Page 46 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)

He smashed Iggs into the stone two more times before hurling his body across the bottom of the stairwell into the pipe-covered wall on the other side.

If the pipes hadn’t been made of sin iron, Iggs would have torn right through them.

Instead, he bounced off like a pinball, flying halfway back toward the prince before landing on his face in the crater they’d made when they came down.

“I’m going to work you for all eternity,” the prince promised as he hobbled forward on his broken foot to grab Iggs again.

“I won’t let you die, I won’t let you rest. You will know nothing but slavery for the rest of your miserable existence.

You’ll never have a second of mercy, not even if you beg for it on your knees! ”

“That last one I actually agree with,” Iggs said, tucking a broken tooth back into place with his tongue as his body pulled itself back together. “Because wrath demons don’t kneel.”

The prince stopped to give him a sneer, and Iggs took his chance, shoving his still-healing arm into his knapsack for the ace he’d readied earlier.

He had to add his other hand a second later, moving his arms hand over hand as he pulled and pulled and pulled out the nine-foot-long barrel of a 30mm rotary cannon, the biggest gun that would fit inside of Solomon’s Armory.

It was an unwieldy beast of a weapon, and Iggs hadn’t even attached the separate ammo cart yet.

It was probably still in the bag somewhere, but Iggs didn’t bother looking for it because he had no intention of shooting.

He’d already learned that bullets did nothing against Heaven’s monsters, but even without its hydraulic-fed loading mechanism, the rotary cannon was still six hundred and seventy pounds of titanium-and-steel construction.

That basically made it a nine-foot-long metal bat, and Iggs used it accordingly, lunging to his feet the moment his broken legs were healed to slam the multi-barrel chassis straight into the overgrown prince’s knee.

It was an easy hit to see coming. If the prince had been in better condition, he almost certainly would have dodged it, but he wasn’t in better condition.

His giant body was insanely powerful, but it’d been clear to Iggs from the start that he didn’t know how to use it.

That was why he’d smashed through all seven walls of Leander’s Seven Walled City instead of just going over the top, and why he couldn’t get out of the way now.

His lumbering body had barely even started to move when Iggs crashed the butt of his beautifully engineered and probably insanely expensive gun into the prince’s kneecap, shattering the joint with a delightfully satisfying crunch .

The prince roared with pain as he staggered, but he didn’t go down. Both of his legs were injured now, but he was still on his feet, glaring at Iggs with all the hate he was named for.

“You’ll pay for that,” he promised, thrusting his not-shattered hand into the air. “Princess of Hate! Return to your master!”

The words rang out like crashing bells in the dark, but nothing answered. There was no clatter of chains, no whoosh as the white sword flew back to her master. Just a deep silence that grew even quieter as a worried expression stole over the prince’s distorted face.

“Princess of Hate,” he said again. “I command you! Come back to—”

The command turned into a scream as Iggs bashed him in the knee again. The prince did go down that time, crashing to the floor like a toppled statue.

“Princess!” he bellowed as Iggs hit him again. “ Inora , I command you by your name! Come to—”

His voice cut off for the last time as Iggs smashed the giant cannon into his face.

The first hit shattered the prince’s jaw.

The next cracked his skull. The third caved in his cheek below the eye, but it wasn’t until the fourth that the hulking monster of a man finally stopped moving, his giant body falling still in a rapidly spreading pool of his unnatural white blood.

Iggs slumped against the gun he was using as a club, his own body heaving with the force of his ragged breaths as he braced for whatever was coming next, but his enemy didn’t move again.

He was still breathing, though. Iggs was working up the strength to swing his weapon one more time and finish the job when he heard the unmistakable, blood-chilling click of carved bone feet landing on the stone behind him.

He whirled around with a stagger, struggling to lift the enormously heavy gun to face the new enemy, but the princess, who’d just landed at the bottom of the stairs, wasn’t even looking at him.

Her golden eyes were locked on the distorted body of her downed prince as she moved toward him, dragging her black chain on the floor behind her as she walked right past Iggs to kneel beside the prince’s still-breathing body.

For ten long heartbeats, she hovered over him like a kneeling statue, her golden eyes staring at the spreading pool of his white blood from behind the cage of her sin-iron muzzle.

This went on for so long that Iggs was seriously considering just leaving her like that and going back upstairs to find Lys and Leander when the princess suddenly raised both her fists with a scream before bringing them down on what was left of the prince’s battered face.

What happened next was so brutal even Iggs had to look away.

The Princess of Hate tore her prince’s body apart with her bare hands.

Her shrieks got louder with every piece she ripped off, rising higher and higher before they suddenly stopped, leaving only a wet silence.

When Iggs finally peeked out from behind the pole of his gun, the princess was standing in a white splatter that went all the way to the walls of the stairwell.

There was no sign of the prince’s body left, but his princess finally looked at peace.

“I hated him most of all,” she whispered, gazing at the white blood that coated her chained hands before she slung it away. She looked at Iggs next, and her lovely face split into a thankful smile behind the cage of her muzzle.

“You made this possible, demon,” she said in a croaking voice that sounded like it hadn’t been used in centuries. “In return for that great gift, I will kill you quickly.”

“Or you could not kill me,” Iggs suggested, backing away.

The princess shook her head. “You have to die. Everyone here must. It’s the only way to escape this hated place. I’m sure you understand.”

“I really don’t,” Iggs said, stalling hard as he scrambled to think of a way out of this, because he didn’t think beating a princess with a giant metal bat was going to work as well as it had on a prince who was already mangled. “Why don’t you explain it to me so I can—”

The rest of his bullshitting was drowned out by a high-pitched whistle.

It sounded like the sound effect movies used for a charging plasma cannon, but when Iggs jerked his head up, he saw it was Leander.

The former prince was standing on the spiral above them with one arm braced against the other and what appeared to be a miniature black hole floating in front of his palm.

His mouth was moving like he was speaking very quickly, but Iggs couldn’t hear a word.

Whatever it was must have taken all Leander’s concentration because the prince was sweating buckets.

When he finally said something loud enough for Iggs to hear, though, his voice was steady and strong as steel.

“Royal Verse Fifteen,” he said as he aimed the crackling black ball at the princess. “Heavenly King’s Eternal Banishment.”

The whistling sound grew louder with every word, but when Leander’s spell finished, it ended with a pop .

The black hole vanished at the same time, flickering out from in front of the prince’s palms like a snuffed candle.

Iggs was still wondering what all of that was supposed to do when he realized the princess was gone.

Not crushed, not blasted into bits. She was simply gone the same way the orb was, and in the place where she’d been standing lay a woman’s severed hand.

“Holy Ishtar,” Iggs muttered, staggering away from the empty place where the princess had been. “What in the Hells was that ? And why didn’t you do it before ?”

“The answer to both of those is the same,” Leander replied in an exhausted voice as he bent down to pick up Lys’s body, which he’d laid carefully on the stairs behind him.

“Unless you’re inside one of Gilgamesh’s private spaces, Royal Verses aren’t something that can be just tossed out on the fly.

I needed time to build it up, and to get down here. ”

He frowned at the white splatter that had been the prince. “I saw the whole fight on my way down, and I’ll admit, I’m shocked you survived. I thought for sure it was over when he named his princess, but I should have known she’d be able to resist. Otherwise, why would he need so many chains?”

“That does make sense,” Iggs agreed. “But why did she turn on him like that? I thought even the crazy princesses loved their princes.”

Leander shook his head as he carried Lys’s body down the stairs. “Hate is different. Hers was the last emotion Ishtar felt before she died. Not even Gilgamesh’s sorcery can overcome that level of ire, which is why her princes never last very long.”

“He did seem extremely hateable,” Iggs agreed, holding out his arms to take Lys from Leander. “But you were awesome! That black-hole spell was clutch. You even evaporated her chains!” He grinned down at Leander. “Looks like you really are on our side now.”

“Destroying Demetrios is a pleasure I would have relished no matter what side I was on,” the ex-prince assured him. “But yes, I am most definitely not going back to Gilgamesh. Even if he offered to forgive me, my father doesn’t tolerate sons who think for themselves, and I can’t tolerate him.”

“Welcome to the rebellion,” Iggs said, giving the prince a wink before looking down to check Lys.

That killed his victorious mood real quick.

“This is bad,” Iggs muttered, pressing his big red fingers against the delicate column of Lys’s throat. “Pulse is barely detectible, and they’re still bleeding like a faucet.” He examined the black-soaked bandage taped to Lys’s shoulder before shaking his head. “We need to find Adrian.”

“What’s he going to do?” Leander asked, strolling over to retrieve the Princess of Hate’s severed hand from the white pool of her prince’s blood. “Your comrade was struck by a Blade of Gilgamesh. There’s no witchcraft in the world capable of healing a wound like that.”

“Adrian’s can,” Iggs said stubbornly, changing back to his normal size so he could wrap a fresh bandage around Lys’s shoulder without having to worry about accidentally crushing them. “He’s done it before.”

“Oh, he has, has he?” Leander replied with unexpected bitterness.

“Sounds like he’s quite the golden child.

I look forward to officially meeting him and finally finding out what makes him so damn special that both Father and Mother bent over backward to fit him into their plots.

Must be nice to be so loved. The Old Wives of the Blackwood never fought for me. ”

There was a whole wide world of family drama in that statement that Iggs wasn’t touching with a nine-foot gun.

And speaking of nine-foot guns, the 30mm cannon was still lying on the ground where he’d dropped it when he’d realized the fight was over.

Lys was in a bad way, but even though the barrel was so dented it would probably never fire again, Iggs couldn’t stand the thought of abandoning the weapon that had just saved his life.

He’d just put Lys down on a clean spot of floor that wasn’t covered in prince blood so he could shove the battered cannon back into his knapsack when Iggs heard a strange noise.

It sounded like shouting. Iggs didn’t remember hearing anything like it during the fight, but he might have just been too preoccupied with not dying to notice.

There were definitely voices coming from the giant door on the other side of the stairwell now, though, which was where Iggs got his second shock because he’d thought the only door down here was the one to the Lowest Hell behind him.

A quick look around proved that was incorrect.

They looked identical with their towering height and giant images of Gilgamesh carved into their black faces, but there were definitely two different pairs of giant doors built into the circular bottom of the stairwell.

The one behind him was dusty and silent, but the one in front of him was shaking like a crowd was banging on it from the other side.

A large, strong crowd yelling for help in the ancient language of the Riverlands.

“I hear you!” Iggs yelled back in the same tongue as he ran over. “What’s happened? Who’s in there?”

The voices cried back in a frantic chorus, pleading with Iggs in the language of his homeland. The door was too thick to make out the exact words, but Iggs didn’t need to. He already knew what he’d found. Or, rather, who he’d found.

“What are you doing?” Leander asked as Iggs changed back into his big red form.

Iggs didn’t waste his breath explaining something that was about to be obvious. He just dug his feet in and charged, slamming his now-giant shoulder into the prison door that separated him from the panicked, familiar voices on the other side.