Page 73 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)
“You killed him!” Bex roared as her flames leaped higher, reflecting off the bronze bodies of the war demons until the whole tower was lit up like the inside of a mirrored lamp. “He was your demon, your charge! Even if you didn’t want him, he was yours , and you killed him !”
War opened her sneering lips to reply, but whatever sound came out was lost in Bex’s enraged scream as she leaped up the tower to wrap her flaming hands—both of them—around her sister’s hard white throat.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
This was not how it was supposed to go.
Adrian watched Bex jump onto her sister in a panic, scrambling to figure out how everything had gotten so out of control.
It’d been such a simple plan: use his status as a prince to stall the fight and force a different outcome.
There was still some risk, which was why he hadn’t told Bex ahead of time so she wouldn’t try to stop him.
Treason or no treason, though, Adrian was still the only son of Gilgamesh who could blend sorcery with witchcraft.
His stingy father would never permit the destruction of such a useful tool no matter how many times Adrian turned on him, which meant the Crown Princess couldn’t either.
That made Adrian the perfect shield for this situation, and he’d intended to stand his ground until Gilgamesh himself came down to move him.
At the very least, he’d hoped to confuse the situation long enough for the rest of the demons to evacuate.
It was supposed to be his big play to reclaim his honor and prove once and forever that he was someone Bex could rely on, but he’d barely started his grand gesture before Kirok had shoved his way forward and everything had gone very literally to hell.
Now Bex was fighting the same princess that had defeated her a week ago, only this time she was doing it barehanded.
It was the worst possible way this situation could have gone. But while Adrian was scrambling to come up with something, anything he could do to save her, he realized Bex was doing… not that bad, actually.
She was burning brighter than he’d ever seen.
Her whole body was covered in white-hot flames so intense they hurt to look at, but it wasn’t the wild, out-of-control fire he’d seen earlier.
That fire had been a storm that filled the Hells.
This was a cutting torch, a single focused flame of wrath so intense, even the Princess of War looked surprised before her beautiful face contorted into fury.
“Do you really think you can win against me?” she screamed, covering her carved body in white, shell-like armor as she swung the huge black blade that had killed Kirok at Bex’s head. “You rage-drunk fool, you don’t even have a sword!”
Bex didn’t say a word. Adrian didn’t know if she could speak.
He’d seen Bex get mad plenty of times, but he’d never seen her like this.
He couldn’t even make out her face through the blazing white fire as she swept her leg up fast as lightning to kick the incoming blade off course.
She moved again the instant the sword went crooked, using the opening she’d just made to dart inside her opponent’s guard and slam her glowing fist into the Princess of War’s armored stomach.
The moment her fist connected, Adrian knew the hit hadn’t gotten through. The princess’s white armor was simply too thick for a bare fist to crack. The hit still sent the princess flying, though, flinging her armored body clear across the tower into the stone on the other side.
The walls must’ve been thicker up here than in the white tower downstairs because the princess didn’t go through them like Bex had when her double tackled her, but she still made a hell of a dent.
She lay there stunned for a second, then the princess heaved herself out of the crater with an enraged roar, reaching up with the hand that wasn’t holding her sword to clutch her carved white face, which was now as cracked as the stone she’d just slammed into.
“You animal !” she screamed as the white shards broke away to reveal the pitted bronze face of the monster Adrian had seen Bex fighting on the battlements a week ago. “ He just made that one for me! ”
The final word turned into a screech as the Princess of War launched herself off the cracked wall with enough force to finish breaking it.
She moved so fast that Adrian’s eyes could barely keep up, but the white-hot Bex was even faster, running across the battlements full of fleeing war demons to meet the princess halfway.
The Princess of War swung her giant sword with a bellow of fury, but Bex darted under it like a flickering candle to slam the flat of her empty palm against the inside of her enemy’s sword arm.
Once again, the princess’s strike was thrown wide, but War was ready for it this time. When Bex turned to drive her fist into the princess’s broken face, War slammed her knee into her stomach instead, knocking Bex off the stairs with enough force to shatter the rest of her white facade.
It was a startling transformation. The Princess of War had looked like a living ivory statue when she’d first come down the stairs.
Now, though, her truth was revealed as the four-armed, corroded-bronze body of the hornless Queen of War ripped off the last of her false white shell to bare her cracked teeth at Bex.
“You want death so badly?” she bellowed as the thick plates of her heavy armor rearranged themselves to fit her new, much larger body “Come and get it, sister !”
She must’ve been holding back earlier to avoid damaging the body Gilgamesh had carved for her.
Now that her beautiful shell was broken, the Queen of War was swinging hard enough that just the wind off her blade was enough to knock the legions of war demons off their feet.
The whole tower fell into chaos as soldiers raced down the stairs to get out of their queen’s warpath.
Adrian had just scrambled back into Bex’s melted tunnel so he wouldn’t get trampled when he felt a familiar weight land on his shoulder.
“Great Forest, look at them go!”
“Boston!” Adrian hissed, grabbing the cat off his shoulder. “I told you to stay back. It’s dangerous up here.”
“Exactly,” Boston said, squirming out of his grip. “What kind of familiar stays behind when his witch is in danger? And you can’t possibly expect me to miss this.” He scrambled back onto Adrian’s shoulder, putting his paws on his witch’s head so he could stand up for a better view.
“They’re like gods,” he whispered in an awed voice, his green eyes shining like emeralds in the white light of Bex’s fury. “Is this what you saw when they fought before?”
“No,” Adrian said, letting go of his cat with a defeated sigh. “This is different. Bex had her sword last time, and she wasn’t so…”
He trailed off, unable to find the words to describe the blinding flash Bex had turned into.
The Queen of War was attacking indiscriminately now, slicing off entire battlements that fell like boulders onto the fortifications below them.
She’d done more damage to the Hell of War’s tower than Bex had at this point, but no matter how hard she swung her black sword, she couldn’t land a blow.
Bex didn’t even seem to have a body anymore.
She was just a tongue of flames. A pure, blazing star of wrath that danced around every one of War’s strikes, which seemed slow and ponderous by comparison.
“How is she doing that?” Boston asked in an awed voice. “I thought losing her horns made her weaker.”
“I don’t think this is about her horns,” Adrian said, leaning against the still uncomfortably hot wall of the melted tunnel to get them both a better view.
“Bex told me once that that her horns were proof of her identity as Ishtar’s daughter, but she isn’t using Ishtar’s powers right now. She’s angry in her own right.”
Boston scowled. “Isn’t the Queen of Wrath always angry?”
“Not like this,” Adrian said. “She’s really mad this time.”
“Again, how is that different from usual?” Boston asked. “Not that she doesn’t have a lot to be upset about currently, but this seems extreme. Where’s she even getting all that energy from?”
Adrian didn’t know. He’d felt the intense magic rolling off Bex when she’d turned into a firestorm, but this was different.
It looked like all that raging fire had been condensed into a single, Bex-sized flame that felt both more controlled and much, much more dangerous than the raging bonfire she’d been before.
“However she got to it, that level of output doesn’t look sustainable,” Boston observed. “We should stop her before she hurts herself.”
“I don’t think we can,” Adrian said. “More importantly, I don’t think we should . Look at that.”
He pointed ahead of them at the base of the tower where Bex had made her first stand.
The room had been empty when they entered, a barren circle of stone designed to provide the archers above with a nice, clean kill box.
Now, though, the bottom floor of the Hell of War’s tower was packed with war demons.
They’d squeezed their bodies into every available inch, standing shoulder to shoulder like bronze bullets packed into a magazine.
The only open spot was the place where Kirok had died.
Between the princess’s brutal execution and the curse that, oddly, looked like the work of Adrian’s mother, there wasn’t much of the former general left.
What little there was, though, was surrounded by an honor guard of the biggest, meanest war demons Adrian had ever seen.
They stood over Kirok’s fallen body like a fortress, watching in determined silence as the two queens fought on the stairs above them.