CHAPTER 13 #2
“It’s nothing like that,” Adrian assured the prince, doing his best to look pathetic. “It’s just… I left my cat upstairs. If this is truly the end, I’d like to hug him one last time before I die.”
The prince’s mirrored eyes narrowed. “That’s a very suspicious request.”
“It’s an earnest one,” Adrian promised. “I might be a son of Gilgamesh, but I was raised as a witch. We Blackwoods are a sentimental bunch, especially when it comes to our animals. I just want to say goodbye, and surely the future Crown Prince of Heaven isn’t afraid of a cat?”
The Prince of Envy frowned even harder, but just when it looked like he was about to say no, Leander spoke from the floor.
“Just let him do it, Hector,” he said in a pained voice as he pushed himself off the cracked marble. “He’s our baby brother, and Father always says that mercy is the privilege of the strong.” He flashed the Prince of Envy a sneer. “You’ll look weak if you deny him.”
“As if you weren’t always the weakest among us,” the other prince snapped, but his face was set in a scowl.
“Oh, very well,” he said as the Princess of Envy released her death grip on Adrian’s arms. “You can say goodbye to your pet, but only if you call it here. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
“Perfectly acceptable,” Adrian said as he rubbed his aching shoulders. “Thank you very much.”
The Prince of Envy rolled his eyes and gestured for Adrian to get on with it. The witch did so with great humility, crouching down and turning to face the staircase, where he could already feel his familiar waiting.
“Here, Boston,” he called. “Here, kitty, kitty.”
It wasn’t possible to share emotions through the familiar bond, but Adrian still swore he felt his cat’s disgust land on him like a wet blanket.
In this as with every task his witch assigned him, however, Boston was a consummate professional.
He galloped down the stairs exactly like a scared pet running to its owner.
He even meowed, jumping into Adrian’s arms in a moving display of animal devotion.
“It’s under my left foreleg,” he whispered when Adrian caught him. “I had Iggs stick it there with tape from his first aid kit and covered it in a Nevermind.”
“You are absolutely brilliant,” Adrian whispered back, giving his cat a completely genuine hug of relief.
“Just be careful,” Boston murmured as Adrian began to gently pry the wrapped object out of the nest of tape his familiar had heroically allowed to be stuck to his fur. “It’s not fully cured yet, so the potency will be high.”
“I’m counting on it,” Adrian said, giving his faithful familiar a final squeeze before setting him back on the ground to run to Leander, who was crouched several feet behind Adrian like he was bracing for impact.
“Are you finished?” the Prince of Envy asked impatiently.
“I’m finished,” Adrian said, raising his hands to his face as if he were saying a final prayer. “Do your worst.”
The prince smiled at this clear display of surrender, but Adrian hadn’t been talking to him.
He’d breathed those words over the object Boston had smuggled into his hands.
The curse that was now crawling out of its wrapping to reveal the five-inch-long black body of a preserved wasp.
Its wings weren’t dried all the way through yet, and its body was still soft in places where the magic hadn’t finished.
The wasp was actually a lot less ready than he’d expected, but it still shot out of Adrian’s palm like a bullet, streaking across the white room to drive its half-inch-long stinger into the exposed skin of the dirty prince’s face.
The Prince of Envy screamed when it happened.
Adrian screamed, too, falling to his knees as the burning venom raced through his system.
Deploying the karma wasp always resulted in at least one sting for the caster, but this time was so much worse than when he’d used it on the Spider.
Adrian was normally pretty invincible when it came to poison, but Boston must’ve been dead-on about the increase in potency.
The toxin flowing through Adrian’s system was strong enough to dim his vision.
Using the wasp was still worth it, though, because as hard as the poison was hitting him, it was hitting the Prince of Envy even harder.
“You underhanded witch!” the prince roared, frantically loosening the hard collar of his golden armor as his head began swelling up like a balloon. His princess ran to help at once, but the prince shoved her away.
“Don’t bother with me,” he snarled. “Kill him!”
That wouldn’t be hard. Thanks to the karma wasp’s poison, Adrian couldn’t even open his eyes all the way right now. Killing him should’ve been the work of a second, but when the Princess of Envy turned around to rip his head off, Leander’s arm shot out first.
“Band of a Thousand Irons.”
The sorcery had barely left his lips before the princess toppled over with a band of metal the size of a telephone pole wrapped around her body.
Because she was still the Princess of Envy, the same iron band clapped around Leander as well, slamming him to the floor.
He took the fall gladly, grinning the whole way down, because it no longer made a difference.
No matter how helpless he’d just made himself, the Prince of Envy was choking too hard to follow through.
Adrian was choking too. He wasn’t sure if the karma wasp was even more potent than he’d initially realized or if the Prince of Envy’s power was reflecting the full poison back at him, but he’d never been stung this badly in his life.
If he hadn’t spent thirteen years training to resist poisons, he’d have died in the first thirty seconds.
He was trained, though, so he was able to hang on, but every blood vessel still felt like it was filled with acid.
It burned worse than anything he could remember, but at least all that gasping in pain meant he could still breathe, which was more than Adrian could say for his enemy.
The Prince of Envy’s entire face was black with poison now.
His eyes had been reduced to two puffy slits, and his neck was so swollen that his own armor was choking him even with the unlatched collar.
The karma wasp was still darting around stinging any bit of exposed flesh it could find, but the prince was no longer trying to swat it away.
All of his attention was focused on sucking air through his swollen throat, but every breath he managed was shorter than the last until, finally, he couldn’t get one in at all.
That was when it truly ended. The prince had already fallen to his knees, but the moment his breathing stopped, he toppled like a felled tree.
His princess screamed when she saw it. She still couldn’t walk thanks to the metal bar Leander’s sorcery had used to bind her, so she wiggled on her belly like a worm, dragging her iron-wrapped body across the floor until she lay beside her dying prince.
She was begging him not to die when the Prince of Envy’s bloated body finally went still.
“No!” she screamed when she saw it. “You can’t leave me! I can’t be the only one without a prince! I—"
“Silence.”
The command was so sharp and cold that even Adrian stopped gasping long enough to watch Leander sit up, despite the weight of the iron manacle that was still wrapped around his body, and fix the sobbing princess with a look of pure disdain.
“Your beloved is dead,” he told her. “That makes you a masterless sword, the lowest of the low. As a son of Gilgamesh, I now rank above you. By that authority, I command you by your sacred name: Kesra, Princess of Envy, release all mirrored sorcery and return to your sword.”
The princess had kept screaming the entire time Leander was speaking, but as soon as he said her name, her cries stopped like a flipped switch.
The metal bindings holding Leander vanished a second later, setting him free as the white Blade of Envy, a needle-sharp sword once more, toppled to the ground.
“That was a lot of fuss,” Leander said, wiping the sweat from his brow as he turned to Adrian. “Are you going to live?”
“He’ll make it,” Boston answered when it was clear Adrian was still too busy going into toxic shock to do so on his own. “My witch is second to none when it comes to poison, but why did you order her back into her sword? Iggs told me you smashed the Princess of Hate.”
“Because the Princess of Hate is an unstable menace in any form,” Leander explained while he slowly pushed back to his feet. “Honestly, the same could be said for the Princess of Envy, but unlike Hate, we still need her.”
“For what?” Boston asked as he wiggled his body under Adrian’s legs and elevated them to improve blood flow.
“She’s the key,” Leander said. “I assume you want your queens back, yes?”
“Yes,” Adrian wheezed, reaching out to his forest for help, since his body wasn’t clearing the poison quickly enough.
He should’ve done it that way from the start.
The moment he opened himself to the Blackwood, the venom drained out of him like water down a cliff.
He’d been worried about dumping such a large dose of poison into the ecosystem, but this forest was much bigger than his grove back on Bainbridge, and it was eager to help.
He could almost feel the tree roots pushing him back to his feet as he groggily climbed off the floor.
“Okay,” he said when the room had slowed to an acceptable level of spinning. “How do we get Bex back?”