CHAPTER 9 #2
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 it wasn’t their 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. Your prince, 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.
“You dare!” the prince roared, whirling around to stab his white blade into Lys’s open back. “Die with your queen, you filth!”
He brought his knife down as he finished, its gleaming white edge perfectly positioned to sever Lys’s spine.
But Lys was a seasoned soldier and an even more practiced shape changer.
The second the knife’s course was set, they shifted their torso to the side, moving their flesh like water to leave the prince stabbing at nothing.
But while the change was fast enough to save Lys’s back, nothing could save the rest of their body when the prince swung the fist he wasn’t using to hold his knife straight into their ribs.
The blow sent Lys rocketing sideways into one of the fir tree’s gigantic knotted roots, which wasn’t nearly as soft or fluffy as the layer of thick green moss made it look.
If they hadn’t just consumed an entire bottle of artificial lust, that would’ve been the end.
Lys had never been as good at regenerating as Bex or Iggs.
Add in the blood loss from their wounded shoulder and the damage might’ve been fatal.
Fortunately for Lys, the moment the witches had shown up with their bottled sins, they’d taken a page from their queen’s old book and started chugging.
The results weren’t as transformative as Ishtar’s glowing water, but they gave Lys enough strength to get out of the splintered roots in time to avoid the prince’s next attack, which had been aimed to take off their head.
“Fancy dodging won’t save you,” the son of Gilgamesh warned, flipping the white knife over in his golden-gloved hand. “Nothing can at this point, because I know who you are. You’re the Coward Queen’s nursemaid, the one who always runs to find her after she dies.”
His handsome face split into a cruel smile.
“My brother Leander reported the queen abandoned the fight against him after you were injured. I don’t normally take advice from traitors, but my orders were to stall the queen’s advance, and I like the idea of killing you far more than carving a bunch of poetry into a tree that keeps growing back over the words as soon as they’re cut. ”
“Only an idiot would expect a Blackwood tree to stay still and let you mutilate it,” Lys taunted from where they clung to the side of the giant trunk.
“But if you think I’m the easier target, that’s your mistake to make.
I’ve faced a lot of puffed-up princes in my time, but you’re the sorriest one I’ve seen yet.
Just look at your tiny little sword.” They flashed him a smirk.
“No wonder your brothers sent you off to do the gardening. I bet you can’t even cut me with that thumbtack. ”
That taunt was the cellophane version of a transparent ploy, but Lys had never met a prince who could take an insult. Sure enough, this one took the bait with a roar, shape-changing the stolen demon wings back onto his shoulders so he could fly up high enough to stab at Lys’s heart.
He didn’t even get close. The prince was fast, yes, but so was Lys, and more importantly at the moment, they knew how to use their wings.
The prince’s flying wasn’t bad, but his wingbeats were merely efficient.
He had none of the grace or natural instinct of someone who’d been born to fly.
Lys, on the other hand, had been flying since the first Bex set them free.
They dodged the prince’s attack by miles, launching up the craggy trunk of Adrian’s tree to hide in the night-dark shadows of its interior branches.
It was a stalling tactic at best, but after their last two near-death encounters, Lys wasn’t about to try fighting a third prince alone.
Unfortunately, they didn’t have a lot of other options at the moment.
From the thundering blast of Gilgamesh’s cannons along with what sounded like actual thunder, Bex clearly had her hands full already.
Nemini would’ve been a big help, but Lys wanted her watching Bex’s back.
Same went for Iggs and Adrian. Lys also wasn’t about to call a bunch of normal demons out of the rootway to come get slaughtered.
That was the opposite of what Bex wanted, but Gilgamesh wasn’t the only one who could push a time limit.
If the Prince of Lust’s job was to create disasters that stopped Bex from entering Gilgamesh’s palace, then Lys would keep him too busy to cause trouble.
They’d stay ahead of his short knife, attacking just enough that he never felt safe resuming his carving but not so much that they put themselves in actual danger.
It was still going to be a throw, but as the superior flier and the superior shapeshifter, Lys had the advantage in the dense interior of Adrian’s tree.
The Prince of Lust could disguise himself as a demon, but could he add owl feathers to his leathery wings to make them soundless?
Could he turn his fingers into hooked claws that were perfect for moving through thick branches?
Lys didn’t think so. Most lust demons never even bothered learning those tricks, since serving warlocks and scooping sludge in the Hells didn’t require such advanced techniques, but Lys was a soldier of the Bonfire Queen.
They’d been transforming their body into whatever weapon got the job done for centuries, and they put all of that experience to work now, changing the color of their skin to match the fir tree’s dark bark and stretching their fingers into hooks that let them hang off the underside of the thick branches like a squirrel.
They’d just gotten themselves nice and tucked away when the prince burst into the canopy.
“Come out and fight!” he bellowed, flapping his wings hard to support his armored weight as he looked around the dark forest of the heart tree’s interior. “Or are you as cowardly as your queen?”