Tear Down Heaven: Urban Fantasy Action with Witches and Demons, page 10
“That’s different,” he insisted, squeezing her wrist tighter. “They were children.”
“So were we,” Agatha said in a cold voice as she yanked her hand away. “My sisters and I were barely out of our first decade when the new god known as Gilgamesh showed up to burn our forest. He kept us as slaves in those early days while he was perfecting his sorcery. I was sixteen the first time I seduced him and seventeen the first time I fed a lock of my hair to the Morrigan to ensure I’d bear him a son. I’ve been repeating that cycle ever since to ensure our coven’s survival, and to ensure we’d get our revenge someday.”
She leaned down and tapped Adrian on the chest. “You are that revenge. Ours and the Blackwood’s. The fire the Great Forest poured through you into the Queen of Wrath is the same fire Gilgamesh used to burn our ancestors. He tied them to their own heart trees and torched them to ash, but the forest has deep roots, and witches do not forget. He thought he stole you from me like he steals everything, but you were, are, and always will be ours. The moment you gave your heart to the forest, Gilgamesh’s fate was sealed.”
Her voice was ringing with ancient anger by the time she finished, but all Adrian could do was lower his eyes. Nothing she’d said had surprised him. His family always put the forest first. It was the first thing witches swore when they took the coven oaths, but Adrian’s heart was only partially roots. The rest was still angrily, bitterly human, which meant it hurt to hear his mother talk so proudly about molding him into a weapon to stab into his father’s heart.
“I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear,” Agatha said as she reached up to touch her son’s face. “But none of it means that I don’t love you. I’ve loved all the sons I surrendered to Heaven.”
“You just loved the Blackwood more,” Adrian finished as he leaned away.
“The heart of a witch is the forest,” Agatha reminded him with a sad smile. “I’m sure you would’ve behaved differently, which is fine. A child should strive to be better than his parents, but I’m not ashamed of what I did. Because of my actions, our coven has a chance to finally be free of Gilgamesh. You have the chance to be free, as do your beloved Rebexa and her people. Remember that before you judge me and your aunts too harshly, hmm?”
“There’s no point in judgement,” Adrian said, turning away from her to finish putting on his dry clothes. “The past cannot be changed. The present can, though, so let’s focus on that before we lose the opportunity you did all this to achieve.”
“Spoken like a true Witch of the Flesh,” his mother said proudly, marching back toward his front door. “This way.”
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.
“We did it!” she cried as golden fires flared back up all over her body. “Ishtar said it was impossible, but we did it! We did it! We did it! We did it!”
Her voice was borderline hysterical by the end, but Adrian didn’t want her to calm down. He just hugged her back, leaving the flying to Bran and the panicking to Boston as the four of them dropped out of the sky toward the grass-covered square.
They were still ten feet above the ground when Bex suddenly hopped off the broom. She lit back up as she did so, exploding in a column of fire that missed Bran by inches. She raised her sword at the same time, greeting the enormous crowd of demons, who were all screaming so loudly that their voices shook the ground. There was so much chaos that Adrian didn’t realize the packed square was crammed with more than just demons until he set his broom down beside her.
“I don’t believe it,” Boston said, pushing the brim of Adrian’s hat down with his paws as he climbed onto his witch’s head for a better view. “Did your mother bring the entire coven?”
It certainly looked that way. It was hard to see through all the celebrating demons, but there was a torrent of Blackwoods coming into the square. Black-dressed women were pouring out of the rootway and zipping through the branches of his tree on their brooms. From what he could feel through his new roots, they’d brought their support staff as well, all the partners and adult children and other family members who weren’t witches but still lived under the Blackwood’s protection.
It looked like a full-on invasion. Bex’s demons were still too excited about what their queen had done to pay the witches much attention yet, but the crow-shaped Morrigan was watching the incoming army with pride from her perch on top of the Hells’ Gate, completely ignoring the very angry-looking Lys, Iggs, and Nemini who were standing in front of her.
“Oh, ho, ho,” the Morrigan laughed, finally turning her beak to the demons, who looked like they were about to jump her. “You see? It turned out exactly as I said. Now get out of my sight before I change my mind about eating you.”
If she’d said that to Adrian, he would’ve scrambled away as fast as he could, but Lys had always been fearless. All they did was flip the giant crow off before leaping off the black cube and flying down to their queen on their dusky, still-bandaged wings.
“Bex!” they cried as they landed practically on top of her raised sword. “You did it!”
Bex responded with a whoop that made Adrian’s ears ring, grabbing Lys out of the sky and spinning them around. It was absolutely not something she should’ve been doing given the state of Lys’s shoulder, which was already bleeding through the bandages again, but Adrian couldn’t bring himself to tell Bex to stop. Lys was already falling to their knees on their own, staring up at Bex with an expression of holy wonder.
“I still don’t believe it,” they said, raising a trembling hand. “Your horns, your sword—Ishtar has given us a miracle!”
It might’ve been Adrian’s imagination, but he would’ve sworn Bex flinched at Ishtar’s name. Whatever the look meant, though, she hid it immediately. Or maybe the expression was shocked off her face when Nemini ran over to grab Bex’s head.
“You have a new name,” she announced, peering deep into her sister’s glowing eyes.
She said that like an accusation, and Bex flinched again. Before she could reply, though, Iggs elbowed his way in.
“Who cares about that?” he cried, giving his queen a crushing hug before whirling to point at the cloud of dust rising from Gilgamesh’s broken palace. “Did you see what she did to that tower?” He slammed his fists together with a fang-toothed grin. “Oh, it is on now!”
“Gilgamesh won’t know what hit him,” Lys agreed, looking more fired up than Adrian had ever seen them as they surged back to their feet. “So what’s the plan from here? Fly back up and chop off some more architecture?”
Both of those questions were aimed at Bex, but she turned to look at Adrian instead, grabbing him by his shirt sleeve and pulling him down so she could whisper in his ear.
“What is the plan?” she hissed. “The witches are here because of you, right? What are they planning to do?”
“I have no idea,” he whispered back. “I was being boiled up until just a few minutes ago. My mother told me they’re readying the rootway to evacuate everyone who can’t fight back to Earth, but I don’t know the plan aside from that. Since the Old Wives brought everyone in the entire forest, I presume they’re here to fight, but I don’t…”
Adrian’s voice trailed off. He’d been talking very fast, trying to relay all the important information as quickly as possible, but the moment he mentioned the evacuation, Bex’s entire face lit up like a sunrise.
“The witches are going to help my people escape?” she asked, her fiery eyes shining. “They’re going to get them to safety?”
Adrian had barely started his nod when Bex covered her face with her hands. She stayed that way for several seconds, but though her shoulders didn’t so much as quiver, he could smell the salty tang of her tears. So could the rest of her crew from the looks on their faces, but Bex had always hated crying in front of others, so they all dutifully pretended it wasn’t happening. Adrian did the same, though he didn’t see what she had to be ashamed about. Bex had spent almost two hundred lifetimes working to save her people. Of course the relief would feel crushing when it finally happened. The demons weren’t evacuated yet, though, which meant they still had work to do.
“I need to coordinate with my coven about what the plan is from here,” he said, drawing attention away from Bex to give her an excuse to keep her head down. “There’s no way Gilgamesh can ignore a direct attack on his fortress, so we should probably expect some sort of retaliation soon. I’ll take Bex with me so she can speak to the Old Wives directly. Lys, can you start organizing the demons to make sure those who need the most help get out first when the rootway opens for evacuation?”
Lys shot him a look so scathing, Adrian swore he could feel their eyes carving I don’t take orders from you into his skin. To his enormous surprise, though, the demon didn’t actually say the words out loud. They just nodded and turned to address the others.
“Nemini, you stay with the queen until she orders otherwise. I’ll take point on organizing the evacuation. The quicker we get everybody who can’t fight out of here, the sooner those of us who can fight will be free to do so. And speaking of fighting, Iggs, do you have any guns left in that goblin bag of yours?”
