Page 18 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)
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A DRIAN DID END UP using the sap as glue after all.
Considering how many pieces the Queen of Pride’s horns were in, he’d thought he was embarking on a massive restoration project, but they actually came together astonishingly quickly once he started working.
The hardest part had been getting everything into the right order, but once Adrian started fitting the broken edges into place, the black pieces had snapped together like a precision-machined jigsaw puzzle.
There was no smoothing or erosion, no gaps where the thinner bits had started to crumble.
Every edge was still razor-sharp and ruler-straight like the horns had broken five minutes ago, not five thousand years.
As someone who’d worked on more than his fair share of dead bodies as part of his craft, it was the craziest thing Adrian had ever seen.
He’d expected to have to replace at least some lost material like he’d done with Bex’s fire, but the Queen of Pride’s horns were apparently immune to time.
He couldn’t even tell they’d been shattered on a battlefield because every single piece was there.
It looked like she’d broken her horns straight into Gilgamesh’s box, but the really crazy part was that the pieces were still warm.
He'd noticed the odd temperature the first time he handled them, but he’d been too distracted by Gilgamesh, the loss of his forest, and the potential death of everyone he loved to consider what that meant at the time.
Now that Adrian was actually doing the work, though, that gentle heat changed his entire strategy, because warmth was a quality of living bodies.
That made this Witchcraft of the Flesh, not the Bones, and unlike the delicate work of reconstructing a crumbling skeleton, Adrian could set a broken bone in his sleep.
Once he made that connection, everything got easier.
Not easy —the horns were still split into five hundred and fifty-two tiny pieces—but putting them back together took much less work than restoring Bex because the Queen of Pride’s horns were merely broken, not empty.
Their power hadn’t been hollowed out by eons of constant battle and nearly two hundred reincarnations, which meant he didn’t have to replace it.
He just had to fit all the pieces back into their correct positions and hold them there until the pine sap he was using as glue solidified.
That would’ve been enough by itself if he’d been back in his own forest. Since he was in Heaven, though, with all its anti-resurrection restrictions, Adrian had had to cheat by dunking the glued horns into a giant tub filled with bright-blue deathly water and healing herbs.
It was a higher-concentration version of the same bath he’d used to heal Bex after she’d fought the prince in his forest, and it was apparently the most illegal thing you could make in Heaven.
From the new blood stains on her white fingers, Adrian wasn’t sure he wanted to know what his princess had done to collect all the materials on his list, but it had worked .
Just like when he submerged Bex’s body in his bathtub back home, Pride’s broken horns had started knitting themselves back together the second they hit the water.
After ten minutes of soaking, Adrian could no longer see the yellow lines of sap he’d used to hold the cracked pieces together.
Just two smooth, glossy horns even blacker and taller than Bex’s.
Twistier, too. Unlike the Queen of Wrath’s horns, which were as straight as spears, Pride’s crown looked like a cross between a stag’s antlers and an obsidian thorn hedge.
The tangle of their fully reconstructed form was so wide that Adrian almost couldn’t fit it in the tank.
Adrian couldn’t imagine wearing something that enormous on his own head, but the daughters of Ishtar were famously strong, and if any queen was going to have an iron-stiff neck, it would be Pride.
“That’s amazing,” the princess said when Adrian finally hauled the finished crown out of the tank and picked all the residual leaves off to make sure every crack had healed.
“I can’t believe you did that so fast. Gilgamesh was unable to heal the Queen of Pride’s crown for five thousand years, but you did it in fifty minutes. ”
“It’s a matter of approach, not skill,” Adrian said, refusing to be flattered by a tool of the enemy but still unable to resist explaining his cleverness.
“Gilgamesh is a sorcerer. That means he works by command and force of will, but you can’t boss around an enemy with nothing to lose.
These horns were already in pieces, and, if Gilgamesh’s story is to be believed, the Queen of Pride herself was the one who made them that way specifically to keep them out of his hands. ”
He pointed at the enormous crown dripping on the worktable.
“The pieces had absolutely no reason to put themselves back together for him, and unless he wanted to complete Pride’s work by blasting them to powder, Gilgamesh had nothing he could threaten them into obedience with.
I’m pretty sure if I’d tried to use sorcery, I would’ve had just as little luck, but witches don’t approach problems that way.
Gilgamesh treated the Queen of Pride’s horns as a war prize to be reclaimed.
I treated them like a broken bone. Look at it that way and it’s easy to see why Ishtar’s gift of regeneration worked for me and not my father. ”
“Well, I still think it’s incredible,” the princess insisted, smiling at him with Bex’s beaming face. “Gilgamesh was so right to bring you here. You truly were exactly what he needed to complete his great work.”
Adrian had been feeling exceedingly clever, but the fawning way she said that hit him like a boot to the head.
He’d gotten carried away with his work, but he couldn’t let himself forget for a second that he was playing chicken with the man who’d killed the gods.
That wasn’t a fight Adrian could win no matter how clever he was.
Fortunately, he’d already stacked the deck.
The highest left antler of Pride’s towering black crown was missing its point.
Not because that piece hadn’t been in the box, but because Adrian had slipped it into his pocket earlier when he was laying everything out.
It was still in there, stuck to the sticky belly of his fur-covered wooden cat, whose sharp nose was pointing like a compass needle at the Queen of Pride’s body.
The fact that he could still feel it moving even through his pocket gave Adrian enormous hope, which in turn gave him the courage to take the next step in his plan.
“Gilgamesh’s great work isn’t complete yet,” he said, pretending to dry the horns so the always-watching princess wouldn’t see how nervous he was. “There’s a piece still missing here, see?”
He pointed at the gap left by the tip he’d pocketed, and the princess’s face grew horrified. “How is that possible?” she asked. “Gilgamesh used sorcery to collect every shard!”
“I don’t think it was ever there to begin with,” Adrian lied.
“Whatever blow was capable of shattering these horns in the first place probably destroyed this part completely. Normally, that would mean it’s lost forever, but the reason Father chose me for this job is because I have experience replicating Ishtar’s lost creations, and I think I know how to fix this. ”
“I hope it doesn’t involve something on Earth,” the princess said, biting her carved lip. “Even if it’s for the Queen of Pride’s horns, I can’t take you back down there unless Gilgamesh gives his explicit permission.”
Adrian blinked. He hadn’t even considered asking to go back to Earth. It was a moot point since he would never leave Heaven without Bex, but he still felt stupid for not thinking of it.
“I don’t need to go to Earth,” he assured her. Truthfully, this time. “The Queen of Pride was born and killed in Paradise. That means everything I need to rebuild her should still be here. I even know how to find it. Do you remember this guy?”
He pulled the cat charm out of his pocket just long enough for the princess to see it before tucking it back in.
“He’s a finding charm,” Adrian explained, which, again, was not a lie. “I originally used him to find what I needed to repair the horns, but he can also find what I need to complete them.”
“Really?” the princess asked excitedly. “Whatever it is, we’ll get it. What do you need?”
Adrian took a deep breath. Here it went.
“I don’t know,” he said, turning around so she could see the full breadth of his false disappointment. “Witchcraft is not precise like sorcery. This charm can point me to the material I need, but I won’t know what it is or how to use it until I see it with my own eyes.”
The princess looked suspicious. “How can you look for something if you don’t know what it is?”
“That’s just how witches work,” he said with a helpless shrug.
“It’s a craft, not a science. Sometimes you just have to trust the process, but I can promise you that, if you take me to where my charm is pointing, I’ll know the solution when I see it.
Since there’s such a tiny portion to be replaced, I should be able to finish the horns right then and there if you can just help me get to the last part I need. ”