CHAPTER 3
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Five minutes earlier.
BEX STOOD AT THE edge of the square, clutching Boston like a lifeline.
She could hear a crowd of curious demons gathering behind them, but for once, Bex’s people were not her first concern.
The demons were fine, or at least not in immediate danger, but she couldn’t say the same for Adrian.
He didn’t seem to be doing anything but kneeling in front of a pile of dirt with his eyes closed, but she could feel sorcery rising like a knife in the air.
The hairs on the back of her neck rose at the same time.
She tried reminding herself that it was Adrian’s sorcery and he was using it to save them, but five thousand years of threat response wasn’t something that could be overcome with logic.
Bex might not remember her previous one hundred and ninety-eight lives, but she knew she’d fought sorcerers in all of them.
It was a good thing Drox was still asleep on her finger, because the urge to pull her sword and start swinging was overwhelming.
She was keeping her eyes on Adrian and telling herself to just breathe through it when the acorn he’d buried suddenly shot out of the dirt to stab him through the chest.
No logic or breathing could stop her after that. Bex dropped Boston and charged, hand already stretching out to yank Adrian off the spear his father’s faithless magic had turned on him. She was less than a foot away when something grabbed her leg and yanked her back.
Bex stumbled with a gasp and looked down to see Boston in his big form with his teeth wrapped around her calf and his claws digging into the white-paved road.
He knocked her off balance next, taking advantage of her shock to fling her to the ground and leap on top of her, pinning her with his huge furry paws as Bex flailed beneath his weight.
“What are you doing?” she screamed.
“What Adrian told me to!” Boston snarled back, his growling voice terrified but resolute. “He ordered us not to touch him for any reason!”
“But he’s dying!” Bex cried, whipping her head back to Adrian, who was now covered in the prince’s unnatural white blood.
The overwhelming scent of it filled her with so much fear that Bex couldn’t have called her fire if she’d tried.
She didn’t know what had gone wrong, if his witchcraft had failed or if Gilgamesh had deliberately turned his sorcery against him, but his face was blank with shock and pain.
That wasn’t the face Adrian made when things were going right.
She had to get to him, but Boston was putting up a surprisingly good fight.
If she’d still had her old strength, she would’ve tossed him into the sky, but while Bex’s fire was back, she was still hornless and weakened.
It wasn’t much, but between her fear, her faded strength, and her reluctance to hurt Adrian’s cat, Boston had the edge he needed to stay on top.
“Would you stop it?” he yelled, slamming a paw the size of a dinner plate onto Bex’s back to shove her down.
“Bex!” a different voice shouted at the same time right before Iggs ran up beside her. Her demon was still looking frantically between Boston and his queen when Adrian’s familiar lost what was left of his patience.
“I know it’s not your strong suit, but I need all of you to calm down and act rationally,” he ordered, keeping his full weight on Bex while his green eyes glared at Iggs and the small army of demons who’d run over to defend their queen that were standing behind him.
“I know things look bad right now, but that’s exactly why Adrian warned us ahead of time not to touch him.
Great acts of witchcraft always require sacrifice.
Have you forgotten everything you saw in his grove? ”
“This is different!” Bex yelled as she squirmed against the hard, spotlessly clean white pavement. “We’re not in Adrian’s forest, and that is not his magic!”
Bex was no witch, but that was a hill she would die on.
Adrian’s magic smelled like a summer forest. It was warm and rich and beautiful, and while it could definitely be scary, it still always felt like him.
This didn’t. The white blood pouring out of his sundered chest smelled like dust and death.
It was the same overwhelming scent she remembered from Enki’s tomb, and while the look on Adrian’s face had gone from shock to intensely focused concentration, that could just be him trying to save his life.
Nothing good came from Gilgamesh’s magic, but when she tried again to grab him, Boston slammed the full weight of his now lion-sized body down on top of her.
“Please,” he begged, retracting his claws so he could grip her shoulders without hurting her.
“I don’t know what’s going on either, but I’m certain that Adrian’s the only one who can fix it now.
I might not always agree with my witch’s risk assessment, but I trust his skill with my life.
More importantly, I trust it with his life.
He knows what he’s doing, but he can’t succeed if you’re pulling him down! ”
Boston turned his giant furry head back toward Adrian, who now seemed to be helping the tree dig into his chest. “Just let him work,” he said, the words rumbling through his chest into Bex’s. “You trusted my witch enough to let him start this. Trust him to finish it.”
She did. Bex trusted Adrian’s witchcraft to a near-religious degree at this point, but it was still so hard to lie there and watch him die.
The whole mound was soaked with his white blood now, and his face was a frightening shade of gray.
If the expression on it hadn’t been so determined, nothing could have kept Bex away, but Boston seemed to be right.
Adrian did look like he knew exactly what he was doing as he reached his bloody hands into his chest and pulled out his heart.
At least, Bex thought it was his heart. The root-covered lump pumping in his white-dripping hands looked nothing like the healthy red organ she’d watched him bury the day he’d arrived in Bainbridge.
That had been a mythical, magical experience.
This was a ghastly spectacle as Adrian ripped the bloody, root-riddled heart from his own sundered chest and buried it shakily in the white-drenched ground.
She held her breath the entire time, praying frantically to Ishtar that the hole in his chest would start closing now that he’d retrieved his heart, but it didn’t.
If anything, he seemed to be bleeding out even faster as he curled over the dirt and whispered something she couldn’t hear.
It looked like just one word, but the moment he said it, the ground began to shake.
The street cracked a second later. Bex hadn’t felt anything change, but the whole road was suddenly breaking apart like an ice sheet in spring.
The destruction hit the apartment blocks next, sending the demons inside fleeing for their lives as the buildings’ foundations began tilting like something was pushing them up from below.
Bex’s first thought was that it was a monster coming up from the Hells, but that turned out to be totally wrong.
This was no retaliatory weapon or creature of Gilgamesh.
It was a tree. An enormous Douglas fir that exploded out of the broken pavement like a rocket to send both Bex and Boston flying.
By the time they landed much farther down the road, the whole city looked different.
What had once been a pristine white square lined with identical apartment buildings was now carpeted in the softest, greenest grass Bex had ever seen outside of Adrian’s forest. The Douglas fir that had thrown her into the air was still going up like a skyscraper, but other trees were coming in as well now.
They were all varieties Bex remembered from Bainbridge, but much, much bigger.
Adrian always said it took time to grow a forest, but the new trees were climbing taller than the White City’s apartment blocks as she watched with no sign of slowing down.
It wasn’t just plants either. The new greenery filling the plaza that surrounded the gates to the Hells was being crisscrossed with burbling streams before her eyes.
The formerly bone-dry air of Heaven was suddenly thick with humidity and loud with the drone of insects.
Birds darted among the growing branches, and fresh mud oozed through the cracks in the street.
In the space of less than a minute, the entire eight-square-block portion of the Holy City surrounding the entrance to the Hells was transformed from a cold mausoleum to a verdant forest teeming with life.
Bex couldn’t even see the white stone anymore.
It was all vibrant green leaves and craggy brown bark, colorful insects and flashing birds, darting chipmunks and lazing lizards, splashing fish and swarming tadpoles.
Everywhere she looked, life was blooming. Every life, that was, except Adrian’s.
“Where is he?” Bex demanded, beating back the chest-high undergrowth that was suddenly between her and the massive trunk of Adrian’s new tree. “Where did he go?”
“I think he was carried up,” Boston said, shrinking back to his house-cat size as he leaped onto her shoulder. “Let’s go! Hurry!”
Bex didn’t bother asking why the familiar had switched from holding her down to telling her to hurry up. She just launched herself into the air, using her fire to blast them both up onto the lowest branch of the skyscraper-sized fir tree that now dominated the Holy City’s skyline.