CHAPTER 9
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CURRENT LIFE-AND-DEATH situations notwithstanding, Adrian had never been more excited to watch a curse go off.
The Witch’s Spite was the stuff of legends, the greatest destructive magic his coven had ever constructed.
They’d been building it since the first Blackwood grove was initiated, collecting the bones of every dragon that died in their care, tallying favors done for the Great Forest, and binding pine cones with protective magic so they’d grow into trees that could take hits in someone else’s stead at some point in the future.
The Witch’s Spite was the greatest expression of Blackwood witchcraft, a monument to the incredible power of patience, preparation, and cooperation with the forest. It famously took a thousand witches working together to spread out the damage when the payment for such an enormous curse came due, which explained why his mother and aunts had arrived with everyone.
It also could only be cast within the borders of a Blackwood grove, which was where Adrian came in.
“We need more coverage to the west,” Boston reported from his perch at the tip of Bran’s broomstick. “Bex just kicked the prince over there.”
Adrian nodded and moved the vine—a super-long-growing woody variety that his cousin had brought with her from South America for exactly this purpose—as directed.
The vines were the key to all of this. Even with the astounding power of his new heart tree and the full force of his coven behind him, tree roots were slow to spread.
Vines, on the other hand, grew like wildfire anywhere there was sunlight.
The tropical liana vine in particular could stretch itself practically forever as long as its base was well rooted.
A power Adrian had been abusing to the hilt.
It was still hard to push through Heaven’s antigrowth protections, but he’d never had so much support, or so much need.
Coverage was critical, since wherever Adrian’s plants were, so was his forest. That connection was what had allowed the Old Wives to cast the Witch’s Spite on Gilgamesh’s doorstep.
It was also the only way Adrian—and by extension, Boston—was able to see what was happening on the ground.
Looking through his physical eyes while he was communing with his forest had always been difficult.
Now that his mother and her apprentices had filled the sky with a thunderstorm, though, it was physically impossible.
Bran would throw Adrian off if he tried to fly into that pounding rain, so he and Boston were floating above the black clouds, using the forest’s senses to track the battle below.
Since plants didn’t have eyes like humans, the information was limited, but liana vines were extremely sensitive to both light and pressure, which made them excellent spies.
Adrian was making a mental note to ask his cousin for more cuttings when a knife stabbed into his side.
That was what it felt like, at least. When Adrian looked down, though, his coat—which he’d put back on when he’d gone to his cabin to resupply before the fight—was undamaged.
There was no spreading bloodstain or gaping wound when he unbuttoned his shirt to check, but he swore he could feel a knife carving into his flesh.
It reminded him of the time the Spider had filled him with phantom daggers, but rougher and more chronic. The Spider’s sorcery hadn’t hurt until he activated it. This felt like someone was carving their initials into his ribs with a rusty pocketknife.
That last thought was where Adrian found his answer.
He was getting stabbed, just not in his physical body.
This pain came from his heart tree. When he glanced over his shoulder to check, though, the towering dark-green spire of the skyscraper-sized Douglas fir looked normal.
He was trying to shift his consciousness over to investigate when Boston galloped down the broomstick to dig his claws into Adrian’s knee.
“Get the vines inside the doors!” the cat cried. “Iggs’s team is pushing into the palace, but the Witch of the Future’s protections can’t defend them if they leave the forest’s borders!”
“I’m not sure I can go inside the doors,” Adrian told him through gritted teeth. “The palace is Gilgamesh’s private territory. It’s a really hard line to cross, especially when I’ve got something stabbing me in the ribs.”
“What are you talking about?” Boston asked in alarm.
“Something’s attacking my heart tree,” Adrian reported, keeping his words tight and short as he breathed through the pain. “I need to go back and defend it, but the vines here are already overextended. I can’t leave them alone.”
“Then tell somebody else to go,” his familiar suggested. “Our entire coven is here to help! You don’t have to do everything by yourself anymore.”
Adrian shook his head. All the other witches were busy supporting the Old Wives’ three-pronged curse. It didn’t feel right to ask them to help him on top of that, but Adrian did know someone who was already at his heart tree and who’d probably love a chance to get into the fight.
Solution in mind, he grabbed his broom tight with his one hand to compensate for the dizziness the pain was sending through his body and reached up with the other to tap the comm inserted into his ear.
“Lys?”
“I’m here,” they answered immediately. “Does Bex need backup?”
“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.
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“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 I need is 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.