Page 43 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)
Iggs could actually see the blade’s black point sticking out through the front of the prince’s windpipe.
It was a solid skewer, a killing blow, but Lys wasn’t letting up.
They’d already braced their legs against the prince’s armored back so they could leverage their body weight to push the dagger sideways for a full beheading.
Iggs could hear the crack of the sharp blade cutting through the prince’s spinal vertebrae when the dying son of Gilgamesh clenched his fist around his princess’s chain.
The white sword launched itself off the ground a second later, hurtling over the gasping prince’s shoulder straight into Lys.
The attack sent them both flying backward into the white staircase, which now looked more like a white gravel pile thanks to Iggs’s indiscriminate storm of bullets.
When the dust finally cleared, Lys was lying on their back with the prince’s sword stabbed through their left shoulder, stapling them to the broken ground.
The prince had just yanked the chain to pull his sword back when Iggs burst into motion.
He charged across the tower like one of Leander’s bulls, running past the still-choking prince to snatch Lys’s body off the ground.
The moment he pulled them into his arms, Iggs knew it was bad.
Lys had always been a lightweight, but it barely felt like he was holding anything at all.
Iggs really hoped that was due to the extra strength of his adrenaline-jacked body and not because Lys had just left all their blood on the ground.
There was a terrifying amount of it on the stone where they’d fallen as well as streaming down Iggs’s arms, but he didn’t have time to panic.
He’d already run Lys back to the hole Boston’s spell had blasted through the floor, racing down the spiral staircase toward the Lowest Hells.
The moment the prince was out of sight, he put Lys down on a step and grabbed the emergency triage kit he kept on his belt.
“Never mind that,” Lys wheezed as Iggs dug frantically for a bandage to tie up their perforated shoulder. “Did I get him?”
“I’ll never ‘never mind’ you dying in front of me,” Iggs growled, holding Lys still as he wiped the black blood off with a gauze pad so he could see the damage. “What in the Hells were you thinking? Don’t you remember what happened the last time you stabbed a prince in the back?!”
“That’s why I went for the jugular this time,” Lys wheezed. “Heaven’s suck-ups call them divine, but Gilgamesh’s princes are still human, and all humans have a hard time when you give them gills. Now stop fussing and let me—”
They cut off with a gasp when Iggs touched the wound in their shoulder.
Lys went quiet after that, breathing in short little pants while Iggs pressed the sterile pad over the hole and secured it in place with several hastily torn pieces of medical tape.
That stemmed the flow of black blood, which normally would have meant he could leave the rest to Lys’s natural regeneration, but this was an injury from a Blade of Gilgamesh.
Iggs knew exactly how impossible those were to heal after seven years of watching his queen bleed.
He needed to get Lys somewhere safe until Adrian could take a look at the wound.
Quietly as he could, Iggs rose from his crouch, peeking over the edge of the hole into the tower.
The prince hadn’t followed them down the stairs yet, and Iggs didn’t see him waiting at the top, which was a good sign.
If Lys’s stabbing had bought them some breathing room or—even better—forced the prince to retreat, maybe he could…
Iggs’s hopeful thoughts trailed off when he spotted a glint of gold moving on the other side of the tower.
Sure enough, when he eased his head a little higher over the lip of the broken floor, the damn prince was back on his feet.
He’d taken off his helmet so he could apply pressure to his still-bleeding neck, but he looked more angry than pained.
Definitely not the face of someone who was dying because he’d just had his throat shish-kebabed by a poison knife.
“Is he down?” Lys asked feebly.
Iggs was still trying to think of an answer that wouldn’t be crushing or an outright lie when Leander appeared out of thin air beside him.
“We need to go.”
“Whoa!” Iggs cried, jerking away. Then he scowled. “What was that ? You told Bex you couldn’t teleport!”
“I can’t,” Leander informed him crisply. “That was Fifty Steps of the Pilgrim. Completely different spell.”
“I don’t care if it was Fifty Shades of Grey,” Iggs snarled as he scooped Lys back into his arms. “We’re not going anywhere.
I know things were in chaos after Boston blew the floor early, but the queen still gave us our orders before we came up.
Our job is to keep the prince off the key team.
If we bail, we’ll put everyone else in danger. ”
“I’m afraid that ship has already sailed,” Leander replied, pointing up through the broken tower at the enemy.
Iggs peeked back over the ledge with a curse.
He already knew the Hells prince was back on his feet, a totally unfair move for someone who’d just had a knife put through his jugular, but there was more going on with him now than just ignoring deadly damage.
The prince Iggs saw when he followed Leander’s pointing was noticeably larger now than he’d been when Lys attacked.
That wasn’t just a trick of perception. The prince’s height had visibly increased, and his chest had gotten so much wider that gaps were starting to open where the pieces of his armor came together.
The overlapping golden scales that formed his breastplate started popping off as Iggs watched, revealing giant veins throbbing beneath his olive skin.
Whatever he was doing must’ve hurt because the prince was groaning deep in his throat, but the weird growth didn’t stop. He’d already doubled in size by the time Iggs turned to Leander and asked, “What in the Hells is going on?”
“It’s got nothing to do with the Hells,” Leander replied, never taking his eyes off his expanding brother.
“It’s his weapon. The Princess of Hate is a double-edged sword.
She’s the most unstable of all the Blades of Gilgamesh, but she’s also the most difficult to deal with, because every wound she takes makes her stronger.
That same power extends to her prince, which is why the Prince of Hate is usually a forward-facing combat position.
The more you hurt him, the stronger and bigger he becomes. ”
“That sounds pretty hateful,” Iggs agreed, shoving the half-empty minigun back into his bag. “So how do we stop him?”
“I’m not sure we can anymore,” Leander said, looking more nervous than Iggs had ever seen a prince get.
“The Blade of Hate requires a certain level of abuse to activate, which is why I was focusing on attacks that pushed back rather than maimed. I’d hoped to neutralize the princess before that idiot got brave enough to grab her, but it seems the damage from your companion’s surprise attack pushed him over the line.
” He pressed his already thin lips tighter.
“In this state, it might not be possible to stop them without the Queen of Wrath’s assistance. ”
“Then we’d better find a way to make it possible,” Iggs said, grabbing a bandage roll from his kit to tie Lys, who’d mercifully passed out at some point during this conversation, to his back.
“Bex is busy with her own problems right now, but that doesn’t mean we’re off the hook.
Our queen gave us a duty: keep the prince busy so Desh’s group can get the keys and Boston can rescue Adrian.
If killing him is too hard, we’ll make do with stalling.
So long as we keep him off of everyone else until the tower is secure, we still win. ”
“That’s a very loose definition,” Leander said sourly. “But I don’t have a better plan, so how do you propose that we advance?”
It was pretty surreal having the prince who’d kicked his ass asking him for tactical advice, but Iggs had learned to be a soldier the hard way, and he rolled with the curveball like the seasoned professional his queen expected him to be.
“Our first priority is to get him away from the others,” he said as he dug into Solomon’s Armory. “So let’s try kiting him down the stairs.”
The prince scowled in confusion. “Kiting?”
“It means baiting the enemy into chasing us without running so fast that we lose him,” Iggs explained quickly. “If we do it right, we might be able to trick him into following us all the way back to that Hell where you were trapped.”
Leander scowled harder. “Won’t that get us trapped as well?”
“Yeah, but it’s better than dying,” Iggs said as he felt his way through the knapsack’s expansive selection of military hardware. “If you’ve got a better idea, say it quick. I don’t know how long it takes your ugly brother to hulk out, but he’s gotta be nearly done with—”
Like he’d been listening for his cue, the Prince of Hate chose that moment to finish his gross metamorphosis.
He looked more like a transformed wrath demon than a human now, but his scream rang with hatred instead of anger as he ripped the last bits of broken golden armor off his giant body and flung them at his enemy.