Hell for Hire (Tear Down Heaven #1)

by Rachel Aaron

The massive black cat crouched inside his plastic carry crate, fluffy tail lashing with indignity. “I can’t believe you stuck me in the middle seat.” “Would you rather I carried you in my lap?” asked the black-dressed man sitting in the window seat beside him. “And keep it down. Normal cats don’t talk, remember?”

Apparently, mechanical planes didn’t go straight down like brooms did. Their descent was a long, slow coast, forcing the witch to endure thirty more minutes of white-knuckled anxiety before the winged tin can finally touched down, its wheels bumping so hard against the pavement that his cat carrier would have slid off the seat if it hadn’t been buckled in.

“Finally,” the cat huffed as they stepped off the plane into the strange, collapsible hallway that connected it to the airport. “We were so close to death up there, I practically saw the Holy City.”

Even deep inside their hidden forest, all witches had heard the chilling tales of lost luggage.

The broom’s anger intensified as the image of a crowded, depressurized cargo hold forced its way into the witch’s mind. The baggage handlers had thrown the broom in there like so much trash. It had nearly been crushed. “Stop being dramatic,” the witch scolded, pulling a leather carrying strap out of one of his spelled pockets and threading the broom’s handle through the loops at the ends. “You were crafted by the Witch of the Bones herself. Surely you can take a bit of rough handling.” The broom responded with a stab of ire so intense, the witch had to check his palm to make sure he wasn’t bleeding.

“So,” Iggs said excitedly, leaning over the back of Lys’s seat so he could get closer to Adrian. Or, more accurately, to the puffed-up ball of black fur in Adrian’s lap. “Is that your cat?” “I’m his familiar,” Boston replied in a scornful voice. The whole van rocked as the Iggs jumped. “He can talk!” “Of course I can talk,” Boston snapped. “I’m a renowned magical expert and fully initiated member of the Blackwood coven. The only reason I didn’t say anything earlier was because there were humans around, and I was respecting my witch’s wishes not to get us all kicked.” “He’s normally very talkative,” Adrian agreed. That comment earned him a set of claws in the thigh,

“Can your cat do magic too?” “We do magic together,” Adrian explained. “Witchcraft is much more complicated than just chugging quintessence and saying some words. Boston helps me manage those complications.”

attention to the bay, leaning so far over the railing that Bex grabbed his coat to make sure he didn’t fall in. “Are there seals in the water?” he asked excitedly. “Sometimes,” she said, tightening her grip. “You don’t normally see them this close to the pier, though.” He looked horribly disappointed as he slid back down to his feet.

The heart of a witch is the Blackwood, and the heart of the Blackwood is a witch.’”

“Wait,” she said, eyes wide. “You had that in your trunk the whole time?” When Adrian nodded, her jaw fell open. “Did you seriously baggage-check your heart?” “It was the easiest way to get it through security,” Adrian said with a shrug. “What if it got lost?” Bex cried in horror. “Your heart could have ended up at an auction warehouse in Tucson!” “I’m very good at finding lost things,” he said, waving her worries away. “And I’d much rather track down a missing trunk than go through the effort of digging my heart out of my chest again.”

“We build everything we use,” Boston told her smugly as he trotted past. “It is called witchcraft, after all.”

the cat suggested, giving himself a shake before he trotted off into the woods. “I’m going to catch a mouse for supper. Call me when we’re leaving.”

“If you’re looking for Bex, she’s upstairs,” she said without looking up from her book. “Not that it matters, since we’ll all become the same dust at the end of time, but that’s her current spatial location.” “Right,” Adrian whispered, wiping the cold sweat from his brow. “Thank you.”

He sounded so earnest that Bex almost laughed. “Being in danger’s the whole point of hiring security,”

“No matter how much effort we invest or how hard we try, we all still die in the end.” “If it’s all equally futile, then you might as well waste your time with us,” Bex told her with a smile before returning her attention to the phone.

“That’s good to hear. Purchasing something that turns people into salt will cause a lot less talk than a warlock buying gardening supplies.” “I would never buy anything for my garden from an Anchor Market,”

“You could do it, too,” said Nemini, who still hadn’t looked up from her book. “All you need is to surrender the illusion of self and embrace the truth that we’re all just insignificant specks of organic matter hurtling through an infinite cosmos we can neither affect nor control. It’s very freeing.”

If the sight of Gilgamesh holding Ishtar’s sword had made Bex furious, the kneeling demons made her see red. In all his statues, the king presented himself as a magnanimous conqueror who’d opened the doors of Heaven to all mankind, but that Heaven had never been his. He’d stolen Paradise from the people who already lived there, the same demons whose queens he’d depicted kneeling at his feet.

Bex dropped her eyes. She didn’t want to see the ninth queen, but it’d be hard to avoid. Her figure was the only part of the Anchor that changed from location to location, and her position in Seattle happened to be right where Adrian was heading.

A granite statue of a female just like the queens at Gilgamesh’s feet, only this one wasn’t kneeling. She was running, fleeing from the king’s golden statue with her back turned on the caged demons below, because this was the ninth queen. The one who’d run away from Gilgamesh and left her people to die. The story was right there, engraved beneath the queen’s running feet for every demon to read while they waited to be sold. Behold the Coward Queen, it said, who chose her life over yours.

“It’s because they suffer that I did it,” she told him in a calm, quiet voice. “There is freedom in nonexistence. There is no pain in the void.”

“I’m not a war demon!” Iggs bellowed. “And I was trying to pet you! You’re a cat! I like cats!” “Iggs,” Bex said. The warning in her voice cut through the tension like a knife, but while the demon backed down immediately, Boston was having none of it. “I will not be treated like a stupid animal!” he roared, spitting in fury. “I am a familiar of the Blackwood! The product of untold generations of magical pedigree! I am a great and powerful creature! I am not yours to pet!” “Boston!” Adrian yelled, but unlike Bex’s demons, cats were not obedient, and it did no good. Boston just got bigger, his black body swelling until he was the size of a Doberman. “How do you like that, horn boy?” he taunted, baring his new, impressive fangs. “Want to try petting me now that I can bite off your—” “Holy shit.” Everyone froze. Adrian, the demons, even Boston went stone-still as the woman coming out of the café behind them—the human woman with scales clearly visible in her wide eyes—dropped her freshly made cup of boba tea. “It’s a giant talking cat!” Adrian had just enough time to see Boston’s ears go flat against his skull before the kick hit him. Having spent nearly his entire life inside the Blackwood, Adrian had never been kicked before. No one he knew had. Kicks were something that happened to cocky sorcerers and other quintessence-drunk

“He ruined human magic,” Adrian said scornfully. “But we’re not just souls waiting around for our chance to go to Heaven. The natural cycles run through humans the same way they do every other animal. That magic might not come in a convenient chewable form like quintessence, but it’s as powerful as life itself for those of us who know how to use it. That’s why witches bind ourselves to the forest. By braiding our lives into the tapestry of the Blackwood, we become part of its magical engine.”

Quiet, too. The sort of deep-wilderness silence that made you want to lie down and sleep for a hundred years, though that might have just been Bex. Pushing so long without water always left her exhausted.

“And who made them Hells?” Bex roared. “There was no Heaven or Hell before Gilgamesh came. All was Paradise! The most beautiful land imaginable, until he ruined it.”