The words flowed out like a torrent, but it was the answering roar that Bex felt most. As soon as she spoke her new name for the first time, the crowd of demons shouted back so loud that the ground trembled. The sound crashed into her like a wave, surrounding Bex in a pillar of raging fire as they hung their hopes and prayers upon her.
I never realized worship was so potent,Drox said as the power flooded over them.This is a force far greater than mere wrath. No wonder Ishtar was so mad at you for taking her place.
“Then let’s not waste what we’ve been given,” Bex replied, gathering the storm of flames tight around her as she raised her blade. “Ready?”
Always,her sword said as his hilt settled firmly into her palm.Forever.
Bex grinned at her partner and swung with everything she had. She swung with her own wrath plus the wrath of her people.She swung with their sorrow, swung with their pride. Swung with the fear left behind by five thousand years of oppression and the desperate desire that it was almost over. Everything that had brought them to this point, Bex channeled into her sword, lashing out in a sky-splitting strike that roared like a river of fire through the empty air above the part of the White City that was not yet covered in trees and straight into the fortress of the enemy.
CHAPTER 6
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A few minutes earlier.
ADRIAN WOKE TO THEextremely unpleasant sensation of being boiled alive.
He surged to his feet with a curse then leaped out of the piping-hot cauldron someone had placed him inside, burning his hands in the process. He was still stripping out of his scalding-hot clothes when a familiar weight leaped onto his shoulder.
“Adrian!” Boston cried, shoving his head against the underside of his witch’s chin. “You’re up early.”
“I’m surprised I’m up at all,” Adrian said, wringing the water out of his rapidly-cooling shirt as he looked around in shock at the last place he expected to see again.
He was in his cabin.Hiscabin, fromhisBlackwood. That was his cauldron in his fireplace that he’d just been boiling inside, but while he definitely hadn’t left the fire going, everything else looked exactly the same. The pottery mugs from where he’d served tea to his father while explaining his plan to grow roots into Heaven were even still sitting on the table. If he climbed into his loft, he was sure he’d find the cell phone he’d left charging on the window solar panel a week ago.
It was all exactly as he remembered, but this definitely wasn’t Seattle. The forest he could feel through his freshly reburied heart felt far larger than the eleven-acre grove he’d grown on Bainbridge Island, and much,mucholder. No amount of witchcraft could grow taproots longer than fifty feet in lessthan a century, but Adrian swore the roots of his new heart tree went all the way down to Earth. He was still prodding them in confusion when he heard the familiar creak of his front door.
“Look at you!” cried a voice he knew as well as his own. “I should’ve known you’d be out early. You never could stand to wait until the treatment was completed.”
Adrian looked over his shoulder in surprise to see his mother standing in the doorway. Like everything else since he’d woken up, Agatha looked exactly as he remembered, but the scene behind her was a total shock. It was hard to make out details in the dark, but it looked like his cabin wasinsidethe branches of a giant conifer. Also still in Gilgamesh’s Heaven, if the reports he was receiving through his new and shockingly extensive root system were to be believed, which meant his plan hadworked. He’d grown a connection back down to Earth! But the size of it was… was… It was overwhelming. He’d never been directly connected to a forest this enormous. It felt like he’d been wired straight into the Great Cycles themselves, and suddenly, Adrian needed to sit down.
“Andthat’swhy you stay in the cauldron until the treatment is complete,” his mother said as Adrian sank to the floor. “Boston, why did you let him get out? He’s barely got enough blood to function.”
“You know I can’t control him, Lady Agatha,” replied that cat, who was still on Adrian’s shoulder. “He’s always done exactly as he pleases.”
“That would be why Muriel picked him,” Agatha admitted, giving her son an indulgent smile as she picked up the wet coat he’d stripped off and hung it by the fire to dry. Adrian’s broom was already there, propped in its usual spot against the hot rocks to bake off the lingering damp from the Hells. The carved raven head gave Adrian a self-satisfied wink when he glanced at it, and the witch dragged a hand through his dripping hair with a sigh.
“Will someone please fill me in on what I missed?”
“I suppose an explanation is in order,” his mother said as she walked to the linen chest to grab him a towel. “The short answer is that you lived up to expectations. A few centuries ago, when the witch hunts forced us to move our heart trees from the Old World to the New, your aunts and I concocted a plan. We would use our relocation as cover to start a project we’d long been considering, a way to break Gilgamesh’s stranglehold on our coven. You remember the grove your cousin Olivia was working on?”
“Of course,” Adrian said, catching the towel she tossed him and scrubbing it over his face. “They were the biggest trees in the Blackwood other than the heart grove itself, the work of generations.”
“And now that work is finished,” Agatha told him proudly, waving her hand at the gigantic branches pushing against the cabin’s windows. “Muriel knew that one day, I would bear a child capable of overthrowing Gilgamesh, so we grew these trees in preparation. We didn’t know when exactly it would happen, but the moment I saw your four-year-old eyes light up as you watched me working at my cauldron, I knew you were the one. Since that day, everything we’ve done has been in support of the miracle you just achieved. A prince of Heaven strong enough to earn Gilgamesh’s respect but principled enough to defy him. A witch tied to the Blackwood tightly enough to grow his own grove, yet rebellious enough to earn the loyalty of the last demon queen.”
She huffed as she walked into his bedroom to grab him some dry clothes. “It was hair-raising work. There weresomany details to get right, but our Muriel is nothing if not meticulous. Even I wasn’t sure you’d pan out at times, but she always insisted you were our best shot, and as usual, she was right.”
Agatha returned to the main room with a smile, but Adrian took the folded black shirt she handed him with a grim expression.
“So it was all a setup from the beginning?”
“From before the beginning,” his mother corrected, holding out his witch hat, which she must’ve used magic to dry, clean, and reshape while he was unconscious, because it looked brand-new.
“You’ve been our weapon since before you were born, Adrian of the Blackwood,” she murmured as she placed the pointed hat on his head like a crown. “I waited so long to have a son who loved the forest as much as I did. All the princes I bore to Gilgamesh were clever. Some of them even learned a bit of my magic, but you were the only one who could truly be called a witch.”
She was still adjusting the hat on his head when Adrian’s arm shot up to grab her wrist.
“What about the rest?” he demanded, glaring at her with eyes that, now that he’d been bled dry of all his quintessence, were once again the same gray-blue as his father’s. “My brothers, the other princes, did you give them all up to Gilgamesh?”
