CHAPTER 2 #3
It was the first time he’d felt his pulse as anything more than a distant echo since Gilgamesh had brought him here.
Each contraction hurt so much it brought tears to his eyes, but Adrian had never been so happy to be in pain.
The sapling’s supple branches were still lodged inside his chest, but he didn’t bother trying to dig them out.
He pushed his own hands deeper instead, reaching through his rib cage into the empty hole left by the organ he’d surrendered the night he first became a witch.
Just like that first time under the moonlight in the coven circle, he dug his hands as deep as they would go, reaching through his body into the forest that lived at his core.
The beloved, familiar forest he could finally feel again.
Adrian had barely opened his fingers in request when the Blackwood responded, digging out its own roots and placing them in the cup of Adrian’s palms.
When he finally removed his white-bloody hands from his chest, Adrian was holding a piece of two worlds: a human heart wrapped in roots and fungus, the living proof that the heart of a witch was the forest, and the heart of the forest was a witch.
He’d never realized the old adage could be so macabrely literal, but witchcraft was an ancient magic born from the cycles of life itself, and life was never clean.
It was bloody, dirty, and beautifully biological, the exact opposite of everything Gilgamesh had made his Heaven to be, and it was with great satisfaction that Adrian Blackwood took his filthy, blood-smeared, root-infested heart and buried it in the ground.
He buried it deep, tucking the vital organ he shared with his forest around his aunt’s acorn, the symbol of all their futures.
When it was all bound together in a bloodsoaked mess, he bent his head lower still, pressing his face into the damp earth he’d crafted to whisper his wish once more.
“Grow.”
The tremor that followed the word this time put everything before it to shame, because Adrian was no longer speaking sorcery.
This was something new and uniquely his, a hybrid just like Adrian himself.
Every time the heart he shared with his forest beat, more white blood poured out of him, but Adrian no longer cared.
He could finally see the whole picture, the reason all of this had to happen.
For the first time in his entire life, he understood the shape of the plan his coven had been nurturing for centuries.
He could even feel them reaching back, a thousand generations of witches all speaking with him in one voice as Adrian shouted the most forbidden word in Heaven at the top of his lungs.
“Grow!” he bellowed, tilting his sundered chest so that the liquid quintessence Gilgamesh had poured into him would flow down his arms to water the seed Adrian’s coven had bet everything on. “Grow!”
His Blackwood heart thundered in response.
The oak sapling was already shriveling, crushed under Heaven’s oppressive aura of stillness and death, but Adrian’s heart was different.
Gilgamesh had already filled it with the power he’d stolen from the gods.
The same quintessence that made Adrian a prince also allowed his heart to flourish here, and the tree that grew out of it wasn’t white or sickly or even an oak.
It was a Douglas fir, a beautiful deep-green offshoot of his original heart tree.
It burst out of the dirt he’d made like an exploding bomb, shattering the road Adrian was kneeling on along with the buildings beside it.
It broke everything it touched, leaving the orderly White City in ruins as the Great Blackwood, the oldest forest that connected all forests, crashed its way into Gilgamesh’s Heaven.
The rest of the woodland followed right behind.
Within seconds, the empty white plaza surrounding the black cube that marked the entrance to the Hells was covered with bright-green flowering grass.
Streams of clear water filled with fish and frog spawn poured from the windows of the root-tilted apartment blocks and pooled in the new cracks on the ground.
Trees of every sort—conifers, hardwoods, softwoods, and evergreens—sprouted wherever their roots found purchase, transforming the dry, blindingly white City of Heaven into a wet and shady grotto filled with singing birds.
It was the most beautiful thing Adrian had ever seen.
Sadly, it was probably also the last thing he was ever going to see.
His aunt’s acorn had gotten it started, but this forest was a Blackwood grown directly from his heart and fueled by his white blood.
Considering how many barrels of quintessence Gilgamesh had dumped into him, Adrian thought he’d never run dry, but by the time the new trees’ roots were deep enough to hold the trunk upright, his reservoir was tapped.
He didn’t even have enough strength left to push back when the roots of his new tree pulled him into the mound where he’d buried his heart.
It was what his forest always did when he was wounded, but Adrian didn’t think he’d be digging himself back out this time.
He couldn’t bring himself to regret it, though.
He’d just grown a witch’s forest in the center of Heaven itself!
Not even the Old Wives could have managed that.
And since he’d grown them out of his own heart, the new trees counted as an official grove of the Blackwood, which meant the rest of his coven could connect to them through the main forest and give Bex’s demons a way out.
That was the best outcome he could’ve hoped for.
Adrian would still rather have done it without killing himself, but if everyone else got out alive, he wasn’t going to complain.
He just wished he could’ve seen Bex and Boston one last time to say goodbye.
He was probing his new heart tree to see if he couldn’t leave them a letter on a leaf or something when three strong hands reached up through the roots to grab him.
“Not yet!” cried a voice that was actually three voices blended into one. “You’re not done yet!”
Adrian begged to differ. The only reason he was still conscious was because he shared a soul with his forest. He’d used up every drop of his white blood to pull this off.
No human, not even a prince, could survive total exsanguination.
His physical body was already starting to break down.
But just as Adrian was about to pass into the grove of his ancestors, the huge force of witchcraft he’d felt rising to meet him when he told the forest to grow hit him again, knocking him out of death and into something that felt like a boiling cauldron.