Page 53 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)

“They were yelling their heads off earlier,” Iggs insisted. “I thought this whole place was like the black cavern you fell into. That’s why I dropped the prince down here. I was hoping to get him stuck in the void demons’ black hole, but it turns out there’s two Lowest Hells.”

He pointed at the dented doors in front of them before swinging his arm across the room to point at a second pair of giant black doors by the stairs that Bex hadn’t noticed yet.

That set also had an image of Gilgamesh at his most intimidating carved into them, but they were sealed with a giant dusty clay tablet covered in humming cuneiform.

“Makes sense in hindsight,” Iggs continued as they crossed the final distance to the dented doors he’d been leading her toward, which seemed to be locked only with a floor bolt.

A gigantic sin-iron floor bolt, but still just a physical barrier.

“Heaven’s propaganda always said there were Nine Hells.

I thought they were counting Limbo as ours, but it looks like Gilgamesh prepared a place for Wrath in his kingdom after all. ”

“Guess he figured I’d take one of his thousand surrender offers eventually,” Bex said as she got down on the floor to get a better look at the lock. “Happy I proved him wrong. Can you make me some room?”

Iggs flashed her a delighted grin and grabbed the warped edge of the doors he’d clearly been slamming his shoulder into earlier.

He braced his legs against the bloody floor and heaved with all his might until the bottom of the giant door lifted off the floor.

It was just a hair-thin gap, but it was still enough for Bex to get eyes on the bolt that held them closed.

Target in sight, Bex called her fire and pressed her burning fingers against the gap.

“Watch your hands,” she warned as she fanned herself brighter. “This might get hot.”

Iggs nodded and tightened his grip, pulling the tiny gap a little wider as Bex blasted her fire through.

The geyser of flame she produced wasn’t nearly as precise as the glowing wire Drox had used to cut Havok’s armor in half, but it got the job done.

It took her only thirty seconds to get the bolt hot enough to bend.

The moment he felt it start to give, Iggs smashed his shoulder into the doors like a battering ram, snapping the weakened bolt in half and opening the right-hand door wide enough for Bex to squeeze through.

She did so in a blaze of fire. Part of that was because she simply hadn’t put herself out yet, but the rest was a deliberate show of power.

If her demons really were in here, then her Bonfire would be the surest way for them to recognize her, especially since Bex still didn’t have her horns back.

She did tamp her flames down to her skin to make sure she didn’t accidentally engulf anyone, but it still should’ve been an impressive sight.

When Bex actually made it to the other side, though, what she found was not what she’d hoped.

“What’s wrong?” asked Iggs, shifting back to human size so he could squeeze through the cracked door as well. “What do you see?”

Bex still wasn’t sure. The Hell of Wrath looked a lot like the Hell of Pride’s low-ceilinged cavern, complete with the countless bodies lying in the black water that covered the floor.

But where the former Pride demons were trapped in their own eternal torment, these demons looked passed out.

There was a whole pile of them next to the door that had gotten pushed over when Iggs slammed it open.

They weren’t chained up, thank Ishtar, nor were their bodies covered in unnatural gray like they’d been in Limbo.

They were actually all in human form with normal-colored skin and black horns that ranged in shape from Iggs’s wide bull horns to Bex’s former pointed spears.

Under any other circumstances, that would’ve made her sob in relief.

But while Bex was happy to see her people back to their natural color and not trying to eat her in a starvation-fueled frenzy, something was still wrong.

Not only were her demons not moving, they looked even worse than the slaves upstairs.

Their bodies were so thin beneath their rough-woven slave tunics that Bex could see every ridge of the bones under their sagging skin.

Their closed eyes were sunken into their skulls, and their arms were stained black to the elbows with what looked like a toxic amount of sin.

“What in the Hells?” Iggs cried, falling to his knees beside the collapsed demon closest to the doors, a young woman so thin she looked like she’d crack if he touched her. “I heard them all yelling earlier. What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Bex said, pushing up her flames to illuminate the cavern full of emaciated bodies. “They look pretty weak, though. Maybe making a commotion to get your attention took all the strength they had left.”

“If that’s the case, we have to get them out as fast as possible,” Iggs said, looking around the room in growing panic. “But I still don’t understand how they got this bad. We’re all thin when we come out of Limbo, but not like this. What in the Hells did this place do to them?”

Bex was wondering the same thing. There was no way to know until someone told them, though, so she reached down to touch the shoulder of the woman lying closest to the door. She wasn’t holding out hope for much, but the wrath demon opened her eyes the moment Bex’s burning fingers touched her skin.

“My queen,” she whispered in Riverlander, her unfocused eyes following Bex’s light like a baby’s.

“Don’t move,” Bex ordered in the same language when the woman started trying to push herself into a bow. “Tell me what happened here. What did Gilgamesh do to you?”

The woman’s sunken eyes filled with tears.

“He worked us,” she whispered. “I don’t…

I don’t recall how it started. I remember being hungry and lost in a gray haze for a long time.

Then, suddenly, I was in this place, and the traitor, the killer of the gods…

He was here , my queen! He walked among us. ”

“What did he do?” Bex asked, reaching down to clutch the woman’s terrifyingly thin hand.

“He ordered us to collect sin,” she whispered, her dilated pupils finally focusing on Bex’s glowing face.

“We told him we would not, that Wrath would never kneel, but he held your crown in his hands. He spoke with your voice, and we could not disobey. He worked us for days without food or rest, making us scrape sin out of this strange, stagnant river.”

She turned her head to look at the Hell’s flooded floor, and her eyes filled with tears. “So many died,” she whispered. “We were still thin and weak from the gray hell, but the Traitor King had no mercy. He didn’t even let us stop long enough to move the bodies. He just ordered us to keep working.”

“Where is Gilgamesh now?” Bex asked in a flat, deadly voice.

“I don’t know,” the woman said, closing her eyes again.

“I’m sorry, my queen. It’s all a blur. He would appear and disappear in a clash of bells.

Every time he left, he took all the sin we’d collected with him, but I don’t know where.

Even when he wasn’t here, though, the order to keep working remained.

It didn’t break until a few minutes ago, which was when we all collapsed. ”

“I bet it was when you got your fire back,” Iggs said, speaking in English so that only Bex would understand.

“I don’t know if that’s it,” Bex replied in the same language. “If my fire and name were linked, Drox would be able to hear me. It could just be a coincidence. Whatever happened, though, we need to get them out of here.”

“No argument there,” Iggs said, getting back to his feet. “But how? This cavern is full of skeletons. Even if you had your horns back and could order them to move, they look like they’d fall apart.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Bex growled, clutching the woman’s hand as she switched back to Riverlander.

“Gilgamesh will not return,” she promised. “I have to go see about your treatment, but my loyal servant Iggerux will watch over you until I return. I’ll be back in a minute. Wait for me.”

“We have always waited for you,” the woman whispered, bowing her head as much as she was able.

“You are the sacred Bonfire of Ishtar, the light of our people. We always knew that you would come for us. Even when the other tribes said you were dead, we felt you. We knew you were still alive and fighting for us.”

“She’s the only queen who never kneeled,” Iggs agreed proudly. “And neither have we. Wrath has never stopped fighting, and we won’t be beaten by this, either. Our queen has finally arrived. Just hold on a little longer, and she’ll take us all home to Paradise.”

The woman started sobbing in earnest then, her skeletal body curling around Iggs’s boots as she cried and cried.

Bex felt a bit like crying herself because she had no idea how she was going to keep all the promises they’d just made.

She wasn’t going to not tell her people she’d save them, though, so she sucked it up and stepped back through the cracked door to figure out how in the world she was going to get thousands of worked-almost-to-death wrath demons back on their feet.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“You found all your people?” Adrian said without looking up from the bright-green, foul-smelling goop he was meticulously smearing all over Lys’s injured shoulder.

“That’s fantastic! I’m sorry to hear they’re in such a bad state, but I’m sure they’ll be on their feet again in no time.

Demon regeneration is a force to be reckoned with. Just look at Lys.”

Bex was looking, and it didn’t look good. “How’re they doing?”

“Peachy, thanks,” croaked a blessedly familiar voice.

Bex jumped, snapping her attention back to Lys’s face just in time to see the lust demon’s amber eyes crack open.