Page 48 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)
A rush of victory shot through Bex’s body as her fingers closed around something heavy and metal and fixed to the ground. It was hard to feel the actual links through all the slimy, built-up sin grime, but it had to be a chain.
Sure enough, when Bex yanked her arm out of the murky water, a black chain was clutched in her fist. It was just a piece of the larger tether that locked the closest line of slaves in position, but there was still enough slack for Bex to reach her arms around the princess like she was giving her a hug.
She slammed the stump of her right arm into the back of the statue’s head, throwing Gilgamesh’s weapon off-balance while her still-working left hand looped the slimy black chain around the princess’s neck.
The moment the noose was in place, Bex yanked it tight.
The princess pulled back with a shriek, lifting Bex off the ground with her as she tried to rip the chain off, but Bex didn’t let go.
She just planted her boots against the princess’s stomach and pulled, using her whole body to keep the chain too tight for the princess to dig her fingers under.
That worked for a solid five seconds before the princess realized what was going on and stopped tugging on the chain to slam her fist into Bex instead.
She hit the true queen hard in the stomach, knocking her out of her brace.
She stomped on her arm next, grinding her carved white foot with its gold-embossed sandal into Bex’s wrist to force her hand open and make her let go.
The slimy black chain was still looped around the princess’s neck, but its hold was getting looser and looser as Bex’s grip began to slip.
She was about to lose it altogether when the chain suddenly pulled tight again.
It wasn’t Bex’s doing. She’d been working with the part of the chain that was attached to the floor, which was now falling limp as her broken fingers finally lost their grip.
The pressure keeping the princess in a choke hold came from the other side of the line where the slaves who had been shivering in the dark were now on their feet, pulling at the chain that bound them together with all their might.
Like all the slaves Bex had seen down here, they were thin and exhausted-looking, but there were a lot of them.
When they pulled on the chain together, their combined force was enough to lift the kicking princess off the ground.
She was thrashing her feet in the water as she grabbed at her noose, but the chain was slick with sin from so many years under the river.
No matter which way her fingers bent, she couldn’t seem to get a grip on the slippery links, and Bex saw her chance.
“Keep going!” she yelled, grabbing her end of the chain again with her still-healing hand. “ Pull! ”
The demons were already on it. The moment Bex shouted, they moved as one, using the combined weight of their bodies to yank the slimy chain until the princess was dragged off her feet.
This meant Bex couldn’t keep pulling without risking a kick to the head, but it was fine.
The end of the chain that wasn’t attached to the slaves was locked into the Hells’ stone floor by a sin-iron bolt tough enough to hold down a whole string of raging demons.
Even a princess wasn’t strong enough to pull it out, especially when her smooth-carved ivory feet kept slipping in the muck that covered the bottom of the slave floor.
No matter how hard she thrashed, so long as the slaves kept the line pulled tight, the princess couldn’t get enough leverage to stand back up, and that gave Bex an idea.
“Keep it up!” she yelled as she dropped to her knees, scraping her fingers through the muck at the bottom of the flooded floor for something she could use.
Eventually, her hand came up with a foot-long bar of metal scrap.
It looked like a piece of the warlocks’ elevated walkways that had fallen off centuries ago, but it could’ve been Excalibur from the way Bex whooped.
Clutching her new weapon like a spear, she ran back around to the side of the princess the slaves were pulling on and shoved the scrap metal through the spot where the chain noose crossed over itself.
When it was good and tangled in the links, Bex turned the black bar like a crank, using the improved grip it gave to twist the chain loop around the princess’s neck even tighter.
The fake Bex screamed as the slimy black metal dug even harder into her carved throat.
They couldn’t actually choke her out since carved idols didn’t need to breathe, but every material had a breaking point.
Since the slaves’ chains were made from the same sin iron Gilgamesh used to bind the Wheel of Reincarnation, Bex was betting the princess would snap first, and sure enough, her throat was already starting to splinter.
By the time Bex turned her scrap metal bar five times, everything from the bottom of the princess’s white chin to the tops of her graceful shoulders was covered in spidering, hair-thin cracks.
She was screaming loud enough to make Bex’s ears bleed, a real trick for somebody who had no lungs, but no matter how hard she thrashed, she couldn’t escape.
Every time she got a hand on Bex, the queen kicked it away and cranked her improvised winch again, twisting the sin-iron chain noose tighter and tighter, smaller and smaller until, with the gunshot sound of breaking porcelain, the princess’s white neck shattered.
“Don’t let your guard down!” Bex yelled as the chained demons started to cheer. “Princesses aren’t like us! She’s not—”
The rest of her warning was lost in a wave of screams as the princess’s white body—headless, but still just as fast as ever—shot to its feet.
Its movements were jerky and uncoordinated, and it didn’t seem to be able to see them now that its carved head was rolling across the flooded floor, but a princess in any state was a deadly foe.
Her blind, wild swings still whistled through the air.
Bex dodged the first two by inches, but then the princess launched into a blind charge, flying right past Bex to plunge her fist into the chest of one of the still-chained demons standing behind her.
The punch hit the poor old woman like a cannonball.
The force snapped her bones with an audible crunch and ripped her body right off the chain, sending it flying off into the dark like a rag doll.
Bex screamed in fury as she saw it happen, dropping the now-useless chains for the scrap metal bar instead.
It was an even sorrier weapon than her combat knife had been, but she’d stabbed through war-demon armor with worse.
She was running forward to plunge the sharp end into the headless princess’s back when one of the chained demons sprinted away, dragging the rest of the work gang after him as he ran for the old woman the princess had sent flying with a scream that sounded different.
His howled words were nearly unintelligible, but Bex still caught the gist. The slave woman the princess had punched was his mother.
The other demons gave him as much slack as they could so he could get to her, but it was already too late.
The princess’s hit had crushed her rib cage and shattered her spine.
In the living world, under normal circumstances, those injuries would have been recoverable through Ishtar’s gift of regeneration.
It would have hurt and likely taken several days to heal for someone who wasn’t a queen, but it shouldn’t have been fatal.
Down here, though, things were different.
These weren’t the free demons Bex was used to or even warlock servants.
These were hard-labor slaves who’d spent their entire lives being kept just above starvation in the Hells.
Ishtar’s gift never even got a chance to trigger.
The woman was dead before her son reached her, and his scream when he realized that hit Bex like an electric jolt.
The feeling made her stop. She felt this once before the night they’d liberated the Anchor, when the war demon she’d freed turned on his warlock master.
The circumstances were wildly different, but the sensation was exactly the same.
The crying man was wailing too hard for Bex to make out his words anymore, but she still understood him because his wails weren’t wails of sorrow.
They were screams of rage. The demon was furious, screaming at the headless princess, at the Hells themselves in a storm of raw, wounded wrath.
The sound of it rang through Bex like nothing else had since she’d lost her horns, and something inside her stirred in response.
It was the same stirring she’d felt when her hand had started to glow in the Hell of Pride, but much, much bigger, because this wasn’t a bunch of terrified demons pleading for any queen who would listen.
This was a primal scream for justice, a war cry of pure, unadulterated rage.
The thing she’d been born to burn.
The moment Bex felt it, she reached out with all she was.
Reached out with every cell of the hollowed husk the loss of her name had left behind, because she knew that feeling.
It was fire, her fire. Now that it was sparking again, Bex didn’t know how she’d ever let it die, because unlike her horns and her name and her sword, the bonfire wasn’t something that could be taken away.
She’d been a queen the first time her fire almost died out, but it wasn’t her horns or Drox that had brought the flames back.
It was Adrian’s magic and her own decision to trade away all her reincarnations for one last fight, one last shot at victory.