Page 27 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)
With that, Bex stopped staring at the demons she couldn’t save yet and started looking around for the ones she could.
From what Desh had said earlier, she’d expected them to be all over, but other than the void demons laid out on the floor, she didn’t see anyone, mostly because she couldn’t see much at all.
Even with the new glow from her fingers, Bex could only see a few feet in any direction.
She was taking tiny steps to start exploring the area her rope could reach when she felt something cold touch her foot.
She jumped away on instinct then sighed.
It was just water. Like the Middle Hells above, the floor of the Lowest Hells was also covered in a shallow flood.
It was so filthy that it barely reflected her light, which was why Bex hadn’t noticed it until the freezing cold seeped into her boots.
Now that she was splashing through it, though, Bex could see that the whole Hell was covered in an ankle-deep, barely moving river.
Using her glowing hand like a flashlight, Bex bent down until her nose was almost touching the water’s oily surface.
It was much dirtier than the flood upstairs, but the water here was definitely from a River of Death.
This close, Bex could see the black residue of extracted sin building up around the pride demons’ unconscious bodies.
It drifted like silt in the shallow river’s gentle current, flowing away from the demons and eventually falling down the grates that were placed everywhere in the Lowest Hells’ stone floor.
The amounts were much smaller than the grime she’d seen the other slaves scraping into their buckets upstairs, but the basic idea was the same.
The pride demons had been submerged so that their bodies could keep collecting sin even while their minds were lost, and the longer Bex thought about that, the angrier she became.
“That bastard ,” she snarled, clutching her glowing fist. “He keeps using us even when we sleep.” She kicked her boots through the shallow water, dislodging the thin layer of black sin that had already built up along the sole. “I swear to Ishtar, I’m going to tear down every last one of his damn—”
“ Bex! ”
Her head shot up. As she’d noted earlier, the ceiling in this Hell wasn’t very high, but the shout still sounded like it’d come from miles away.
The disconnect was so jarring, Bex didn’t even realize she’d fallen straight down until she spotted a glimmer directly above her head.
When she craned her neck all the way back, she saw Lys staring down at her with the metal flashlight from Bex’s backpack gripped in their hand.
“ Bex! ” they shouted in a voice gone hoarse from panic. “Are you alive?”
“I’m here,” Bex called back, though she didn’t think they heard. She’d been looking straight at Lys’s face when she yelled, but their amber eyes were still darting all over like they couldn’t sense a thing.
The hole must still look like an impenetrable pit of darkness to them, Bex realized.
The void demons had let her go because she’d proven who she was, but that mercy didn’t extend to anyone else, not even themselves.
She was able to stand down here without being dragged into terrified madness, but every pride demon was still twitching in the shallow water like victims of the world’s worst nightmare.
It was a heartbreaking sight, but there was nothing Bex could do about it.
There was nothing she could do for anyone until she got her horns back, so she got her act together and reached up to tap the button on her ear comm.
It took three more taps, though, before Bex realized her radio wasn’t working.
That made sense in hindsight. If comms functioned down here, Lys would’ve been yelling in her ear this entire time.
Bex didn’t know if the problem was magical or mechanical, but seeing how no outside sound or light seemed able to penetrate the Lowest Hells, her money was on magic.
The rope was still tied around her waist, though.
So, since she couldn’t call to let them know she was alive, Bex reached up and gave the line a yank instead.
She’d just been trying to communicate to Lys that she was okay, but since she’d jumped down here without setting up a signal like an impatient idiot, her first tug triggered a frantic attempt to pull her back up.
Bex was ten feet off the ground before she caught her balance and pulled back, giving the rope a series of long, calm tugs until Lys—or more likely, Iggs—got the message and stopped trying to reel her in.
Once Bex was back on the ground and, more importantly, confident she’d stay there, she let go of the rope and resumed her search for all the not-pride demons she’d come down here to find.
According to Desh, there should’ve been a ton of them, but all Bex saw were more rows of twitching void demons.
She was starting to worry this whole idea was a bust when she spotted something odd in the tiny circle of light from her still-glowing hand.
It looked like a giant pile of old clothes, but as Bex walked closer, she realized they were demons.
Not void demons—the last line of those had stopped a few feet back—but every other sort imaginable.
They were all lying piled on top of each other in a giant heap like they’d been dropped there from the ceiling over eons.
Just like the void demons, their eyes were squeezed tight and their faces were contorted with fear, but where the void demons lying on the ground were all wearing the same prison tunics as the slaves upstairs, the piled bodies were wearing a random assortment of clothing from every era of human history.
Bex was still trying to make sense of the chaos when her eyes landed on a familiar face near the top.
It was a war demon. A fully transformed one who’d recently lost all four of his arms. The twiglike replacements had been frozen before they could finish growing in, but it was his dented bronze face that Bex recognized.
That was the war demon who worked for the Spider, the one who’d attacked her in the train yard, Trinaeous.
She could only shake her head after that.
Of all the demons she could’ve found, it had to be the one who’d almost killed her.
Still, even though he’d run her down and tried to drag her back to his master, Bex couldn’t help feeling sorry for the loyal bastard.
Lys had told her all about how the Spider had still banished him to the Lowest Hells despite Trinaeous telling him the truth about Bex’s identity, which was just unfair.
Even traitorous bootlickers deserved better than that.
He was also on top of the pile, which made him the easiest demon to reach without straining her rope.
Since she could already feel Iggs twitching to pull her back, that turned out to be the deciding factor. Before she could change her mind, Bex wrapped her arms around Trinaeous’s comatose body and gave the rope three hard tugs.
She’d just finished the third pull when Iggs yanked them both into the air. Kirok must’ve been helping him because Bex scarcely had time to duck her head before she and her rescued war demon were hauled through the hole in the ceiling and into Lys’s arms.
“I thought you were dead !” they wailed, squeezing Bex so tight her ribs creaked. “Why do you always have to jump into every strange hole you see?”
That had been inconsiderate. Saying sorry would only make Lys angrier, though, so Bex kept her mouth shut and hugged them back instead, giving her faithful, traumatized demon gentle, reassuring pats while Iggs finished rolling her catch onto the floor.
“Whoa,” he said when he saw who she’d brought up with her. “Why’d you grab a war demon?”
“I think it was a logical choice considering we’re in the middle of a war,” General Kirok replied, leaning over to get a better look at Trinaeous’s dented face.
“I know this one. He was one of my trainees a few decades ago before he went to work as a bodyguard for the favored warlock known as the Spider.”
“Not that jerk again,” Lys groaned, glaring over Bex’s shoulder. “Why’d you grab him?”
“Because he was closest,” Bex said as she untangled herself from Lys’s stranglehold.
“Big bastard, isn’t he?” Desh said, reaching out to push Iggs back. “We’ll want to give him his space. Coming back from the Lowest Hells can be a shock. I know I came out punchy.”
“How did the prince get you out?” Bex asked, suddenly curious. “Can Gilgamesh’s sons walk around down there?”
“Gods no,” Desh said. “I got pulled out the same way they put me in: banishment. So long as you know a demon’s name, you can move them just about anywhere in the Hells.
I understand it costs a lot more quintessence if the demon isn’t right in front of you, but paying to call them up is still a damn sight better than going down yourself.
Even princes can’t set foot in the Lowest Hells without falling under its curse, or so I’ve been told.
” He gave Bex a funny look. “How’d you manage it? ”
“Because she’s a daughter of Ishtar, you dolt,” Lys snapped.
“That did help,” Bex admitted, pushing Lys and Desh apart before anything regrettable happened. “But the main reason I made it was because the pride demons let me through.”
Lys and Desh stopped glaring daggers at each other to gape at her.
“Pride demons?” Lys repeated in a skeptical voice.
“I thought they all turned into void demons and died,” Desh said at the same time.