The famouslymortalman. Unlike the Queen of War, who’d taken Bex’s flames like the divinely unkillable metal statue she was, Gilgamesh’s arm felt fleshy and human in her grip. His boiling blood was red—not princely white—and his charring flesh smelled like any other burning meat.
Impressively, he didn’t scream as she scorched him to the bone. Hedidtry to push her off with his sorcery, but Bex was still clutching the Blade of Ishtar in her left hand. She couldn’t swing it at the moment thanks to the sword’s unruly nature and the effort of producing all that fire, but her mother’s weapon was so sharp that just holding it still in the right position was enough to slice any sorcery aimed at her to ribbons as she cooked Gilgamesh alive.
And itworked. In the space of seconds, Bex’s roaring flames reduced Gilgamesh’s arm to ash that blew away in the wind whipping off her fire. He almost got away then, but Bex didn’t let him. Whenever one part of the king became toocharred to hold on to, she lurched forward and grabbed another, impaling herself farther and farther up his sword to grab his shoulder, then his chest. Eventually, with no hand left to hold it, the king’s white blade fell out of her stomach on its own, clattering to the bloody stone below as Bex clawed her way up Gilgamesh’s body, cremated him piece by piece until there was nothing left but ash.
Even though she was the one doing it, Bex couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She’d been saying she was going to burn Gilgamesh for as long as she could remember, but she hadn’t thought it would be so…
“Easy” was the wrong word. If her body hadn’t been burning with the strength and regenerative power of every demon queen put together, he would’ve killed her in the first thirty seconds. But while the battle with Gilgamesh had been every bit as brutal as Bex had always imagined, she had thought it would take longer. Not that she was complaining, or taking any chances. She kept burning until Gilgamesh’s ashes were ashes. Only when there was literally nothing left to hold on to did Bex finally uncurl her flaming fingers and take a cautious look around.
The first thing she noticed was that, except for smoke and billowing ash, the air was empty. Gilgamesh’s sword was also still lying on the ground where it had fallen, its white blade coated in Bex’s black blood. That was a good reminder that she needed to finish healing herself, but Bex wasn’t sure she had enough fire left. Her body hadn’t felt this hollowed out since before Adrian had healed her, but it was all worth it to kill—
Her pain-muddled thoughts stumbled to a stop as a hand wearing a golden gauntlet reached into her field of vision and picked up Gilgamesh’s white sword. It seemed to come out of nowhere, but when Bex’s eyes snapped up, a man was standing at the head of the destroyed banquet table. He was dressed in aheavier version of the princes’ cuneiform-marked golden armor topped with a helmet shaped like a lion’s head. Bex had never seen anything like it, but when the soldier finally raised his golden visor, Gilgamesh’s face—healthy, whole, and completely unburned—was the one that smiled up at her.
“Now you see why I’m called the Eternal King,” he said in the silence of Bex’s shock. “Nice job on the fire, by the way. I wasn’t expecting that.” He smiled wider. “It’s always exciting to be surprised. Now how about I show you one in return?”
Bex was still trying to figure out what he meant by that—struggling to understand how he was here at all after being turned to ash—when Gilgamesh swung his white sword up to point at her face.
The world vanished immediately after. There was no pain, no sensation of falling, just blackness everywhere she looked. Her first thought was that he’d teleported her somewhere, but when she tried to flare her fire to get some light, Bex realized the truth was much simpler. She couldn’t see anything because she was blind.
Gilgamesh had placed a magical darkness over her eyes. Now that she’d guessed what was happening, Bex could feel his sorcery pressing against her eyeballs like two coins, but her hands found nothing when she tried to pull it off. Ishtar’s Sword probably could’ve cut it, but that would mean getting the jerky, uncontrolled blade right next to her eyes, and then there was the question of what Gilgamesh was doing while she was blind. He’d probably already launched an attack, but Bex couldn’t dodge what she couldn’t see.
I can,Drox said, leaving his ring to return to her grasping hand.I might not be able to slice through sorcery like the Blade of Ishtar, but I’m still a weapon of the gods, and I’d have to be blind in every sense not to feel power like Gilgamesh’s. It won’tbe perfect, but if you give me control of your arm, I can defend you while you cut the blinders off.
That was a good plan, but not in their current configuration. If Bex was going to have any hope of cutting the blinding sorcery off her eyes without cutting off her own head in the process, she needed Ishtar’s Blade in her right hand. That would leave Drox with her weaker, non-dominant left arm, but there was no other way this was going to work, so Bex mashed her hands together, blindly switching her swords so that Ishtar’s insanely sharp, insanely unhelpful blade was in her right and loyal Drox was in her left.
He took control the second he landed in her palm, jerking Bex’s arm up to bash away something she couldn’t see.
“What was that?”
No idea,her sword replied, moving her left arm into a defensive position.Without your eyes, I can only see the names of demons. I feel magic with my other senses. It’s normally limited, but Gilgamesh’s magic is so strong that I can feel him from several feet away. That should give me enough warning to block anything he throws, but you should still hurry.Her sword quivered in her hand.I worry he’s surrounding us.
Bex was worried too. Fighting Gilgamesh was terrifying enough without also having to do it blind. She needed her eyes back as soon as possible, so she yanked Ishtar’s sword up to her face, looping the first finger of her right hand over its black guard to gain more fine control. The position should’ve let her maneuver the blade like a straight razor, but even when she was holding it in her dominant hand, the sword refused to behave. It fought her for every inch, yanking against her grip like it wanted to fly off and fight on its own.
If it could’ve actually done that, Bex would’ve been happy to let it, but although the Blade of Ishtar was the most powerful sword she’d ever touched, she’d never seen it move on its own.Maybe Ishtar could’ve made it fly, but Bex was just a pretender to the goddess’s throne. The best she could do was hold the stupid thing still, channeling the Queen of War’s unbreakable stance as she slashed up with the black sword’s insanely sharp edge.
It still took her three tries. The first hit missed completely, dragged off course by Bex’s left arm, which Drox was moving constantly to defend them from whatever Gilgamesh was doing. The second strike almost took off her nose, but the third landed right where Bex wanted, slicing through the thick magic that had attached to her face like an octopus.
The world came back into view a second later. Bex was still where she’d been when Gilgamesh put out her lights, suspended in the air by her blasting flames thirty feet above the stone platform, but she saw no sign of the miraculously resurrected king. Also, everything was still oddly dark. The desert had been blastingly bright when she and Adrian had come up the stairs, but now it looked like a cloud had passed over the nonexistent sun. She was wondering if she’d missed part of the blindness spell when she heard a strange whistling sound.
Bex jerked her head up with a curse. Things hadn’t looked dim because there was still a spell in her eyes. It was shady because she was standing in the shadow of a falling mountain.
She had no idea how Gilgamesh had done it, but a rock big enough to crush a city was suddenly plummeting through the empty sky where the Wheel of Reincarnation had been. It wasn’t going as fast as an actual meteor, but even at that relatively slower speed, it was so big that getting out of the way was going to be impossible. It was already only a few dozen feet above her head, so Bex did the only thing she could think of. She slammed both her swords together in front of her and blasted all her fire out behind, turning herself into a rocket-stabilized knife as the giant stone crashed down.
If she’d been any less than what she was, that would’ve been the end. Even the original Rebexa would’ve been crushed, because no fire was hot enough to burn through all that stone before it hit her. But Bex was no longer that Rebexa nor merely the Queen of Wrath. She was the combined hope of all of Ishtar’s creations, and she pulled on every single one, coating her body in both Fear’s scales and War’s bronze armor to keep her arms from buckling as the falling mountain crashed into her.
She’d never been hit so hard in her life. Even with all her fire blasting, the initial impact almost smashed her into the ground. But Bex was the Bonfire of her people’s Wrath, and she had five thousand years’ worth of shit to be mad about. When the crashing rock pushed her down, she dug in and pushed back, reaching deep not just into the well of their righteous anger but also their sorrow, hate, and fear. She pulled from the suffering of the war her people had been fighting and dying over for fifty centuries and the pride they’d held onto despite that. She used everything her demons had ever given her, turning herself into a white-hot star as she drove her two swords in like a wedge to split the falling meteor in half.
The giant rock broke with the biggest crash she’d ever heard. Then, as fast as it had appeared, the enormous meteor vanished, revealing a clear blue sky filled with golden lights. They looked like motes of dust floating in the sunlight, except there was no sun in this cursed place, and they were all getting brighter. That was when Bex realized she wasn’t looking at motes or lights or anything so benign and beautiful.
They were lions.
A thousand golden lion cannons were standing in the sky above her. Just like the vanished meteor, Bex had no idea where they had come from, if Gilgamesh had pulled them from some ancient stockpile or simply created them out of thin air. All she knew was that they were about to fire. The air in front of themwas already shimmering with the first gleams of the destructive white light that had obliterated the Seattle Anchor. But while Bex had smacked the lions’ shots away plenty of times, she’d never faced this many at once. She was wondering if she still had time to run when Gilgamesh—whom she’d just spotted standing in the air behind the cannons—waved his golden-gloved hand.
The lions all roared as soon as he gave the signal, unleashing a wave of white fire that, once again, Bex had no choice but to cut through. Just like before, she did it with both blades at once, holding Drox on her left and Ishtar’s sword on her right to slice the barrage right down the middle. When her swords made contact with the blinding fire this time, though, the shots didn’t bounce off. They exploded, blasting through Bex with enough force to make the world go white.
When she came back to herself, she was lying on the ground in a pool of her own black blood. She must’ve already healed a lot of the damage, because her body had that tingly, fragile, overused feeling she remembered from the day and a half she’d spent battling Havok nonstop. Drox’s voice was buzzing in her ear, but she couldn’t focus on his words long enough to comprehend them. The only thing she understood was that she probably shouldn’t take another of those.
You absolutely shouldn’t take another!Drox yelled through her ringing head.Your regeneration is nearly instantaneous now that you’ve got six horns, and youstillalmost died before it could catch you!She felt his blade shake in her limp hand.I’m starting to understand how Gilgamesh defeated Ishtar now. You absolutely cannot let him hit you like that again.
