“There’s no point,” she warned, pulling her feet up to get them farther away from the horns he’d just set down. “If I put that crown back on, my divine name will be restored. I’ll be dragged out of the emptiness, dragged from my freedom and forced to be the gods’ slave again. Even for Rebexa, I can’t do that.”
“And I can’t force you,” Adrian said. “Iwon’tforce you, but I don’t think it’ll matter.” His lips curled into a smirk. “Bex has a habit of inspiring people to do the impossible, so I’m making the same gamble I made the first day I saw her waiting in front of the airport. I’m betting it all on her. I’m betting it all onyou, because you’re loyal, too, Nemini. If you weren’t, Bex wouldn’t trust you so much.”
Nemini’s eyes narrowed even further. “That’s a lot of bets for a man who’s been fighting with us less than half a year.”
“And yet I’m never wrong,” Adrian said with a cocky grin. “Not about Bex, anyway. She’s the gamble I’ve always won, and I intend to keep throwing all-in with her until I die.”
The tower rumbled as he finished, reminding Adrian that he’d better get a move on if he didn’t want those to be his ironic last words.
“I’ve got to go help Bex win a fight she should never have been forced into,” he said, patting his shoulder to signal Boston to climb back up. “I’m trusting you to do the right thing, Nemini.”
“Right and wrong are subjective,” Nemini reminded him, but Adrian had already stuck out his hand for his broom. The moment Bran’s broomstick hit his palm, Adrian vaulted on, holding onto his hat and bending his body low so Bran could shoot them through the broken tower window toward the smoky darkness where he’d last seen Bex.
And behind him, alone on the stairs that were the Middle Hells’ only exit, the broken remains of the Queen of Pride stared down at the crown that had once been her entire world.
CHAPTER 11
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“BEX!”
Iggs’s shout rang through empty air. The second princess had come out of nowhere. He hadn’t even realized therewasa second princess until she’d tackled Bex through a wall. Now they were rolling through the putrid water that covered the slave floor, punching each other in a tangle of perfectly matched limbs. Iggs was digging into his bag for a gun big enough to blast the princess off his queen when an iron-hard hand latched onto his arm.
“Stick to the plan!” Lys yelled.
Iggs jumped. He’d thought Lys was going for the keys with Desh, but they were suddenly right behind him wearing a massive male body that had muscles on top of muscles. Like all of Lys’s shapes, though, the bulging biceps were just for show. No matter what form they took, there was a hard limit to how strong Lys’s bodies could get. None of them could have moved Iggs an inch if he’d really dug his heels in, but he let Lys turn him back around to face the princess Leander was barely keeping back with his bulls.
“Stick to the plan,” Lys said again as they moved up to defend Iggs’s left. “Bex has been handling herself for five thousand years. She needs us to do our jobs, not get distracted worrying about her.”
“Okay,” Iggs said nervously, eyeing the chained princess, whose white body still wasn’t cracked despite a full belt ofmachine-gun ammo and a whole herd of sorcerous bulls from Leander. “But how do we do that? Neither of us has ever beaten a princess without Bex before.”
“You don’t know everything about me,” Lys replied with a stubborn lift of their perfectly square new chin. “I’ve fought a lot of scary stuff for my queen, and it’s not as if we’re doing this alone.”
It sure looked like they were alone. All the badass demons Bex had pulled out of the Lowest Hells had already run upstairs. General Kirok and Nemini were up there as well, whichsuckedbecause they were the two Iggs would’ve picked first to be at his side for this. With Bex kicked through the wall, that left just him, Lys, and Leander facing off against the Hells’ rabid princess.
Considering the thrashing Leander had given him using less than ten words back in Seattle, that should’ve been enough. This princess was proving to be way more resistant to sorcery than Iggs had been, though, and Leander was hardly in peak form. He’d always been a scrawny, sleep-deprived-looking bastard, but the prince was huffing like a shut-in who’d been forced to run a marathon, the sorcerous poetry coming out of his mouth in ragged gasps as he struggled to keep the princess under control.
“Looks like we’re not winning that way,” Lys muttered, switching out their bodybuilder for a smaller and nimbler, but no less intimidating, female body. “You got anything in your magical murder bag that can knock her down?”
“Maybe,” Iggs said, digging into the depths of Solomon’s Armory. “I tried to look through everything before we left, but there’s a ton of weapons in here, and Felix’s goblins didn’t exactly give me an inventory list.”
“Just find something that can get her on the ground,” Lys ordered, pulling out their sin-iron knife. “Once she’s prone, I’ll take care of the—"
They cut off when Leander shouted behind them. It sounded like he’d taken a hit, but when Iggs’s head whipped back, the prince was still in one piece and on his feet. He did, however, look very,verypissed.
“Enough of this!” he roared, whipping out his hand. “Band of a Thousand Irons! Band of a Thousand Irons!Band of a Thousand Irons!”
Iggs’s Ancient Sumerian wasn’t nearly as good as Lys’s, but he remembered that one. That was the spell Leander had used to tie him up before sending him flying. It worked the same way this time, but while Iggs had gotten just a single iron band around his feet, the princess got a triple, causing her to go down hard as three iron bands the size of telephone poles appeared out of nowhere to wrap her up like a mummy.
“Nice,” said Iggs as the bound princess toppled to the ground.
“There’s nothing nice about any of this,” Leander panted. “That was too close. Where’s your queen?”
“Busy,” Lys replied sharply, pointing their dagger at the bound princess wiggling on the floor. “How long will that hold her?”
“Not forever,” Leander admitted, still breathless. “But she’s not our primary concern in that form. The real danger comes if we let her—”
“Return to my grasp, chalice of grudges.”
