“It’s you,” he whispered as his face split into a giddy smile.
Nemini looked more confused than ever, but Adrian’s mind was whirling faster than his charm. Of course, of course, it all made sense! Nemini’s age and rarity, the black snakes that covered her head but no one else’s, her uniquely horrifying and incredible powers, the way she treated Bex like family, there was nothing she could bebuta queen!
But while the truth was becoming more self-evident to Adrian by the second, Nemini looked like she’d seen a ghost. Her confused expression had already collapsed into a look of horror, and her normally calm eyes were stretched so wide that Adrian could see the full circle of her yellow irises. She backed away next, snakes hissing defensively. She looked like a cornered animal, but Adrian was too stupid with excitement to notice.
“I can’t believe I didn’t realize it sooner!” he cried as he leaped off his broom to run to her. “It all makes sense now! You’re the Queen of—”
She slapped a hand over his mouth before he could finish. The cold wash of oblivion followed, leaving Adrian numb and helpless as Nemini yanked him into the tunnel stairway that connected the Middle and Upper Hells. She slammed him into the wall next, knocking the witch hat off his head and grinding the back of his skull into the stone with impossible strength. Adrian was sure she was about to crack him like an egg when Boston suddenly leaped onto Nemini’s back.
“Nemini,stop!” he cried desperately as he clawed his way up her back. “I’m realizing that we might have just accidentally trodden upon a delicate topic, but I swear Adrian meant no harm! He had only the best of intentions when he—”
“He always has the best intentions,” Nemini interrupted, clenching the hand she was still pressing over Adrian’s mouth until his jawbone ached. “That’s his entire problem. He lets his hopes override his common sense.”
That was one way of seeing it, Adrian supposed, but actual self-reflection was impossible when Nemini’s void was sucking his consciousness down like a stone. He was on the verge of blacking out when Boston made it to Nemini’s shoulder and pawed her arm with a pleading look. The cat’s charm must have gotten through, because the demon released her grip with a long, tired sigh.
Adrian hit the ground like a sack of bricks. When he became aware of his surroundings again, he was sitting at the bottom of the stairs between the Upper and Middle Hells with Boston curled into a shaking ball in his lap and Bran hovering nervously over his head. He was waving the broom away when Adrian realized Nemini was sitting on the stair beside him, hunched over her knees with her snake-covered head in her hands.
“How did you know?”
The question came out as a whisper, and Adrian winced.
“I didn’t until just now,” he said, leaning forward to match her. “And I didn’t figure it out on my own. I was following that.”
He pointed at the tracker Boston had dropped on the floor, though it wasn’t until the void demon gave him a sideways look through her fingers that Adrian realized just how strange the wooden doll covered in cat hair must look to someone who wasn’t a witch.
“It’s a finding spell,” he explained quickly. “I was using it to find the Queen of Pride in the hope that she’d help me escape. I never imagined it would lead me to you.”
“It shouldn’t have,” Nemini said, raising her head to give him the bitterest look Adrian had ever seen. “The Queen of Pride is dead. She destroyed herself five thousand years ago to spite Gilgamesh.”
“But she doesn’t have tostaydestroyed,” Adrian said, flashing her a smile. When she failed to smile back, he held up afinger, rose to his feet, and trotted back across the room to grab the still-rattling finding spell off the ground.
“Just a moment,” he said as he pried the bit of horn that served as the primary locating apparatus off the wooden cat’s belly. He dug into his coat’s largest enchanted pocket next to pull out the magnificent set of repaired horns he’d almost finished back in his workroom. When he had the whole crown balanced in his hands, Adrian slid the final piece into place.
He hadn’t brought any sap to glue it, but none was necessary. The moment the final piece touched the others, the horns latched onto it all by themselves, healing the break with the same lightning-fast regeneration he’d seen a hundred times in Bex’s body. When the very last crack was repaired, Adrian turned around to offer the completed horns to Nemini.
“These are yours,” he said in a reverent voice. “Gilgamesh collected the pieces and kept them for eons until he could find someone capable of repairing them. That someone turned out to be me, but I didn’t do this for him. I restored these horns for all of us, for Bex and myself and your crew and everyone else who wants to escape Gilgamesh’s yoke. With these, we can put another queen who never kneeled back in the fight. We can free the demons, defeat the princes, save Bex, topple Heaven itself! Everything we thought was lost when Bex was defeated is back in our grasp. We just have to reach out and grab it, so here,” He stretched his arms out farther. “Take them.”
He was smiling so hard, his face hurt by the end. It’d been a rough road, but Adrian had never felt so close to victory. There was no way Nemini didn’t feel it too. She was one of Bex’s demons, a fellow soldier in the Queen of Wrath’s endless fightanda daughter of Ishtar. This should’ve been everything she’d been waiting five thousand years to hear, but Nemini was leaning away from the horns like they were a sword pointed at her heart.
“I can’t.”
The smile slid off Adrian’s face. “What?”
“I can’t do it,” Nemini repeated. “Those are the Queen of Pride’s horns, and I’m not her.” She curled back over her knees. “Leave me alone.”
“No,” Adrian said fiercely, taking one hand off the towering horns to grab the no-longer-functioning finding charm.
“My magic isn’t wrong,” he insisted, shaking the wooden cat at her. “These horns are part of your body. Ithasto be you!”
When she didn’t look up again, Adrian shoved the charm into his pocket with a sigh.
“I understand your hesitation,” he said gently, trying a different tactic. “But whatever happened in the past, the truth of the present is that we’re going to lose this war if we don’t have a queen. Gilgamesh knows that. It’s why he came down on Bex so hard and why he kidnapped me to Heaven even though it would’ve been much easier to fix your horns inside my own forest. He knows he can’t risk your return, which is exactly why we have to make sure it happens.”
He took another step toward her. “Don’t you see, Nemini?” he whispered, voice trembling with excitement. “You’reit. You’re the change we’ve all been waiting for, the changeBexhas been waiting for. You’re how we win back Paradise, how we turn this whole war around, and all you have to do is go back to being what you always were.”
He could already see it happening. Nemini would put on her horns and take command of all the demons in the Hells. He’d seen how strong the queens could be, and Nemini’s powers weren’t even ground down by time. She could save Bex, save Iggs, save the slaves, save everyone! Adrian didn’t see how anyone could say no to such an obvious and universal good, buteven when he spelled it out for her, Nemini refused to look at him.
“You have no idea what you’re asking,” she whispered, curling herself into an even tighter ball on the stairs. “I already gave up my life for this war once. I’m not doing it again. For the last time, the queen you’re talking about is dead. Now leave mealone.”
