Devil Sent the Rain

Smashwords Edition –2015

WordFire Press
wordfirepress.com

ISBN: 978-1-61475-259-2

Copyright © 2012 D.J. Butler

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover painting by Carter Reid

Cover design by Janet McDonald

Art Director Kevin J. Anderson

Book Design by RuneWright, LLC
www.RuneWright.com

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

Published by
WordFire Press, an imprint of
WordFire, Inc.
PO Box 1840
Monument, CO 80132

***

Chapter One

“I don’t like this place,” Mike grumbled. The big guy shrugged deeper into his cracked leather jacket.

Rain thumped angrily on the skylight overhead, rattling the warped old metal and threatening to punch through the glass. Water trickled down the cement walls of the room, prickly-cold from the weather and lit in blue and gray by fluorescent tubes. Jim paced the room like a caged cat, looking into the corners and behind the furniture.

“What’s the matter, missing your serape? Don’t get thunderstorms like this in Oaxaca? No chiles rellenos in the green room?” Adrian needled Mike. Mike wasn’t particularly Mexican, had grown up in Texas or something, but he had Mexico in his family and he was sensitive about it. That gave Adrian all the room he needed to tease him.

The truth was, Adrian didn’t much like the club either. It was a dive, and dives got dangerous, even without the hurricane-force storm that was building outside. For that matter, the storm might keep attendance down, and that would create a different sort of problem. Fewer drinkers meant less cash for the band meant less gas for the van, and Chicago was still a long drive away.

The thought of clubs and the dangers they presented reminded Adrian that he still hadn’t checked this one for wards or other arcane traps, which was definitely his job. He was, after all, the resident wizard.

He reached into his pocket for his Third Eye—

“We can get chiles rellenos,” the club gopher chirped. She was young and cute, in a cream-of-the-math-major-and-gamer-girls-crop sort of way, complete with dark-rimmed square glasses and a ponytail. She clicked on her tablet and typed in a couple of characters, moving in closer to Adrian. Adrian grinned his best wolfish grin and tried not to back away. The gopher kept invading his space in a way that made it hard not to realize she was attractive. It wasn’t that he didn’t like sex, or girls, but Adrian was a wizard, and he couldn’t expend his
ka
-energy or burden his shadow with anything as frivolous as sex. “There’s a good Mexican place just down the street.”

“What is that, Yelp?” Adrian asked. He leaned over her to look at the map of Kansas City that sprang to life under her fingers. He missed his own app-loaded smartphone, which had been crushed by a renegade angel in New Mexico a few days earlier. Besides, if he focused on the cool toys, it helped him not to think about the girl who was holding them.

“
Chingate
,” Mike swore. “Both of you.”

“Ain’t nothing down the street but water, anyway,” Eddie threw in. “Every direction. I looked.” Eddie just had to assert that he was the boss, no matter how much of a second fiddle he would always be to Jim. The guitarist scratched himself under his arm, and Adrian knew he was reassuring himself that his pistol was still there. “I’d take comfort from the forecast that this is going to be a light rain, if I was able to take comfort from anything.”

In answer, thunder crashed outside the building. The rain stopped drumming and began to hammer.

“Not literally,” Gopher Girl agreed. “But we could send a bike.”

They stood in the green room of a club called the Silver Eel. The building had once been some kind of dockside warehouse, squatting low down on the water’s edge below a steep hill. The green room and performance space were on the upper floor. The green room was a rectangular slice taken off one end of the top floor, stuffed with ratty armchairs and a card table carrying a basket of candy bars and a huddle of water bottles. It had a door at each end, one leading onto the stage and the other into a stairwell that climbed down to the lower floors—there was a lounge and restaurant on the floor below them, at street level, and stairs that led further down, to space that was presumably at the level of the river. Adrian’s arms were still stiff from loading in up those stairs.

“You could send a boat,” Eddie suggested. “It’d get there faster.”

“Any port,” Adrian said, “et cetera.” In a storm. Obvious, though, wasn’t it? Say something useful, he kicked himself. Say something impressive.

As if to punctuate the lameness of his quip, a flash of thunder through the skylight came accompanied by an immediate
BOOM!
of thunder.

“Jeez,” Mike said. “That’s close enough, it could have killed somebody in the street.”

“Mexican food,” Twitch commented, swishing her tail as she turned to look around the room, “but no mirrors? How do you expect a girl to do her makeup?” She fluttered her long silver eyelashes and then winked.

“You’re a girl?” Gopher asked, then looked flustered.

“Hypothetically,” Twitch said, and Adrian managed not to laugh. Twitch was girl enough when she wanted to be. At other times, she was a horse, a bird or a boy. The sheer strangeness of the fairy, and her magical nature, made her feel safe for Adrian. She reeked of sex half the time—Mab’s people had that gift—but it wasn’t really sex, so it didn’t bother Adrian. And he knew she was happier for the fact that there were no mirrors in the room.

“Grandpa Archuleta fought in the war,” Mike was still gnawing away at the chip on his shoulder about his ancestry. “World War Two. He was a gunner in the Navy.”

“Yeah?” Adrian raised his eyebrows. Low-hanging fruit. “Which side was Mexico
on
?”

He didn’t like the green room much, either. For one thing, unless it was caffeinated, the water was useless to him. He’d need caffeine before the night was over, or he’d be slapping nicotine patches onto his arm. He wasn’t sure they helped—he knew for a fact they didn’t stop the curse from affecting him one hundred percent—but he thought they had some effect, anything was better than nothing, and it was worth a shot. Also, the candy bars were okay, but they weren’t great. Sugar was a nice energy kick for a short burst, and that might come in handy, but a candy bar wasn’t karmically perfect. The sugar and the nuts would weigh into his shadow and put a drag on his ka. Some wizards were happy to tolerate the dead weight, because they liked their steak and candy bars and because, honestly, it wasn’t all
that much
weight. Adrian found it unacceptable. He was a high performance machine, a two hundred megaton sorcerer, and when he needed to explode out of the silo on full burn, he wanted to be able to really light it up. He needed eggs, preferably organic and free range, but any egg at all would be better than any candy bar.

Thinking of sorcery, he remembered that he needed to check the club for traps. He reached for the Eye again—

“Hey, do you want to double check your pedals and effects on this diagram I made?” Gopher Girl held up her tablet and Adrian saw what looked like a circuit diagram, but in color and three dimensions. The view rotated under her fingers as she moved them in a slow circle. He looked at her fingers and tried to ignore the rest of her.

“Everything worked at the sound check,” he mumbled, but he was fascinated by the pictures of his own stompboxes. He pointed at a missed connection. “The drum machine runs through the Fuzz Face.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I tested the fuzz beats, they work. I guess you just missed it. But how did you do this? What kind of app are you using here?” His hand slapped in vain at the pocket where he usually carried the smartphone. Damn angels. “May I?” He touched the individual pedal icons and saw little windows with their specifications open up. “Is this homemade? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It’s the club’s,” Gopher Girl grinned. “It’s proprietary.”

“Yeah? I dig proprietary inventions, I’m a tinkerer myself. What other cool stuff do they have?” Adrian saw that the circuit diagram included the fixed elements of the club’s sound, too—mixing board, PA, and so forth.

“It keeps track of the play list.” She showed him with a tap. “And it checks it against what you actually play, and automatically updates the club’s blog.”

“Did we agree to that?” Adrian didn’t think any of the Infernals used the Internet—that was why he had felt comfortable using a smartphone, once he had carefully disabled certain tracking components inside—but the Legate of Heaven was human, and he probably did. He probably had an email address and a Facebook account, if you knew where to look. If you tweaked your settings just right, you could probably get a date with him on Match.com.

He tried not to imagine what those settings would have to be.

“Not to any recording,” she agreed quickly, shaking her head so that her ponytail shook like the horse’s tail on Twitch’s rump. She pointed at Eddie. “He said no recording.”

“Good.” Adrian relaxed a hair. If Eddie was going to act all large and in charge, at least he’d gotten it right, despite being from a pre-Internet generation.

“Here’s all the site will show.” Gopher Girl brought up a page showing the Silver Eel at night, window signs lit and the lights of downtown Kansas City sparkling across the river in the background. The day’s date was in the subject line of a blog entry, which announced that the Notorious Gentlemen would be playing, and a set list.

Adrian chuckled. He didn’t love the fact that the song titles were listed, but it would be hard for anyone to track them by those, since they issued no recordings and had no Internet presence themselves. Also, the sight of the band’s name for the evening amused him, since he’d come up with it.

BOOM!
More thunder. Adrian shivered, feeling a little uncomfortable. It was the storm that was making him edgy, he decided. He’d get over it once he hit a hundred ass-kicking decibels with the Hammond.

“Jim?” Eddie asked.

Jim stopped against one wall and nodded. His long black hair was clumped together by the humid air and hung around his pale face like a picture frame.

“He’s nervous,” Mike observed to Eddie. He pocketed a couple of candy bars and bit the head off a third. The skylight rattled in its frame with a glass-against-metal chinking noise. “Aren’t you? Couldn’t they give us just a
little
booze?”

“Seeing your cousin again?” Eddie asked the question, so it was sincere, even if it sounded harsh. If Adrian had asked it, he would have been asking in mockery. Even as he asked, Eddie’s own eye slid sideways and he shuddered.

“No,” Mike said. “But it wouldn’t hurt to be a little bit buzzed … just in case.”

Gopher Girl looked confused, so Adrian tried to get her attention back on the tablet and away from the talk of ghosts. A wordless voice nagged him in the back of his mind, telling him he was forgetting something important. He ignored it. When the voices in his head could come up with actual words, then he’d listen to them. “What do you think the odds are of me getting a copy of some of these apps … what did you say your name was?”

“They call me ‘Mouser.’” Mouser smiled. “Like a cat. It’s ’cause I handle all the little stuff around here, the mice.”

“Curiosity killed,” Adrian started, and then realized he might sound like he was threatening her, “er, you know.” For a two hundred megaton sorcerer, he knew, he had a real gift for sounding like a numbnut.

Mike charged ahead. “I mean jeez, who wouldn’t be nervous, after those flaming, sword-swinging giants smashed up the meat packing plant around us. Plus, the flesh-eating horse, the flying snakes, the lamia … and … you know, all of it.” He looked sideways at Mouser, like he’d just realized she was there.

Mouser giggled. “You guys are funny.”

Adrian shook his head and let her laugh. “You don’t know the half of it, sister.”

“Yeah,” Eddie grunted, “life’s a bitch. Let’s play, collect gas money and hit the road. Maybe the bartender will give you a free beer.”

“Or you could pay me,” Mike suggested around a mouthful of nougat.

“Or I could use the money to get us to Chicago.” Eddie’s nostrils flared. He hadn’t gotten the sleeves of his green army jacket replaced, so he looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger in
Commando
, only wiry and black and perpetually pissed off. “You do want to go to Chicago, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” Mike looked down at his feet. “Yeah, I wanna go to Chicago.
Cagado
flat tire.”

“You got a better car?” Eddie snarled. “Last time I saw that Impala of yours, it wasn’t going anywhere fast.”

“The van’s our ride,” Adrian agreed. He definitely wanted to go to Chicago. For all the horsepower he had running under his wizard’s hood, he didn’t have enough. He still worked shackled to his uncle’s curse, and that was a serious practical problem as well as a constant humiliation. Eddie, he knew, was anxious to back out of his deal with the devil. Adrian wanted to make one, and Chicago was the place to do it. “Mike’s just saying what we all think.”

“Yeah?” Eddie glared at Adrian, eyes quivering. He was a bit on edge, and no wonder. “What’s that?”

“He’s just wishing the van wasn’t such junk, so he could afford to have a beer.” Adrian grinned a grin he knew would irritate the crap out of Eddie.

“It ain’t fancy,” Eddie agreed. “It needs a little extra attention, sometimes. Some of it’s held together by duct tape, and I haven’t pimped it six ways to Sunday like you do to everything, Adrian. But
my shit works
.”

“Huh.” Adrian didn’t really want to get into a fight with the guitarist, who was a combat vet and a karate guy, but he couldn’t leave a target that easy be.

“What do you mean,
huh
?”

Adrian shrugged. “I have a different strategy.”

“Yeah?”

“My stuff isn’t
shit
.”

“Aren’t we on any minute now?” Twitch asked.

The intensity of the rain kicked up another notch, rattling the skylight in its frame and sending spritzes of cold water down through the gaps in the glass. Adrian pulled his jacket collar up around his neck and shivered. The silver suit was summerwear, really, lightweight and comfortable but not warm at all.

“You can go on now,” Mouser said. She smiled and held up the tablet for Adrian to see. “I’ll be listening to the songs.”

She disappeared out the far door leaving Adrian trying to ignore the faintest hint of perfume she left behind. Jim turned and led the way through the nearer exit, into a haze of cigarette smoke and the pungent biting tang of alcohol on the air. At least here the club owners had replaced all the fluorescent tubes with hooded yellow incandescents, neon signs and other lighting more appropriate to a temple of alcohol service. Rock band, hell, Adrian thought. Really, they all funded their quirky quests to undo their own personal damnations by working as traveling salesmen of beer.