered to carve out
a different bit of pain to rival the chemical-induced desire crawling through his body.

  He bit down on his bottom lip hard enough to cut it, breathing harshly as the new pain hit. Patrick chewed into his own skin to give himself something else to focus on rather than the shine and shadows in his eyes. It was a last-gasp effort that wouldn’t hold up for long, but it let Patrick keep his feet underneath him when he wanted to let his body rest.

  There was no rest to be found underground, in the fringes of the veil.

  Patrick tried to keep track of their passage through the sprawling maze of tunnels, but he kept getting distracted. They passed rooms that would never see daylight, many of which had shadows moving in them, holes in his sight that held no souls.

  He thought the earth trembled at the end of the final tunnel but chalked it up to a possible hallucination. Wavering on his feet, Patrick watched as a pair of vampires approached a steel door not unlike the one guarding the underground entrance back at the club. The only difference was this one had wards scrawled over its surface, some of which were broken and forcibly tied to newer ones.

  Even to Patrick’s damaged vision, he could see the areas where the wards were joined together weren’t stable. Before he could try to make any sense of the magic, the vault-like door swung open, revealing a low-lit area beyond the rat-maze they’d just traversed.

  Cool, musty air hit Patrick’s nose as Tremaine hauled him forward into a long-abandoned subway station. Old, rusted train tracks stretched down a forgotten tunnel into the dark. The wards that buttressed the entire subway system were missing completely down here, or broken so badly as to be remade into something sickeningly new. Patrick was too out of it to really appreciate how wrong it all was, but he knew the broken wards weren’t something he should forget.

  What magic Patrick could see lining the tunnel entrance flickered with a gray, malevolent light that warred with the red-orange glow coming from hundreds of candles. Tiny votives, obnoxious candelabras, glass vases with pictures of the Virgin Mary painted on them—any kind of candle a person could buy or make surrounded an intricate shrine built on the old train platform.

  In the center, seated within a large gold-leafed frame, was a life-sized skeleton clad in white robes, the cowl pulled up over long, brittle black hair that pooled in its lap. In one bony hand the skeleton held a long scythe; in the other, a golden globe. Dozens of gold necklaces were draped around its neck and shoulders, glinting on the white cloth in the candlelight. Marigolds filled the space near its legs and feet, the orange petals like bits of flame.

  In the flickering candlelight, the skull of Santa Muerte seemed to grin.

  Patrick dropped his gaze, eyes watering, and saw more bones than those found in a small graveyard between them and the shrine. Which meant it wasn’t only a shrine, but an altar.

  “My lady appreciates the offerings I bring her more than you will ever know,” Tezcatlipoca said into his ear.

  “Fuck you,” Patrick ground out, heart pounding in his chest.

  The god’s laughter echoed eerily in the station, the twisted wards lining the subway entrance flaring up at the sound. “You’ll beg for it soon enough. Our sacrifices always do before Tremaine sucks the marrow from their bones.”

  Patrick jerked away from the god’s presence but didn’t get far since Tremaine still had hold of him. The master vampire casually tossed him into the arms of the worshippers who had followed them down into the dark—Night Court vampires and Omacatl Cartel members whose religion revolved around death.

  Even in Patrick’s drugged-up state, he still tried to fight them, but his body wasn’t cooperating. Shine burned through his veins, filling his eyes with the brightness of souls, need clawing painfully at his skin. The drug made him want things he never would outside the chemical changes in his brain.

  He wanted the unholy darkness to snuff out the light, wanted hands on him that he’d sooner break if he could only stay focused. But the ability to think rationally was fracturing beneath the ache in his body that shine drew out of him.

  Patrick was dragged to the altar laid out before the shrine. He tripped over bones, breaking some, sending others tumbling away from his feet. Two humans gripped his arms, the brightness of their souls almost overpowering his sight, especially the one to his left. The vampire ahead of them blotted out the candlelight, leading the way to the empty space at Santa Muerte’s feet. Marigold blossoms lined the area like funeral wreaths.

  “No,” Patrick said, the word sticking to his teeth as he was forced down to the platform floor.

  It smelled like blood, like flowers, and Patrick knew he would always associate this particular fear with the cloying floral scent tinged in iron filling his nose.

  Two cartel members held him down at the wrists and shoulders, the bruising weight of their grip keeping him in place. His legs were wrenched apart with a strength he couldn’t break. Lying on his back, Patrick watched as Tremaine approached, bright sparks burning around that human-shaped darkness like some mirage or hallucination. He would never be any oasis Patrick would pray for.

  “Is this how you killed the werecreatures you didn’t force to fight?” Patrick asked over the pounding drum beat of his heart.

  “This is how we pray now that our mother has forsaken us,” Tremaine said, kneeling between Patrick’s legs.

  Patrick choked out a bitter laugh, hands clenching weakly into fists. Tremaine didn’t know—couldn’t have known—that Ashanti was dead, but her absence had still been felt. In the void of her death, her children had gone searching for acceptance somewhere else.

  Tremaine’s power of persuasion coiled in his mind, digging at the breaks in resistance shine had already created. “You want this.”

  Some part of Patrick did, but the rest of him still fought. Cold hands rucked up his shirt, tearing at the button on his jeans. Patrick heaved against the hands pinning him down, trying to get away even as he ached to be touched by the darkness that promised a false respite. In the burning light that filled his eyes, the scythe swung down, held by a bony hand that wielded it with unearthly precision.

  “I bring you a sacrifice, my love,” Tezcatlipoca said from the train tracks.

  The tip of the blade came to rest right over Patrick’s heart, tearing his shirt and scratching at his scars. He blinked, staring in horror as the skull moved, teeth parting around a voice that sounded like the echo of prayers in a cold mausoleum.

  “Worship me,” Santa Muerte said as Tremaine yanked Patrick’s jeans down around his thighs.

  Through blood and sacrifice, eased by false desire—a lamb to the slaughter in a makeshift temple.

  If Patrick worshipped anyone, it wasn’t death.

  The hands gripping his left arm and shoulder shifted, the burning brightness of the man’s soul blocking out the shadows all around him. Patrick blinked, tasting blood as Tremaine’s cold fingers slipped beneath his underwear, sharp nails scraping against his cock.

  In the center of that blinding light, all Patrick saw was a pair of ageless yellow eyes burning brighter than the sun.

  The stranger was not a god Patrick knew.

  Time stilled like it had on the street the other night, the god’s presence a counterpoint to the prayer Tremaine sought to make with Patrick’s body and soul.

  “My cousin searches for you,” the god said right before he pushed Patrick through the platform and into the cold tangle of the veil, letting him fall away from the grasping hands of death.

  13

  Jono knew something was wrong even before the old Greek coin still embedded in Marek’s window exploded with magic. Power rushed through the apartment’s walls with a whoosh that made Jono’s ears pop. Wade jumped off the sofa in surprise, the bag of chips falling away from his hands.

  “What the fuck?” Wade said, eyes wide and voice gone high-pitched with fear.

  “Marek!” Jono yelled as he raced for the door.

  Footsteps pounding down the upstairs hall told him Marek had left h
is office at a run. “I still can’t see a damn thing!”

  “Then stay here behind the ward. Goes double for you, Wade.”

  Jono yanked the front door open, glad to see the magic wasn’t stopping him from leaving—but someone else was. Jono drew himself up short, nearly crashing into Hermes where the messenger god stood in the foyer.

  “Huh. I forgot about that coin,” Hermes said.

  “Get out of my fucking way,” Jono growled.

  Hermes’ gaze flicked up and down Jono before he shrugged. “I got you a ride. Let’s go.”

  The tugging in Jono’s soul seemed to get worse the second he crossed the threshold. He didn’t need to be a magic user to know what that meant.

  Patrick was in trouble.

  Jono shouldered past Hermes and headed for the stairs instead of the elevator, careening down them to the ground floor. Hermes met him at the bottom landing, having moved through the veil as only a god could.

  The tugging in Jono’s soul got sharper. A creeping, vicious unease poured adrenaline through his veins.

  “What happened?” Jono snarled as he slammed through the entrance of the building, the door rattling on its hinges.

  An SUV was parked on the street out front. Quetzalcoatl stood near a familiar motorcycle with two passengers that was parked alongside it. Both engines were running hot.

  “I warned him not to go to the club,” Quetzalcoatl said, sounding irritated.

  “It’s not your case,” Jono reminded him savagely. He would’ve said more, except his mobile started ringing and he yanked it out of his back pocket. Sage’s name flashed over the screen and he answered immediately. “Sage?”

  “Patrick traded himself for Kennedy and us,” Sage said, sounding breathless and furious and scared. Beyond her voice, Jono could hear the sound of honking horns, squealing brakes, and the snarl of beasts he remembered from the subway. “He gave me his dagger and said he wouldn’t use his magic. He—”