Page 31 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)
It was so odd that eventually Adrian gave up all pretense and started peering through windows to see if the good stuff was just stashed farther in.
Every room he managed to get a look into, though, had the same white walls, white furniture, and occasional gold accents.
It all looked exactly like his own bedroom in the palace, but while it made sense for Gilgamesh’s base of power to have a unified style, the fact that the same look continued through every single house in the city was just creepy.
So creepy that, after ten blocks of it, Adrian felt compelled to ask.
“Why does everything look the same here?”
“Because unity is beautiful,” the princess answered, waving her hand at the elegant, white, three-story townhouse next to them that looked exactly the same as every other elegant, white, three-story townhouse on the street.
“The Eternal King wants his people to dwell in beauty always. Also, white is the color of purity. If corruption of the gods were ever to resurface, having a pure, blank canvas makes it easy to spot and eradicate.”
Adrian rolled his eyes. He should’ve known it’d come back to the gods.
Everything Gilgamesh did came back to the gods.
He’d complained about the obsession himself back when he’d been pretending to be a loving father and not the world’s magical tyrant, but Adrian was only now beginning to understand just how much effort the king put into it.
There was probably some palace official whose job it was to go through people’s houses and report any walls that weren’t white enough.
Again, how anyone could call this place Heaven with a straight face was a mystery.
This was the fancy part of town near the castle too.
The buildings got even more samey as they moved on to the apartment blocks by the outer walls.
The big, multi-unit structures were still well-appointed and stuffed with fancy furniture, but the fact that there were haves and have-nots even up here proved that everything Gilgamesh said about fairness and freeing humanity from the favoritism of the gods was bullshit, because he was doing the exact same thing.
This wasn’t Heaven. It was a company town, a place where all the cronies and bootlickers showed off how important they were by having two more rooms full of identical white furniture than the guy down the street.
The competitive conformity was so oppressive, it was actually a relief when the entrance to the Hells finally came into view.
“At last,” Adrian said with a smile. “I thought my brain was going to die.”
The princess gave him a skeptical look, which was warranted considering what they were walking toward.
The gateway to the Hells stood at the end of the street in front of them like a black monolith.
It was made entirely from sin iron and shaped like a cube.
Its walls were decorated with carvings of screaming demons being tormented, but its giant doors were dominated by a three-story-tall image of Gilgamesh dressed in full regalia with the crown of Anu on his head and the sword of Ishtar held ready in his hand to strike down any demon foolish enough to defy his authority.
Aside from that, there was nothing. Adrian didn’t know if it was for security reasons or if even Gilgamesh couldn’t find someone willing to live next to the Hells, but the black cube was surrounded by a hundred feet of empty paving on all sides.
The only structures near it were four white obelisks capped with a golden ring containing a giant golden eyeball.
They looked like bigger, freestanding versions of the golden eye that used to be in the wall at the entrance to the Anchor’s back end before Iggs had blown it up with grenades.
The closest one actually spun around to watch Adrian and the princess, the interlocking rings of its golden pupil constricting with a metallic click click click as it zoomed in on them.
Other than the watching eyes, Adrian didn’t see any security, but he did see a lot of demons.
This was where the train of war demons pushing the sin-iron carts started.
They were all coming out through a smaller door hidden inside the carving of Gilgamesh.
When Adrian started toward it, though, the princess grabbed the sleeve of his black coat.
“You can’t go in yet, my prince,” she reminded him. “We have to wait for Prince Demetrios to escort us.”
Adrian sighed. He’d been hoping she’d forgotten that detail in her rush to get this finished, but he should’ve known better.
Even the real Bex was a stickler when it came to following procedure, and while Adrian probably could’ve convinced her to at least go through the door with him, it didn’t seem wise to step out of line when the golden eyes were staring straight at him.
He looked around for a bench or something they could sit on while they waited since his legs still ached from climbing all those stairs, but there was nothing.
Other than the eye-topped obelisks, the courtyard was completely empty.
So, since he didn’t want to lean against the white apartment buildings like a loitering teen, Adrian locked his knees and reached into his pocket to check his finding spell.
It was still twitching like mad when he touched it.
The charm had had time to fully cure by this point, the sap and fur merging together until it felt like he was touching an actual tiny cat with very rigid posture.
If he wrapped his hand all the way around it, Adrian could feel the line running from the cat’s carved nose to his target, who was deep underground below him and several hundred feet to his left.
She wasn’t walking anymore, but now that he was out of the palace, Adrian swore he could feel the rise and fall of her breathing through the cat’s hard ribs.
A dangerous bubble of hope swelled up inside his chest. He’d been moving so fast, he hadn’t stopped to think about what finding another queen might actually mean.
If she was really as alive as his charm made it feel, then she had to be in a cell of some sort.
He hadn’t thought Gilgamesh would be stupid enough to keep queens near their subjects, but the Hells had been created to imprison demons, and this queen was hornless.
Maybe Gilgamesh had dismissed her since she was broken.
Adrian desperately hoped so, because Bex was also a hornless queen, and it was only logical to keep similar prisoners in the same area.
If the former Queen of Pride truly was as lively as she seemed to be and she was locked in the Hells, then there was a good chance Bex might be imprisoned right beside her.
Adrian almost burst into a grin before he caught himself.
He couldn’t afford any mess-ups past this point.
Pretending to be a loyal prince had gotten him this far, but eventually Adrian was going to have to play his hand, and since he was going into the Hells with an escort, he was going to have to do it with another prince and two princesses breathing down his neck.
It was a hell of a gamble, but if he could pull it off and he was right about the circumstances of her imprisonment, then he wouldn’t just be bringing the Queen of Pride her horns.
He’d also be bringing Bex’s ring and lost hand right to her.
That was a big enough prize to make Adrian very reckless indeed. He was desperately trying not to give himself away by looking too excited when the princess tugged on his sleeve again.
“There he is.”
Adrian’s brain had run so far ahead with his plots, it took him several seconds to remember which “he” the princess was referring to.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, any questions he might have asked answered themselves when he looked up to see all the war demons that had been pushing sin iron out of the Hells abandon their carts and run back inside.
A second later, the little side door closed, and the enormous pair of Gilgamesh-decorated doors started to move, the huge, sin-iron slabs grinding open under the power of a dozen demons so that a man in golden armor could stride through.
He was a very handsome prince. He had the same olive skin as Adrian, but his dark hair lay flat and shiny instead of curling, and his features were both sharper and straighter.
He was definitely Agatha’s son, but the beauty he’d inherited from their mother was spoiled by the cruel gleam of his mirrored eyes as he dragged something out of the Hells behind him.
Adrian’s white blood ran cold. The prince was dragging a woman on a black chain.
Her body was carved from bone and embellished with gold, but even with the prince walking in front of her, Adrian had trouble believing that was a princess.
She lurched at the end of her chain like a barely-controlled wolf, straining against the manacles that bound her wrists, feet, and neck so hard that the metal had cut grooves into her ivory limbs.
Her entire face was covered in a sin-iron cage, and her eyes were wilder than Adrian had realized hammered gold could look.
She didn’t stop clawing at the ground the whole time her prince was walking toward them, lunging back toward the entrance to the Hells over and over with her white teeth bared like spikes behind the black cage of her muzzle.
“ Stop that ,” the prince hissed, yanking her back to his side. “Or I’ll feed you to the grinders.”
Adrian didn’t know what the grinders were, but the feral princess must have, because she stopped throwing herself at the doors, though she didn’t stop pulling.
No matter where the prince tried to direct her, she went right back to the end of the leash, forcing the prince to drag her the last few feet toward Adrian.
“Ah,” he said when they were finally within conversational distance. “You must be the new brother Alexander warned me about. The witch.”