“On schedule for what?” Bex asked nervously. “Because ‘atom bomb’ doesn’t sound good.”
Adrian opened his mouth to answer, but they were almost at the floor by this point, and whatever he’d been about to say was drowned out by Iggs.
“Bex!” he shouted, waving his giant red arms. “Adrian!Over here!”
Bex jumped off the broom the moment Adrian touched them down, running across the dusty, blood-splattered bottom of the stairs, the seemingly last level of Hell.
“What’s going on?” she demanded as she ran to join Iggs at the edge of the circular floor. “Where are the…”
Her voice trailed off as her brain finally caught up with what her eyes were seeing. Iggs was fully transformed andstanding in front of a pair of giant doors carved with a terrifying image of Gilgamesh. It looked just like the doors they’d passed through to enter the Middle Hells, except this pair had an Iggs-shaped dent in the middle.
He’d clearly been throwing himself at them for a while, but a door strong enough to keep Iggs out wasn’t the most alarming thing down here. That honor went to the giant splatter of white blood that covered the entire back half of the stairwell’s circular floor. It looked like a prince had exploded, but before Bex could congratulate Iggs on what had obviously been a massive win, she spotted Leander sitting on the only remaining clean spot with a very bloody-looking Lys laid out beside him.
“Lys!” Bex shouted, sprinting over. “What happened?”
“They took a hit from a Blade of Gilgamesh,” Leander replied calmly, waving his hand at the wad of black-drenched bandages wrapped around Lys’s shoulder. “It wasn’t a fatal wound, but the bleeding has yet to stop.”
It would never stop. Bex knew that firsthand, but it didn’t stop her from dropping to her knees beside Lys’s body to check for herself.
“How long have they been unconscious?”
That question came from Adrian, who was suddenly right beside her, gently pushing Bex’s shaking hands away so he could examine Lys’s wound.
Leander shot the witch a cold look and said nothing. Fortunately, Iggs was on it.
“They’ve been out since we jumped down here,” he reported. “So maybe ten minutes?”
Adrian nodded and reached back toward Boston, who was already dumping a cornucopia of witchy-looking items out of his cat pack.
“I can’t heal a Blade of Gilgamesh wound down here,” he said in the clipped, stern tone Bex thought of as his doctorvoice. “But I can stem the bleeding and help them regain consciousness.”
“Are you sure?” Bex whispered, hands shaking.
“Nothing is sure when it comes to living bodies,” Adrian warned her, then he smiled. “But I’ve treated Lys before. They don’t give up easily, and blood loss is much easier to deal with than sin-iron poisoning.” He gave her a nudge with his shoulder. “I’ll take care of them. You go help Iggs.”
Bex didn’t want to leave. This was too close to what had happened the last time Lys faced a prince. They’d survived that, but Bex was still shaking from the idea that Lys could have died down here and she wouldn’t even have known.
“They’re not dead yet,” Adrian said, reading the fear right off her face. “And they’re not going to be. I’m fighting with them now, so you go do what only you can do and leave me to do what I do best, okay?”
“Okay,” Bex whispered, giving Lys’s too-cold hand a final squeeze before she forced herself to get up and go to Iggs, who was bouncing nervously on the balls of his giant feet.
“Are they going to be okay?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” Bex said, forcing herself to sound confident. “Adrian’s on it, and you know how good he is. Lys isn’t going anywhere.”
She clenched her fists as she finished, squeezing her fingers hard like she could squeeze the words into being true, and Iggs’s red eyes widened.
“Hey, you got your hand back!” he cried, ducking his giant horned head to get a better look. “And your ring, too! When did that happen?”
“When I ripped the head off the doll Gilgamesh stuck them to,” Bex replied, lifting her restored fist. “The princess that tackled me out of nowhere was the one Gilgamesh made for Adrian out of my stolen hand.”
“Adrian got aprincess?” Iggs said, his eyes going even wider. “So does that mean Drox is a gross white Blade of Gilgamesh now?”
“No,” Bex said quickly, looking down at the band on her right ring finger. “Or, at least, I don’t think so. I still don’t have a name, so I haven’t been able to draw him yet, but he doesn’t feel like a tool of Heaven.”
“That’s good to hear,” Iggs said, but he still looked disappointed. “Gotta admit, when I heard Desh and the others cheering upstairs, I wasreallyhoping you’d made a comeback.”
“Who says I haven’t?” Bex replied as she called her flames to surround her body.
