Page 56 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)

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B ACK AT THE BOTTOM of the Hells, Adrian was in a panic.

He’d seen the exact moment Bex realized who the Queen of Pride was. It’d flashed across her face like lightning right before fire engulfed her body and she’d launched herself toward the top of the tower where he’d left Nemini staring at her horns.

He was scrambling for his broom before her boots left the ground.

Great Forest, how many more ways could this go wrong?

All he’d wanted was to bring back a queen who was supposed to be five-thousand-years dead.

It should’ve been a miracle, but nothing was ever simple when it came to the daughters of Ishtar.

Now he had to get upstairs and explain the situation before everyone involved jumped to the wrong conclusion.

He was throwing his leg over Bran for the takeoff when a bandaged hand shot up to stop him.

“Not without me, you don’t,” Lys snarled as they hauled their bloody body onto the broomstick.

Adrian was scrambling to make them get off before they reopened the wound he’d just glued back together when Bran dipped nearly to the floor. When he looked up to see why, Iggs was sitting on the broom’s bristles with a stubborn expression across his once again human-looking face.

“No, no, no,” Adrian said as he struggled to keep his seat on the now furiously bobbing broom. “We can’t all go. Someone has to stay down here and keep an eye on Leander and the wrath demons. Also, there’s not enough room for— ow !”

He snatched his hands up with a hiss, glaring at the raven-carved broomstick that had just pecked him for implying that a broom made by the Old Wife of the Bones wasn’t capable of carrying a crowd.

“I wasn’t trying to malign you,” Adrian told it quickly, but he was too late. Bran’s honor had been impugned. The broom was already changing beneath him, transforming into its broomgrass raven form, which had plenty of room for everyone.

“Fantastic,” Lys said as they plopped down on the raven broom’s back. “Let’s go.”

“Bran doesn’t take orders from you,” Boston snapped from his perch on Adrian’s shoulder. “We’ll leave when our witch is ready.”

Everyone turned to look at Adrian, who sighed.

“Hang on,” he said, reaching down to tap Bran’s now six-foot-wide back with his fingers.

His broom must’ve been waiting for a chance to show off.

The second Adrian gave the signal, Bran popped off the floor like a cork, shooting up the center of the spiral stairs so fast that his passengers were crushed against his stiff, bristly wings.

Adrian didn’t even get an opportunity to gawk at the enormous crowd of unchained demons that had gathered around the base of the tower in the Middle Hells before they were whisked past them to the top.

The broom stopped on a pin the moment it reached the tower’s highest floor.

The huge spiral staircase kept going, but the tunnel to the Upper Hells where Adrian had had his disastrous confrontation with Nemini was now blocked by a sin-iron security door that looked as thick as the slab he’d beaten his head against beneath the Seattle Anchor.

Adrian wasn’t sure when the barricade had come down, but he was relieved to see it.

That lump of sin iron might be blocking their exit, but it was also shielding them from the army of war demons that was almost certainly marshalling on the other side.

It was a small mercy, but a comforting one, because the rest of the situation wasn’t looking good.

Other than the stairs leading to the blocked entrance to the Upper Hells, the entire top of the white tower was shrouded in darkness.

The sorcerous sconces on the walls that usually filled the tower with blindingly white light now looked as dim as fireflies, their glare crushed by the haze of shadows that emanated from the horned figure huddled against the farthest wall.

No, Adrian realized when he nudged his broom closer, not shadows. Nemini’s body was shrouded in gigantic, coiling black snakes. Their bodies looked no more solid than smoke, but their fangs gleamed with very real menace thanks to the brilliant flames roaring off the other queen in the room.

Bex was standing at the top of the staircase in full bonfire.

The heat pouring off her was intense enough to crisp Adrian’s hair, but her blazing fire barely penetrated the snake-filled shadows.

It did, however, give Adrian a perfect view of the fury on Bex’s face as she opened her mouth to demand to know how this had happened.

At least, that was what Adrian assumed she was going to say. It was certainly the most obvious question. When Bex actually spoke, though, the words that left her mouth weren’t what he’d expected at all.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

The question came out in a small, hurt voice, and the snake-wrapped figure on the other side of the tower sighed.

“Because I thought I was free,” Nemini said, finally raising her horned head to stare at Bex with yellow eyes that gleamed with more emotion than Adrian had seen her show in all the months he’d known her put together.

“I didn’t want you to know,” she whispered, burying her face in her knees again.

“I liked being nobody. I was happy in the void. When I was a queen, my entire life belonged to other people. So long as my horns were broken, though, there was no one I had to be. I was free. Wholly and truly free for the first time in my life. I thought I’d get to live like that forever until your witch went and pulled off another miracle. ”

Adrian flinched at the bitter anger in her voice.

Then he flinched again when Bex’s flaming head snapped toward him with a look of horrified shock.

He was still scrambling to come up with a version of the truth that didn’t make it sound like he’d fixed Nemini’s horns behind her back when Bex lost her patience.

“It doesn’t matter,” she snapped, fixing her glowing eyes on Nemini again. “However this happened, it’s done now, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”

Her face grew gentler as she took a step forward.

“I understand how much you valued your freedom, but if the Queen of Pride was ever going to come back from the dead, I couldn’t have picked a better time, better place, or better person than here, now, and you.

Your countermand just saved all of us, including me.

That’s incredible , but it’s also not surprising, because I’ve fought beside you my entire life.

I already know how good your heart is, how much you care.

I know this isn’t what you wanted, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still make the most of it.

” A smile spread over Bex’s face as she held out her blazing hand to the shadows.

“Let’s fight Heaven together like we always do.

Let’s use what we’ve got and win this thing so we can finally go home. ” Her smile grew even wider. “Sister.”

She was shining like the sun by the time she finished, but Nemini—or at least the demon who’d once been called Nemini—just pulled deeper into the shadow of her snakes.

“I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

“I do understand,” Bex insisted. “You’re the one who showed me that the void isn’t the end. I know how much it means to you, but—”

“You don’t know,” the queen snapped. “That’s why you were able to walk out of it.

When the loss of your name tore all responsibility from your grasp, did you consider the emptiness?

Did you take even a second to think about what else you could be without the crown that weighed you down?

No. You turned around and snatched your duties right back to your chest because you like being responsible.

You enjoy serving your people, but I was never like you. ”

She lowered her yellow eyes, the only color left in the twisting nest of snakes she’d built around herself.

“I hated being queen,” she whispered. “I hated how my demons were always pulling at me, needing me to do things for them. The only value I saw in them was how their worship made me special. I thought I was their chosen ruler, the one the gods entrusted with the safety of their treasured Paradise. That pride was the only thing that made queenship tolerable. It wasn’t until I broke that I realized I’d never been special at all.

Being queen wasn’t an elevated privilege.

It was a job. I was a cog in the gods’ soul-processing machine just like every other demon.

A slave with no agency or choice of my own. ”

“That’s not true,” Bex said fiercely. “Gilgamesh is the one who made us slaves, not the gods!”

The queen shrugged. “I fail to see the difference. Whichever side of the war you look at, demons have never lived according to our wants. Even Gilgamesh’s slave bands are just adaptations of the names the gods were already using to control us.

We’ve always been dogs at the end of someone else’s leash.

The only time I was ever free of that was when I had no name at all. ”

Her face grew sad. “I’d hoped you’d realize that as well when you lost your own name.

We’d never gotten along before the war because I looked down on you.

I thought all your loyalty and hard work was a show for Ishtar’s benefit.

It wasn’t until you found me and picked me up off that dark riverbed that I realized you’d never been faking anything.

You showed more love and compassion toward a nameless, broken demon than I’d ever gotten as the haughty Queen of Pride.

The years I spent basking in the warmth of your fire were the happiest of my entire life.

My only pain was that you wouldn’t stop fighting. ”