Page 65 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)

Bex leaped back immediately, clutching her white-hot fist to her chest so she wouldn’t accidentally burn whoever was inside, but the body she’d been hoping for didn’t fall out into her arms. It couldn’t, because while the outside of the coffin had been as smooth as a river stone, the interior was lined with hundreds of swordlike sin-iron spikes.

It looked like the inside of an Iron Maiden, and pinned on those spikes like a butcher bird’s victim was a body.

A woman’s hornless, handless body covered in black blood.

“Sister,” Bex whispered as she stumbled forward. “ Sister! ”

She reached out desperately, but Leander beat her to it.

He rushed the broken coffin, ignoring the spikes that stabbed his unprotected arms as he dug his hands under the woman’s body and yanked it free.

Her face was so damaged that Bex couldn’t make out her features, but she still recognized her on the same instinctive level she’d recognized every daughter of Ishtar except Nemini.

Unlike Nemini, though, this queen’s name wasn’t shattered.

Bex might even be able to remember it once her sister’s face was healed enough to recognize.

Ishtar’s gift of regeneration was already pulling her broken features back together when Leander unceremoniously dumped her body on the ground.

“ What are you doing? ” Bex roared, darting to grab the queen before she hit the filthy floor. “That’s my sister!”

“It’s not Mara,” the prince said, looking wild-eyed at the eight other coffins. “Do the next one. Quickly!”

Bex bared her teeth and clutched her sister’s body to her burning chest. She was still trying to find somewhere to put her where her wounds wouldn’t touch the filthy sin on the floor when Adrian’s hands came down from above.

“I’ll take her,” he said, lying down on the top of the wall so he could hold his arms out to Bex. “Go ahead and do the others. We’re running out of time.”

The urgency in his voice snapped Bex out of her protective trance.

She handed her sister’s body to Adrian at once, pushing her up from below while the witch hauled her to the top of the wall.

The moment she was sure he wouldn’t drop her, Bex let go and moved to the next sin-iron tomb that Leander was impatiently tapping his finger against.

It took less time to crack the second one now that she knew what she was doing, but not by much.

Even when she was burning her hottest, the sin iron was hard, thick, and pure.

It also didn’t crack cleanly every time.

Sometimes she had to melt her hand all the way through and pull the prison apart piece by piece, which took a while.

There was also the problem that not every tomb was full.

Since she, Nemini, and the Queen of War still had their original bodies, three of the caskets were empty, but it was impossible to tell which ones until she broke them open.

They were all filled with spikes, though, and the more Bex thought about that, the less sense it made.

“Why do you think Gilgamesh did this?” she asked Adrian when he reached down to take the third body that wasn’t Mara’s from Bex’s arms. “Does he just enjoy their suffering?”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Adrian said as he carefully accepted the bloody queen. “Gilgamesh considers demons beneath him. He hates the gods, but I can’t imagine him building something this expensive just to torture a bunch of already defeated queens.”

He looked at the next coffin Leander was pressing his ear against. “I bet this is just the most efficient way to keep them under control. Ishtar’s daughters are famously hard to kill, but being stabbed full of sin-iron spikes would immobilize anyone.

Add in the void demons pulling their minds into the abyss and you have a simple and effective prison. Trademark Gilgamesh.”

“You don’t have to sound so impressed,” Bex muttered, calling her fire back to her fists to get cracking on the next coffin.

The water started coming in again before she finished.

By the time Bex’s fist finally punched through to the center where the spikes were, the sin-polluted slime was pouring over the top of Leander’s protective walls in sheets.

That sarcophagus turned out to be empty, so Bex moved on to the next one, sloshing over to it through the now knee-deep water while Leander paced frantically beside her.

“Hurry,” he begged. “ Hurry. ”

“I’m going as fast as I can,” Bex growled, turning the water around her to steam as she slammed her fist into the tomb’s shiny black surface.

At least she knew this would be the last. They’d already hit the three empties, and there was only one sarcophagus left.

Now that the flood was coming over the walls in buckets, though, fear was starting to eat at the edges of Bex’s rage.

If the water was high enough to overcome Leander’s Seven Walled City, it also had to be almost to the top of the doors out.

They were very, very close to getting trapped down here, but Bex was so close to being finished. Just one more inch and—

“There!” she cried as her fist went through to the spike-filled pocket. The coffin didn’t crack like the others, but she was still able to wedge her arm inside, bracing her leg against the wall to pry the black tomb open like a bear trap, revealing the bloody prize inside.

“Mara,” Leander whispered, his voice cracking. “ Mara! ”

Her face was as damaged as all the others, so Bex couldn’t say if she looked like the princess from the bridge or not.

Leander had already eliminated all the others, though, so there was only one queen left that she could be.

Sure enough, when the prince clutched her body to his chest, Bex saw a bloody strand of the long, straight, black hair she vaguely remembered falling around Mara’s smiling face.

It had to be her, and now that the job was done, they had to get out.

“Come on!” Adrian yelled from where he was floating on his broom above the now completely-flooded edge of the stone rings. “We have to go!”

Bex didn’t wait to be told twice. Leander had already Fifty Steps of the Pilgrim’ed himself up with Mara’s body in his arms. Bex would’ve blasted herself after him, but thanks to the water pouring in over the top, the cylinder of the innermost wall was now flooded up to the center of her chest. It couldn’t douse her magical fire, but it was a lot harder to trigger the gas-expansion explosion she used to move herself around.

There was also the sin to consider. Bex was normally pretty resistant to sin toxin, but she’d been exposed to the polluted water for a while now, and all that burning had left her exhausted.

Now that that flood was lifting her booted feet off the ground, she was quickly realizing that she didn’t have enough strength left to tread water fully clothed.

She tried climbing the walls, but they were smooth and coated with slippery black grime from the freezing, polluted water pouring over them.

It poured into Bex’s face as well, leaving her drenched and gasping.

She was scrambling to find something to brace her feet against when a pair of strong hands reached down to hook her under the arms.

“Gotcha,” Adrian’s strained voice said as he hauled her out of the water. She landed on Bran’s back next, gasping on the broomgrass like a landed fish next to the neatly arranged bodies of her unconscious sisters.

“That’s everyone!” Leander’s voice cried somewhere to her left. “ Go! ”

“What do you think I’m doing?” Adrian growled, hunkering low over Bex and digging his fingers into Bran’s bristles as the faithful broom shot them forward.

Bex relaxed into the familiar stiff bristles as she felt them start to move.

She’d been so desperate to get out of the water, she hadn’t noticed her fire had gone out until she realized she couldn’t see.

This left her body cold and shivering, but Adrian was warm as a blanket above her.

She’d thought that was why he was doing it until she heard something scrape uncomfortably close to her head.

When she managed to get the flames going again, Bex saw it was the top of the Hell.

The cavern’s ceiling was flying by just a few inches above Adrian’s uncovered head.

He had his hat off and was lying flat on top of her, giving Bran room to work as the broom frantically wove them around the rocky juts and other uneven bits that hung down from the cave’s roof.

It was an incredibly dangerous way to fly, especially in the dark, but there was no other option.

The rest of the cavern was already filled with choppy, foam-topped, polluted water, leaving them racing through a rapidly closing gap.

Bex couldn’t even see Nemini’s light at the exit anymore, assuming there was still an exit at all.

For all she knew, they’d already been flooded in.

She couldn’t do anything about it, though, except lie flat and hold on as Adrian pushed his broom faster and faster, shooting between the water and the roof like a bullet until, at last, Bex saw a glimmer of fire through a pointed gap she recognized as the top of the Hell’s arched doorway.

“ Get flat! ” Adrian yelled, rolling off Bex to press himself into the broom beside her.

Leander did the same, shielding Mara’s head with his body as Bran hurtled toward the shrinking exit.

For a heart-dropping second, Bex wasn’t sure if they were going to hit the water or the wall.

Somehow in the end, though, they missed both.

Bran put on a burst of speed at the last second, slipping them through the final gap like a letter through a mail slot.

They burst into the bottom of the stairwell, which was much brighter than Bex remembered. She was still pushing her head up when she heard the familiar flap of wings coming down from above.

“ Bex! ”