Iggs staggered away, his shocked face lit up by her blazing light. Instead of jumping for joy like she’d hoped, though, her demon collapsed on the ground.
“Whoa, Iggs!” Bex cried, snuffing her fire as she rushed to grab him. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Iggs said, his voice thick with emotion as he bowed his horns to the floor. “I’m just happy you’ve returned, my queen.”
“I never left,” Bex reminded him, but she stopped trying to pull him out of his bow. She still hated when Iggs got like this, but she’d learned long ago that he needed to do this stuff sometimes. It was like she’d told Adrian in front of the boba shop months ago: Iggs bowed for his own reasons. All Bex could do was stand there and take it until he decided to get back up.
“Sorry,” he whispered, scrubbing his face as he lifted his head at last. “Got something in my eye.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Bex promised as she reached up to dry his cheek. “You held the line and saved us all. I don’t know if I could’ve taken a prince by myself even with my fire back, but you made it so I didn’t have to.” She gave him a huge, proud smile. “You’ve served me very well, Iggerux.I couldn’t have done any of this without you, and I am very grateful.”
She ducked her head, lowering the place where her horns used to be. Naturally, this sent Iggs into a panic. Before he could go too far off the deep end, though, Bex lifted her head with a smile.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go save our people. Where are they?”
It took Iggs a few seconds to snap out of the daze of everything that had just happened. When he did, though, he was all business.
“Over here,” he said, striding across the white-blood-soaked room toward a large set of black doors with a fresh, Iggs-shaped dent in the middle. “I heard them yelling after the Prince of Hate died, which was some scary shit, by the way. I dropped him down here to get him away from the others, but it was his princess who actually dealt the killing blow.”
“I was wondering what happened to throw his blood ten feet up the walls,” Bex said. “But where’s the princess? Did she get away?”
Iggs shook his head. “Leander evaporated her. He’s not half bad now that he’s on our team. I was going to ask him to blast the door open for me, but I didn’t want any of our people getting hurt.”
“Are you sure they’re in there?” Bex asked, cupping a hand to her ear. “I don’t hear anything.”
“They were yelling their heads off earlier,” Iggs insisted. “I thought this whole place was like the black cavern you fell into. That’s why I dropped the prince down here. I was hoping to get him stuck in the void demons’ black hole, but it turns out there’stwoLowest Hells.”
He pointed at the dented doors in front of them before swinging his arm across the room to point at a second pair ofgiant black doors by the stairs that Bex hadn’t noticed yet. That set also had an image of Gilgamesh at his most intimidating carved into them, but they were sealed with a giant dusty clay tablet covered in humming cuneiform.
“Makes sense in hindsight,” Iggs continued as they crossed the final distance to the dented doors he’d been leading her toward, which seemed to be locked only with a floor bolt. A gigantic sin-iron floor bolt, but still just a physical barrier. “Heaven’s propaganda always said there were Nine Hells. I thought they were counting Limbo as ours, but it looks like Gilgamesh prepared a place for Wrath in his kingdom after all.”
“Guess he figured I’d take one of his thousand surrender offers eventually,” Bex said as she got down on the floor to get a better look at the lock. “Happy I proved him wrong. Can you make me some room?”
Iggs flashed her a delighted grin and grabbed the warped edge of the doors he’d clearly been slamming his shoulder into earlier. He braced his legs against the bloody floor and heaved with all his might until the bottom of the giant door lifted off the floor. It was just a hair-thin gap, but it was still enough for Bex to get eyes on the bolt that held them closed. Target in sight, Bex called her fire and pressed her burning fingers against the gap.
“Watch your hands,” she warned as she fanned herself brighter. “This might get hot.”
Iggs nodded and tightened his grip, pulling the tiny gap a little wider as Bex blasted her fire through. The geyser of flame she produced wasn’t nearly as precise as the glowing wire Drox had used to cut Havok’s armor in half, but it got the job done. It took her only thirty seconds to get the bolt hot enough to bend. The moment he felt it start to give, Iggs smashed his shoulder into the doors like a battering ram, snapping the weakened bolt in half and opening the right-hand door wide enough for Bex to squeeze through.
She did so in a blaze of fire. Part of that was because she simply hadn’t put herself out yet, but the rest was a deliberate show of power. If her demons really were in here, then her Bonfire would be the surest way for them to recognize her, especially since Bex still didn’t have her horns back. She did tamp her flames down to her skin to make sure she didn’t accidentally engulf anyone, but it still should’ve been an impressive sight. When Bex actually made it to the other side, though, what she found was not what she’d hoped.
“What’s wrong?” asked Iggs, shifting back to human size so he could squeeze through the cracked door as well. “What do you see?”
Bex still wasn’t sure. The Hell of Wrath looked a lot like the Hell of Pride’s low-ceilinged cavern, complete with the countless bodies lying in the black water that covered the floor. But where the former Pride demons were trapped in their own eternal torment, these demons looked passed out. There was a whole pile of them next to the door that had gotten pushed over when Iggs slammed it open. They weren’t chained up, thank Ishtar, nor were their bodies covered in unnatural gray like they’d been in Limbo. They were actually all in human form with normal-colored skin and black horns that ranged in shape from Iggs’s wide bull horns to Bex’s former pointed spears.
Under any other circumstances, that would’ve made her sob in relief. But while Bex was happy to see her people back to their natural color and not trying to eat her in a starvation-fueled frenzy, something was still wrong. Not only were her demons not moving, they looked even worse than the slaves upstairs. Their bodies were so thin beneath their rough-woven slave tunics that Bex could see every ridge of the bones under their sagging skin. Their closed eyes were sunken into their skulls, and their arms were stained black to the elbows with what looked like a toxic amount of sin.
“What in the Hells?” Iggs cried, falling to his knees beside the collapsed demon closest to the doors, a young woman so thin she looked like she’d crack if he touched her. “I heard them all yelling earlier. What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Bex said, pushing up her flames to illuminate the cavern full of emaciated bodies. “They look pretty weak, though. Maybe making a commotion to get your attention took all the strength they had left.”
“If that’s the case, we have to get them out as fast as possible,” Iggs said, looking around the room in growing panic. “But I still don’t understand how they got this bad. We’re all thin when we come out of Limbo, but not like this. What in the Hells did this place do to them?”
Bex was wondering the same thing. There was no way to know until someone told them, though, so she reached down to touch the shoulder of the woman lying closest to the door. She wasn’t holding out hope for much, but the wrath demon opened her eyes the moment Bex’s burning fingers touched her skin.
“My queen,” she whispered in Riverlander, her unfocused eyes following Bex’s light like a baby’s.
“Don’t move,” Bex ordered in the same language when the woman started trying to push herself into a bow. “Tell me what happened here. What did Gilgamesh do to you?”
