“Don’t let your guard down!” Bex yelled as the chained demons started to cheer. “Princesses aren’t like us! She’s not—”
The rest of her warning was lost in a wave of screams as the princess’s white body—headless, but still just as fast as ever—shot to its feet. Its movements were jerky and uncoordinated, and it didn’t seem to be able to see them now that its carved head was rolling across the flooded floor, but a princess in any state was a deadly foe. Her blind, wild swings still whistled through the air. Bex dodged the first two by inches, but then the princess launched into a blind charge, flying right past Bex to plunge her fist into the chest of one of the still-chained demons standing behind her.
The punch hit the poor old woman like a cannonball. The force snapped her bones with an audiblecrunchand ripped her body right off the chain, sending it flying off into the dark like a rag doll. Bex screamed in fury as she saw it happen, dropping the now-useless chains for the scrap metal bar instead. It was an even sorrier weapon than her combat knife had been, but she’d stabbed through war-demon armor with worse. She was running forward to plunge the sharp end into the headless princess’s back when one of the chained demons sprinted away, dragging the rest of the work gang after him as he ran for the old woman the princess had sent flying with a scream that sounded different.
His howled words were nearly unintelligible, but Bex still caught the gist. The slave woman the princess had punched was his mother. The other demons gave him as much slack as they could so he could get to her, but it was already too late. The princess’s hit had crushed her rib cage and shattered her spine.
In the living world, under normal circumstances, those injuries would have been recoverable through Ishtar’s gift of regeneration. It would have hurt and likely taken several days to heal for someone who wasn’t a queen, but it shouldn’t have been fatal. Down here, though, things were different. These weren’t the free demons Bex was used to or even warlock servants. Thesewere hard-labor slaves who’d spent their entire lives being kept just above starvation in the Hells. Ishtar’s gift never even got a chance to trigger. The woman was dead before her son reached her, and his scream when he realized that hit Bex like an electric jolt.
The feeling made her stop. She felt this once before the night they’d liberated the Anchor, when the war demon she’d freed turned on his warlock master. The circumstances were wildly different, but the sensation was exactly the same. The crying man was wailing too hard for Bex to make out his words anymore, but she still understood him because his wails weren’t wails of sorrow.
They were screams of rage. The demon was furious, screaming at the headless princess, at the Hells themselves in a storm of raw, wounded wrath. The sound of it rang through Bex like nothing else had since she’d lost her horns, and something inside her stirred in response. It was the same stirring she’d felt when her hand had started to glow in the Hell of Pride, but much, much bigger, because this wasn’t a bunch of terrified demons pleading for any queen who would listen. This was a primal scream for justice, a war cry of pure, unadulterated rage.
The thing she’d been born to burn.
The moment Bex felt it, she reached out with all she was. Reached out with every cell of the hollowed husk the loss of her name had left behind, because she knew that feeling. It was fire,herfire. Now that it was sparking again, Bex didn’t know how she’d ever let it die, because unlike her horns and her name and her sword, the bonfire wasn’t something that could be taken away. She’d been a queen the first time her fire almost died out, but it wasn’t her horns or Drox that had brought the flames back. It was Adrian’s magic and her own decision to trade away all her reincarnations for one last fight, one last shot at victory.
That determination didn’t belong to Ishtar or Gilgamesh. The Blackwood had poured its fire intoher. Filledherwith its rage at what Gilgamesh had done to its beloved witches. It was just like Drox had said. The Bonfire of Wrath hadalwaysbeen fueled by the anger of her people, and that same anger hit her now like sparks to dry kindling.
The rush caught her completely by surprise, though it really shouldn’t have. As the familiar flames spread over her body, all Bex could think was what a fool she’d been, what an idiot. She’d been so devastated by the magnitude of everything she’d lost, she’d completely missed the things she hadn’t. Even when a tiny bit of it had come back in the Lowest Hells, she’d assumed it was just a forgotten ember, a scrap that her defeat had left behind.
What a stupid thing to think. One ember was all it took to start a forest fire, and wasn’t that what she was? How many times had Drox told her that the flames weren’t something that she called? They were what shewas. Bexwasthe Bonfire, and unlike her sword and horns and all the other powers Ishtar had given her, that could never be taken away. It could only be lost, but Bex was done losing. The wrath of her people—the wrath ofallthe demons whose lives had been stolen in the Hells—was pouring over her like gasoline, and the moment Bex embraced it, she lit up like the sun.
The explosion of her restored fire shook the Hells to their foundations. The chained slaves jumped when the roaring pillar of her fire enveloped them, but the Bonfire of Wrath only burned what she raged at, and Bex’s anger wasn’t for them. Her heat melted the sin-iron chains and boiled away the stagnant river, but it didn’t touch a hair on her peoples’ heads. The princess, on the other hand, received no such mercy.
If Bex had still had doubts that Gilgamesh’s ivory dolls weren’t really her sisters, the sight of that headless body flailingblindingly for an enemy would have put them to rest. It didn’t even look like a princess anymore. It was just another abomination, another crime to lay at Gilgamesh’s feet, and the Bonfire of Wrath was happy to burn it.
She didn’t even have to stretch to engulf the headless figure in flames. There was more wrath here than Bex had ever felt. It was caked onto the walls of the Hells like soot, five thousand years of anger left behind by all the demons who’d lived and died in this darkness.
With so much fuel at her fingertips, Bex’s bonfire leaped high enough to light the entire cavern of the Middle Hells. Her flames were so hot, the princess’s headless body was incinerated in seconds. Not even blackened scraps were left, just a fine white ash that blew away in the howling, superheated wind coming off the tornado of fire Bex had become.
That should’ve made her happy, but the fire raging through her head was making it hard to think. She couldn’t even see the demons who’d sparked her anymore. Maybe they’d run away when she’d melted their chains, or maybe she just couldn’t see anything through the glare of her flames. Either way, the Bonfire of Wrath’s fury had already moved on to the next target, engulfing one of the elevated metal platforms the overseers used to keep their feet dry while they watched Ishtar’s children slave.
She’d burn it all, the Bonfire decided. Burn this entire cursed place to ash so that no demon could ever be sent here again. She’d burn until the whole rotten system collapsed under its own weight. Burn until Gilgamesh himself came down to stop her, and then she’d burn him too. She’d burn and burn andburnuntil all their anger—the fury of generations—was avenged. Burn until she burned out as well, her duty finally finished.
These were the Bonfire’s thoughts, if a fire could even be said to have thoughts. Her flickering attention had already jumped from the melted overseer tower to the stockpile of slavechains beside it. The Bonfire was gleefully watching the cursed black metal melt into bubbling tar when she heard a familiar voice.
“Bex!” it shouted. “Bex!”
Deep in the roar of the bonfire, the tiny spark that still remembered that name lifted her head. The next memory that flickered through was Drox. Her steadfast sword was always the one who called her back when she got like this. That must be his voice, the tongue of flame that had once been called Bex reasoned, but wasn’t Drox gone? Wasn’t that part of why she was so angry?
The fire wasn’t sure. There were so many reasons to rage that it was hard to keep track, but they’d all be burned soon. The Bonfire was about to return to that important work when the voice yelled again.
“Bex!” it screamed. “Come back!”
The Bonfire of Wrath seethed. No one gave her orders. But when she looked down to see what soon-to-be-ash fool would dare, it wasn’t her sword or a demon or even one of her fellow daughters of Ishtar.
It was a human. A handsome, mirror-eyed man with curling black hair and a witch’s broad-brimmed hat flapping in the wind that roared off her inferno. He was standing dangerously close to the bonfire’s base, holding something up in his hands like an offering. The object was pale and small and even more familiar than the man’s voice. It wasn’t until he lifted it over his head, though, that the flicker of fire that had once been Bex realized it was a hand.
A queen’s severed hand with Drox’s black ring still gleaming on its pale finger.
“Bex!” Adrian yelled, using the arm that wasn’t holding up her hand to shield his face from her raging flames. “It’s over! You won! You can come back now!”
The Bonfire scoffed. This was nowhere near over. The was still so much left to burn, so many left to punish. She’d stop when the endless anger of her people was sated. But when the raging Bonfire lifted one of its thousand tendrils to destroy the mortal who presumed to give orders to the Wrath of Ishtar, Bex yanked it back down.
“No!” she shouted, shoving back against the flames. “We burn our enemies. We donotburn Adrian!”
But he wanted them to stop, and they were still soangry.
