Page 39 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)
The blast that followed echoed like a cannon through the giant cavern of the Middle Hells. Both Bexes were flung apart, but while the real Bex went skipping across the flooded floor like a stone, the princess grabbed one of the sin-iron slave chains.
The metal that held the Wheel of Reincarnation was plenty strong enough to check her momentum.
The princess threw herself forward next, grabbing the chain in her fist to fling herself in the same direction the real Bex had been thrown.
The last thing Adrian saw was the princess’s white back vanishing into the smoky dark of the Hells.
He’d already started climbing through the tower window to go after them when he stopped himself short.
It took every bit of his willpower to do it.
He normally wouldn’t worry about Bex fighting a princess, but now that the rush of seeing her again was fading, all Adrian could think about was how different she’d looked.
Even in glimpses caught from a distance, it was impossible not to notice that she was still missing her horns and right hand.
Adrian already knew she didn’t have her sword because Drox’s ring was on the fake princess’s finger, but Bex’s fire was part of her, and he hadn’t seen a flicker of that either.
That was a lot of handicaps for a solo fight against a princess of Gilgamesh.
The urge to run and help was overwhelming.
The only reason Adrian didn’t was because he already knew Bex wouldn’t thank him for it.
She’d chosen to charge this tower for a reason, and Adrian wasn’t egotistical enough to believe it was solely for him.
She had other goals here, demons to free.
Bex always put the mission first, so Adrian forced himself to stop reacting and start figuring out how to actually help them win.
It definitely wasn’t looking good. For better or worse, Bex had taken the Princess of Wrath out of the fight, but that left Iggs facing off against the Princess of Hate alone with only one other human as backup.
It was hard to tell from way up here, but the skinny man looked a lot like the prince Adrian had seen in the Walking Memory.
The one who’d picked him up and traded his unconscious body to Bex for the crazy prince’s burned carcass and her sister’s hand.
Adrian couldn’t imagine the sequence of events that had led to that same prince fighting alongside demons in the Hells, but he was clearly on the rebels’ side now.
He was barefoot and filthy with no sign of his white sword or golden armor, but he was standing on the newly-revealed staircase like a sorcerous turret, sending out smaller versions of the bull he’d used earlier to keep pushing the Princess of Hate back.
He sent the bulls up the tower as well, trampling the warlocks who were trying to stop Desh’s army of demons.
The lightning-fast sorcery combined with the calm determination on the prince’s gaunt face made for an absolutely terrifying sight.
So long as he was shooting Gilgamesh’s people, though, Adrian wasn’t going to worry about him.
He’d already dug his hand into the front pocket of his coat for the finding spell that had been stabbing him in the chest since he’d arrived on this floor.
“What’s that?” Boston asked when Adrian pulled out the little carved cat. “Wait, is that me ?”
“None other,” Adrian said proudly, holding his palm flat so the finding charm could do what he’d made it to do. “Gilgamesh sealed me off from my forest, so I used my connection to you to borrow your connection to the Blackwood so I could make a modified version of the corpse-finding spell.”
Boston looked affronted. “You turned me into a corpse sniffer ?”
“That was the original plan,” Adrian said. “But when I fired you up, you found something even better. Look!”
He moved his hand to show Boston the broken piece of black horn glued to the wooden cat’s belly.
“What’s that?” Boston asked.
“A piece of the Queen of Pride’s broken horns,” Adrian replied with a grin. “I’ve been using it to track her body.”
His familiar blinked. “Her what?”
“The Queen of Pride’s body!” Adrian repeated excitedly, moving his hand up and down as he desperately tried to follow the spell’s wild jumping.
“Gilgamesh didn’t bring me up here just because I’m his son.
He wanted me because I was the one who figured out how to restore Bex’s bonfire, and he brought me to Heaven so I could do the same thing to the Queen of Pride. ”
Boston looked even more confused. “Why would Gilgamesh want to restore a queen?”
“I’m still trying to figure that out,” Adrian admitted, steering Bran back out into the middle of the tower so he could get a better reading.
“All I know is he’s planning something that requires the horns of all nine queens to work.
Since the Queen of War tore Bex’s off, Pride is the only crown he’s missing.
The whole reason Gilgamesh pretended to be Malik and taught me sorcery was so that I would put her shattered horns back together and complete his set. ”
“But you didn’t, right?” his familiar said nervously. “If Gilgamesh brought you to Heaven to do a thing, common sense dictates that that’s the one thing you should never, ever do.”
When Adrian didn’t answer immediately, Boston leaned over to shove his nose in his witch’s face. “Tell me you didn’t do it , Adrian!”
“I didn’t complete them,” Adrian hedged as he craned his neck to keep his eyes on the finding charm despite the cat in his face.
“But I couldn’t let this chance go by. You think I’d let Bex go off to fight by herself if I didn’t have a solid plan to change the tide of this entire battle? Just look at the finding charm.”
He pulled his arm back to shove the wooden cat, which was spinning like a broken compass, under Boston’s nose.
“It’s pointing at the Queen of Pride’s body,” he said fiercely.
“Her moving body, because she’s not dead !
All the statues showing her crushed beneath Gilgamesh’s foot are lies.
She’s still alive, and she’s here in the Hells.
That’s why I came down here in the first place.
I’ve got her horns right here in my pocket.
All I have to do is put them back on her head, and we’ll have another queen back in the fight! ”
He was shaking with excitement by the time he finished, but Boston’s expression looked dire.
“Are you certain?” he demanded, staring into Adrian’s eyes. “Are you absolutely positive that the Queen of Pride is here?”
“Of course I’m positive,” Adrian snapped.
“I used a corpse-finding charm with a piece of her own horn as the fulcrum. There’s nothing else it could be pointing at.
” He glared at the charm, which was still spinning like a top on his palm.
“It was giving me a clear line before I got to this floor, but all the magic flying around must be interfering with the locator.”
“It’s not the locator,” said Boston, who still looked unhappy but was clearly unable to resist correcting Adrian’s wrong assumptions. “It’s spinning like that because we’re on top of the target.”
“You see?” Adrian said triumphantly. “I told you I wasn’t messing around.” He looked down at the broken floor where Iggs and the renegade prince were still smacking the Princess of Hate. “I bet she was hidden under that false floor.”
“It looks more like the charm is pointing up to me,” Boston said, giving the spinning cat a sniff before he sighed and stuck out his paw. “Hand it over.”
“You’re helping?” Adrian asked, shocked. “Does this mean you’re not mad at me?”
“I’m furious with you,” Boston snarled, lashing his tail. “Gilgamesh kidnapped you out of your forest to do a task and you did it ! That was a stupid move, Adrian. Did you not think that you might be playing straight into the enemy’s hands again ?”
“Of course I thought about it!” Adrian cried.
“But I didn’t have anything else to work with, and I was trying to escape.
Fixing the Queen of Pride and letting her bash us a way out of here was the best plan I could come up with, and for your information, it’s worked perfectly so far.
I was able to get out of my cell in Gilgamesh’s palace and all the way down to the Middle Hells.
Now the Queen of Pride is practically on top of us, so do you want to keep criticizing, or do you want to help me put another queen in the fight so Bex doesn’t die out there? ”
Boston heaved an enormous sigh before jumping off of Adrian’s shoulder to land on Bran’s broom handle.
“For the record,” he announced, “I am absolutely right. Repairing the last piece Gilgamesh needs to put his unknown master plan into motion was reckless in the extreme, but I also acknowledge that I wasn’t there and thus can’t comment upon choices you were forced to make.
Either way, done is done. The horns are back together, so we might as well make use of them. ”
“Glad to hear it,” Adrian said as he held out the still-whirling charm. “Now how do I stop this thing from spinning?”
Boston gave him one more exasperated look before getting to work.
“The problem is you, not the magic,” he reported.
“Going through me to reach the Blackwood was a clever move, but using cat hair as a spell component hinders as much as it helps. That charm was never going to docilely do its job because cats aren’t the obeying sort.
Even I can’t make it fully behave with so many exciting things going on, but since you used my hair as the base component, I should have better luck than you’re having. ”