As long as Patrick was safe.
Another wave of magic rolled over Anna, and her breath burned like crushed glass in her lungs. She fought through it, pushing on until Oscar careened off the wall, shattering actual glass all over the floor. He slid, first in the fragments and then in the blood from his lacerated paws, and still she didn’t stop. Not until she made one last lunge and closed her teeth on his throat.
He gurgled, and she held fast as blood welled, hot and metallic, on her tongue. Shouts echoed through the room, tinny and far away, words she could barely make out through the red haze in her mind.
But the pained grunt behind her was crystal clear.
Not a scream or a cry. It was hardly more than a rough exhalation, edged with agony and an inevitability that had her twisting around before she realized she’d released Oscar.
Patrick was already falling. One of the guards had shifted into wolf form and had him by the shoulder, dangerously close to his neck, dragging him down to the floor.
Anna couldn’t feel her legs. The room spun in a dizzy circle as she rushed the guard and hit him square in the shoulder. They tumbled across the floor and hit the wall, but she couldn’t feel that, either. All she could feel was a cold ache in her chest and fur under her fingers as she gripped the guard’s muzzle and jerked his head to one side with a sharp crack.
She scrambled across the floor on blood-slicked knees, not paws. She’d lost her wolf, but the grief was a drop compared to the fucking ocean that crashed in on her when she reached Patrick’s side and saw his blank, dead eyes.
He was gone.
Anna was crying, and it was all his fault.
Again.
It had been going so well too. He’d fallen into that beautiful place of altered time where bullets were something you swatted out of the air with the edge of your blade and power flowed from him, shaping the world to his will. It was heady power, fucking exhilarating, and he’d gotten cocky.
“Give me my body back, you fucking
bitch
.”
“It’s not your body, it was never
your
body.”
An open palm cracked across flesh, which shouldn’t have been possible. But it drew Patrick’s attention away from Anna, weeping over him—and back to the struggle that had caused him to step out of it.
The witch. She looked so damn normal, brown hair and pale skin and a face that belonged on a soccer mom or a real estate agent, not a murderous spell caster bent on stealing a man’s life. She had her hands around Oscar’s throat—the
real
Oscar, not the wolf bleeding on the floor. His ghost.
Real and yet not.
The witch caught sight of Patrick, did a classic double-take—and smiled, an expression that took her from harmless suburbanite to crazy asshole in a heartbeat. “One down.”
He couldn’t feel his body beyond a vague heaviness centered somewhere in his noncorporeal chest. Anna was huddled next to him, shaking and shocked. Blood pooled under his shoulder, pouring from a wound he couldn’t feel.
A lot of blood.
His hand fisted, and his sword was suddenly there. Not the real one—that rested beside Anna, beneath his limp hand—but a ghostly version that glowed with all the magic he had left. “One’s all you get.”
She shoved Oscar away, and he tumbled through the wall. “You think I won’t go after your girlfriend next? I owe her.”
Patrick placed himself squarely between the witch and Anna. “I think you’re a ghost, and you can’t do a goddamn thing to her.”
“For now.” She peeked past him and clucked her tongue. “But maybe when you’re gone, I’ll crawl back into
your
body. See what shakes out.”
“Oscar already tried that. Anna would know it wasn’t me, and she’d rip you right back out.” He advanced on her, swinging his sword in a lazy arc. Light trailed in its wake, an afterimage burned into the air around them. Pure power…if he could figure out what to do with it.
The witch’s eyes narrowed, and the light flickered, just for a moment. “That’s a nice toy.”
“You’ll get an up-close and personal look at it soon enough.” The pool of blood had spread to brush Anna’s bare knee, and the weight in Patrick’s chest was easing.
Somehow, he didn’t think that was a good thing.
He was dying, and fast. He didn’t have time to banter his way through a sword fight. Oscar’s body was probably already healing, because that was what shapeshifters did. They came back from the brink of death while humans tumbled over it.
The sword wasn’t a toy, but it
was
a tool. The focus for the magic, a channel and outlet for when too much built up inside him. But the power was all his.
Twisting his wrist, he held the glowing weapon in front of him, blade parallel to the ground, and pressed the tip to his other palm. It connected with a shock, and he watched the witch as he began to push his hands together.
The sword melted, twisting in on itself until it hovered between his palms, transformed, a bright ball of pure energy with silver flames licking across the surface.
He only let himself admire it for a moment before flinging it at the witch.
She didn’t move. Instead, she reached out with both hands, freezing the energy in midair. She laughed, but after a moment the glowing orb shook, shuddered, and zipped at her, slicing across her cheek in a razor-sharp, glancing blow.
She reached for it. Patrick flung his hand out in a snatching motion, and the orb snapped back toward his palm.
This magic wasn’t some intangible force harnessed by mystical rituals or spells. He could see it. Touch it. He slammed his hands together and separated them, imagining the energy split into two, and it was. He imagined flames and those appeared, red and orange and furious and
effortless
—
Dying made everything so much easier.
He didn’t throw it this time, just twitched his wrist and sent one ball hurtling toward her, and the other zipping toward Oscar’s—
her
—prone body.
“No!” She dove for the body, just as Oscar’s spirit burst out of the wall in his wolf form, teeth bared. He tore at her arm, but instead of blood, glowing light ripped free of her form.
Maybe that’s all ghosts were—energy or power that hadn’t faded yet. Patrick called his magic back to him, and with a single thought he was holding his sword again. He’d formed the blade from dull, hungry silver, and it tugged at the air around him as he lunged and stabbed it into the witch’s shoulder.
She hissed and staggered back, her aura diminishing for a split second, and Oscar snapped again. Her hiss turned to a howl of pain, and Patrick swung, cutting into her side and holding steady as the blade grabbed hungrily at her essence.
The witch opened her mouth again, not to howl but to
roar
, and a wall of power slammed into Patrick. It stole his breath, squeezed at him like a vise—
He was falling. Falling fast, as if his shoes were made of enough cement to carry him straight to Hell, which was arguably where he belonged by any religion’s standards. But he didn’t slam into Hell at all. The weight was his body, and pain exploded through him, all the agony of having his shoulder ripped open.
Anna’s breath caught on a sob he could barely hear over his own groan. A moment later, his carabiner full of charms rattled as she flipped wildly through them. “I told you he wasn’t gone, Alec. I could
feel
him—” She pressed one charm and then another hurriedly against his bloody skin, and they activated with a whoosh that raised the hair on his arms. “Hold on, Patrick. Just hold on—”
He tried to twist his head, but he barely managed to roll it to one side. More men had crowded the room, a dozen shapeshifters who had every exit covered and Alec and Anna surrounded. Jorge was bent over Oscar’s body with one of the guards, who had a first-aid kit emptied next to them.
Oscar couldn’t beat the witch back on his own. She would reclaim his healed body, and there was no way she’d let Alec and Anna walk out of the room. They wouldn’t be able to fight their way free, not against such unbalanced odds. Not when Anna would never leave a wounded Patrick behind to die.
His mouth was dry. He swallowed, and it still hurt to croak out one word. “Anna.”
She shook her head, her face pale, her eyes red and bright. “Don’t leave me, not like this.” She sounded lost, so lost. Alone.
He didn’t have a choice. The only sure path out of this clusterfuck was to shove Oscar Ochoa back into the witch’s transformed body—alone. And the only way to do that… “I’ll try to come back,” he whispered, weathering the pain of moving so he could touch her cheek. “Love you.”
“No, Patrick, wait—”
“Be right back.”
All he had to do was close his eyes and
reach
, and Anna’s words grew muffled. It was easy to slip free of the confines of his physical body on purpose this time. Too easy, and maybe that meant his last words to her had been a lie, that his connection to his dying body was so tenuous there would be no crawling back inside.
He snapped his eyes open as the witch caught Oscar by the legs and slammed the wolf into the wall. Patrick’s magic took glowing form with a thought, and he slung it at her exposed back before charging her.
She pitched forward but came up laughing as she realized he’d returned. “You idiot. That body won’t live forever without you in it. You just killed yourself.”
When he was close enough, he started the swing as if the sword was already in his hands, and it appeared just in time to slice through her arm. “As long as I take you with me.”
“You can’t.” But it was a lie. Her aura wavered, phased into nothingness for a fraction of a second before she resolidified and retaliated with an easily deflected blow.
Oscar had weakened her, and all Patrick had to do was what he did best—finish the damn job.
She lashed out at him again, a weak sputter of fire, and he sliced through it and swung back around, feinting for her unprotected side. She twisted, throwing up an almost transparent shield of energy.
It would have stopped the sword, but her shielded side had never been his target. A shift of his grip, a change in footing, and he shoved the sword through her chest, impaling her nonexistent heart.
She clawed at him, tearing away shreds of power as she dissolved. Talons of agony ripped at his core until his entire being burned. The pain ceased, leaving Patrick feeling dizzy and light, as if the fight had kept him grounded but now he was floating away.
Stillness fell along with gray shadows and a peace far removed from the chaos of the room. Alec was dragging Anna off of him, while she screamed inaudibly and flailed in what seemed like slow motion.
Oscar hovered by his father and the fallen body that should have been his. “It’s over,” he mumbled. “She’s gone, but so am I.”
“You don’t have to be.” The sword in Patrick’s numb hand pulsed with enough power for a miracle—but only one. The one that would make Anna safe. “That body is healing, and it looks like you. All we have to do is get you into it.”
Oscar looked up, startled, but his disbelief faded quickly. “You’re doing this for Anna.”
“She knows where Carrie is.” Only two steps to where the witch’s body lay, but the effort exhausted Patrick. “I think I can get you back into this body. Maybe I can even keep you there. You tell your father the truth and get Alec and Anna out, and you get your family.”
Oscar held out his hand. “You have my word.”
He tried to clasp Oscar’s palm, but his fingers melted through the wolf’s. No time left, no second chances. “Close your eyes,” he muttered, visualizing what he needed to happen, holding it in his head until there wasn’t room for anything else. No doubt. No distraction.
One purpose.
Oscar’s eyes fluttered shut, and he struck, driving the sword through the man’s chest. Patrick ignored the betrayed, furious snarl and used the momentum of his thrust to carry them both to the ground. The tip of his blade slid cleanly through the witch’s abandoned body and into the floor beneath, and Patrick imagined it pinning Oscar’s spirit into flesh.
The ghost blinked out. The body’s eyes flew open—Oscar’s eyes now, not the witch’s, not ever again. Patrick could see rough edges, the blurred lines where the spirit didn’t quite overlap. It would take power to bind them together, raw magic, and that was what his ghostly sword was made of. His energy mixed with what he’d stolen from the witch, plus whatever was holding him to the earth, all of it trembling in his grip.
So he let go. Released the hilt and stumbled back a step, and he didn’t have to
think
. Oscar’s aura flared, painfully bright, and all of the energy in the room swirled, spiraling down into the wolf’s chest, binding him to flesh.
The world was spiraling too. Patrick closed his eyes against a wave of vertigo, but it faded as that peaceful grayness flooded into him, stripping away any need for up or down. Maybe he was falling. Maybe he was floating.
They could drag him down to Hell now, if they wanted. Anna would be safe, and knowing that was as close to Heaven as he had ever deserved to be.
Chapter Twenty-One
Things weren’t supposed to end like this.
“Anna, honey. I’m here.” Sera’s voice drifted in and out, though she kept touching Anna. Stroking her arms, brushing her hair back. “I need you to come back to me. Come back to all of us.”