CHAPTER 6 #2
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 an eye 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 is here?”
“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.
They were 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 explosive boom.
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 can really begin.”
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 was so bright, 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.
Adrian had lived through a lot of scary magic in his life, but he’d never felt anything like this.
The burning razor wasn’t even aimed in his direction, but he swore he could feel its sharpness in every cell of his body.
The strike cut through air, cut through sound, cut through the unknown magic of the gods that was the foundation of Paradise itself.
It sliced through the golden bubble around Gilgamesh’s fortress like a red-hot wire through spun sugar before slamming into the palace itself.
The attack hit the white stone like a comet, burning a line of glowing destruction from the thick base where all the spires connected to the top of the frontmost tower where Adrian had been kept prisoner.
He swore he saw the windows of his old workshop shatter back into sand before a cloud of dust and debris exploded upward, and the whole tower began to tilt.
It was only one out of a dozen, but Adrian still held his breath as the front tower of Heaven’s Holy Palace—the one with the golden balcony where his father had brought him to watch Bex’s defeat—toppled like a chopped tree.
It fell sideways into the city to the palace’s west, crushing the ornate white buildings and throwing a plume of sparkling dust into the air that rose higher than all but one of the palace’s remaining gold-roofed spires.
The crash was still echoing through the empty White City when the shining creature Bex had become suddenly wobbled.
Her blinding light vanished at the same time, leaving the Bex Adrian remembered from this morning plummeting out of the sky like a shot bird.
Fortunately for them both, Bran was quicker on the uptake than his witch.
The broom started moving before Adrian could even think the command, darting into the perfect position to catch the falling queen as she flew by.
“Gotcha!” Adrian cried, trusting his broom to keep them balanced as he snatched Bex out of the air.
Boston managed to stay on as well, digging his claws into his witch’s back as Adrian dragged Bex onto the broom in front of him.
He was feeling her limbs to make sure she wasn’t hurt when he saw something that made him freeze.
The pale woman gasping on the broom in front of him looked like Bex.
She had Bex’s lovely face and glowing eyes, her dark hair and small frame, but her head was crowned with not two, not four, but six towering black horns.
They were the same shape and size as her old ones, but instead of just poking out of her forehead, these new horns encircled her entire skull like the points of a crown.
They were so tall and spearlike that Adrian had to watch where he put his face so he didn’t lose an eye.
But although the new horns were like nothing he’d ever seen, the dazzling smile on her face was one hundred percent pure Bex.
“Adrian!” she cried, throwing her arms around him. “You’re okay!”
“I’m fine,” he said, dodging her spikes. “But are you okay?”
“I’m amazing,” Bex replied in a dazed voice as her now very dangerous head whipped back toward the plume of white dust that was still rising from the broken tower. “Did you see that shot?!”
“I did,” he assured her. “I also saw you fall out of the sky.”
“Yeah, I might have gone a bit too hard,” she admitted, though her smile didn’t budge. “But I did it! I actually got damage on the Palace of the Highest Heaven!”
She grabbed him as she finished, almost knocking them both off the broom as she pulled Adrian into a rib-creaking hug.