“No, she’s doing fine,” Adrian said, reaching through the vines to check the pressure of Bex’s feet as she slammed her sword into the scale-covered Prince of Fear. “I’m the one who needs help. Someone’s cutting into my tree. I need you to make them stop.”
“Can do,” replied the lust demon, making this the first and only time they’d ever taken an order from him willingly. “Do you know where the enemy is, and do I need to worry about the tree coming down?”
Adrian looked over his shoulder at the city-block-sized trunk. “I don’t think we need to worry about anything falling. Not before we breach the castle, anyway. But the stabbing is making it hard to concentrate on keeping my forest extended to protect Bex.”
As always, those were the magic words.
“I’ll take care of it,” Lys promised. “You just keep that moss under our queen.”
Bex wasn’t Adrian’s queen, and he wasn’t working with moss, but he nodded just the same. “Thank you very much.”
“Make sure she stays alive,” Lys ordered in a worried voice. “I’ll let you know when I’m done.”
They hung up before Adrian could open his mouth to promise he would, leaving him floating nervously over the lightning-filled thunderhead of his family’s ire as the battle for Heaven raged below.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“All right,” Lys said, handing the megaphone they’d been using to Annika, the sorrow demon who’d been their best safehouse leader back in Seattle. “I’ve got to go handle something for the queen’s witch. You keep things moving.”
“Would you like someone to go with you?” Annika offered, shooting a nervous look at Lys’s bandaged wing. “We have several—”
“I’m not pulling anyone else off their job,” Lys snapped as they checked their weapons, both the sin-iron dagger under their left wing and the trusty steel combat knife under their right. The steel blade wouldn’t even scratch a war construct, but Lys never went anywhere without it. That knife was the one their first Bex had given them after killing their warlock. Lys would die with it in their hand.
“The evacuation is the queen’s top priority,” they reminded Annika when the sorrow demon didn’t stop biting her lip. “It’s probably just some idiot war demon acting out. I’ll take care of it and come right back. You keep getting our people down that rootway, and make sure you send any new soldiers who come up straight to the front to help the battle at the palace.”
“They’re doing a good job of that on their own,” Annika said, nodding at the river of armed demons pouring out of the four-lane-highway-sized hollow at the base of Adrian’s tree. “But are you sure you should be the one to deal with this? No one here would ever question your battle prowess, but you were injured by a Blade of Gilgamesh. Surely you need—"
“What Ineedis for all of us to do our jobs,” Lys said firmly, knocking back another bottle of distilled lust from the six-pack the witches had given them. The manufactured sin tasted nothing like the real thing, but it filled Lys with so much energy that they barely felt the hole in their shoulder. The immunity wouldn’t last for long, though, so Lys went ahead and flapped into the air.
“Just keep everybody moving,” they ordered. “I’ll call for backup if I get into trouble.”
“As you command, Right Hand of the Queen,” Annika said, bowing her horns.
Lys ducked theirs back and took off, ignoring the pain that was already building in their shoulder again as they flew over the panicked mass of demons Annika and the rest of the evacuation team were desperately attempting to send down the rootway in an orderly fashion.
The crowd noise dropped off quickly as Lys flew, but that was typical of witchwoods. Back in Adrian’s forest on Bainbridge, they’d barely been able to eavesdrop on Bex from ten feet away. Not that Lys needed to keep an ear on the queen inside Adrian’s forest, but having an actual safe space was a new thing for them, and old habits died hard.
Speaking of old habits, Lys was leaning on one of their favorites right now. Bex liked to attribute their success as a spy to being a good shapeshifter, but the real trick, in Lys’s opinion, was attention to detail. Case in point, as soon as they reached the towering trunk of Adrian’s new heart tree, Lys stopped flying fast and started flying low. They weren’t sure what they were looking for yet, but they went over every nook and fold of the fir tree’s gigantic base like they were being paid by the root. Lys had almost made it all the way back around when they finally spotted the culprit.
It was another lust demon, a big one with shimmering wings that were closer to purple than Lys’s dusty rose. Just as Adrian had predicted, they were carving something into the tree’s trunk. Lys couldn’t read what they were writing from the air, but the demon had peeled off a big chunk of the Douglas fir’s thick, corky bark to reach the paler wood beneath, which was a crime all by itself in Lys’s eyes.
“Hey!” they shouted, making the other demon jump as Lys swooped down to land on the gnarled root the carver had been hiding behind. “That tree belongs to the witches who came to our rescue! What in the Nine destroyed Hells do you think you’re doing taking a knife to…”
Their tirade trailed off as Lys’s eyes finally landed on the knife in question. Given Adrian’s complaints about the pain, Lys had assumed the culprit would be using sin iron scavenged from the drowned Hells, but the ornate dagger in the lust demon’s hand was white, not black. Lys was close enough now to read what the other demon had been carving, too, and itwasn’ttheir name or profanity or even a deranged rant against the queen, which had been Lys’s first guess. This was far worse, because the demon was writing in cuneiform.
Thanks to their constant spying, Lys’s ancient Sumerian was better than most warlocks’, but this text was much denser than the writing they usually saw on Earth. The carving was also enormous, with enough cuneiform to cover a solid three-square-foot block of tree trunk. Despite all of that, however, the actual words were pretty simple.
Like most of the cuneiform Lys encountered, it was a poem. The first verses were nothing but fawning fluff praising Gilgamesh’s glory, but the main body contained a florid and highly detailed description of an explosion that would “return everything built by the Eternal King’s enemies to dust.”
The lust demon had been carving the final stanza when Lys caught them, so it was less of a surprise than it should’ve been when the demon turned around and looked up at Lys with eyes that flashed mirror-silver.
“Well, well,” they said in a masculine voice, letting the winged-demon disguise fall away to reveal a human male in familiar golden armor. “Looks like the Coward Queen forgot to take all her lackeys with her.”
Lys didn’t bother replying. They just reached under their arm and pulled out their sin-iron dagger.
The prince laughed when he saw it. “Please,” he mocked, twirling his own foot-long white knife in his armored fingers.“Don’t you recognize me? I’m the Prince of Lust.Yourprince, so show a little respe—”
The haughty speech became a yelp when Lys dove at him. The prince got his dagger-sized Blade of Gilgamesh into a defensive position with the same annoying speed all of Heaven’s sons seemed to be blessed with by default, but Lys wasn’t stabbing at him. They were going for the spell behind him. Sin iron would have poisoned the tree, so Lys used their steel blade, gouging a series of furious slashes across the cuneiform the prince had so carefully carved into the Douglas fir’s soft wood.
