Page 71 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)

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I T TOOK FOREVER . BEX thought she’d beat the demolition team with time to spare, but she was actually the last to finish.

Even using her hottest fire, the sin iron was thick and refused to melt.

The toxic fumes it gave off when it finally did burned Bex’s lungs and sent her into coughing fits, forcing her to duck out for clean air every time she needed to breathe.

By the end of the first hour, all Bex could think was thank Ishtar Iggs had come up with the ceiling plan.

If they’d been counting on her to clear the stairs, they never would’ve made it.

The flood was only one floor below by the time she finished cutting a Bex-sized hole through the blockade’s center.

Adrian had had his part ready for ages. He was waiting patiently with his cat on one shoulder and Bran’s broomstick resting against the other when Bex finally came out to say she’d made it to the final inch.

She’d just pushed the button on her ear comm to ask Iggs if he was ready when she noticed General Kirok standing next to the door she’d just been burning through.

“What are you doing here?” she asked suspiciously. “I ordered everyone to help with the breach.”

“You did,” he said. “And I obeyed. Once all the charges were placed, however, your second-in-command Lys ordered me to return here and accompany you.”

“That wasn’t their call,” Bex replied angrily. “I know Lys is worried, but they had no right to order you into such a—”

“The order was at my request,” Kirok insisted, holding his flat, sandy-colored horns high.

“You are marching into the lion’s mouth, but it is my people who were forced to be its teeth.

The war demons are slaves, the same as all the other demons here.

If you’re going to fight them, I wish to stand at your side, if only to show them there’s another choice. ”

Bex looked away with a huff. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand how Kirok felt, but the Queen of War was almost certainly waiting just above them. Maybe not in person, but definitely close enough to ensure that her demons didn’t get a chance to disobey.

That was the entire reason Kirok had asked the Witch of the Present to draw the curse of obedience on his neck.

It was supposed to be a failsafe, a way for him to choose death rather than be forced to be the Queen of War’s tool yet again.

In Bex’s mind, that meant Kirok needed to stay as far away from his queen as possible.

After all, if War never gave him an order he didn’t obey, the curse wouldn’t kill him, and he’d get to stay alive.

If he walked into the trap with her, though, Kirok was dead.

Even if Bex squeaked through this somehow, there was no way the Queen of War wouldn’t order him to kill her, and then the general would die.

Unless he’d been an inside man from the start.

That was a properly paranoid way to view things.

If Drox had been awake, he would’ve been proud.

Bex, however, rejected the idea the moment it entered her head.

She’d seen Kirok’s face when he talked about the betrayal the war demons had been forced to participate in at the Anchor and heard the hatred in his voice just now when he’d talked about the war demons being slaves.

He was as angry as the rest of them. Bex could feel the righteous fury of his wrath from three feet away, and that more than anything made up her mind.

“Welcome to the distraction team,” she said, holding out her still-flaming hand.

Kirok shook it without hesitation and moved aside for Adrian, who’d been waiting nervously just behind him.

“Are you sure you don’t want to take a quick break first?” the witch asked Bex as he stepped up next to the war demon. “We’ve still got a few minutes before we hit the time limit, and you’ve been burning nonstop since you got here.”

“I’m fine,” Bex insisted, tilting her head toward the dark ceiling outside the tower’s busted windows. “This whole place is caked in centuries of anger. There’s even more fuel for me to burn here than there was in Limbo. Honestly, the real struggle is not flaming out of control again.”

Adrian’s scowl deepened. “Is that a risk?”

“Not anymore,” Bex promised, turning back to the tunnel.

“I’m no longer fighting desperately. I’ve got a goal to ground me now, and the war demons don’t deserve to be burned.

They’re victims of Gilgamesh just like the rest of us, and I’ve got to make sure that they get free too.

” She smiled. “The Bonfire of Ishtar does not burn her own people.”

That last part was spoken directly at Kirok, who lowered his horns in reply. It looked physically difficult, lowering his horns before a queen that wasn’t his when his own was so close, but he persevered, holding the bow rigidly in place as Bex reached up to tap the comm in her ear.

“How’s it looking?”

“We’re ready when you are,” Iggs’s voice came back. There was a long pause, and then, “Are you sure you still want to—”

“Yes,” Bex said, marching back into the oven-hot tunnel of melted sin iron until she was standing in front of the half-inch thin wall of metal she’d left at the very end.

There was another long pause before Iggs switched to Riverlander. “Ishtar guide your sword, my queen.”

“May she guide yours as well,” Bex replied in the same language, holding her fire ready as Iggs began shouting orders at the others.

“This is it!” his voice bellowed over the little speaker in her ear. “We’re about to blow, so everyone stand clear of the blast area! Trigger teams, get ready to hit your buttons on my mark!”

There was a flurry of shouting, and then Iggs’s voice came through again at a volume pitched for Bex’s ears. “On your signal.”

Bex glanced over her shoulder to make sure Adrian and Kirok were behind her. When she saw them waiting at the tunnel’s entrance, she turned back around and pressed her burning hand against the final barrier.

“Do it.”

“ Go! ” Iggs shouted.

Anything else he could’ve said was lost in a thunderous cascade of explosions.

Bex felt the entire Hell shaking under her feet, but she was already blasting herself forward, stoking her fire as hot as it would go as she smashed through the final wall to burst out of the blocked stairwell into a second, totally different tower.

It looked like she’d just tunneled into the bottom of a fortress.

The stairs she’d been following kept going up in a spiral, but where the Lower Hells had been just an empty stairwell and the Middle Hells had looked more like an office building, the tower of the Upper Hells was a citadel with all its fortifications pointing inward.

The staircase still spiraled up the outside, but there were metal gates that could be swung out every ten feet to block it, and the open column in the middle was ringed with galleries where archers could fire down from cover.

Add in the open floor at the bottom, and the whole thing was basically a killing jar.

And manning all those battlements, packed together shoulder- to-giant-shoulder like gleaming bronze sardines, was an army of enormous, sandy-horned, four-armed war demons.

The sight was intimidating enough that even Bex stepped back a pace.

She’d never seen so many war demons packed into one place before.

The fortress wasn’t actually well lit, but the few torches there were reflected off all of their bronze bodies so brightly that the entire tower gleamed with light.

It was so bright, so overwhelming, Bex didn’t even notice that every one of those soldiers had an arrow aimed at her heart until she heard the creak of all their bowstrings pulling back as one.

It was the most weapons Bex had had pointed at her since her fight in the sky over the White City.

Unlike Gilgamesh’s golden constructs, though, these were not mindless sorcerous automatons firing on a predetermined system.

They were actual soldiers, the only tribe of Ishtar’s children bred for war.

They were also much closer than the constructs had been.

If they opened fire at this range, there was no way she could burn all the arrows before they hit.

She was wondering why they hadn’t just shot her yet when she heard the familiar clack of carved feet walking over stone.

Bex’s head snapped up like a bobber on a string.

It wasn’t a surprise, exactly, but her heart still stuttered when she saw the Princess of War descending the spiral stairs.

Gilgamesh must’ve fixed her fake body, because the corroded, four-armed queen once again looked like a fragile, two-armed ivory statue.

Her face looked even lovelier now than it had been when she’d come down with her lion to destroy the Anchor Market, but there was more malice in her mismatched eyes than on all the faces of her soldiers put together as she pointed at Bex and said,

“Kill her.”

There were no horns carved into the princess’s lovely white hair, but that didn’t seem to matter.

She might have looked like a delicate porcelain doll, but the voice that spilled from her lips was a queen’s.

It rang with Ishtar’s ancient authority, and the moment the war demons heard it, every soldier in the tower released their bows, filling the air with the scream of arrows.

Bex was pushing her fire into an inferno in the hopes of at least burning a couple of them, when a tall black blur shot in front of her.

“ Stop! ” the Princess of War shouted.