Adrian’s shoulder was damp enough already. Thank Ishtar he always wore black, or her ashy tears would’ve ruined his clothes. It was pathetic how much she liked knowing that she could cry on him without leaving a trace, but Bex was used to her heart being an idiot by this point, so she rolled with it, grabbing his hand so they could run together up the staircase’s final spiral.
Boston was already waiting when they got there, pawing at the bottom of yet another set of massive sin-iron doors. It was the biggest, heaviest, most ornamented doorway Bex had seen yet, which she took as a sign that they were on the right track. Gilgamesh had always been a sucker for grandeur, and thosedefinitelylooked like the gates of Hell.
“Finally,” Boston said, looking over his shoulder with a lash of his tail. “I’m not sure if the doors are locked or just heavy, but I can’t get them to budge.”
“Have you heard anything from outside?” Adrian asked as he crouched beside his cat.
“Not a peep,” Boston reported, leaning down to push his nose against the perfectly fitted seam where the giant doors met the floor. “I haven’t smelled anything, either, though that could be because the doors are so tightly sealed. They were meant to keep the Hells out of Heaven, after all.”
“Let me give it a try,” Bex said, pressing her hands flat against the cold, ornately carved metal. “Um, you might want to give me some distance.”
Boston leaped out of the way at once, scrambling up the front of Adrian’s coat to his damp shoulder like a fluffy black squirrel. When Bex was confident she wouldn’t have to worryabout singeing anyone’s fur, she closed her eyes and called her fire.
As always since she’d reignited during her flight with the princess version of herself, the flames came over her in a rush. That was normally a good thing, but Bex was only a few minutes off the blinding-white, cutting-torch burn that had taken down the Queen of War. Her arms started shaking the moment the fire engulfed them, but she’d wasted too much time being weak already, so she forced herself to push through, silently reciting all the things Gilgamesh had done to her people to stoke the flames of her anger higher and higher, hotter and hotter. She was closing in on the sin-iron melting point when Adrian said, “Hit it here.”
Bex turned in alarm to see him standing way too close. She was pretty good with her fire these days, but one mistake was all it would take to burn him to a crisp. Adrian had to know that, but either he was very good at hiding his nerves or he trusted her to an insane degree, because he’d planted his hands less than an inch away from her flaming ones without a trace of fear.
“There’s a smaller door hidden inside the big ones,” he explained, running his fingers over a crease in the sin iron that Bex had assumed was just part of the decoration. “I saw the war demons using it when I was here earlier. It might be easier to open.”
Bex nodded but waited until Adrian stepped back to lean in for a look. Sure enough, when she got her face right next to the metal, she spotted a hidden seam exactly where Adrian had put his fingers. The rectangle it made was still pretty big for a door but much smaller than the rest of the massive gate and sealed only lightly with a few pins at the corners. It looked more like it’d been made to stop bad smells and noise than demons, which made a weird sort of sense when Bex thought about it. If a rebellion ever did get this far, Gilgamesh would stop it with anarmy, not a door. This gate was probably meant to be more of a logistical barrier than an actual security measure, a suspicion that was proven correct when all the pins snapped like cheap birthday candles the moment Bex’s flames touched them.
She froze the moment they broke, smothering her fire so she could listen without the bonfire roaring in her ears. She didn’t hear anything, though, which made no sense. After saving the Queen of War, Gilgameshhadto know they were coming. His army was probably just waiting for her to stick her head out so they could fill her face with arrows, so Bex led with her foot instead, easing the unlocked door open with the reinforced toe of her combat boot.
The first thing that came through was light. The moment the door cracked, blinding-white radiance burst into the smoky, torchlit staircase like water from a fire hose, along with the scent of something sweet. Bex had been down in the Hells for so long now, it took her several seconds to recognize the aroma as fresh air. It entered her nose like a shot of pure nostalgia, reminding Bex that this was home. No matter how much Gilgamesh had changed it, they were still in Paradise, the land she’d been made to protect, and the moment its cool, clean scent hit her brain, Bex yanked the door open with all her might.
The flash that followed whited out her vision. For several heartbeats, blinding light was all she could see. When she finally blinked the glare away, though, what her eyes saw next wasn’t any more informative.
“Wait, what?” she said, shielding her face against Heaven’s brilliance as she stepped through the black doorway into what appeared to be a completely empty square.
She was standing in the White City, where she’d fought the Queen of War only a week ago. Back then, the streets had been filled with golden war constructs. Now, though, there was nothing. The pale-blue sky was empty, the elegant white-stone buildings silent and still. Bex didn’t even see any guards standing watch, which was almost scarier than finding an entire army.
“You’re seeing this, too, right?” she whispered to Adrian, who was hovering directly behind her, staring over her shoulder. “Is there actually nothing there, or is this a trick?”
“It looks real to me,” he whispered back before glancing at his feet. “Boston?”
Bex hadn’t even heard the cat jump down, but Boston was suddenly standing between her boots, poking his nose out as far as he could reach without actually stepping over the threshold.
“I smell a lot of sorcery,” he informed them after several seconds of intense sniffing. “But I don’t think there are any spells active in our immediate vicinity. Nothing big enough to hide an army or blow us up when we step on it, anyway.”
That was good to hear, but Bex still didn’t step forward.
“What is going on?” she asked instead, crossing her arms over her chest. “We just took over all Nine Hells. Why is there no response? What is Gilgamesh doing?”
“I have no idea,” Adrian confessed, pressing even closer as he tried to look around the door’s corners without actually crossing the line into the city. “This place was full of people when I passed through a few hours ago.”
“Well, they’re not here now,” Bex said, finally stepping through the gate into the apparently empty square.
She stopped the second she was through, but nothing happened. There was no wind, no sound, no blasts of sorcery or creak of armor from a hidden ambush. Her senses were admittedly duller since the loss of her horns, but so far as Bex could tell, they really were alone. She took a few more steps into the open, just to be sure, but no sniper shots came out of the silent buildings to hit her in the head, so she went ahead and motioned for Adrian and Boston to come out.
They did so in a rush, hurrying to join her in front of the Hells’ gate, which, now that she was outside, Bex could see was shaped like a giant black cube. Its surface was carved all over with reliefs of suffering demons and, of course, a giant image of Gilgamesh guarding the doors. It looked just like the oversized hallway Lys had led them down when they’d first come here, but where that had been a tunnel through the ground, this was a monolith standing alone at the center of a huge, empty square.
The open space was clearly meant for staging troops, but the only security Bex saw at the moment were four white obelisks capped with Gilgamesh’s creepy golden eyes.Thosewere watching them with the same intensity as the princesses, but Bex didn’t hear any alarm bells. Just heavy, empty silence and the faint whine in her ears that always came when she knew she was walking into a trap.
“Okay, I officially hate this,” Bex announced, circling around Adrian as she tried to keep an eye on every direction at once. “Where in the Hells is everybody? Where are the warlocks? The sorcerers? Where’s the damn army?”
Rather than answering, Adrian pulled his broom off his back and hopped on. Bex sat down behind him a second later, followed by Boston, who took his usual position on the broom’s tip. When they were all aboard, Adrian kicked them into the air like a popping cork. In the blink of an eye, they’d cleared the roofs of the white residential buildings that lined the empty square, and the Holy City came into view.
It looked just like Bex remembered: a perfect circle of elegant white buildings surrounded by a towering white wall. The melted carcasses of the lion cannons were still glimmering on top of the battlements, but everything else was gone. There were no construct soldiers, no white-robed warlocks, not even any demon slaves peeking through the curtained windows. The entire city looked like it had been emptied, but it wasn’t untilBex’s eyes made it over to the palace at Heaven’s center that she saw why.
