Page 44 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)

Iggs ducked the busted golden chest plate easily, which was how he didn’t see the sword coming in behind it.

The white Blade of Hate wasn’t bloated like her prince, but something must’ve changed for her as well, because she was flying like a mad hornet.

She whipped at the end of her chain like a kite in high wind, shooting up to the end of her tether only to immediately slam back down like a wrecking ball.

Each hit left a crater the size of Iggs, but, by a miracle of Ishtar, he managed to dodge every time, running down the giant spiral staircase toward the Lowest Hells with Lys’s still-bleeding body lashed to his back and Leander hot on his heels.

The light got dimmer quickly as they descended.

By the time they passed the tunnel where they’d come in, Iggs could barely see two steps ahead.

The sword was still destroying everything she hit, but the crashes seemed to be getting farther behind them.

Iggs was starting to think they might have to slow down to keep the enemy baited when something enormous slammed into his back.

It felt like he’d been hit by a falling tree.

For a breathless second, Iggs was certain he was dead and simply didn’t know it yet, but no white sword exploded through the front of his chest. He didn’t even see any black blood on his shirt other than what Lys had already dumped there.

He was still trying to figure out what in the world had hit him when he heard Leander’s voice yelling beside him, and then the last of the light cut out.

“That should buy us some time,” Leander panted, summoning the sorcerous blue fire he’d used earlier to examine something that looked like, but couldn’t actually be, a giant steel umbrella.

It covered their heads like a pavilion, but the strangest thing was that its edges connected to walls.

Big stone ones that muffled the sound of the Sword of Hate bashing against the outside.

Together with the steel umbrella, the walls formed a pillbox that completely surrounded the stairs where Iggs and Leander were standing, sealing them off from attack.

“Don’t look so worried,” Leander chided, patting Iggs on the shoulder. “We’re inside the protection of my Seven Walled City. Even the Coward Queen going at full burn took a while to chew through these walls. Did I get the Emphatics of Steel Skin on you in time?”

“I don’t know what that is,” Iggs said as he pushed himself back up, “but considering I’m not dead, I’m going with ‘yes.’ So what’s your plan now that we’re in here?”

The prince’s gaunt face grew grim in the eerie blue light.

“I don’t have one,” he admitted. “Walls only delay problems, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

I thought we were outrunning them adequately, but then the prince threw his sword.

I would have put a protection up earlier, but I didn’t realize Hate’s chain was long enough to go across the center of the stairwell until her blade was practically in your back.

” His frown deepened. “If they can attack us from so far away, I don’t think the kiting plan is going to work. ”

“In that case,” said Iggs, taking the Armory of Solomon’s knapsack off his shoulder so he could dig through it properly, “it’s time to move to Plan B.”

“Don’t say that like you actually have a Plan B,” Leander snapped.

“This whole mission has fallen apart! I gave us a decent chance when it was four on one against the princess, but the fully manifested Prince of Hate and his sword against the two of us? While carrying an injured demon?” He shook his head so hard that his hair—which had the same dark curls as Adrian’s—flew.

“It’s impossible. There is literally no way left for us to win. ”

“Not with that attitude,” Iggs said, struggling to picture exactly what he wanted as he shoved his hands deeper into the endless magical arsenal.

“But you’re on our team now, and the number one rule of running with Bex is that we don’t quit.

If Plan A isn’t working, we move on to Plans B and C.

We’ll go through the whole damn alphabet as many times as we have to until we find what we need, but we don’t give up while we’ve still got people in the field. That’s how my queen does things.”

“With respect,” Leander said through gritted teeth, “your queen has been synonymous with pointless, stubborn stupidity since before I was born. Even Mara, who loved her best, called the Queen of Wrath a bullheaded fool.”

“So what?” Iggs snapped, grinning as Solomon’s Armory finally got the picture and coughed up four large bricks of silver-gray, plasticky-looking clay.

“Fools are the ones who come up with all the brilliant solutions that sensible people who knew better can’t imagine.

Also, with respect , you Heavenly blowhards have never been much good at stopping us, so unless you’ve got something constructive to add, I’d thank you to kindly shut up and let me work . ”

Prince Leander looked mortally offended.

To Iggs’s great surprise, though, he did as he was told, leaning silently against the fortifications he’d conjured out of thin air while Iggs cut the gray clay into pieces with his combat knife.

When all four blocks were diced, Iggs worked the moldable pieces into putty before sticking them on the wall of the pillbox, covering the curved stone from top to bottom until the inside of the bunker looked like a gray version of a mud dauber’s nest.

“What is that?” Leander asked when his curiosity finally overpowered his stuck-up prince-ness. “Some kind of witchcraft?”

“Nope,” Iggs replied, doing his best to ignore the constant bang bang bang of the princess’s sword, which now sounded like it was only a few inches from his head.

“These are plastic explosives. They’re weapons created by good old human destructiveness, and they aren’t magical in the slightest unless you count the magic of excessive kinetic force. ”

“Explosives?” the prince repeated in a horrified voice. “Do you intend to martyr us?”

“Not if you can do that teleporty thing again,” Iggs replied as he reached back into Solomon’s Armory for the wires and trigger button, which came out already connected, praise Ishtar.

Leander scowled. “Are you referring to ‘Fifty Steps of the Pilgrim’?”

“If that’ll do the job,” Iggs said, shoving the colorful wires into the shaped blobs of C-4 putty as fast as his hands could go. “I’m not picky about the specifics. I just need you to cast something that will move us away from this position without opening the walls.”

“Then Fifty Steps is the spell you want,” Leander said authoritatively.

“But what are you hoping to accomplish? As you saw earlier, mundane weaponry has no effect on the divine implements of Heaven. An explosion might throw them off the stairs, but without a fatal blow to finish the job, they’ll quickly recover.

When that happens, we’ll be right back in the same doomed scenario we were in earlier except I won’t be able to save us again because I can’t cast Seven Walled City more than once per hour.

Our enemy will be more fearsome as well since, as I already explained, any damage the Blade of Hate receives only makes her and her prince stronger. ”

“We’ll jump through those hoops when we get to them,” Iggs said as he finished prepping the wires and slung his beloved knapsack back over the shoulder that Lys wasn’t tied to.

“If nothing else, punching the enemy in the face with explosives is a much more satisfying way to die than hiding in a box.”

The prince didn’t have a quippy comeback to that, so Iggs took the chance to get himself rearranged, shifting the explosive trigger to the side he was holding Lys on so his right arm would be free to pull the ace he’d positioned at the top of his endless armaments bag if he saw a good opportunity.

“I think that’s everything,” he said as he stepped over to join Leander on the side of their tiny shelter that was farthest away from the plastic-explosive-covered wall the Sword of Hate had just started cutting into. “Get ready to teleport us as far away as you can on my signal.”

“For the last time, it’s not a teleport,” Leander snapped, but he still wrapped his arm around Iggs’s waist. “Ready.”

The wall behind the explosives was starting to crack by this point, but Iggs still waited until he saw the actual sword break through before he yelled, “ Go! ”

Leander was reciting his poetry before the command left Iggs’s throat.

The moment he felt the magical movement grab them, Iggs mashed his thumb on the trigger.

He actually saw the plastic explosives start to expand before the sorcery finished, and then he was suddenly outside again, standing on the opposite side of dark stairs four spirals below where they’d originally started.

He actually had a perfect view of the seven enormous circular stone walls Leander had conjured to protect them.

The Prince and Princess of Hate had been smashing their way straight through the layers like a brainless bulldozer, but the moment they broke into the final ring, the entire staircase filled with blinding white light.

The explosive shockwave hit the stair Iggs was standing on a fraction of a second later.

Leander must not have been as durable without his golden armor, because he went down like a leaf.

Iggs, however, was a wrath demon. A strong one who’d ditched the stupid slippery golden boots he’d had to put on for their disguises ages ago.

He was back in his favorite combat boots now, and between their thick treads and his own heavy weight, Iggs managed to stay on his feet, watching in awe from behind the shelter of his arms as the explosion filled the dark stairway all the way down to the Lowest Hells.