“Without a moment’s hesitation,” his mother replied. “I’m a witch, Adrian. Sacrifice is in my blood, and yours. You would have sacrificed yourself just now had we not been waiting to catch you.”
“That’s different,” he insisted, squeezing her wrist tighter. “They werechildren.”
“So were we,” Agatha said in a cold voice as she yanked her hand away. “My sisters and I were barely out of our first decade when the new god known as Gilgamesh showed up to burn our forest. He kept us as slaves in those early days while he was perfecting his sorcery. I was sixteen the first time I seduced him and seventeen the first time I fed a lock of my hair to theMorrigan to ensure I’d bear him a son. I’ve been repeating that cycle ever since to ensure our coven’s survival, and to ensure we’d get our revenge someday.”
She leaned down and tapped Adrian on the chest. “Youare that revenge. Ours and the Blackwood’s. The fire the Great Forest poured through you into the Queen of Wrath is the same fire Gilgamesh used to burn our ancestors. He tied them to their own heart trees and torched them to ash, but the forest has deep roots, and witches do not forget. He thought he stole you from me like he steals everything, but you were, are, and always will beours. The moment you gave your heart to the forest, Gilgamesh’s fate was sealed.”
Her voice was ringing with ancient anger by the time she finished, but all Adrian could do was lower his eyes. Nothing she’d said had surprised him. His family always put the forest first. It was the first thing witches swore when they took the coven oaths, but Adrian’s heart was only partially roots. The rest was still angrily, bitterly human, which meant it hurt to hear his mother talk so proudly about molding him into a weapon to stab into his father’s heart.
“I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear,” Agatha said as she reached up to touch her son’s face. “But none of it means that I don’t love you. I’ve loved all the sons I surrendered to Heaven.”
“You just loved the Blackwood more,” Adrian finished as he leaned away.
“The heart of a witch is the forest,” Agatha reminded him with a sad smile. “I’m sure you would’ve behaved differently, which is fine. A child should strive to be better than his parents, but I’m not ashamed of what I did. Because of my actions, our coven has a chance to finally be free of Gilgamesh.Youhave the chance to be free, as do your beloved Rebexa and her people.Remember that before you judge me and your aunts too harshly, hmm?”
“There’s no point in judgement,” Adrian said, turning away from her to finish putting on his dry clothes. “The past cannot be changed. The present can, though, so let’s focus on that before we lose the opportunity you did all this to achieve.”
“Spoken like a true Witch of the Flesh,” his mother said proudly, marching back toward his front door. “This way.”
Adrian got dressed as fast as he could before snatching his broom off its hook. His boots and coat were still drenched, so he left them drying by the fire and followed his mother onto the front porch in his shirtsleeves and sock feet. As he’d already seen through the windows, his cabin now sat like a birdhouse in the branches of his enormous new heart tree. Adrian hadn’t realized just how much quintessence Gilgamesh had poured into him until he saw the scale of the tree it had grown, but what truly shocked him was what he could feel below it.
“Is this whole tree a rootway?”
“It is,” Agatha said proudly as she grabbed her own broom from where she’d left it propped beside his front door. “Like I told you, we’ve been planning this for a long time. The entrance on our side has been ready for centuries. Muriel has been sitting beside it ever since the Queen of Wrath left for the Hells just to make sure we didn’t miss our cue, and it’s a good thing she did. You cut it very close. Your body was already technically dead by the time we caught it. If you hadn’t had such a strong connection to the Blackwood, even the cauldron couldn’t have saved you.”
Hearing how near he’d come to death made Adrian wince, but his mother didn’t notice.
“Someone had to stay and make sure you didn’t boil over, so I volunteered to watch the pot while Muriel and Lydia went back for the others,” she continued. “That left no one to keep aneye on the demons, but we’d already summoned the Morrigan, so she took care of that part.”
“Wait, the Morrigan?” Adrian repeated in alarm. “The Morrigan ishere?”
“In the flesh, bones, and soul,” Agatha assured him. “Her role in this is as critical as yours. Having her around also freed Lydia and Muriel to focus on widening the rootway enough to bring our coven through while still leaving room for the former Hells slaves to get out, so it was a two-birds-with-one-stone sort of situation.”
For the first time since he’d come back to life, Adrian smiled. “You’re going to let Bex’s demons evacuate down the rootway? That’s uncommonly kind of you.”
“Kindness has nothing to do with it,” his mother said. “It doesn’t take Muriel’s foresight to see that the fastest way to secure the Queen of Wrath’s cooperation is to help her demons. That’s why we showed up at the collapsed Anchor in Seattle, and it’s why we’re making room for them now. We need the Bonfire Queen focused on destroying Gilgamesh, not fussing over a bunch of half-starved demons. Assuming she survives the transformation, of course.”
“What transformation?” Adrian asked in alarm. “What did you do to Bex?”
“Nothing she wouldn’t have eventually done for herself,” his mother replied in the cryptic voice he’d always hated. “Your part in this was planned to the second, but the Bonfire of Wrath has always been a wild card, so we asked the Morrigan to give her a little push, just to make sure the timing lined up.”
“What timing?” Adrian demanded, grabbing his mother’s shoulders. “What did you do?”
The Witch of the Present flashed him a knowing smile, which made Adrian angrier than anything she could have said. He could forgive his mother for manipulating his life. Theywere both witches, after all. Living and dying in the service of the Blackwood was part of the deal, but Bex was different. She was already fighting with everything she had. Pushing her any harder was just cruel at this point, but before Adrian could force an answer out of his mother, something flashed bright enough to white out his vision even through the thick branches of his tree.
The shock wave landed a split second later, shaking the entire tree with an explosiveboom.Adrian had just grabbed the doorframe to keep from being thrown off the porch when the light shifted from blinding white to familiar fiery red-orange. Sure enough, when he swung his head toward it, he saw flames flashing through the branches. Enormous ones from a raging bonfire as tall as his tree that was currently lighting up the skies of Heaven.
“Well, well,” Agatha said brightly. “Looks like your firecracker came out on top. Muriel thought she would. Now things canreallybegin.”
She rubbed her hands together in anticipation, but Adrian was already on the move, scooping Boston—who was still getting back to his feet from where the shock wave had knocked him over—off the floor before leaping onto his broom. He caught a final glimpse of his mother waving farewell before she and his misplaced cabin were lost behind a wall of thick fir needles, leaving Adrian flying Bran at top speed toward the flames that shone like spotlights through the branches ahead of him.
“Are you sure that’s Bex?” Boston yelled over the howling wind as he clung to Adrian’s shirt. “I’ve never seen her bonfire go that big before.”
The fire was absolutely enormous. Even when she’d turned into a tornado of flame in the Hells, her light hadn’t been this bright. It looked like they were flying into an erupting volcano. Adrian didn’t know what the Morrigan could’ve done to push her that far, but he was bracing for the absolute worst.When they finally burst through the fir tree’s thick outer limbs, though, what he saw was the exact opposite.
There was no raging fire or out-of-control storm, just the outline of a woman glowing brighter than his eyes could look at. She shone like the sun that was missing from Heaven’s sky, like a spear of light that went from the tree-covered ground straight up to the firmament. She wassobright, Adrian couldn’t actually make out what she was doing, but it looked like she was talking to someone. He was flying closer for a better look when a black sword appeared in her hand.
The weapon was the only part of her that wasn’t shining, making its path easy to follow as Bex—or at least the brilliant creature he presumed was Bex—swept the sword through the air in front of her. It looked like she’d swung at nothing, but the moment the blade moved, an arc of light shot off its point to slam into Gilgamesh’s shielded tower.
