Page 17 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)

The moment Bex saw it happen, she knew. She didn’t know how.

She was a nameless, hornless shadow with a literal void inside her.

She should’ve been as invisible as Nemini, but the moment the princess smiled at her, Bex knew she’d been recognized.

Maybe the princess remembered Rebexa’s face from the old days, or maybe it was just a lingering echo of the instinct that allowed Bex to recognize her sisters even after they’d been reduced to severed hands.

Whatever it was, Bex didn’t want to stick around for it. She grabbed the back of Lys’s robes and booked it, shooting past Iggs and Kirok to kick open the tower exit so hard, she knocked both of the war-demon guards outside into the water.

“What are you doing?” Lys shrieked as Bex dragged them back onto the elevated walkway. “The prince is right there !”

“He’s about to be right on top of us,” Bex hissed, looking over her shoulder to make sure Iggs and Kirok were following. “His princess already spotted me. We have to lose them fast, or we’re dead. Now run! ”

She yelled the last word as hard as she could, but her order was still drowned out by the horrific, predatory screech as the chained princess exploded through the golden door behind them.

The sudden motion must’ve snatched her chain right out of the prince’s hand, because Bex saw him stumble in surprise before the gold door slammed shut again, trapping them outside with the mad princess.

“Oh Hells,” Lys muttered, jerking out of Bex’s grasp to start running on their own power. “Which one is that?”

“No idea,” Bex said, running faster. “But she recognized me for sure.”

“That is such bullshit !” Iggs cried as he darted ahead to take point. “I can’t even tell what you are anymore, and you’re my queen! How is some psycho-looking princess we’ve never met able to recognize you when I can’t?”

“Forget about that,” Lys snapped, looking around at the slave floor as it flew by. “Where’s Nemini? She’s supposed to be scouting ahead to warn us about crap like this!”

Almost as if she’d been waiting for her cue, there was a crash behind them, followed by the mad princess’s hawklike scream.

When Bex looked over her shoulder, the chained princess was down with Nemini on her back.

That was usually a fight-ender, but Nemini’s normally emotionless face looked as freaked out as Bex felt.

She let go of the princess a second later, vanishing into the smoky dark only to instantly reappear on the walkway in front of Iggs.

“We have to get off the main path,” the void demon ordered, grabbing a very startled Iggs by the arm and dragging him off the walkway into the water where the slaves were working. “This way. Boston’s preparing a diversion.”

“Good work,” Bex said, following them off the edge with a gasp of relief.

She’d completely forgotten about Adrian’s cat and broom in the chaos, but she wasn’t surprised to hear they already had something prepared.

Boston was always prepared. Sure enough, a few seconds after Nemini mentioned his name, a mist began to boil up from the water at their feet.

It rose around them like a wall of smoke, making the demon slaves—who’d been frantically trying to get out of their way—yelp in surprise.

It was the first sound Bex had heard them make, but she didn’t have time to reassure them.

She was already charging into the fog, following Nemini’s dark shape through the water, which was only calf-deep but bitingly cold.

The chill soaked through her boots and turned her feet numb in an instant, but Bex shook it off and kept running, leaping over the rows of kneeling slaves like hurdles as she, Lys, Iggs, and Kirok ran in a zigzag pattern that would hopefully get them lost in the fog.

“I can’t see a damn thing,” Lys said angrily as they shed their warlock disguise and returned to their true, winged form. “I’m going to fly up and check where we are.”

“Don’t go too high,” Bex ordered.

The magical fog was so thick that she couldn’t even see Lys nod, only hear the beat of their wings as they flew up into the air only to dart right back down again.

“Oh yeah, she’s still following,” they said in a shaky voice as they swooped in to glide beside Bex.

“Did you see where we’re going, at least?” Iggs asked as he leaped over a chain of terrified envy demons.

Before Lys could reply, a shriek shot through the thick fog, making them all jump. It sounded like an angry velociraptor, and it was a lot closer than Bex had expected.

“Shit,” Bex swore, tripping over a slave chain and almost falling on her face before she kicked herself back up. “We need a better plan.”

“Running does not seem to be working,” General Kirok agreed. “We should try hiding instead. The Middle Hells are a big place, and our enemy doesn’t seem like the patient sort. If we force her into a long search, she might give up.”

“What makes you think that?” Iggs yelled. “Do you know her or something?”

Kirok shook his head. “It’s just a supposition based on observations.”

“Good enough for me,” Bex said as she dug her boots into the slick, slimy rock beneath the freezing water the slaves were working in. “Head back to the cliffs. We’ll lose her in the houses. Which way is it, Lys?”

This was why Bex loved working with an experienced team.

The moment she asked, Lys pointed the direction, and their whole group turned as one.

No one argued, no one asked stupid questions, no one panicked.

They simply kept running, moving through the water in a tight knot with Bex in the middle.

It was impossible to see how far they still had to go through the fog, but the cliffs surrounded the cavern on all sides, so even if they went off course, they couldn’t miss them.

They just had to get there without getting caught.

That was looking like it’d be easier said than done when they suddenly got a rare stroke of luck.

Bex hadn’t had a chance to talk to or even look closely at any of the silent kneeling demons they were running past. There was no way they could’ve known who she was without her horns, but the fact that she was being chased by a princess must’ve been enough to put her on their good side, because while Bex and her team had no trouble at all running across the slave floor, the princess seemed to be having a hell of a time.

The fog was still too thick for Bex to see exactly what was happening, but the princess’s predatory shrieks were increasingly punctuated by the clattering, unnatural sound of an ivory body falling down repeatedly.

She was tripping over the chains, Bex realized. The slaves leaned together when Bex’s team ran by to keep their bindings slack on the ground. When the princess was coming, though, they leaned the other way, pulling their chains tight so that the black water suddenly became filled with trip lines.

Bex didn’t know if the slaves were doing it on purpose or if the tripping hazards were just a byproduct of them trying to get away from the screaming madwoman, but she was incredibly grateful.

The multiple falls coupled with the chains hobbling her limbs were the only reason their group was able to stay ahead of the princess’s superhuman speed, and while the fog never actually managed to throw her off their trail, it kept her from seeing her feet, which made her trip even more.

“Keep it up,” whispered Lys, who’d been darting out of the fog every few seconds like a winged dolphin to make sure they didn’t start running in circles. “We’re only two hundred feet away from the—”

Their excited whisper turned into a gasp as Bex heard the familiar twang of a bowstring, and then Lys’s falling body slammed into her back.

The sudden impact almost took her off her feet, but while Lys was much larger than Bex was, lust demons were made for flight, which meant they barely weighed a thing.

As soon as she caught her own balance, Bex threw her arms around Lys and kept going, tossing their body over her shoulder to keep their long limbs from banging on the ground.

“Where’d they get you?”

“Wing,” Lys hissed through their gritted fangs. “Gods-damned war demons always go for the gods-damned wing !”

That was the most logical place but now wasn’t a good time to say as much.

Bex was far more concerned with figuring out which direction the arrow had come from, because if they had war demons coming in to surround them, that was super bad.

She hadn’t heard any alarm bells, but surely one of the patrols had noticed a shrieking princess chasing a cloud across the sin collection floor.

Case in point, another arrow shrieked through the air in front of her.

It missed Iggs by a good six inches, but it got much closer to hitting the demon he was jumping over, almost skewering the cowering man through the temple.

Bex shouted an apology as she ran past and put on a burst of speed until she was sprinting next to Iggs.

“We have to get away from the civilians,” she told him. “Can you get us back onto one of the walkways?”

“Haven’t seen any,” he panted, his huge shape barely visible through the fog even though he was right beside her. “The ground is sloping up now, though, so we’ve got to be close to the edge.”

The water did seem to be getting shallower, now that he mentioned it.

Bex hadn’t jumped over a slave since the man they’d nearly gotten shot, either.

That had to mean they were almost there.

She was peering through the fog in a desperate attempt to see something useful when she heard a crunch followed by Iggs’s yelp.

“Found the wall,” he reported in a pained voice. “Where do you want to hide?”

“This way,” Bex said, reaching out her hand to find the cliff edge. “Run along the cliff and stay low. With so many hovels, they won’t know which one we ducked into. We’ll keep going until we’ve got a bunch of false positives, and then we’ll find a place that’s big enough for all of us to hide.”

It’d sounded like a solid plan when she said it, but after ten seconds of running past doors, Bex understood how naive she’d been.

Yes, there were a lot of dwellings carved into the rock, but every one of them was the size of a broom closet.

She hadn’t found a single place big enough to hide Iggs, much less all of them.

Nemini was a ghost—as was Boston, apparently, since Bex still hadn’t spotted him—but she, Lys, Iggs, and Kirok would be sitting ducks.

She hadn’t heard the princess shriek in a while, but there were more war demons than ever.

Bex could hear them shouting at each other through the fog as they started to organize a search of the holes the slaves lived in.

Her heart sank lower with every word. She’d known coming to the Hells was a gamble, but she hadn’t expected everything to go so wrong so quickly.

Running into that princess had been pure bad luck, but there was still a chance they could salvage things and try again if they found a place to hide.

That was looking less and less likely with every house she checked.

If she let the war demons corner them, though, they were finished.

Bex was confident in her team’s abilities, but a fight where you couldn’t retreat and the enemy had endless resources was the definition of a losing battle.

No. If they took a stand here, they were going to lose.

Their only option was not to fight, but Bex couldn’t find a way out.

If they climbed up, they’d leave the cover of the fog.

If they hid in one of the tiny hovels, they’d be instantly discovered.

If they kept running, they’d just end up exhausted and caught.

Every strategy she came up with felt like a dead end, but then, just when Bex was sure she’d finally made the bad call that got them killed, a hand shot out of the fog to grab her arm.

“ This way! ”

Bex caught her shriek just in time. Her brain was scrambling too hard to place the voice, but it sounded strangely familiar.

It definitely wasn’t a war demon’s, though, so Bex decided to trust it, turning on a dime to carry the still-bleeding Lys into the hovel the hand that grabbed her had come out of.

Iggs crowded in right behind her, then Kirok followed by Nemini, who seemed to coalesce out of the darkness in the corner.

Boston flew in last, swooping out of the fog on Bran like the two of them had simply appeared from the vapor.

Bex had just pulled the hovel’s curtain closed behind Bran’s bristles when she realized how strange their situation was.

Going by the size of the door, the hole she’d ducked into should’ve been no bigger than a closet, yet somehow the five of them plus a cat and a broom had been able to fit inside.

Bex was wondering how that could possibly be when a sixth figure—one who wasn’t her, Iggs, Kirok, Nemini, or Lys—nudged her gently aside to place a large wooden partition with a fake stone front made from sandy paint over a hole in the actual dirty stone wall.

He slotted the fake chunk of wall into place just in time as a shouting squad of war demons ripped open the hovel’s curtained door.

They were so close, Bex could hear them panting through the wood.

They must not have been looking too hard, though, because they moved on a second later, leaving the five of them— six of them—standing silently in the dark behind the hovel’s false back.

Bex was digging into her backpack for her flashlight— and her explosive short sword—when she heard someone laugh in the dark beside her.

“Well, well, well,” said the same voice that had hissed at her earlier. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Bex jerked. She knew she recognized the voice this time, and she wasn’t the only one.

It was so dark that she could only make out people’s silhouettes, but that was still enough to see Lys’s head snap up like a trigger.

A light flashed over them a second later as someone pulled the cloth off a small lantern, revealing a hidden hallway lined with false-backed walls just like the one they’d taken shelter behind.

And standing in the middle of it with a smile so wide that Bex could see every one of his fangs was a familiar fear demon wearing a prison tunic and a big sin-iron collar around his pale, slave-marked neck.

“Hello, luv,” said Desh, giving her a cocky wink. “Bet you’re happy to see me.”

Before Bex could even think of a reply, Lys leaped off her shoulder with a snarl to tackle Desh to the ground.