She still looked unconvinced, so Adrian played his final card.
“Think of it as insurance,” he said gently. “If your hand’s back on your wrist where it belongs, it’ll be a lot harder for Gilgamesh to turn it into a princess again. Do it for my sake, if nothing else. If I ever have to see that creepy fake Bex again, I won’t be held responsible for my actions.”
Thatgot a smile out of her. “Glad you weren’t fooled into thinking it was actually me in there.”
“Not for a second,” Adrian promised as he reached down to gently touch the stump at the end of her right arm. “May I?”
He waited until she nodded, and then Adrian slowly pressed the severed hand against Bex’s cut wrist. Considering the massive injuries he’d seen her recover from without so much as a scar, he fully expected her body to snatch the hand out of his grasp, but that didn’t happen. Nothing did. The hand just sat limply against her stump like it belonged to someone else, and Adrian felt Bex start to shake.
Oh no. He wasn’t letting her go there, not while he still had a say. Other than the cut in her side from the Blade of Gilgamesh, Bex’s body had always repaired any wound dealt to it, but he’d never seen her reattach a completely severed limb. The problem could be that—since the stump was healed—her body thought its work was already finished.
If that was the case, then Adrian just had to get her natural healing going again. Solution in sight, he slid his hands up to cover the gap where her wrist and hand connected. When the wound was completely encircled by his fingers, Adrian closed his eyes and reached out with his magic. Not with his father’s quintessence, but with the witchcraft he’d loved from the moment he’d realized what it was.
Healing was the first magic his mother had taught him, and it was still the part of their craft he enjoyed the most. Doing the impossible and fixing the unfixable were what made witchcraft feel like true magic, and Adrian poured himself into both of those now. He even had help, because while the forest in his heart was still blocked by the lion Gilgamesh had placed inside his chest when he became a prince, Bex’s fire came straight from the Blackwood. Adrian himself had been the funnel that had poured it into her, which made him intimately familiar with every aspect of it.
He used that connection now. Since he couldn’t reach his forest with his own heart, he reached through Bex instead, sliding down the channel the Great Blackwood had created when it’d poured through them both to pinch back a bit of the fire they’d put into her last summer.
The flames leaped to meet him the second he got close, raging into his hands like the forest fires they’d been originally. If he hadn’t been so familiar with every bit of Bex’s magic, they would’ve burned him to a crisp. Fortunately for him, this was a dance Adrian had done before. The raging fire barely had time to flash in his mind before he passed it on, pressing the all-consuming fire of life he’d plucked from Bex’s body into the cold flesh of her lifeless hand.
That should’ve been all there was to it. The fire of life was defined by its all-powerful drive to spread and grow. It should have raged into her hand like a grass fire entering a fresh dryfield, but something was pushing it back. When Adrian gave the thing a poke, he realized it was quintessence.
Thick, concentrated quintessence had been pumped into every one of the hand’s blood vessels and left to solidify there like cement. Adrian probably should’ve expected something like that in hindsight, but the extent of the intrusion was still a shock. His father’s magic had invaded every cell, conquering the hand the same way he’d conquered Paradise. Pulling it all out again would require more sorcerous skill than Adrian possessed, but he hadn’t come to this as a sorcerer. He was here as a witch of the Great Forest, and the Blackwood knew better than any that the best way to rejuvenate a rotten forest was to burn it.
The moment he realized what he had to do, Adrian reached back down the connection to Bex’s fire, but not to grab another pinch. This time, he let the whole thing go, turning himself once again into a conduit for her flames. They seared through him just like they had on the day he’d put her in the bonfire his forest had built, but this time Adrian knew what to expect.Thistime, he was ready, grabbing the flames as fast as they came in and shoving them down his arms into the hand he was clutching between his fists.
The result was just as dramatic now as it had been the first time. The moment he sent the fire into it, Bex’s severed hand burst into flames. The flare was so bright that even Bex looked away, but as the quintessence saturating its flesh began to char and boil away, the hand itself lost its dead, passive limpness and began to twitch.
Bex gasped at the same time. Her eyes—which were glowing like torches again, thanks to her rekindled fire—grew huge as her flaming hand ripped out of Adrian’s grasp and shoved itself back onto her wrist of its own accord. The wound closed up a second later, the scar burning off her wrist like a piece of string in a furnace.
When the flames finally died back down, there was no sign that she’d ever been injured in the first place. Her hand looked just like it always had, beautiful and strong as Bex clenched it into a fist.
“Thank you,” she whispered, clutching her restored fingers to her chest with a ragged breath. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Adrian whispered back, pulling her against him with zero guilt this time. Not that healing her hand made up for letting Gilgamesh play him, but it was so nice to be part of a team again. Finally,finally, Adrian felt like he was back on the right track, which was almost as amazing as the feeling of Bex’s warm body resting against his chest.
He really hadn’t paid enough attention to that. A critical lapse for a Witch of the Present, and one Adrian was overjoyed to remedy. He’d just given himself over to the sheer pleasure that was the smell of Bex’s hair in his nose and the feeling of her fire-warmed body seeping through his clothing when he heard something beep.
“Sorry,” Bex said, breaking away from him slowly, but still much faster than Adrian preferred, to press a finger against the familiar-looking device wedged into her left ear.
“I’m here.”
The reply was too quiet for Adrian to hear who it was, but the fact that Bex could still talk to anyone was incredible. He’d been the first to point out that the Bonfire of Wrath only burned things she was mad at, but it still seemed unbelievable that the comm’s black plastic hadn’t melted from all the heat earlier. Same for Bex’s clothes, which also looked completely untouched by the raging inferno. She was even wearing her signature leather jacket, a beautifully nostalgic touch that almost made him choke up. Adrian was still getting the feeling under control when Bex’s face lit up in an excited smile.
“Are you sure?”
Adrian still couldn’t hear the other person’s reply, but it must have been good because Bex’s smile widened into a beaming grin.
“That’s fantastic! Stay right there. We’re on our way.”
“Who was that?” he asked when she let go of the comm button.
“Iggs,” Bex replied as she whirled and started running for the stairs. “He’s found our wrath demons!”
Adrian hadn’t known they were missing, but he didn’t waste Bex’s time with questions. He just ran after her toward the distant column of the warlocks’ white security tower. He was struggling to move his feet through the calf-deep water when Bex suddenly turned back around. Adrian thought there must have been something she’d forgotten to tell him, but then he realized Bex wasn’t looking at him. Her glowing eyes were fixed on the silent crowd standing all around them.
Adrian went still. He’d been so focused on Bex, he’d completely forgotten they were surrounded by an audience of chained demons. In his defense, it was so dark and smoky down here that he could scarcely see. The demons were just shadows crouching in the filthy water that covered the floor of this place, watching in eerie, nervous silence.
Not watchinghim. Even after Boston caught up to Adrian on Bran’s broomstick, the three of them might as well not have existed. Every eye in the Hells was locked on Bex. Then, like a signal he couldn’t hear had just been given, every single one of the demons bowed. The wave of lowering heads spread through the giant cavern like a ripple. Even for an outsider like Adrian, it was a silent, profound gesture, but the one who got hit hardest was Bex.
