Devil Sent the Rain (8 page)

Eddie, Mike, and Twitch were backed into a corner, fists and fleshy weapons raised. Elaine Canning huddled inside their protective ring. She didn’t look frightened, more … surprised.

And touched, maybe.

Between his friends and the wolf stood arrayed the three Fallen. All three of them looked identical, like glowing white renditions of his uncle. Yamayol and Ezeq’el (Adrian guessed, unable to really tell them apart in their simplified ba-and-name forms) sparred with his friends. Semyaz stood in the center of the room, holding dream-Adrian, the young boy.

That would be Jim.

Tendrils of darkness wrapped around little Ade-Jim like rope, and Semyaz struggled with them, fighting to keep his prisoner. The boy’s face was quiet, unreadable, hiding deep secrets. Adrian shook blood from his eyes and susurrating shadow from his head, fighting to stay awake. He looked again, and saw that the darkness of the tendrils dropped into a pool at Semyaz’s feet. The pool filled the attic.

The same pool flowed into and rose up in front of Adrian in the form of his uncle, the wolf.

“You took my life.” The wolf spoke gravely, and with authority. It was true, Adrian had killed him. Murdered him in his sleep, not even in a fair fight.

Though what fight could ever have been fair between the full-fledged sorcerer and his apprentice?

Fairness doesn’t justify anything, he heard himself think. You can’t steal things because it isn’t fair that someone else has what you don’t.

But what about justice?

“You took my father.”

Adrian had never known, not for sure. Had suspected it, but never said anything about his suspicions out loud. But the wolf’s tongue extended another arm’s length as he said it, the wolf towered even taller, and the wolf denied nothing.

“Join me,” the wolf urged him. “It’s not too late. There is always struggle between master and apprentice. That’s the way of the wizard. It only confirms that you’re mine.”

And Adrian felt that maybe he should. He took a shuffling step forward, and Uncle-wolf blurred. His body became a little indistinct, a little open, like Adrian might step inside him like a hand into a puppet. Or would the puppet be Adrian, and the invading hand the hand of his dead uncle, haunter of his dreams?

But at least he would have power. His uncle had been powerful. Being his uncle would mean never being powerless again.

The Semyaz-uncle looked pleased. He nodded and chuckled, still wrestling with the tendrils of darkness.

Adrian took a deep breath of warm, dank air. “No,” he whispered.

He felt like a gear inside his chest had just rotated.

All four uncles turned to look at him. Eddie took the opportunity to kick the nearest glowing white wizard right in his solar plexus, and the angel stumbled back before regaining its balance and rejoining the fight.

“What do you want magic for?” Uncle-wolf asked quizzically. “It’s the purest form of power in the universe, and can do anything, properly focused. What wealth do you desire? What person do you wish to destroy? Whom do you want to make a god?” His teeth were long and snaggled. “Tell me, and I will show you how.”

His uncle’s body seemed to open like a cape. In the dim light, Adrian couldn’t tell his uncle’s front from his back, his inside from his out. The shadowy form seemed to drift in his direction, and he couldn’t tell if he was looking at his uncle’s face, or out through his uncle’s eyes.

Adrian looked away from his uncle and into the silent, opaque eyes of his child-self, clutched in Semyaz’s arms.

“This is just the same crappy deal you offered Jim,” Adrian said. He wasn’t really sure which of the images of his uncle he was talking to. He felt stoned, and everything seemed to blur together. “It’s just a rotten little bribe. I said
no
and I meant it.”

Semyaz-uncle raised the child Adrian closer to him, wrapping an arm around his neck. Adrian involuntarily shot a look at Mouser, remembering her … death. She looked horrified.

“Join me,” Uncle-wolf said, “or I’ll destroy this innocent.”

That wasn’t new, either. Adrian ground his teeth together. “What I want magic for is to kill creeps like you, you son of a bitch.” He straightened his back though the floor continued to sway, deciding that if he had to die, at least he wanted to die with dignity. “Besides, that kid is no innocent. And I said
no
.”

The wolf raised himself to his full height—

which suddenly wasn’t all that tall, after all. And his tongue disappeared, and his ears and other wolfish features melted away into nothing, until he was just Adrian’s uncle.

And suddenly Adrian noticed that his uncle wasn’t physically imposing at all. He wasn’t a tall or a strong man, no taller than Adrian himself, and a good deal less muscular. He looked like an older Adrian, withered and atrophied by vice.

Against the wall, Adrian’s friends’ clothing changed, pajamas vanishing in a wink and being replaced by their more normal choices. Elaine Canning once more looked the part of a seventeenth-century lady, too, though Adrian couldn’t see the red chains.

And the space in the attic was a good deal less dark than it had been.

The three uncle-angels became three Fallen again, too. For some other observer, that might have been a change for the worse. For Adrian, they were less terrifying in their angelic forms, maybe because they were less familiar. He could resent an angel’s intrusion into his affairs, but he had no personal history with them.

With most angels, anyway.

Rooooooowwaaaaarrgh!

Semyaz threw back his head and bellowed, a terrible, frustrated, agonized sound in the attic. He raised child-Adrian over his head, as if he was going to smash the boy to the floor—

but Ade wasn’t a child anymore, and he wasn’t Adrian, he was Jim—

and Jim the rock and roll singer punched both his fists into Semyaz’s neck, just behind the ear on each side.

Semyaz grunted and staggered back. Jim swung his legs up against the ceiling and kicked off, throwing himself down into Semyaz like a hammer.

***

Chapter Eight

CRAAACKKK!

Wind and rain blasted Adrian in the face. The suddenness of it caught him by surprise, and it took him a moment to realize where it came from—a chunk of the attic’s roof and sloped wall had torn away, leaving a gaping hole. Beyond were darkness and water, and strange lights like something out of deep space in
Star Trek
.

Jim piled into Semyaz and they collapsed to the floor in a rolling tangle of elbows that bounced and headed in Adrian’s direction, fists pummeling and feet flailing.

Adrian tightened his grip on the tawny eye and danced out of the way. “The roof!” he yelled. His words were snatched away by the storm and he wasn’t sure anyone had heard him, so he yelled louder, “GET ONTO THE ROOF!”

His friends weren’t in jammies anymore, but Adrian’s view of his ka-umbilical cord had not reappeared—nor had Elaine’s chains. He needed to see the cord and be able to tap into its power again if he was going to get them all out of there, but he didn’t want to put the eye into his head too early. He’d wait until the last possible second this time.

He skittered aside again as Jim and Semyaz rolled back his direction—

and something slammed him from behind.

“Oooomph!” Adrian hit the floor of the attic, hands out in front of him—

and lost his grip on the eyeball.

He groped after it, missed, watched it roll away from him, felt fingers knotting themselves into his short hair, saw the eyeball fall down through the open hatch of the pull-down stairs—

wham!

His face cracked against the floor. For a slab of warm meat, it was surprisingly solid, and Adrian hurt.

“You had your chance,” his uncle told him. Adrian felt a knee between his shoulder blades, pinning his chest to the floor, and he wiggled to try to escape.

He failed.

Wham!
His face slammed into the floor again. Darkness slithered all around him like a jar of snakes. He saw Elaine Canning’s hoop skirts, slick and shining from the rain and glowing red and green from the psychedelic lights, flash past him. She kicked Semyaz in the head, and then Jim punched the Fallen’s eye.

Good for them, Adrian thought, a little hazily. Fighting to the end.

“Weakling.”

The fingers in his hair pulled his head back again, and Adrian prepared for the impact. Maybe this would be the blow that finally did it, he thought. He couldn’t possibly hurt any more than he did, and it would just be like falling asleep. He’d passed out a thousand times, thousands of times, and the thought of losing consciousness held no terrors for him.

Though if he was going to go like this, he kind of wished he’d eaten a T-bone steak first. And a milkshake.

And wouldn’t his losing mean that his uncle had won?

Adrian jammed his forearm under his face.

Thud!

His arm softened the blow. The collision of his head with the crook of his own elbow, together with the image of his uncle grinning triumphantly as he died, snapped Adrian’s thoughts into clear focus.

“You were never strong enough to follow the way of the wizard,” his uncle snarled softly above and behind him. “I should have seen that from the start.”

He pulled back Adrian’s head again.

Adrian rolled sideways, hard. His uncle cursed and slipped off, bouncing to the floor in a
swish
of silk and soft leather. Adrian punched his uncle as hard as he could with the knuckles of his left hand, right in his astonished expression. Backhanded and off-balance as the blow was, it couldn’t have hurt very much, but it would do; his uncle fell back and let go, a trickle of blood showing at the corner of his mouth.

Adrian threw himself forward and into the hole in the floor.

He didn’t need to beat up or kill his uncle. But without the tawny eye, he had no idea how he could possibly escape.

He sucked air into his lungs as he dove, and nearly spat it all back out again when he hit the water. It was like diving into ice, a thousand needles poked him everywhere in his body at the same moment and he felt like the water was flaying off his skin.

He opened his eyes.

The house was gone. There was no hallway, no wardrobe, no bathroom, no windows, no banisters, no staircase, no walls or ceiling. There was a bottomless well of cold, wet darkness. Down beneath him, lights flashed like explosions in the deep, sending up bright colored beams and bubbles of gray smoke. Between him and the lights, monsters drifted back and forth, big scaly leviathans of the deep, with glowing escae before them and misshapen heads and limbs.

Above the monsters, but slowly drifting down, sank the tawny eye.

Adrian spun himself in the water, wishing he were more of a swimmer, and scissor-kicked to move downward. He reached out a hand, almost far enough to close his fingers around the eyeball, kicked again—

whumph!

Adrian squeezed half the air in his lungs out his nostrils as something piled into his back, hard. He closed his fist and felt the meaty orb of the eye pop out between his fingers and drift away. Hands clawed at his back as he spun around, battering away fingers with his elbows and punching with his forearms at an angry face glowing green in the subaquatic light.

“You could have been great!” his uncle roared, and wrapped his fingers around Adrian’s throat.

Huh? How was his uncle talking?

Adrian lost a little more air and struggled to fight back. He brought his knees up between the two of them, managing to get one of them against his uncle’s chest. He pushed, and his uncle’s sharp fingernails scratched his throat as they were knocked free of their grip.

Adrian turned, trying to find the eye. He could firebolt his uncle and end it once and for all. Or could he? Would Vulcan’s Kiss work at all when submerged, he wondered? The water was heavy as well as cold, squeezing him in a death-grip like a python made entirely of ice.

He saw the eye and stretched out his hand for it.

“You won’t get me a second time!” his uncle roared. He grabbed Adrian with long fingers, sharp with razor-like nails and more wolf-like every second. Adrian’s suit tore under the pressure. It ripped away from his shivering body in great handfuls.

Adrian buffeted his uncle in the face, rocking the older man’s body but not knocking him very far. How on earth was his uncle talking underwater? Adrian’s lungs screamed at him for mercy, but he had none to give. He reached out for the eye again, and his uncle grabbed his throat once more.

“It’s not so easy when I’m awake, is it?” his uncle snarled, his face inches from Adrian’s own in the green shadowy soup. The darkness of inviting unconsciousness puddled at the edges of Adrian’s vision like warm, sweet maple syrup, and he didn’t know if it was his narcolepsy or imminent suffocation that threatened to take him away. At this point, it didn’t matter.

His uncle dragged Adrian closer, jaws gaping wide to reveal long teeth that glinted yellow-green in the flashing lights at the bottom of Adrian’s dream-ocean.

Adrian’s uncle could change shape. He could survive a firebolt, be in two places at once. He could even breathe underwater.

It wasn’t fair. Adrian didn’t even have his own ka, he was crippled, and his nemesis was some kind of superman.

Something clicked deep inside Adrian’s brain as he felt unconsciousness taking him. Hoping it was an epiphany, he struggled to focus on it. His uncle didn’t have to play the normal rules of reality … neither did the house. The house was a person, what person was it?

Was the house his uncle?

That made no sense. His uncle was dead.

Adrian stirred, batting aside a hand at his throat and jamming his fingers into his uncle’s mouth. His uncle bit down, and Adrian screamed wordlessly in a column of air bubbles. The pain woke him up, at least for the moment.

Was the house him, Adrian?

That had a terrible, sick logic to it, and a hint of something that felt like the truth. Adrian had trapped himself and his friends—and their enemies—inside his own shadow, which took the form of a house that was the same as Adrian’s own flesh. And his uncle was so flexible and fast and so impervious to the logic of physical space because his uncle was a creature of Adrian’s shadow.

No, he realized. His uncle
was
his shadow, just like the house was.

He looked again at his uncle’s face and found himself staring into his own eyes. Shadow-Adrian grinned mercilessly and opened his mouth to bite.

You’re not real, Adrian thought.

The jaws clamped into his flesh and he thrashed, the water warming with the admixture of his own blood.

That wasn’t right, Adrian realized. His shadow was real.

You’re me, he corrected himself.

You’re me, and you can’t really hurt me unless I let you.

And I won’t let you.

No, he told himself.

And suddenly, his uncle was gone.

Adrian hung stunned in the water, unsure of which direction was even up, for several long seconds. Through the warm, milky cloud of his own blood, he spotted the flashing lights again and realized that he was floating head-down.

His lungs still ached.

And there was the tawny eye, floating just out of reach. He kicked downward, reached out, and closed his hand around it.

The eye felt reassuringly material in his clenched fist.

But that was silly, of course. The eye might be something real, but it, too, was a manifestation of something in Adrian’s own shadow. The tawny eye wasn’t the Eye of Agamotto.

Whatever it was, though, it worked.

Adrian kicked and thrashed with his arms to right himself again, and looked up. He felt like he’d been fighting and sinking for eons, but a dark shadow above him, with a rectangular sliver of light in the middle of it, looked like it must be the floor of the attic—as if that made any sense—and it was almost within reach.

He clawed towards the light.

A face met him just below the doorway, a slit-nostrilled, fang-mouthed face, flat as a dinner plate and sloping backward to a tiny forehead. A jutting lower jaw trembled, pointing teeth like sabers at Adrian. Behind the face, a long body like a shark’s or a whale’s stretched out into the murk.

Adrian met the monster’s gaze.

It opened its mouth.

“Piss off!” Adrian snapped, and then kicked up and into the attic past the puzzled, hesitating fish.

He should have been gasping for air when he broke through the jaw-pull-down door, but he wasn’t. He hurt all over, though, and he was freezing.

“Adrian!” he heard Mike shout, and then the big bass player and Elaine Canning in her hoop skirt and big sleeves, plastered to her forearms by the cold water, grabbed Adrian by his collar and shoulders and dragged him out.

He was careful to pull his feet away from the edge, just in case the fish changed its mind.

“Adrian, how do we get out of here?” Mike asked.

“Is the moment come to fly?” Elaine added.

Rain and wind pelted his body and Adrian struggled up onto all fours. The attic roof was entirely gone and the attic floor floated on a turbulent, choppy sea like a raft of meat. Eddie, Twitch, and Jim battled the three Fallen, but with Semyaz’s arms no longer occupied, they were being beaten back. Eddie took punch after punch to his shoulders and side from one of the angels, and especially to the raw and bloody place on his arm where Uncle-wolf had gnawed on the guitarist. Twitch could do little more than dodge the onslaught of attacks that came her way, slapping ineffectively back with empty hands. Only Jim had the strength and athleticism to get any punches in, hammering forward with fists and elbows, and occasionally throwing up a sharp knee. Even he was looking haggard.

“Yeah,” Adrian agreed. “It’s time to fly.”

“Though what we do when we get back to the club is anyone’s guess,” Mike muttered. “Carajo, over there these guys are twenty feet tall.”

“Yeah,” Adrian said, reluctantly bringing the tawny eye up to his face, “but over there we aren’t surrounded by a sea of … whatever. So we get out of here, and we run like hell.” A cold wave sloshed over him as he spoke, like punctuation.

Mike nodded.

“He who fights and runs away,” Adrian said. It was a dumb saying, since he who fought and ran away more than likely just kept on running. His limbs felt like cold lead. “Though I’m sure you’ve heard that before, and don’t give a rat’s ass.”

“Right now,” Mike grinned, “I give every rat’s ass I have.”

Come on, Adrian told himself. This is all just in your head, and none of it can hurt you. He shoved the tawny eye into his eye socket. And screamed—

“Aaaagh!”—

and fell to the ground, clutching his head. Pain lanced him like bullets, his head forced the eye back out, and he bled. This isn’t real, he told himself. It isn’t physical. I don’t have this much blood in my body. How can I still be bleeding, how can this even hurt me at all?

“Huevos,” Mike muttered.

“What aid do you require, sorcerer?” Elaine leaned over him.

“That’s it,” Adrian laughed weakly, wiping blood from his face and trying to stand. “I need another sorcerer.”

“Michael,” she said to the bass player.

“Mike,” he said. “Well, anything but Mikey … Michael’s fine.”

She ignored him. “We have to free James.”

James? “Jim?” Adrian asked. A flurry of blinking and a torrent of tears began to clear his eye.

“Follow me!” Elaine Canning turned and charged into the fight.

Shaking his head, Mike lumbered after her.

Adrian stared. The seventeenth-century woman hustled right past Jim and dove at the angel he fought. The angel tried to step sideways and ran right into Mike’s tackle, and between the two of them they dragged the white, fist-throwing personage to the ground.

Adrian managed to get one foot under him and rise nearly to standing while Jim hauled off, kicked the fallen angel hard in the stomach, and then grabbed Adrian’s elbow and helped him stand all the way upright.

“You look like hell,” Adrian said, and Jim only laughed.

“We’re in your shadow,” he answered. “Can you make the Fallen weaker, or trap them?”

“I don’t really have control,” Adrian told the singer, “but I think I can get us out.”