Tear Down Heaven: Urban Fantasy Action with Witches and Demons, page 15
“Don’t let anyone enter the palace!” the Prince of Fear bellowed as the demons stampeded past him. “Sorcerers, to your posts! Don’t let them—”
His orders were cut short as Bex slammed Drox into his side. The prince’s scales were as hard as Havok’s armor had been, so she didn’t manage to cut him in half, but the blow still sent him flying. He landed on his back on the opposite side of the enormous plaza, coughing white blood out of his lungs as the three witches spoke again.
“The ancient oaths have been invoked,” the Old Wives of the Blackwood said in unison. “By our bones, flesh, and souls, we keep the oldest promise. By the past, present, and future, we deliver that which is due. By the tongues of all our coven, we cast down the Witch’s Spite, curse of all curses, upon the lands of Gilgamesh, murderer-king of Uruk. So say we all and so shall it be, now, before, and forever more.”
A fresh flash of lightning lit up the sky as the final rhyming words of the curse finished, illuminating the damage the dragons had already done, the pounding rain that was presently washing their enemies away, and the shimmering protection that would guard the demons from harm in the future. Watching it all come together was enough to make Bex’s knees go weak. She’d seen Adrian do big magic before, but she didn’t have to be a witch to know that this curse was magnitudes stronger than the ones he’d used when he’d turned his forest black to kill the Spider’s warlocks. Just speaking the words had been enough to send a torrent of red blood pouring from Muriel’s lips, but the young-faced witch still looked triumphant as she rose into her sister’s rain on a broom carved to resemble a swan.
The scaled Prince of Fear jumped after her, trying to knock the witch back down, but Bex got there first. She kicked the prince back to the wet ground with a boot to his temple. It was a move that would’ve taken the head off a normal human, but the Prince of Fear must’ve been as tough as an actual fear demon. He shrugged the kick off like it was nothing, rolling back to his feet with a glare so hateful, Bex could feel it through the mask of scales that covered his face.
“You have no idea what you’ve just done,” he snarled, gripping his white sword, which could no longer paralyze her thanks to the witches, but still had a wickedly curved cutting edge. “You idiot demon. You should have stayed in the Hells where you belong!”
He charged as he finished, running at Bex with a speed she hadn’t seen since she’d fought Havok. Fortunately, Drox was quicker on the uptake than his queen. By the time Bex realized she was in trouble, her loyal sword was already swinging. He bashed the white Blade of Fear away like it weighed nothing, but the prince had already pivoted to swing again, attacking with the raw fury of someone with nothing left to lose.
Bex knew that feeling well, but she couldn’t afford to do the same. She was fighting for everything now, so she met his attack with skill instead of fury, putting her one hundred and ninety-eight lifetimes’ worth of experience to use as she ducked the prince’s wild swing to attack his legs.
It was a solid hit, but once again, the prince’s thick scales kept her from landing actual damage. Drox’s blade slid right off, but the blow still made the prince stumble, driving him back across the rain-soaked courtyard and away from the sorcerers who’d run up to defend the palace entrance that Iggs and the rest of Bex’s demons were just starting to assault.
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.
Speaking of old habits, Lys was leaning on one of their favorites right now. Bex liked to attribute their success as a spy to being a good shapeshifter, but the real trick, in Lys’s opinion, was attention to detail. Case in point, as soon as they reached the towering trunk of Adrian’s new heart tree, Lys stopped flying fast and started flying low. They weren’t sure what they were looking for yet, but they went over every nook and fold of the fir tree’s gigantic base like they were being paid by the root. Lys had almost made it all the way back around when they finally spotted the culprit.
It was another lust demon, a big one with shimmering wings that were closer to purple than Lys’s dusty rose. Just as Adrian had predicted, they were carving something into the tree’s trunk. Lys couldn’t read what they were writing from the air, but the demon had peeled off a big chunk of the Douglas fir’s thick, corky bark to reach the paler wood beneath, which was a crime all by itself in Lys’s eyes.
“Hey!” they shouted, making the other demon jump as Lys swooped down to land on the gnarled root the carver had been hiding behind. “That tree belongs to the witches who came to our rescue! What in the Nine destroyed Hells do you think you’re doing taking a knife to…”
Their tirade trailed off as Lys’s eyes finally landed on the knife in question. Given Adrian’s complaints about the pain, Lys had assumed the culprit would be using sin iron scavenged from the drowned Hells, but the ornate dagger in the lust demon’s hand was white, not black. Lys was close enough now to read what the other demon had been carving, too, and it wasn’t their name or profanity or even a deranged rant against the queen, which had been Lys’s first guess. This was far worse, because the demon was writing in cuneiform.
Thanks to their constant spying, Lys’s ancient Sumerian was better than most warlocks’, but this text was much denser than the writing they usually saw on Earth. The carving was also enormous, with enough cuneiform to cover a solid three-square-foot block of tree trunk. Despite all of that, however, the actual words were pretty simple.
Like most of the cuneiform Lys encountered, it was a poem. The first verses were nothing but fawning fluff praising Gilgamesh’s glory, but the main body contained a florid and highly detailed description of an explosion that would “return everything built by the Eternal King’s enemies to dust.”
The lust demon had been carving the final stanza when Lys caught them, so it was less of a surprise than it should’ve been when the demon turned around and looked up at Lys with eyes that flashed mirror-silver.
“Well, well,” they said in a masculine voice, letting the winged-demon disguise fall away to reveal a human male in familiar golden armor. “Looks like the Coward Queen forgot to take all her lackeys with her.”
Lys didn’t bother replying. They just reached under their arm and pulled out their sin-iron dagger.
The prince laughed when he saw it. “Please,” he mocked, twirling his own foot-long white knife in his armored fingers. “Don’t you recognize me? I’m the Prince of Lust. Your prince, so show a little respe—”
The haughty speech became a yelp when Lys dove at him. The prince got his dagger-sized Blade of Gilgamesh into a defensive position with the same annoying speed all of Heaven’s sons seemed to be blessed with by default, but Lys wasn’t stabbing at him. They were going for the spell behind him. Sin iron would have poisoned the tree, so Lys used their steel blade, gouging a series of furious slashes across the cuneiform the prince had so carefully carved into the Douglas fir’s soft wood.
“You dare!” the prince roared, whirling around to stab his white blade into Lys’s open back. “Die with your queen, you filth!”
He brought his knife down as he finished, its gleaming white edge perfectly positioned to sever Lys’s spine. But Lys was a seasoned soldier and an even more practiced shape changer. The second the knife’s course was set, they shifted their torso to the side, moving their flesh like water to leave the prince stabbing at nothing. But while the change was fast enough to save Lys’s back, nothing could save the rest of their body when the prince swung the fist he wasn’t using to hold his knife straight into their ribs. The blow sent Lys rocketing sideways into one of the fir tree’s gigantic knotted roots, which wasn’t nearly as soft or fluffy as the layer of thick green moss made it look.
If they hadn’t just consumed an entire bottle of artificial lust, that would’ve been the end. Lys had never been as good at regenerating as Bex or Iggs. Add in the blood loss from their wounded shoulder and the damage might’ve been fatal. Fortunately for Lys, the moment the witches had shown up with their bottled sins, they’d taken a page from their queen’s old book and started chugging. The results weren’t as transformative as Ishtar’s glowing water, but they gave Lys enough strength to get out of the splintered roots in time to avoid the prince’s next attack, which had been aimed to take off their head.
“Fancy dodging won’t save you,” the son of Gilgamesh warned, flipping the white knife over in his golden-gloved hand. “Nothing can at this point, because I know who you are. You’re the Coward Queen’s nursemaid, the one who always runs to find her after she dies.”
His handsome face split into a cruel smile. “My brother Leander reported the queen abandoned the fight against him after you were injured. I don’t normally take advice from traitors, but my orders were to stall the queen’s advance, and I like the idea of killing you far more than carving a bunch of poetry into a tree that keeps growing back over the words as soon as they’re cut.”
