Page 2 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)
“Better than we should be,” Bex reported at once, taking a step back so she could bow her head without hitting the wide brim of the witch’s enormous pointed hat.
“Thank you again for taking us in, and for letting us help with your festival. Large concentrations of human emotion are hard to come by out here in the countryside. A big, chaotic event like this is a feast for my demons.”
“I’m happy to hear it,” the Old Wife of the Future replied as she licked the sticky cinnamon off her fingers. “But that second one wasn’t actually my doing. We hold the festival at the same time every year. Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.”
“Well, I’m still grateful,” Bex said stubbornly. “My people would be dead right now without your coven’s help.”
“That is true,” Muriel agreed around a mouth full of fritter. “But I didn’t ask how your demons were doing. I asked about you .”
She looked pointedly down at the stump on the end of Bex’s right wrist, and the former Queen of Wrath sighed.
“There’s nothing new to report,” she muttered, trying hard not to sound as bitter as she felt.
“My hand’s not coming back. Nemini and Lys both tell me I’ve regenerated limbs in the past, but this time…
” She shook her hornless head. “I don’t know if it was losing my crown or my name or what, but I haven’t recovered any more of my power than I had when you rescued us from the collapsed Seattle Anchor. ”
“I see,” Muriel said as she led Bex around the long line for the cider tent. “But you’re still leaving tonight.”
Bex jumped. She hadn’t told anyone about that yet. She’d barely made the decision herself, though she really shouldn’t have been surprised. What was the point of being the Witch of the Future if you didn’t know what was going to happen before everyone else?
“Will I be successful?” she asked instead.
Adrian’s aunt didn’t reply. She just stared off into the distance, her blue eyes locked on the wall of trees that loomed over the village’s eastern edge like a cliff.
Bex stared at it, too. When the witches had first brought them in, she couldn’t believe that the Great Blackwood was just there .
Even way out here in the boonies where trees were expected to be big, how could the scalies not notice oaks the size of skyscrapers?
Especially right now, when the giant forest was decked out in its autumn splendor.
Most of the crowd clogging the festival tents were leaf watchers who’d driven out here specifically to stare at the scenery.
How was it possible that shutterbugs with gigs of leaf photos on their cameras could walk right by the giant forest rising like an ancient city not three feet beyond Hemlock Bend’s final building and not freak out?
“The same way the good people of Bainbridge never noticed Adrian’s lovely witchwood,” Muriel said, answering Bex’s question before she could even consider asking it out loud. “Gilgamesh’s scales steal from all of us, including those who have no idea they’re being robbed.”
“All the more reason to bring him down,” Bex growled, turning away from the glorious red-and-gold forest to glare at the witch. “You never answered my question. Will my mission tonight succeed?”
The Witch of the Future sighed and ate the rest of her fritter.
“Parts of it will and parts of it won’t,” she said when she’d finally finished chewing.
“Sadly, I can’t tell you which parts because the future isn’t actually mine to control.
It’s more like pruning a sapling. You do your best to coax the branches into the shape you want, but only the tree itself knows what its final form will be. ”
She flashed Bex a cryptic smile. “You’re one of my sharpest pruning cuts yet.
The reason I voted to allow Adrian to go to Seattle was to make sure that he met you.
I have great faith in both of your potential, but when it comes to the specific twists and turns of what is yet to come…
” She shrugged. “Part of mastering soul magic is learning to live with uncertainty.”
Bex was starting to see why soul magic was Adrian’s least favorite school of witchcraft. “So you can’t give me any hints? Nothing at all?”
“I can tell you that Lys is at the Brew Ha Ha,” Muriel said, pointing down the busy street at the largest of Hemlock Bend’s perfectly maintained colonial buildings. “The other thing you were waiting for is there as well.”
“Really?” Bex whistled. “That was fast.”
“You’re not the only one in a hurry,” the witch replied, reaching into the pocket of her simple but beautifully sewn black linen dress.
“I suspect this will be the last time we talk for a while, so I’m going to give you this now.
If you see my nephew before I do, would you do me the favor of passing it on? ”
The mention of Adrian made Bex’s stomach clench.
She’d been trying her best not to think about what was happening to him in Heaven, but she knew it had to be horrible.
What flavor of horrible was still up for debate since she still didn’t know why Gilgamesh had kidnapped him in the first place, but his family was being no help at all.
They refused to even discuss Adrian in her presence, but Bex hadn’t forgotten that the first princess who’d come to Bainbridge had also tried to take Adrian away.
She didn’t know if that was because of the Spider or if Adrian Blackwood had always been part of Gilgamesh’s long game, but Bex was determined to get him back.
That was a big part of why she’d decided to leave tonight.
Lys kept begging her to take more time to heal, but Adrian had been in the enemy’s hands for an entire week.
Bex was so upset at the idea of him being tortured in some sterile white prison cell filled with creepy golden eyes, she didn’t even notice Muriel holding something out to her until the witch gave up and slipped the object into the front pocket of Bex’s oversized black T-shirt.
“What was that?” Bex demanded, patting her chest in alarm. “A curse?”
Muriel shook her head. “Just an acorn.”
Bex arched a dark eyebrow. “You want me to give Adrian an acorn?”
“He’ll know what to do with it,” the witch promised. “My nephew isn’t that bad at soul witchcraft, and seeds are the essence of the future.”
Those were some pretty cryptic instructions, but Bex didn’t get a chance to ask for clarification. The Old Wife of the Future had already wandered away, vanishing like a shadow into the rowdy crowd surrounding the apple strudel booth.
Bex stared blankly at the wall of humans for a few more seconds, and then she turned on the heel of her stiff new combat boots—a replacement for the pair she’d burned to ash during her first fight with Havok—and started walking toward where the Witch of the Future had told her Lys was waiting.
As the only permanent restaurant in Hemlock Bend, the Brew Ha Ha wore a lot of hats.
During the day, it was a coffee shop. After sunset, it was a pub.
On crowded weekends like this one, it served as a shady retreat from the blazing autumn sun.
Every table in its massive common room was packed with tired-looking festival-goers while the witch at the bar served drinks that smelled suspiciously like the potions Adrian used to brew.
Whatever they were, they were definitely filling people with energy.
The moment exhausted customers drank their orders, they went right back outside to spend more money at the craft tents, creating a convenient wall of chaos that kept the scalies from looking too hard up the rickety steps to the shop’s second floor, where Lys was waiting with an unexpected—and extremely early —tall, green guest.
“Can’t be,” Bex said as she climbed the ladderlike stairs to see Felix, the Goblin Prince of Seattle, struggling to balance his lanky, seven-foot-tall body on one of the coffee shop’s antique wooden chairs. “How did you get here so fast? I only called you last night.”
“It’s called hustle, sweetheart,” the goblin replied, his voice sharp and curt with none of the usual flirtation.
“I flew into Albany on the red-eye to pick up the cargo from my freight guy. Had a hell of a drive getting out here, though. You could’ve warned me the witches would be clogging every road into this boondock with their bake sale traffic. ”
“I didn’t realize you’d be coming in person,” Bex said, plopping the remaining half of her pastry on the table before taking a seat next to Lys’s current go-to body: a lanky young man with a photographer’s vest and perfectly trimmed hipster beard who was practically bouncing up and down in his chair.
“Enough about your traffic problems,” Lys snapped, leaning over the antique sawhorse that had been retrofitted into a tiny café table. “Did you bring what we talked about?”
Felix curled his long arm down to pick something off the floor.
It looked like an old-fashioned soldier’s knapsack that had been taken on one too many campaigns.
Every inch of it was stained with something, but the heavy brown canvas beneath was finely woven, and the straps that held its top flap closed were stitched with magic symbols Bex didn’t recognize.
“What in the Hells is that?” Lys demanded, their amber eyes flashing dangerously in their disguise’s friendly face. “We asked for weapons.”
“And I delivered,” Felix insisted with a sharp-toothed grin. “That, my impatient chameleon, is the Armory of Solomon.”
Lys’s scowl deepened, and the goblin heaved an enormous sigh.
“Are you Luddites familiar with the concept of a Bag of Holding?” he asked, leaning as far back in his chair as his ridiculously long limbs would allow. “The Armory of Solomon follows the same principle, but for weapons.”
“Is it sorcery?” Bex asked suspiciously.