Iggs jumped. The words were sorcery, but they hadn’t come from Leander. The former prince actually looked as surprised as the rest of them when the thrashing princess went still inside the iron bindings. Lys and Leander had both already switched to the next target, but it took Iggs a solid count of five to turn and see the man who was suddenly standing at the bottom of the tower’s spiral stairs. The golden-armored, mirror-eyed,superiorly sneering Prince of the Hells, who was now holding a white sword bound to his armored hand by a long black chain.
“Well, well,” he said, eyeing Leander up and down. “Look who finally went full traitor.”
He twirled his sword by her chain as he spoke, causing the heavy blade—which was as long as Bex’s but only half as wide, with a jagged edge that looked more like a sawblade than a sword—to whistle through the air. That seemed like a pretty disrespectful way to treat a princess, but the Hells Prince actually looked like he was in control for once, holding the chain lightly against his palm as he spun his weapon faster and faster.
“No one’s going to be surprised, you know,” the prince went on, smiling at Leander like he’d been waiting years for this moment. “You always did have a weakness for Ishtar’s devils.”
“While your weaknesses are too numerous to count,” Leander replied with a sneer. “You’ve failed to master even the most basic aspects of your position. A true prince is beloved by his princess. Yours hates you so much that you have to chain her like a dog.”
“Sheisa dog,” the Hells Prince spat. “They’re all dogs of the gods, and the fact that you can’t see that is why youfailed!”
He lashed out with his sword arm as he finished, whipping the chained blade like a missile straight at Leander, who immediately ducked out of the way. Unfortunately, this meant the white sword was now flying straight at Iggs, the cover Leander had chosen to hide behind.
If it’d been anyone else, the betrayal would have stabbed deep, but Iggs’s expectations for any son of Gilgamesh were already on the floor. He didn’t even bother getting mad about it. He just shoved his hand into his knapsack.
He had no time to tell the bag what he was looking for, so the gun that leaped into his grasp was random. Despite only using it for a single day though, the Armory of Solomonhad already become Iggs’s favorite thing in the entire world. It proved its awesomeness yet again when he pulled his hand out to reveal a M134 Minigun. He’d only seen the thing in FPS military games before, usually mounted to the deck of a gunship, but this one had been retrofitted with a stock that let Iggs brace it against his shoulder. It also came preloaded with a full drum of bullets as long as his finger, which Iggs immediately began unloading into the sword that was flying at his face.
Just like with her princess form, the nonmagical bullets couldn’t actually pierce the Blade of Gilgamesh’s white surface, but there were still two thousand of them hitting her per minute. That was alotof kinetic force. Too much for the sword to handle, apparently. Her serrated blade sliced right through the bullets, but the combined momentum of all those hits still pushed her off course, causing her to crash into the wall behind Iggs rather than through his skull.
“Good work!” Lys yelled from somewhere to his left. “Now do that again!”
Easy for them to say. The prince had already yanked his chained sword out of the wall and was swinging it over his head like a helicopter blade, forcing the taller Iggs to hit the deck or get decapitated. This exposed Leander, who was frantically muttering something under his breath. Iggshoped it was a barrier spell, because the drum on his minigun was already half empty. He was working the M134’s long multi-barrel around to unload what was left into the prince’s arm in the hopes of making him lose his grip on the chain when the golden bastard’s smug face suddenly went blank.
A wet gurgling noise came next as a gush of white blood bubbled from between the prince’s lips. His flying sword jerked like a shot bird as the Prince of the Hells staggered, gasping in pain from the dagger Lys was shoving into his neck from behind.
“Got you,” they snarled.
They really did. The last time Iggs had seen Lys, they’d been on the other side of the tower. They must’ve used their wings to close the distance, because the lust demon was back in their true form with their prehensile tail wrapped around the prince’s golden helmet, which they’d lifted off his head just enough to make room for the sin-iron dagger to slide through the gap and into the nape of the prince’s neck.
Iggs could actually see the blade’s black point sticking out through the front of the prince’s windpipe. It was a solid skewer, a killing blow, but Lys wasn’t letting up. They’d already braced their legs against the prince’s armored back so they could leverage their body weight to push the dagger sideways for a full beheading. Iggs could hear thecrackof the sharp blade cutting through the prince’s spinal vertebrae when the dying son of Gilgamesh clenched his fist around his princess’s chain. The white sword launched itself off the ground a second later, hurtling over the gasping prince’s shoulder straight into Lys.
The attack sent them both flying backward into the white staircase, which now looked more like a white gravel pile thanks to Iggs’s indiscriminate storm of bullets. When the dust finally cleared, Lys was lying on their back with the prince’s sword stabbed through their left shoulder, stapling them to the broken ground. The prince had just yanked the chain to pull his sword back when Iggs burst into motion.
He charged across the tower like one of Leander’s bulls, running past the still-choking prince to snatch Lys’s body off the ground. The moment he pulled them into his arms, Iggs knew it was bad. Lys had always been a lightweight, but it barely felt like he was holding anything at all. Iggsreallyhoped that was due to the extra strength of his adrenaline-jacked body and not because Lys had just left all their blood on the ground. There was a terrifying amount of it on the stone where they’d fallen as well as streaming down Iggs’s arms, but he didn’t have time to panic.He’d already run Lys back to the hole Boston’s spell had blasted through the floor, racing down the spiral staircase toward the Lowest Hells. The moment the prince was out of sight, he put Lys down on a step and grabbed the emergency triage kit he kept on his belt.
“Never mind that,” Lys wheezed as Iggs dug frantically for a bandage to tie up their perforated shoulder. “Did I get him?”
“I’ll never ‘never mind’ you dying in front of me,” Iggs growled, holding Lys still as he wiped the black blood off with a gauze pad so he could see the damage. “What in the Hells were you thinking? Don’t you remember what happened the last time you stabbed a prince in the back?!”
“That’s why I went for the jugular this time,” Lys wheezed. “Heaven’s suck-ups call them divine, but Gilgamesh’s princes are still human, and all humans have a hard time when you give them gills. Now stop fussing and let me—”
They cut off with a gasp when Iggs touched the wound in their shoulder. Lys went quiet after that, breathing in short little pants while Iggs pressed the sterile pad over the hole and secured it in place with several hastily torn pieces of medical tape. That stemmed the flow of black blood, which normally would have meant he could leave the rest to Lys’s natural regeneration, but this was an injury from a Blade of Gilgamesh. Iggs knewexactlyhow impossible those were to heal after seven years of watching his queen bleed. He needed to get Lys somewhere safe until Adrian could take a look at the wound.
Quietly as he could, Iggs rose from his crouch, peeking over the edge of the hole into the tower. The prince hadn’t followed them down the stairs yet, and Iggs didn’t see him waiting at the top, which was a good sign. If Lys’s stabbing had bought them some breathing room or—even better—forced the prince to retreat, maybe he could…
Iggs’s hopeful thoughts trailed off when he spotted a glint of gold moving on the other side of the tower. Sure enough, when he eased his head a little higher over the lip of the broken floor, the damn prince was back on his feet. He’d taken off his helmet so he could apply pressure to his still-bleeding neck, but he looked more angry than pained. Definitely not the face of someone who was dying because he’d just had his throat shish-kebabed by a poison knife.
“Is he down?” Lys asked feebly.
Iggs was still trying to think of an answer that wouldn’t be crushing or an outright lie when Leander appeared out of thin air beside him.
“We need to go.”
“Whoa!” Iggs cried, jerking away. Then he scowled. “What wasthat? You told Bex you couldn’t teleport!”
“I can’t,” Leander informed him crisply. “That was Fifty Steps of the Pilgrim. Completely different spell.”
“I don’t care if it was Fifty Shades of Grey,” Iggs snarled as he scooped Lys back into his arms. “We’re not going anywhere. I know things were in chaos after Boston blew the floor early, but the queen still gave us our orders before we came up. Our job is to keep the prince off the key team. If we bail, we’ll put everyone else in danger.”
