Page 68 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)

She’d already raised her fist to start working on the tunnel when Nemini said, “You didn’t beat the Queen of War.”

Bex’s body went still, and then she swung with a roar, punching the security door with all her might.

The result was a bruised fist and no visible damage to the actual metal, but Bex hit it again anyway, because what the hell else was she supposed to do?

They were trapped in a cave with the water rising, and it was all her fault.

She was the one who’d decided to come here and the one who’d decided to keep going.

An actual wise queen would’ve cut her losses and retreated as soon as the plan went off course, but Bex had kept charging ahead like her mother’s famous bull, making reckless promise after reckless promise.

No one could live up to the hype she’d built around herself.

Was it any wonder she was failing now that the buck had come due?

She punched the door again, screaming in frustration that rapidly turned to pain as the hit drove the sharp edge of Drox’s ring into her finger.

Bex clutched it with a curse, squeezing her eyes tight against the throbbing that always hurt no matter how fast she healed.

But as she stood there clutching her bruised hand, she could feel the cold, hard metal of Drox’s ring against her skin like an admonishment from the sword himself, and suddenly, Bex felt very stupid.

She didn’t have time for this. Punching doors and hurting herself was emotionally cathartic, but it didn’t solve the problem.

She was the one who’d promised to set these people free.

Until she actually died, that made her responsible for them.

This was no longer a duty she’d been born into.

Bex was the one who’d insisted on staying queen even after she’d lost her horns, which meant she’d better start acting like it.

“All right,” she said, lowering her fist. “Let’s get everyone up here. It’s time to make a plan.”

“Yes, my queen,” Nemini said, vanishing into the shadows again before Bex could remind her that she was a queen too.

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

Fifteen minutes and what felt like an eternity later, the team that had left the Blackwood to storm the Hells was all together again at the top of the tower, plus a few additions.

Iggs was there, his eyes red-rimmed but determined as he clenched his fist around the straps of Solomon’s Armory.

Nemini was there with her new horns held high next to Kirok, who was running his bronze fingers absently over the invisible curse the Witch of the Present had painted around his neck.

Lys was right beside him, lying on the floor with their feet elevated on Bex’s folded jacket while Adrian rebandaged their wound, which had started bleeding again from all the flying, just like the witch had predicted.

They really should’ve been resting downstairs with the other wounded, but they’d absolutely refused to sit this one out.

Bex couldn’t blame them, so she’d allowed it on the condition that Lys stayed flat.

Boston was also keeping an eye on them from the windowsill next to Bran, who was leaning against the wall in his broom form, taking a well-deserved rest. Leander had refused to leave Mara’s side for any reason, so he was still with the queens’ bodies downstairs.

Desh was up here, though, looking uncharacteristically somber with Streya hanging off his back like a deadly ornament.

Everyone was exhausted. It’d only been eight hours since they’d gotten themselves banished here from the Blackwood, but Bex’s team looked like they’d aged ten years.

She certainly felt like she’d been down here for a century as she munched on the plastic-wrapped emergency protein bar she’d stashed in her cargo pockets.

One of the sandwiches she’d brought would have tasted better, but Bex couldn’t remember where she’d put her backpack down during all the chaos and didn’t want to take the time to go look, so she made do with this, chewing each rubbery, faux-chocolate bite slowly to buy herself time.

“Okay,” she said when she couldn’t stall any longer. “What’s our situation?”

“We’ve almost got everyone unlocked,” Desh reported proudly.

“Damn stingy warlocks only had twenty keys in this whole bleeding place. Thankfully, one of the greed demons figured out how to make copies. Once those started getting around, our pace picked up enormously. Hate’s the last one left, and I’ve got the winged demons flying around telling everyone to get to higher ground. ”

“They’ll need to do so quickly,” General Kirok said, looking down the tower at the filthy flood that was now gushing out of the hole in the bottom like a broken water main.

“The central stair is no longer the only place the water’s coming in.

While we were moving the last evacuees, the pipes that transport river water to the Upper Hells burst. They’re now dumping water directly into this chamber at a formidable rate.

I’d say we have no more than three hours before the entire Middle Hells cavern is filled. ”

“And then we all drown,” Desh finished, shaking his black-horned head. “Gotta give Gilgamesh points for creativity. Of all the ways I thought I’d die down here, ‘drowned like mice in a bucket’ wasn’t even on my bingo card.”

“We’re not drowned yet,” Bex said, turning to Iggs, who hadn’t stopped clutching his knapsack since he came up here. “You mentioned you had a plan. Let’s hear it.”

“It’s more of a harebrained scheme than a plan,” her wrath demon admitted, reaching into his bag of weapons. “Remember when you were jumping down that hole to haul people out of the Lowest Hells? Well, I got to thinking, what if the floor between the Upper and Middle Hells is the same?”

“It’s not,” General Kirok said. “The gap between this floor and the Lowest Hells only exists because of the Founders’ Tunnels. The ancient war demons never contributed to those works, so the floor of our Hell remains intact at ten feet of solid stone.”

“But it’s still rock,” Iggs insisted. “Which is a lot easier to cut through than sin iron. Also, this rock is suspended.”

He pointed through the broken tower window at the Middle Hells cavern’s impossibly gigantic arched roof, and Bex’s face split into a smile.

“You want to make a new exit.”

“I want to make us a damn highway,” Iggs replied, grinning back at her as he pulled a brick-sized block of gray clay out of Solomon’s Armory.

“I don’t have shaped mining charges, but Felix’s goblins loaded this thing up with a literal ton of plastic explosives.

I already know they can destroy the rock down here because I’m the one who put that hole in the staircase when Leander and I were fighting the Prince of Hate.

If we do the same thing to the ceiling, we can make ourselves a new exit.

One that isn’t blocked with stupid amounts of sin iron. ”

Lys opened their exhausted eyes to give Iggs a shocked look. “Do you have enough explosives to do that?”

“I should if we dig some fracture lines first,” Iggs said confidently.

“This place might’ve been made with sorcery, but it’s still just a big stone ceiling at the end of the day.

Blasting it to dust will take more firepower than we’ve got, but if we cut grooves in the stone and pack them with C-4, we can split the rock into chunks that will fall by themselves.

It’s the same method the Army Corps of Engineers uses to blast through mountains for roads, except we’re making a highway out of Hell. ”

“I think you mean into another Hell,” General Kirok said, crossing his four bronze arms over his massive chest. “You are all forgetting that the Hell of War is not an escape. It’s full of warriors bound by their names to defend Gilgamesh’s Heaven to the last breath.

No matter where you break in, you’ll be walking into a fight. ”

“Better than walking into a fortress,” Iggs argued, pointing at the giant lump of sin iron blocking the path to the Upper Hells that Bex was leaning against. “You’re the one who told us those stairs lead straight into a shooting gallery.

If we have to go through the Hell of War to get out of here, I’d much rather bust through the back than come in the front door where I know there’ll be an ambush waiting.

This is also our chance to make an exit that’s actually big enough for everyone to evacuate through.

Even if it wasn’t blocked with a giant sin-iron plug, there’s no way we could get seven hundred thousand demons up those stairs before the flood caught us. ”

That was a damn good point. The tunnel into the Upper Hells was ten feet wide just like the rest of the spiral staircase.

That was plenty of room for moving slaves a few at a time under guard but totally insufficient for their current numbers.

They’d barely gotten the survivors of Pride and Wrath up the stairs ahead of the water, and that was with a lower-than-expected population and winged demons flying evacuees up the center to help with throughput.

Moving the entire population of the Middle and Lower Hells through a single ten-foot-wide tunnel would be like trying to drain a swimming pool through a garden hose: possible, but definitely not fast.

“How big a hole do you think you could blast?” she asked Iggs.

“I was planning on doing a full football field,” he replied. “That should be big enough to move everyone out before the water reaches us, though we’ll have to figure out how to move people through an exit that’s in the ceiling.”