“I’m still trying to figure that out,” Adrian admitted, steering Bran back out into the middle of the tower so he could get a better reading. “All I know is he’s planning something that requires the horns of all nine queens to work. Since the Queen of War tore Bex’s off, Pride is the only crown he’s missing. The whole reason Gilgamesh pretended to be Malik and taught me sorcery was so that I would put her shattered horns back together and complete his set.”
“But you didn’t, right?” his familiar said nervously. “If Gilgamesh brought you to Heaven to do a thing, common sense dictates that that’s the one thing you should never,everdo.”
When Adrian didn’t answer immediately, Boston leaned over to shove his nose in his witch’s face. “Tell me youdidn’t do it, Adrian!”
“I didn’t complete them,” Adrian hedged as he craned his neck to keep his eyes on the finding charm despite the cat in his face. “But I couldn’t let this chance go by. You think I’d let Bex go off to fight by herself if I didn’t have a solid plan to change the tide of this entire battle? Just look at the finding charm.”
He pulled his arm back to shove the wooden cat, which was spinning like a broken compass, under Boston’s nose.
“It’s pointing at the Queen of Pride’s body,” he said fiercely. “Hermovingbody, becauseshe’s not dead! All the statues showing her crushed beneath Gilgamesh’s foot are lies. She’s still alive, and she’s here in the Hells. That’s why I came down here in the first place. I’ve got her horns right here in my pocket. All I have to do is put them back on her head, and we’ll have another queen back in the fight!”
He was shaking with excitement by the time he finished, but Boston’s expression looked dire.
“Are you certain?” he demanded, staring into Adrian’s eyes. “Are you absolutely positive that the Queen of Pride is here?”
“Of course I’m positive,” Adrian snapped. “I used a corpse-finding charm with a piece of her own horn as the fulcrum. There’s nothing else it could be pointing at.” He glared at the charm, which was still spinning like a top on his palm. “It was giving me a clear line before I got to this floor, but all the magic flying around must be interfering with the locator.”
“It’s not the locator,” said Boston, who still looked unhappy but was clearly unable to resist correcting Adrian’swrong assumptions. “It’s spinning like that because we’re on top of the target.”
“You see?” Adrian said triumphantly. “I told you I wasn’t messing around.” He looked down at the broken floor where Iggs and the renegade prince were still smacking the Princess of Hate. “I bet she was hidden under that false floor.”
“It looks more like the charm is pointing up to me,” Boston said, giving the spinning cat a sniff before he sighed and stuck out his paw. “Hand it over.”
“You’re helping?” Adrian asked, shocked. “Does this mean you’re not mad at me?”
“I’m furious with you,” Boston snarled, lashing his tail. “Gilgamesh kidnapped you out of your forest to do a task andyou did it! That was a stupid move, Adrian. Did you not think that you might be playing straight into the enemy’s handsagain?”
“Of course I thought about it!” Adrian cried. “But I didn’t have anything else to work with, and I wastryingto escape. Fixing the Queen of Pride and letting her bash us a way out of here was the best plan I could come up with, and for your information, it’s worked perfectly so far. I was able to get out of my cell in Gilgamesh’s palace and all the way down to the Middle Hells. Now the Queen of Pride is practically on top of us, so do you want to keep criticizing, or do you want to help me put another queen in the fight so Bex doesn’t die out there?”
Boston heaved an enormous sigh before jumping off of Adrian’s shoulder to land on Bran’s broom handle.
“For the record,” he announced, “I am absolutely right. Repairing the last piece Gilgamesh needs to put his unknown master plan into motion was reckless in the extreme, but I also acknowledge that I wasn’t there and thus can’t comment upon choices you were forced to make. Either way, done is done. The horns are back together, so we might as well make use of them.”
“Glad to hear it,” Adrian said as he held out the still-whirling charm. “Now how do I stop this thing from spinning?”
Boston gave him one more exasperated look before getting to work.
“The problem is you, not the magic,” he reported. “Going through me to reach the Blackwood was a clever move, but using cat hair as a spell component hinders as much as it helps. That charm was never going to docilely do its job because cats aren’t the obeying sort. Even I can’t make it fully behave with so many exciting things going on, but since you used my hair as the base component, I should have better luck than you’re having.”
That was precisely the sort of excellent observation witches relied on their familiars to provide. Adrian surrendered the charm at once, holding his palm flat so Boston could grab the little spinning cat in his mouth. It stopped moving the moment the familiar’s sharp teeth bit down. A heartbeat later, Boston’s own nose went up instead, pointing like a whiskered arrow straight at the top of the tower. Adrian kicked Bran into motion the second he saw it, shooting them straight up the open center of the tower like a cork.
It felt a bit like flying through the eye of a hurricane. The entire building was engulfed in combat by this point, but the fighting was so chaotic that Adrian couldn’t tell who was winning and who was dying. He also had no idea how or when the Queen of Pride’s body had moved. Adrian was certain it’d been below him when he’d entered the tower, but they were already higher than the floors where he’d been mobbed by warlocks and Boston’s nose was still pointing up.
The charm must have started malfunctioning sooner than he’d realized because it looked like they were going all the way back up to the Hell of War. Now that Adrian thought about it, imprisoning a forbidden queen on a floor occupied exclusively by famously loyal demons did seem like a good idea, but Bostondidn’t take them that far. His nose evened out when Bran reached the observation floor at the top of the Middle Hells’ white tower. The enclosed tunnel staircase that led back to the Upper Hells was right in front of them, and standing beside it like a sentry was Nemini.
Adrian wasn’t surprised at all to see her. The void demon was Bex’s shadow, and she was doing an excellent job of keeping the more cowardly warlocks from reaching the exit. She’d also cut all the cords that rang the alarm bells, proof yet again that she was the most levelheaded demon on Bex’s crew.
Adrian didn’t want to get in the way of her doing her job, so he had Bran move them to the side of the tower where they could look for the Queen of Pride without blocking Nemini’s line of sight. She had to be somewhere on this level, but no matter where he moved his broom, Boston’s nose stayed locked on Nemini…
Who had powers no other demon seemed to possess.
Who’d been with Bex so long that none of her other demons remembered when she’d joined.
Who was the only member of Bex’s crew he’d never seen her name,andthe only demon he’d ever met who didn’t have horns.
Adrian went perfectly still on his broom as all the factors he’d never thought about before suddenly came together in his mind. Boston must have been thinking along the same lines, because he froze in shock, his mouth falling open to drop the charm on the ground where it kept spinning like a top, its carved nose pinned like an arrow on Nemini, who was too busy throwing warlocks down the stairs to notice. She’d just tossed the last one when she finally spotted them staring.
“What?” she asked.
