“Come on,” the cat said with a scathing look. “Have you ever known Bex to stop after a defeat? I’m not entirely sure of the sequence of events, but she reappeared at the Seattle Anchor shortly after Heaven stopped its bombardment and just seconds before the Old Wives arrived to evacuate everyone to the Blackwood.”
“The Old Wives went toSeattle?” Adrian repeated, dumbfounded. “How?Why?The Blackwood never gets involved in outside affairs, so why did—”
“I’ll explain it to you later,” Boston snapped. “Right now you need to pay attention before—”
His voice cut off as the river of bullets that had been roaring nonstop since Iggs climbed out of the hole abruptly ended. A loud curse came next, and Adrian looked down tosee the mad Princess of Hate standing with her carved hand wrapped around the muzzle of Iggs’s gun. She must’ve been slowly pushing forward against the bullets this whole time because there was a mountain of flattened slugs in front of her. The princess, however, was uninjured. A fact Iggs clearly recognized all too well from the look of horror on his face as she grabbed the gun out of his hands and broke it in two, snapping the metal barrel like a twig before throwing it aside to free her hands so she could drive them into the demon’s chest.
It happened with the same horrible slow motion as a car crash. Adrian was certain he was about to watch his friend die in front of him, and he didn’t even have a spell to stop it. There was nothing in his pockets but cat hair, the finding charm, and the Queen of Pride’s horns. He was about to try sorcery again even though he already knew it was too late when the white hand the princess had been about to stab through Iggs’s ribs was suddenly knocked off course.
The chained princess herself staggered a second later, kicked nearly off her feet by someone moving faster than Adrian’s eyes could track. It wasn’t until the black blur stopped to help Iggs get free of his ruined gun’s shoulder strap that Adrian realized he was looking at a petite woman dressed in black combat gear with long, midnight-dark hair pulled into a ponytail, pale skin, and a look of pure fury etched into her lovely, determined face.
“Bex,” he whispered, lurching toward her so fast that Bran had to swerve to keep him from falling. “Bex!”
She didn’t look up, and thank the Forest for that, because the Princess of Hate recovered from the kick immediately. If Adrian had distracted her, she would’ve gotten blindsided. As always, though, the Queen of Wrath didn’t flinch. She ducked the princess’s punch like she’d seen it coming for miles, letting the white doll’s manacled arm fly over her hornless headbefore lunging forward to slam a short sword Adrian vaguely remembered Iggs wearing once into the Princess of Hate’s muzzled face.
The explosion that followed rocked the tower and sent the princess’s white body flying into the air. If her head hadn’t been enclosed in a sin-iron cage, Adrian was sure that hit would’ve blown it off. Her jaw and neck were still blackened when she landed on the second loop of the tower’s spiral stair, snarling at Bex like a rabid animal. Bex snarled back, showing the princess the full spread of her fangs as she lifted her short sword for the next attack.
Adrian’s heart lifted with it. Great Forest, it was good to see her. From the moment he’d first felt Heaven’s attack through his tree, not an hour had gone by that he hadn’t worried about her. He’d imagined all sorts of horrible scenarios where she suffered for his stupid mistakes, but at no point had he expected to find her already free and in the Hells leading what appeared to be a full-scale demon rebellion.
Dunderheaded assumption on his part. Adrian still wasn’t sure how all of this had come to be, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized he should’ve expected it from the beginning, because this was what Bex did. She rose from her ashes. She picked up her sword and came back swinging every single time.Nothing—not death nor defeat nor Gilgamesh himself—could keep her down for long, and Adrian was so proud of her that he felt like he was going to burst. He was scrambling to think of a way to help her that wouldn’t get in her way when a flash of white shot through the golden doors at the tower’s base and tackled Bex off her feet.
It happened so quickly, Adrian didn’t recognize the white streak as his own princess until she smashed the real Bex through the wall. When he rushed Bran to the window to look, he saw the two of them lying outside the tower in a kickingtangle, rolling through the dirty water while rows of chained slaves desperately tried to get out of their way.
This was normally the point where Bex would’ve lit up in a blaze of fury, but no flames appeared. She actually seemed to be struggling to keep her hornless head above the water as the princess crawled on top of her, using the weight of her carved body to pin the flesh-and-blood Bex to the ground. She grabbed her by the throat next, holding the real Bex in place with her carved hand while her gloved one curled into a fist to start pounding the queen in the face, but Bex didn’t give her the chance. She’d already wiggled her good arm free to slam her explosive short sword into the princess’s unprotected side.
The blast that followed echoed like a cannon through the giant cavern of the Middle Hells. Both Bexes were flung apart, but while the real Bex went skipping across the flooded floor like a stone, the princess grabbed one of the sin-iron slave chains.
The metal that held the Wheel of Reincarnation was plenty strong enough to check her momentum. The princess threw herself forward next, grabbing the chain in her fist to fling herself in the same direction the real Bex had been thrown. The last thing Adrian saw was the princess’s white back vanishing into the smoky dark of the Hells. He’d already started climbing through the tower window to go after them when he stopped himself short.
It took every bit of his willpower to do it. He normally wouldn’t worry about Bex fighting a princess, but now that the rush of seeing her again was fading, all Adrian could think about was how different she’d looked. Even in glimpses caught from a distance, it was impossible not to notice that she was still missing her horns and right hand. Adrian already knew she didn’t have her sword because Drox’s ring was on the fake princess’s finger, but Bex’s fire was part of her, and he hadn’t seen a flicker of that either.
That was alotof handicaps for a solo fight against a princess of Gilgamesh. The urge to run and help was overwhelming. The only reason Adrian didn’t was because he already knew Bex wouldn’t thank him for it. She’d chosen to charge this tower for a reason, and Adrian wasn’t egotistical enough to believe it was solely for him. She had other goals here, demons to free. Bex always put the mission first, so Adrian forced himself to stop reacting and start figuring out how to actually help them win.
It definitely wasn’t looking good. For better or worse, Bex had taken the Princess of Wrath out of the fight, but that left Iggs facing off against the Princess of Hate alone with only one other human as backup. It was hard to tell from way up here, but the skinny man looked a lot like the prince Adrian had seen in the Walking Memory. The one who’d picked him up and traded his unconscious body to Bex for the crazy prince’s burned carcass and her sister’s hand.
Adrian couldn’t imagine the sequence of events that had led to that same prince fighting alongside demons in the Hells, but he was clearly on the rebels’ side now. He was barefoot and filthy with no sign of his white sword or golden armor, but he was standing on the newly-revealed staircase like a sorcerous turret, sending out smaller versions of the bull he’d used earlier to keep pushing the Princess of Hate back. He sent the bulls up the tower as well, trampling the warlocks who were trying to stop Desh’s army of demons.
The lightning-fast sorcery combined with the calm determination on the prince’s gaunt face made for an absolutely terrifying sight. So long as he was shooting Gilgamesh’s people, though, Adrian wasn’t going to worry about him. He’d already dug his hand into the front pocket of his coat for the finding spell that had been stabbing him in the chest since he’d arrived on this floor.
“What’s that?” Boston asked when Adrian pulled out the little carved cat. “Wait, is thatme?”
“None other,” Adrian said proudly, holding his palm flat so the finding charm could do what he’d made it to do. “Gilgamesh sealed me off from my forest, so I used my connection to you to borrow your connection to the Blackwood so I could make a modified version of the corpse-finding spell.”
Boston looked affronted. “You turned me into acorpse sniffer?”
“That was the original plan,” Adrian said. “But when I fired you up, you found something even better. Look!”
He moved his hand to show Boston the broken piece of black horn glued to the wooden cat’s belly.
“What’s that?” Boston asked.
“A piece of the Queen of Pride’s broken horns,” Adrian replied with a grin. “I’ve been using it to track her body.”
His familiar blinked. “Her what?”
“The Queen of Pride’s body!” Adrian repeated excitedly, moving his hand up and down as he desperately tried to follow the spell’s wild jumping. “Gilgamesh didn’t bring me up here just because I’m his son. He wanted me because I was the one who figured out how to restore Bex’s bonfire, and he brought me to Heaven so I could do the same thing to the Queen of Pride.”
Boston looked even more confused. “Why would Gilgamesh want to restore a queen?”
