“Not the cat,” Bex said, crouching in the grass beside him. When they were face-to-face, she pulled a small velvet bag out of one of her many cargo pockets and shoved it at the warlock’s chest harder than was strictly necessary.
“Oof,” he grunted when the bag hit his sternum. “What’s that?”
“Fuel,” Bex replied, pulling the string to open the bag so the warlock could see the quintessence glittering inside.
“I know the cabals are short on magic right now,” she said. “So I’m giving you what you need to banish all of us to the Hells.”
“Youwantto be sent to the Hells?” the warlock asked, flabbergasted. “Why?”
“If I told you that, I’d have to kill you,” Bex replied with a smile. “We’re not fans of your profession here, so I suggest you get to work before Lys decides it’d be more fun to gut you.”
Lys punctuated that with a crack of their knuckles, making the warlock jump.
“I can certainly perform a banishment, if that’s really what you want,” he told Bex with a swallow. “But you’ll have to untie my hands, and I’ll need to know all of your true names.”
“Ah, ah, ah,” Lys said, waggling their finger at him. “You only need to knowoneof our true names. Banished demons can take anyone they want to the Hells with them if the passenger doesn’t fight, though it’s much more fun when they do.”
The warlock scoffed. “That’s not true.”
“Of course it’s true,” Lys said. “I’ve done it. Where do you think the phrase ‘drag me to Hell’ came from? It’s for demons who fight, and I’ve always loved a fight.”
“That’s ridiculous,” the warlock insisted, though he sounded slightly less certain this time. “How can a common lust demon know more about the mechanics of banishment than a cabal-trained warlock?”
“Easy,” Lys replied. “I’m older than you are, and, unlike all you ‘trained’ warlocks, I’ve actually been banished. Now, are you going to do this, or should I take the easy kill and go find someone who asks fewer stupid questions?”
The warlock looked over his shoulder for help only to cringe back to the grass when he saw the witches standing next to their forest, which was looking very foreboding in the evening light. That must have been enough to convince him there was no way out of this, because he lowered his head a second later, holding out his tattooed hands for Lys to untie before meekly opening the bag of quintessence.
“Which one of you will I be banishing?” he asked politely.
Lys dropped their human guise, shifting back into their true, towering form as they wrapped their dusky pink, leathery wings around the entire group. When at least one inch of their body was touching everyone, they answered.
“Lysanae.”
The warlock’s hooded eyes went huge. “Lysanae?” he repeated in a fear-choked voice. “Right hand of the Queen of Wrath?”
“That’s my title,” Lys said proudly, leaning forward until they were towering over the much shorter human. “Now put it to use, or I’ll show you how I got it.”
The warlock got to work in a panic, grabbing the quintessence out of the bag and shoving the only four coins Bex had managed to scrape together into his mouth all at once. He cracked them with one bite and began speaking the words of sorcery. He was going too fast for Bex to translate, but she heard the worldLysanaeright before the ground split open under her feet, and a coil of chains shot out to drag Lys—and everyone Lys was holding—straight down into Hell.
CHAPTER 2
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IN A LAVISHLY DECORATED, beautifully sunny, pure-white bedroom located in one of the most important, most coveted sections of the fourth tower of Gilgamesh’s palace in the Highest Heaven, Adrian Blackwood awoke to a crushing weight on his chest.
Not a figurative weight. This was a literal twenty-five-pound lump of smooth-carved bone and hammered gold courtesy of the princess who’d slipped into his bed and curled up against him with her extremely heavy head resting on his chest.Again.
“I thought I told you not to do that.”
“And I thought I could make you change your mind,” she replied in the voice he was learning to hate. Bex’s soft, warm, happy voice whispering intimately from the smiling lips of a creature that was not her.
Adrian clenched his jaw and wiggled out from under her, grateful once again that he’d gone to bed fully clothed. It’d been seven days since he’d stupidly fallen for his father’s lies and gotten trapped here, and every night, there’d been an incident. He would have avoided going to bed all together if he could’ve, but there was no way to make bottled sleep in Heaven, and Adrian hadn’t figured out enough sorcery yet to curse his body into wakefulness. Hehadfigured out how to magically clean the muddy clothes he’d been wearing when he’d crawled out from under his quintessence-soaked heart tree to find Gilgameshwaiting like a smug tiger, so at least he hadn’t been forced to strip yet, but that felt like small consolation when he had to pry the princess’s white arms off his body like he was escaping a bear trap just to get out of bed.
“I don’t understand why you’re being so cold,” the princess said when he finally got free, sitting up in the rumpled bed to look at him with the golden version of Bex’s hurt eyes. “You loved it when I rested my head on you back at the Anchor.”
“That wasn’t you.”
“Yes, it was,” she insisted, her voice heating with that familiar Bex anger Adrian refused to acknowledge, because she wasn’t Bex. “I proved it the day you arrived when you asked me all those questions. I got everything right, so why are you still acting like this? Why don’t you believe I’m me?”
