Page 42 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)

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“B EX!”

Iggs’s shout rang through empty air. The second princess had come out of nowhere.

He hadn’t even realized there was a second princess until she’d tackled Bex through a wall.

Now they were rolling through the putrid water that covered the slave floor, punching each other in a tangle of perfectly matched limbs.

Iggs was digging into his bag for a gun big enough to blast the princess off his queen when an iron-hard hand latched onto his arm.

“ Stick to the plan! ” Lys yelled.

Iggs jumped. He’d thought Lys was going for the keys with Desh, but they were suddenly right behind him wearing a massive male body that had muscles on top of muscles.

Like all of Lys’s shapes, though, the bulging biceps were just for show.

No matter what form they took, there was a hard limit to how strong Lys’s bodies could get.

None of them could have moved Iggs an inch if he’d really dug his heels in, but he let Lys turn him back around to face the princess Leander was barely keeping back with his bulls.

“Stick to the plan,” Lys said again as they moved up to defend Iggs’s left. “Bex has been handling herself for five thousand years. She needs us to do our jobs, not get distracted worrying about her.”

“Okay,” Iggs said nervously, eyeing the chained princess, whose white body still wasn’t cracked despite a full belt of machine-gun ammo and a whole herd of sorcerous bulls from Leander. “But how do we do that? Neither of us has ever beaten a princess without Bex before.”

“You don’t know everything about me,” Lys replied with a stubborn lift of their perfectly square new chin. “I’ve fought a lot of scary stuff for my queen, and it’s not as if we’re doing this alone.”

It sure looked like they were alone. All the badass demons Bex had pulled out of the Lowest Hells had already run upstairs.

General Kirok and Nemini were up there as well, which sucked because they were the two Iggs would’ve picked first to be at his side for this.

With Bex kicked through the wall, that left just him, Lys, and Leander facing off against the Hells’ rabid princess.

Considering the thrashing Leander had given him using less than ten words back in Seattle, that should’ve been enough.

This princess was proving to be way more resistant to sorcery than Iggs had been, though, and Leander was hardly in peak form.

He’d always been a scrawny, sleep-deprived-looking bastard, but the prince was huffing like a shut-in who’d been forced to run a marathon, the sorcerous poetry coming out of his mouth in ragged gasps as he struggled to keep the princess under control.

“Looks like we’re not winning that way,” Lys muttered, switching out their bodybuilder for a smaller and nimbler, but no less intimidating, female body. “You got anything in your magical murder bag that can knock her down?”

“Maybe,” Iggs said, digging into the depths of Solomon’s Armory. “I tried to look through everything before we left, but there’s a ton of weapons in here, and Felix’s goblins didn’t exactly give me an inventory list.”

“Just find something that can get her on the ground,” Lys ordered, pulling out their sin-iron knife. “Once she’s prone, I’ll take care of the—"

They cut off when Leander shouted behind them. It sounded like he’d taken a hit, but when Iggs’s head whipped back, the prince was still in one piece and on his feet. He did, however, look very, very pissed.

“Enough of this!” he roared, whipping out his hand. “Band of a Thousand Irons! Band of a Thousand Irons! Band of a Thousand Irons! ”

Iggs’s Ancient Sumerian wasn’t nearly as good as Lys’s, but he remembered that one.

That was the spell Leander had used to tie him up before sending him flying.

It worked the same way this time, but while Iggs had gotten just a single iron band around his feet, the princess got a triple, causing her to go down hard as three iron bands the size of telephone poles appeared out of nowhere to wrap her up like a mummy.

“Nice,” said Iggs as the bound princess toppled to the ground.

“There’s nothing nice about any of this,” Leander panted. “That was too close. Where’s your queen?”

“Busy,” Lys replied sharply, pointing their dagger at the bound princess wiggling on the floor. “How long will that hold her?”

“Not forever,” Leander admitted, still breathless. “But she’s not our primary concern in that form. The real danger comes if we let her—”

“ Return to my grasp, chalice of grudges. ”

Iggs jumped. The words were sorcery, but they hadn’t come from Leander.

The former prince actually looked as surprised as the rest of them when the thrashing princess went still inside the iron bindings.

Lys and Leander had both already switched to the next target, but it took Iggs a solid count of five to turn and see the man who was suddenly standing at the bottom of the tower’s spiral stairs.

The golden-armored, mirror-eyed, superiorly sneering Prince of the Hells, who was now holding a white sword bound to his armored hand by a long black chain.

“Well, well,” he said, eyeing Leander up and down. “Look who finally went full traitor.”

He twirled his sword by her chain as he spoke, causing the heavy blade—which was as long as Bex’s but only half as wide, with a jagged edge that looked more like a sawblade than a sword—to whistle through the air.

That seemed like a pretty disrespectful way to treat a princess, but the Hells Prince actually looked like he was in control for once, holding the chain lightly against his palm as he spun his weapon faster and faster.

“No one’s going to be surprised, you know,” the prince went on, smiling at Leander like he’d been waiting years for this moment. “You always did have a weakness for Ishtar’s devils.”

“While your weaknesses are too numerous to count,” Leander replied with a sneer. “You’ve failed to master even the most basic aspects of your position. A true prince is beloved by his princess. Yours hates you so much that you have to chain her like a dog.”

“She is a dog,” the Hells Prince spat. “They’re all dogs of the gods, and the fact that you can’t see that is why you failed !”

He lashed out with his sword arm as he finished, whipping the chained blade like a missile straight at Leander, who immediately ducked out of the way. Unfortunately, this meant the white sword was now flying straight at Iggs, the cover Leander had chosen to hide behind.

If it’d been anyone else, the betrayal would have stabbed deep, but Iggs’s expectations for any son of Gilgamesh were already on the floor. He didn’t even bother getting mad about it. He just shoved his hand into his knapsack.

He had no time to tell the bag what he was looking for, so the gun that leaped into his grasp was random.

Despite only using it for a single day though, the Armory of Solomon had already become Iggs’s favorite thing in the entire world.

It proved its awesomeness yet again when he pulled his hand out to reveal a M134 Minigun.

He’d only seen the thing in FPS military games before, usually mounted to the deck of a gunship, but this one had been retrofitted with a stock that let Iggs brace it against his shoulder.

It also came preloaded with a full drum of bullets as long as his finger, which Iggs immediately began unloading into the sword that was flying at his face.

Just like with her princess form, the nonmagical bullets couldn’t actually pierce the Blade of Gilgamesh’s white surface, but there were still two thousand of them hitting her per minute.

That was a lot of kinetic force. Too much for the sword to handle, apparently.

Her serrated blade sliced right through the bullets, but the combined momentum of all those hits still pushed her off course, causing her to crash into the wall behind Iggs rather than through his skull.

“Good work!” Lys yelled from somewhere to his left. “Now do that again!”

Easy for them to say. The prince had already yanked his chained sword out of the wall and was swinging it over his head like a helicopter blade, forcing the taller Iggs to hit the deck or get decapitated.

This exposed Leander, who was frantically muttering something under his breath.

Iggs hoped it was a barrier spell, because the drum on his minigun was already half empty.

He was working the M134’s long multi-barrel around to unload what was left into the prince’s arm in the hopes of making him lose his grip on the chain when the golden bastard’s smug face suddenly went blank.

A wet gurgling noise came next as a gush of white blood bubbled from between the prince’s lips. His flying sword jerked like a shot bird as the Prince of the Hells staggered, gasping in pain from the dagger Lys was shoving into his neck from behind.

“Got you,” they snarled.

They really did. The last time Iggs had seen Lys, they’d been on the other side of the tower.

They must’ve used their wings to close the distance, because the lust demon was back in their true form with their prehensile tail wrapped around the prince’s golden helmet, which they’d lifted off his head just enough to make room for the sin-iron dagger to slide through the gap and into the nape of the prince’s neck.