Boston turned his giant furry head back toward Adrian, who now seemed to be helping the tree dig into his chest. “Just let him work,” he said, the words rumbling through his chest into Bex’s. “You trusted my witch enough to let him start this. Trust him to finish it.”
She did. Bex trusted Adrian’s witchcraft to a near-religious degree at this point, but it was still sohardto lie there and watchhim die. The whole mound was soaked with his white blood now, and his face was a frightening shade of gray. If the expression on it hadn’t been so determined, nothing could have kept Bex away, but Boston seemed to be right. Adrian did look like he knew exactly what he was doing as he reached his bloody hands into his chest and pulled out his heart.
At least, Bex thought it was his heart. The root-covered lump pumping in his white-dripping hands looked nothing like the healthy red organ she’d watched him bury the day he’d arrived in Bainbridge. That had been a mythical, magical experience. This was a ghastly spectacle as Adrian ripped the bloody, root-riddled heart from his own sundered chest and buried it shakily in the white-drenched ground.
She held her breath the entire time, praying frantically to Ishtar that the hole in his chest would start closing now that he’d retrieved his heart, but it didn’t. If anything, he seemed to be bleeding out even faster as he curled over the dirt and whispered something she couldn’t hear. It looked like just one word, but the moment he said it, the ground began to shake.
The street cracked a second later. Bex hadn’t felt anything change, but the whole road was suddenly breaking apart like an ice sheet in spring. The destruction hit the apartment blocks next, sending the demons inside fleeing for their lives as the buildings’ foundations began tilting like something was pushing them up from below. Bex’s first thought was that it was a monster coming up from the Hells, but that turned out to be totally wrong. This was no retaliatory weapon or creature of Gilgamesh. It was a tree. An enormous Douglas fir that exploded out of the broken pavement like a rocket to send both Bex and Boston flying.
By the time they landed much farther down the road, the whole city looked different. What had once been a pristine white square lined with identical apartment buildings was nowcarpeted in the softest, greenest grass Bex had ever seen outside of Adrian’s forest. The Douglas fir that had thrown her into the air was still going up like a skyscraper, but other trees were coming in as well now. They were all varieties Bex remembered from Bainbridge, but much,muchbigger. Adrian always said it took time to grow a forest, but the new trees were climbing taller than the White City’s apartment blocks as she watched with no sign of slowing down.
It wasn’t just plants either. The new greenery filling the plaza that surrounded the gates to the Hells was being crisscrossed with burbling streams before her eyes. The formerly bone-dry air of Heaven was suddenly thick with humidity and loud with the drone of insects. Birds darted among the growing branches, and fresh mud oozed through the cracks in the street.
In the space of less than a minute, the entire eight-square-block portion of the Holy City surrounding the entrance to the Hells was transformed from a cold mausoleum to a verdant forest teeming with life. Bex couldn’t even see the white stone anymore. It was all vibrant green leaves and craggy brown bark, colorful insects and flashing birds, darting chipmunks and lazing lizards, splashing fish and swarming tadpoles. Everywhere she looked, life was blooming. Every life, that was, except Adrian’s.
“Where is he?” Bex demanded, beating back the chest-high undergrowth that was suddenly between her and the massive trunk of Adrian’s new tree. “Where did he go?”
“I think he was carried up,” Boston said, shrinking back to his house-cat size as he leaped onto her shoulder. “Let’s go! Hurry!”
Bex didn’t bother asking why the familiar had switched from holding her down to telling her to hurry up. She just launched herself into the air, using her fire to blast them both uponto the lowest branch of the skyscraper-sized fir tree that now dominated the Holy City’s skyline.
Just like the inside of Adrian’s heart tree back in Seattle, the inside of the tree was incredibly thick. Heaven’s white light vanished in seconds, blocked out by a wall of shaggy fir needles and thick limbs covered in dark, scaly bark. Bex’s hands were instantly covered in sticky sap, but that just helped her hold on tighter as she leaped from branch to branch like a squirrel.
The fir was so tall at this point it felt like she was scaling a mountain, but even when the needles got so thick that no light at all could sneak through, Bex didn’t slow down. She just kept climbing, using her fire to blast them higher and higher through the pine-scented dark. She was wondering if the tree would keep going up forever when Boston’s claws suddenly dug through her T-shirt into the skin of her shoulder.
“Over there!”
Bex whirled around, smothering her flames so she could see past her own glare only to discover she needn’t have bothered. Boston was pointing at a light that was even brighter than her fire. It shimmered like a star that had gotten caught in the fir tree’s thick branches, but it wasn’t until she got closer that Bex realized it was a house.
Not just any house. It was balanced in the branches like a birdhouse, but Bex would know that well-built log cabin anywhere. Its tall roof, open skylights, fieldstone fireplace, and roomy front porch with steps that were perfect for sitting on were as near and dear to Bex as her own RV. That was Adrian’s house lit up like a lantern in the dark, and standing in the doorway like she’d been waiting for them to arrive was his mother.
“Hello, Boston,” the Witch of the Present said, giving the cat a dazzling smile.
“Lady Agatha!” Boston cried, coiling his body to leap off Bex’s shoulder into the Old Wife’s arms, but he never got the chance. Before he could even finish his crouch, Bex had landed on Adrian’s front porch like a flaming comet, her hands already shooting out to grab the smiling witch by the collar of her perfectly stitched black linen dress.
“Where is he?”
“There’s no need for that,” the Witch of the Present chided, sliding out of Bex’s grip with surprising deftness to point through the open cabin door. “Adrian’s right over—”
Bex blew past her in a burst of fire only to stop again the moment she got inside. The interior of the cabin lookedexactlylike she remembered. The carefully organized jars of ingredients on the built-in shelves, the greenhouse full of plants through the back door, the bundles of herbs drying in the kitchen, the fire crackling under the giant cauldron in the fieldstone hearth, they were all right where they should be. There were even still mugs of half-drunk tea left out on the table, like Adrian had simply forgotten to put them away. It was all perfect, like she’d stepped back in time, but the one element Bex didn’t see was Adrian himself.
She was about to go out and check the greenhouse, since that was where Adrian always stuck her when she was injured, when Boston galloped past her toward the big iron cauldron hanging above the fire. He clambered up the rocky fireplace like a pro and trotted out onto the wooden mantel, where he could see down into the bubbling pot. It wasn’t until Bex followed him to see what could possibly be so important that it could distract him from finding Adrian that she realized what was happening.
Adrian was in the cauldron. His body was lying at the bottom of the giant pot like a dumpling, curled up in a fetal position under a boiling version of the same herbal soup that he always dunked Bex in when she was injured. That should’vebeen an enormous relief, but the cauldron was so hot that even she couldn’t touch it. It looked like he was being boiled alive, but when Bex turned desperately to his mother for an explanation, the Old Wife of the Flesh was smiling just like her son did when he’d pulled off something especially clever.
“Don’t worry,” she said as she joined Bex beside the cauldron. “He can take the heat. You could even say he needs it. Adrian poured out every drop of his blood making an entrance for us. If we hadn’t treated him immediately and aggressively, his body would not have survived.”
She grinned at Bex, clearly expecting her to be grateful, and she was. Bex wassograteful that Adrian wasn’t dead, it was physically painful, but she also couldn’t ignore how perfect his mother’s timing was. How she must have been waiting in this cabin with the water already boiling for the moment Adrian reached out.
“You knew.”
“Of course I knew,” Agatha said. “My little sister sees the future.”
She laughed as she said that, smiling like this whole situation was just another clever move, and Bex’s hands curled into fists.
“You did this to him on purpose,” she snarled, whirling on Adrian’s mother with all the pent-up rage and fear she’d been swallowing since she’d first realized Adrian was gone. “You knew that Gilgamesh would steal him. Knew thatallof this would happen!”
When the witch didn’t deny it, Bex’s fire spread over her body with awhoosh. “You used us!” she roared. “Used me and my demons, used your own son to strike back at Gilgamesh!”
