Devil Sent the Rain (3 page)

“The windows open over concrete,” Twitch told him sourly. “The wind’s too strong for
me
and the fall will be unpleasant for any of
you
.”

Adrian harrumphed and pocketed the full clip. “That dead end only underscores the awesomeness of my plan.”

“Which is?”

“Get to the van and get out of here. Rob a gas station to fill the tank.”

“Agreed.” Twitch laughed, a laugh like silver water that turned Adrian on a little bit, despite his fear and the waves of exhaustion lapping at his body. The frisson of arousal made him nervous, but only slightly. It was just Twitch, after all. “I was imagining you might tell me some of the intermediate steps.”

Adrian pointed. “Get Jim into the green room. These things follow him, we have them corralled.”

Twitch didn’t even linger long enough to say she approved. She just sprang into the air, horse’s tail trailing behind her, and the rest of her body metamorphosing into a silver falcon in a split second. She snapped her wings once and was across the hall, swooping among thrashing monsters and reappearing in her drummer form in a divot of cleared space among her three band-mates.

“Come on.” Adrian led Mouser by the wrist to the landing at the top of the stairs. He opened the door to the green room and positioned Mouser facing the hall. In the tumult of struggling limbs he could make out flashes of Jim, cutting his way through the monsters towards the stage and its green room entrance. Then Twitch the horse appeared in the fray, kicking a hole through the mound of monsters with her two hind hooves. Jim, Mike and Eddie broke into a run.

“Get ready,” Adrian warned Mouser.

“What do I do?”

“If they head this way, shoot them.”

“I can do that.” The gopher thumbed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and adjusted her grip on the MAC-11.

“By
them
I mean the
monsters
,” Adrian clarified, and then thought he should probably clarify even a little more. “The ones not in the band.”

He shot a glance down the stairs. It was quiet—no monster sounds, but no restaurant sounds either, and no music. Maybe all the diners had turned into wormy-twisted-six-limbed freaks, too. He heard the distant echo of storm sounds, and didn’t know if the restaurant’s doors were open or the wind and rain noises of the hall itself were bouncing back at him up the stairs.

B-rap-p-p-p-p-p!

Adrian snapped his attention back around to see one of the creatures explode into green goo. The herd of them charged at Jim, who stood in the green room door, holding them at bay, while Eddie, Mike and Twitch sprinted down the length of the green room in Adrian’s direction.

“Wow, these things are stupid,” Mouser observed.

“Good,” Adrian grunted.

Twitch bounded out of the green room first, followed closely by Eddie and Mike.

Adrian felt sweat run down his back and his forehead, and his breathing felt tight. Not now, he told himself, not now. He patted his pockets looking for the nicotine gum and couldn’t find it.

“We get outta here,” the Mexican bass player said, “remind me that I want to sharpen the head of that bass.”

“Not sure it needs it,” Eddie grumbled. “But it ought to have kill notches carved on the neck, that’s for sure.”

Adrian felt woozy. “Pinch me,” he said to Mike.

“
Carajo
,” Mike cursed, but did it immediately. “Don’t fall asleep now!”

“Come on!” Eddie yelled to Jim, and stepped out of the way.

Jim turned and ran.

Adrian saw him coming in stop-motion, feeling his own body slow down, and he screwed his entire will, all the force of his ka into one tiny point, the point through which he needed to cast his spell. My shadow is light, he told himself. The valley of the shadow of death is nothing. It’s sunshine, I’m awake.

Jim ran head down, his long black hair flying behind him and his blade pointed back. Behind him, racing on four legs at a shocking speed, gnarled and twisted necks extended to point their collective thousands of teeth forward, came the beasts.

The others stepped aside. Eddie reloaded.

Adrian felt Mike pinch his side, again and again, as the walls of the green room seemed to blur and slide away in sleep. That was going to leave bruises. He’d asked for it. He tried to focus on Jim, and on the horde that followed him.

Twitch disappeared from his vision.

Jim dove past him.

“
Per Volcanum ignem mitto!
” Adrian shouted. His uncle had never taught him a single attack spell, not one, but Adrian had taught himself this one, late at night on the rooftop with copies of the spellbook’s pages that he had scrawled out by hand, comparing them carefully with a lost (and, by Adrian,
stolen
) book of Pliny the Elder. Combat magic was hard, a lot harder than wards and illusions, especially when you tried to work it in the heat of the moment, but Adrian had learned this one spell by heart.

To hell with the truth. It had been a firebolt that set Adrian free.

Fire erupted from the stub of candle and through the Third Eye, a column of white and gold smashing through the ranks of the creatures. Adrian held it as long as he could, incinerating demonic flesh and obliterating their howls of protest, and when he felt himself slipping into sleep, he let the spell go and collapsed into Mike’s arms.

Mike slapped him in the face.

“Stay awake,
chingado
!” the bass player swore at him.

Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Adrian did.

Slam!

Eddie banged shut the door to the green room. “They’re not all dead!” the guitar player yelled. “Down the stairs, now! Now!”

Mike turned and half-dragged Adrian and Mouser both down the stairs under more fluorescent tubes, one in each arm. Spencer had been a little guy, like him, Adrian remembered. In that respect, at least, Mike was sometimes more useful. Also, he picked locks and stuff.

As his vision recovered, he saw Eddie fire off three short bursts with his Glock on automatic fire, then turn and pound his way down the steps on their heels.

“Where’s Twitch?” Adrian asked, stumbling to his own two feet as they hit the bottom of the stairs and plunged into knee-deep water.

“Really?” Mike was incredulous. “Outta everybody, the one you’re worried about is the one who can fly?”

“I’m right here,” Twitch called. “Sorry.”

In the center of the restaurant, above a wreckage of shattered tables, Adrian saw Twitch. The fairy was in her leather-bar-outfit-clad drummer’s shape, and she dangled in midair, in the clutches of a pig-headed, eagle-winged giant. Two more giants stood in the restaurant, to either side. One had the head of a bull, and the other was a centaur. Not a knobbly, ugly, twisted beast with six limbs like the things in the club above—the things behind them, Adrian thought nervously—but a beautiful woman with long chestnut hair and the lower body of a horse. Though the ceiling was twenty feet off the ground, each of the giants stooped slightly to avoid hitting it.

The restaurant was lit by incandescent bulbs hanging from long chains or set into the walls, which illuminated the giants’ knees very well but left their heads and shoulders in menacing shadow.

“Yamayol,” Jim snarled. “Ezeq’el. Semyaz.”

“Shit,” Eddie added.

***

Chapter Three

“Holy crap,” Mouser muttered.

Don’t get passive, Adrian told himself. Don’t freeze.

He snapped his uncle’s lens over his own eye and looked through it. The enormity of the things in the restaurant and their names should have given them away, but what he saw through the Eye confirmed their identity; they were Fallen.

He could see angelic forms still, through the Eye, burning bright though their wings were plucked off and the stumps bled orange-white light. Those were the
bas
of the Fallen, their essential personalities. But the Messengers that they had once been struggled to occupy the same space as enormous beasts, which were their
bodies
. Together, they looked like kaleidoscope or funhouse mirror images, shifting from one form to the other by degrees as Adrian moved his own head minutely, or they moved in real space. They were kept together by a web of light at the center of each of them, that Adrian couldn’t see clearly—even with the Third Eye—but that he knew must contain the
name
and the
ka
of each of the fallen angels.

Beneath them and about them lay the penumbras that were their
shadows
. In high school, Adrian had laughed so hard he’d fallen out of his desk when some idiot with a Bachelor’s degree had tried to explain to him and the rest of the class about the unconscious mind, as if he was saying anything new, true, or insightful. Every wizard for the last five thousand years had known the five parts of every human being:
ka
,
ba
, and
body
, bound together with a
name
, all together casting a
shadow
. Duh. That was the first lesson you learned if you ever wanted to achieve any level of magical power.

Messengers—angels who were not among the Fallen—didn’t have five parts, but the Fallen were like humans in this respect. Ka, ba, and body made a person. Name bound it together and therefore the true name of any person was the key to being able to command him to do your will—within the appropriate warding. Shadow was the touch the whole bundle left on the world around it. Other than the body, it was all invisible to the naked eye. Through the Eye, some of it could be seen.

Adrian had heard different stories about the animal limbs of the Fallen—that they were divine punishments, or that Heaven itself had taken to vivisecting the Fallen and experimenting on them in some kind of effort to undo Adam’s mistake, or even that the Fallen had for some demented reason chosen themselves to graft animal parts to their own bodies. Adrian wondered if maybe they wanted to be beings of five parts for some reason, but that was speculation. He wondered if Jim knew the truth of it. He didn’t really know how old Jim was, after all, though he didn’t think the singer had been around before the Flood, when the Fallen had made their play and lost.

The pig-headed one had something else on his chest. It looked like a red rose, throbbing with light.

The Fallen stood in a ruin that had once been a decent little restaurant. The windows were all shattered and water flowed through the room like it was raining
sideways
, and hard. The floor was a muddy river full of splintered wood, shifting and treacherous in the yellow-shadowy light. All that Adrian could see with his meat eyes. Through the Eye, he saw again the lines of power that ran around all the walls and webbed across the windows. They tied together intricately, and he couldn’t immediately make out what they did, but he thought there were elements of shielding, restraint and domination in the lines. They were elaborate and very precisely drawn, and they practically throbbed with energy. More energy than he’d ever seen; whatever they did, the wards did it very, very well. He was pretty sure the band was trapped.

Without trying to be obvious about it, he shot a glance past the swishing lizard’s tail of the boar-headed giant to the space where he remembered leaving the van. The band’s ride was still there, but it was smashed into two pieces, like an enormous tree had fallen down right across the middle of it.

Or an enormous foot.

So much for his mobile wards of obfuscation. Adrian shivered.

A mangled mantis-demon limb drifted past him in the water.

“You’re not leaving,” growled Yamayol, the bull-headed giant. As if to punctuate his sentence, he flexed his body in a weightlifter’s pose, clenching his fists and making the gray scales covering his entire body ripple.

B-rap-p-p-p!

A flash of light and a whiff of smoke beside Adrian told him that Eddie was firing his Glock back up the stairs.

“Call off your minions, Ezeq’el!” Jim yelled.

“Why?” the centauress asked. Her voice boomed, but also purred sweetly. “I think they give you all the right incentives.”

B-rap-p-p!

Mike jammed rounds into his .45 as fast as he could and Adrian turned to look up the stairs. The foremost of the monsters rasping down the stairs fell under Eddie’s bullets, but there were more behind.

“What do you want?” Jim barked. He looked like the statue of a Viking hero in some Scandinavian port, standing upright and determined with his sword in his hand and the rain crashing off his body. His voice echoed like he was standing on a reverb plate.

“To reign in Hell!” hissed the boar-headed giant, and smashed his lizard’s tail into the water, stretching wide his wings to their full span, so they filled the restaurant. That would be Semyaz, Adrian thought. Big shot in Hell, and troublemaker.

“Better to reign,” he muttered, “et cetera.” Damned if it wasn’t a thought he’d had himself, a thousand times.

“Screw you!” Jim hissed.

Semyaz flicked his arm and smashed Twitch into the ceiling. The fairy’s blood spattered down in a fine mist, mixed with concrete dust. She yelped, but it was a muffled sound, and after the impact she shifted through several shapes then ended in horse form. Semyaz still held her in mid-air like she was a doll. She whinnied softly, shaking her bloodied head.

Squeeeeeeeal!

B-rap-p-p!

No time for Twitch now.

Adrian whipped around, facing up the stairs just as Eddie’s pistol
clicked
loudly, the clip empty. A trio of windmilling monsters leaped into the air, crashing down upon the band like comets. Sleep grabbed the base of Adrian’s brain and choked him, dragging him away from the conflict, but he shook it off.

He fell to his knees in the water, raising the candle stub and the lens and aiming up the stairs.

“
Per Volcanum ignem mitto!
” he shouted again, and loosed his entire ka-energy reserve into the candle. The coruscating burst of flame stripped paint off the cement walls, shattered fluorescent tube lights and reduced the leaping creatures to a rain of falling muddy ash—

he passed out—

felt himself plunge into water and rebound off the hard floor—

he came up spluttering. And with empty hands.

“Shit!” he yelled, and plunged back into the water. He heard gunfire around him, but it was muted by the water in his ears, and by the shock. The stream rushed past him, and he realized that, as deep as it was, it was still flowing downstairs and into the lower level of the building. That was an
awful
lot of rain.

A whole dead mantis-thing bumped against him, charred black from the waist up. He cursed and kicked it away.

“Adrian!” Mike yelled. “You got ’em,
cabrón
, you got ’em all.”

“Screw that!” Adrian shouted. “I lost the Eye!”

Somewhere, Jim was shouting. “I wouldn’t be Heaven’s plaything, Semyaz! I won’t be Hell’s, either!”

“Why do you care?” Ezeq’el the centauress asked. Yamayol and Semyaz just sounded angry and menacing; she sounded curious. Adrian didn’t pay all that much attention—he kept pulling up bits that felt like the Third Eye, but turned out to be fragments of crockery, broken plates and glasses.

He chanted his own true name silently under his breath as he groped, slapping himself over and over on the neck with wet hands, and forced his mind through memories, trying to reinforce his body, name, and ba against the shadow, to have something to hold him together and awake. He was a superconductor of a sorcerer, he told himself, but he felt like someone had yanked his plug out of the wall.

He tried to avoid memories of his uncle, and champed his teeth in silent rage when he couldn’t. He felt helpless, powerless, bound.

“I’ll have nothing to do with Hell!” Jim spat.

“Even to save your friend’s life?” snorted Yamayol. “Even if we have … other things to offer you?”

Even if he found the Eye, of course, Adrian didn’t have a plan. With his ka spent, there was nothing he could do magically. Unless, of course, he had another power source. He needed another socket to plug the superconductor into. He spat gritty water from his mouth and let that idea germinate in his brain.

“Humans,” Semyaz grunted. “They all belong in Hell.” He fingered the object on his chest.

“I’m not human.” Jim ground the words out through clenched teeth. “Good-bye, Twitch.” He turned to walk away, splashing through the mud past Adrian.

Twitch, in humanoid shape now, grunted.

Yamayol lunged forward. He was gigantic, but he was quick as a snake.

Jim spun, bringing up his sword—

but the bull-headed Fallen rushed past the singer and snatched Mouser.

B-rap-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p!

She emptied the Ingram into his head. Good girl, Adrian thought, but of course it didn’t hurt him. He was material, all right, and the bullets must have stung, but if she inflicted any kind of real injury, the giant didn’t show it. Crappy small-caliber gun.

Eddie threw himself forward, but the bull’s knuckles punched him in the chest and threw him against the wall. Yamayol raised the club gopher into the air and leaped back, brandishing her like a torch.

Bang! Bang! Bang!
Adrian didn’t know where Mike’s bullets landed, but they did no visible damage.

“Aaaagh!” Mouser squeaked, and dropped the machine pistol.

Jim spat into the water and raised his sword.

“Jim, don’t!” Adrian shouted. His hand closed over something round and hard and he knew in his heart it had to be the Eye. Even with fingers numbed by the cold water, he could tell it was more circular, and much smoother, than any of the china shards he’d picked up before.

Jim glared down at him, fury raging in the ice-blue eyes.

“Be cool,” Adrian hissed. He wanted to say
stall
, but with ears the size of tent flaps, he was pretty sure the Fallen would all hear him. Instead he
thought
the word really hard, hoping Jim had latent ESP or that some unseen shred of Adrian’s ka would carry the message to him.

Maybe it worked, because Jim turned slowly and faced the Fallen. “Which one of you reigns, then?” he challenged them. “Hell has only one Satan.”

“But it has many Princes,” Semyaz snarled, milk-jug-sized flecks of yellow slobber raining from his lips and tusks.

“That’s the consolation prize you offer mighty Yamayol?” Jim laughed, and turned to the bull-headed Fallen. “Yamayol, slaughterer of the Five Kings, victor of the Plains of Shinar … will continue to play second man, only to a new … and even uglier … master?”

Yamayol growled. “I am second to none.”

Adrian pulled his hand up to the level of the water and peered into his palm. He had the Eye, all right, and his heart skipped a beat from joy.

“We have come with more than just threats,” Ezeq’el said, with all the placating charm of a cement truck shifting gears.

“Ezeq’el, the great pacifier!” Jim snorted. “I didn’t take you for a rebel.”

“The most effective rebels are the unexpected ones,” the centauress said slyly, arching an eyebrow at Jim. “Like Azazel was.”

“
Was
 … but
is
no longer?”

Adrian tried to remember how the lines of power wrapped around the room, and prepared himself mentally. It would be like taking the batteries out of the taser and wiring it into the wall socket instead, only he was the taser and the lines of the arcane trap in which the band had been caught were the power lines of the house. Adrian felt in his pocket and found string—that was good—and some chalk that was damp but might still write. He shook his head, trying to get out of his mind the image of young, dream-state Adrian walking docilely into his uncle’s arms.

“Heaven is weak!” Semyaz bellowed. “If your father weren’t such a coward, he’d rule two great kingdoms by now!”

“Only two?” Jim chuckled. “Why not more? Why not
everything?
Could Mab and Oberon stand against the combined armies of Heaven and Hell? Could the squabbling nations of Earth?”

“Join us!” Yamayol thundered. “We will release your friends.” He pointed at Semyaz, and Mouser fainted.

Yamayol stamped in the water, sending up small tsunamis of mud and cold grit, and Adrian raised the lens to his eye. He saw the lines of the wards again, and he was close enough to the wall that he could even see how they’d been drawn—pricked with a pin into wallpaper to keep them discreet. They were wards of restraint and domination, a trap, but he could use the ka-energy pulsating in them. Enough power to blow the entire club into a crater if he wasn’t careful—one of the Fallen was an accomplished wizard, or they had someone in the wings doing their dirty work. He imagined how he’d run the lines of power through a new configuration, without touching the trap. The trick would be to take the energy and turn it around, use it to open the trap from which it came.

As quietly as he could, Adrian took that bit of string from his pocket. It was a couple of feet long, which was plenty. He took one end of the string between his lips and swallowed it, getting it down into his esophagus and willing himself to neither gag nor swallow the rest, which trailed out of his mouth and lay floating on the stream of water.

It scratched in his throat. Adrian shut out images of his uncle-wolf’s long pink dream-tongue and tried not to think about what would happen if he screwed up this spell. What if he only pulled the noose tighter around them?

“Why not just kill me and take what you want?” Jim asked.