Devil Sent the Rain (7 page)

Adrian grabbed Elaine Canning by her outstretched hand and dragged her up onto the roof with him. “Don’t let go,” he urged her. “It’s moving.” In New York, this would have been a shingled stretch of roof beneath a window opening into the upstairs hallway. Here … well, the building was covered in hair and twitching, and he hadn’t yet dared look at the spot where the window should be.

What was this place, and how had they got here? He remembered the wards on the Silver Eel in Kansas City, how he had tried to tap into them and failed. The wards had been a trap, set by the Fallen. The Fallen had seized Jim. Adrian remembered the frantic moments of spellcasting—it had seemed to him that his shadow, the wolf-shaped uncle of his nightmares, had held Jim in his grip, rather than Semyaz the Fallen.

Maybe Adrian hadn’t
failed
, it occurred to him. Maybe he had bungled it
spectacularly
. Maybe he had reshaped the wards of restraining and had drawn them all down into his shadow.

It was bizarre, but it held together with a certain logic, in the dream-like analysis of sympathetic magic. Adrian had redrawn the lines of the trap, so that now they were all stuck inside Adrian.

So what had happened to Jim?

Or maybe Adrian had drawn his own shadow up into the club, and made the old warehouse look like the inside of his own psyche.

Was there a difference? He wasn’t sure. In the one case, they might all be running around in the Silver Eel, only not seeing it. In the other, maybe they were all lying face down on the club floor and drowning in flood water.

But, in either case, who was Elaine Canning? Where had she come from? And what was her connection with Jim?

It probably didn’t matter, anyway. Whatever the exact nature of the trap they were in, the only way out seemed to be the way up, and Adrian’s connection to the golden cord. Could he cast a spell to raise them all out of this trap now? It would be easier if he could touch the rest of the band.

He stretched himself out flat and looked back into the abyss. Mike was the slowest, but had had a head start on the others, and as Adrian looked, he reached the edge and started dragging himself over it. Something golden flashed on his chest, and he and Adrian both shivered from the rain. The others were ascending fast, but Eddie had started from below the exit and had just risen above it when their pursuers emerged.

The sphincter spat out light, and then a burning being.

Adrian nearly jumped back in fright. He’d expected something with a bull’s head, or a boar’s, but instead what crawled out of the passage, grabbing for Eddie’s ankles and narrowly missing, looked like an angel.

“Watch out!” he yelled. Angels could fly, and that would make them hard to fight, especially without guns.

Only the angel didn’t fly. It lunged, jumping upward, and when it narrowly missed Eddie, it buried its hands in the wall of hair and caught itself. Adrian shook his head in disbelief. The angel had no wings.

And then he realized what he was looking at. This was one of the Fallen, but detached from his body and ka. This wasn’t physical space, Adrian reminded himself. This was all … astral … spiritual … karmic … shadowy. A flicker of hope tickled the inside of his chest.

And then a second Fallen crawled from the sphincter. That seemed so appropriate that Adrian would have chuckled, if he hadn’t been frightened and off-balance.

“I have hoped for rescuers for centuries,” he heard Elaine Canning say beside him. “But now that I see the angels that are sent, I think I prefer my torments.”

“Good call,” Mike told her. “You wanna hold out for a better offer than
that.
”

Adrian felt a twinge of sympathy for the sphincter, imagining what it would feel like to have multiple people crawl through his own body. He burned with vague shame and reminded himself not to get distracted.

Twitch scrambled up to the ledge and threw herself over.

“What have you got, big boy?” she leered at him. “A bit of Vulcan’s Kiss at least, surely?”

“Better than that,” Adrian cheered himself on. “I’m getting us out of here, as soon as I can touch Eddie.” As he said it, he wondered if he was doing them any favors, or if getting them all out of his shadow just put them back into the power of the Fallen in the physical world. There, after all, they had a huge size advantage and could use sorcery. And Adrian had screwed this up before.

He wondered if he could somehow leave the Fallen behind.

“Come on, Eddie!” Mike shouted. “Kick that
pendejo
!”

The nearest Fallen on Eddie’s tail grabbed for him again, and Eddie took Mike’s tactical advice, slamming the heel of a combat boot into the former angel’s shining forehead. The Fallen grunted and slipped, sliding down several feet.

“Everyone touch my body somewhere,” Adrian told his friends on the shelf with him, and felt hands anchor onto his back and legs. He willed himself not to be uncomfortable with the fact that people were crowding around and touching him, and mostly succeeded.

What if he didn’t have the tawny eye in his head? Adrian thought, feeling the eye’s presence like a painful, invasive foreign body. Like a kidney stone in the urethra of his skull. Eddie would appear to have bare feet, then. Would it affect how hard he kicked?

If they were all inside Adrian’s shadow, his perception might be
defining
the world for
all of them
, and not just providing the lens through which he himself saw things.

He batted away the thought as abstract and a detour. They needed to get out of this place. He reached out and started muttering incantations.

“Grab the wizard’s hand!” Twitch called down to Eddie.

Adrian looked Eddie in the eye and Eddie stared back, concentrating on covering the last feet to Adrian, throwing himself up at a reckless pace, hand over hand and foot over foot. Dangling from Eddie’s chest and bouncing around inside the hairs carpeting the wall, Adrian again noticed a tag. It was like a dog tag, only the size of a tea saucer and golden. They all had them, he realized. He hadn’t noticed them in the climb because they’d all been covered in the vine-like growth of hair.

The plate bore Eddie’s true name.

Adrian didn’t need that, but suddenly he wondered about the Fallen. The Fallen had true names, didn’t they?

He tore his eyes away from Eddie. The three Fallen dragged themselves up the side of the wall, moving as fast as Eddie moved and maybe even a little bit faster. In New York, this wall had been twelve feet tall, if that. Here it seemed to be thirty, but that was no comfort. They were all bearing down—bearing
up
—on Adrian with alarming speed.

Gold saucers bounced on the chests of the Fallen, too.

Adrian’s heart leaped to attention. If he could see those names, he could end this, right here and now. Knowing the true names of his enemies and being the only one—he hoped—with access to ka-power should give him the ability to command them, bend them to his will. Maybe he could force them to help him and the band escape. Or he could escape, forcing them to stay behind. Their ba-less bodies in the physical world would be inert and useless. The band could collect their gear, walk past the Fallen like so many tons of sleeping elephant, and hail a cab.

Okay, a cab wasn’t quite their style. But they could steal a car.

“Semyaz!” Adrian yelled, trying to get the Fallen’s attention. The two former angels kept climbing and ignored him. “Yamayol!” he tried again, and this time one of them looked up.

Adrian got a glimpse of the Fallen’s name-plate and his heart sank. There was writing on it, all right, but it was in one of the Primals. Infernal, probably, if Adrian had to guess. Adrian had been born after the Tower of Babel and the Confusion of the Tongues—a long time after—and he could recognize Infernal, but he couldn’t read it. Much less speak it out loud, which is what he’d have to do.

So much for that hope. Adrian focused on the spell he was weaving. He didn’t know exactly what he was doing, so he improvised. He started with incantations he used in setting wards of obfuscation and he reversed them, imagining them as spells of pathfinding, and envisioning the golden umbilical cord as a path.

A path that went straight up into the sky.

He tried to remember the wards inside the Silver Eel’s restaurant, shaping his incantations to leave them intact, but let him and his friends—those touching him—pass through.

Without warning, the third Fallen emerged from the sphincter, nearly leaping out, the portal was so worn now. Maybe that one was Semyaz, Adrian thought, and then he saw that the last of the Fallen carried a prisoner in his arms.

It was Jim.

He was as tall and heroic-looking as ever, with his sculpted face and long hair, and he wore his prairie shirt, jeans and rider’s boots with flair. But Semyaz carried him tucked under one arm easily, like a small child. Jim snapped his head back and forth, but to no effect. Tendrils of darkness wrapped around his chest like chains, pinning him and leaving him unable to free himself. Adrian felt his chest constrict and his breathing become shallow.

Jim was trapped. Adrian had reshaped the wards of restraint and imprisonment, and in this twisted house of flesh that was Adrian’s shadow, he had trapped Jim in the role of dream-Ade, the helpless little boy.

Holy crap.

Eddie lurched forward, his hand slapping into Adrian’s. “Go!” the guitar player yelled. He didn’t see Jim.

Adrian didn’t want to leave Jim, but he didn’t know how to save him, either. It didn’t matter—at this point, his body and mind marched down the path he had already set for them, and it was too late to make them turn.

He felt like he was watching his own lips mumble from the outside, and he heard his own voice as if from far away. “
Per Wepwawet Mercuriumque semitam sequitor,
” the far-away-Adrian said, just as Adrian had planned.

And then far-away-Adrian disappeared, and so did everything else.

***

Chapter Seven

Wet flesh rasped his face, like the tongue of a dog. Like the tongue of a dog so big that Adrian could fit inside its mouth. Adrian tasted bile in the back of his throat.

He opened his eyes. They hurt like needles had been shoved into both of them, but he saw just fine. He was in the long upstairs hallway of the house. Not the real one, the horrible dream-shadow house made of body parts. He saw Mike’s and Eddie’s backs as they rammed the wardrobe up against the hallway’s lone window. The wardrobe snarled and snapped at them, but they kept out of reach of its grinding jaws.

They were wearing jammies.

“Son of a bitch,” he groaned. “It didn’t work.”

“Oh, it worked just fine,” he heard Twitch say. Swiveling his head, he found the fairy, standing at the top of the stairs and looking down them with a sturdy meat club in her hands. It might be the shower curtain rod, he thought idly. “You got to miss the nasty part. Again. Well done, Adrian.”

Wham!

Eddie and Mike slammed the wardrobe against the wall again. White light shone around the edges, and Adrian thought he saw white fingers slammed under the woody flesh.

Wararargh!
chomped the wardrobe, throwing a rain of warm spittle on all of them.

“Adrian!” Eddie barked. He dug his heels into the moist red floor and threw his shoulder into the wardrobe. “A fireball’d be nice about now!”

Adrian patted around on the floor and found the tawny eye. He picked it up and hesitated.

“That’s going to smart,” Twitch warned him.

“I look that good, huh?” He tried a devil-may-care grin.

“Even better,” the fairy said. “You’re bleeding out both eyes.”

“Nothing ventured,” Adrian bluffed. “You know.”

He touched his own face. He felt like tenderized steak all over so he hadn’t noticed, but Twitch was right. He had blood under both eyes, as well as on his upper lip and trickling down his neck. “Ugh,” he groaned.

Wham!

Eddie tumbled to the ground as the Fallen on the other side of the wardrobe hammered against it. Mike jammed his fists into the red rubbery walls of the window well and leaned back hard. Elaine Canning, again looking like Mouser in rose-spotted pajamas, jumped forward to throw herself against the wardrobe with the bass player.

“Mierda!”

Adrian pushed the tawny eye into his eye socket. The searing pain was so intense and so immediate that his whole body contracted in a spasm, and the eye promptly plopped back out again. It stared at him from a puddle of wet fluid on the floor, smeared in guilty, inadequate blood.

Adrian shuddered, almost crying. “I can’t do it!”

He grabbed the eye and stood, and his lungs filled instantly with smoke. From the floor he hadn’t noticed it, but colored fumes billowed up the stairwell. They stank of sulfur, tobacco smoke, and rotting flesh. The sudden influx burned his lungs and he staggered against the sagging wall, knocking his head against the hanging uvula-light in the process. It swung back and forth, sending all the room’s shadows dancing in circles.

“Uh oh,” Twitch warned them all. “Stairs.”

“Adrian!” Eddie yelled again, and jumped to the top of the staircase. “
Now
would be good!”

Adrian nodded. Eddie was right; now would be very good indeed. He leaned both shoulder blades against the spongy, resilient wall, ignoring the trickles of warm water that snaked down his back, and braced himself.

To hell with the firebolt. To hell with trying to bar the path to the Fallen. He needed to get them all back to Kansas City, and pronto. They’d have to come back for Jim, if they could. And if they couldn’t, well, Jim’s body had the clipping of Azazel’s hoof in Kansas City. Adrian coughed, crouched to get down into cleaner air, took a deep breath and jammed the tawny eye over his own eyeball.

He felt blood spurt out onto his face and winced. A
tun-tun-tun-tun-tun
machine gun pulsing exploded inside his head and his vision blurred and skewed sideways. Adrian grabbed his temples and dropped onto his knees and elbows.

“Aaagh!” his mouth filled with hot fluid and he coughed and spat as much of it as he could onto the floor. He forced his eyes open and found himself staring into a puddle of yellow-gray slime, like bile, or worse.

But he could see the umbilical cord again. “Touch me!” he gasped to the others, trying to wind up the incantations again that he had begun on the ledge of hair outside.

“You’ve got to be joking!” Eddie, again in his sleeveless jacket and combat boots, kicked and punched at one of the Fallen, who tried to emerge from the stairwell. Adrian saw the angel’s name-plate and silently cursed his inability to read the Primals. That was stupid and pointless of course—Adrian would never be able to read the Primals, and it wasn’t his fault. Still, the sense of powerlessness and frustration almost overwhelmed him.

The white angel grabbed for Eddie’s jacket, but Twitch threw herself in the way, slamming aside long-fingered, lightning-colored hands with her improvised club.

“We’re busy!” Mike grunted.

An increase in the white glow from the lower story told Adrian where the third Fallen was. He raised his arms and opened himself to channel ka-energy through the umbilical cord.

“
Per Wepwawet Mercuriumque semitam
—”

With a flash of pain that Adrian saw as much as felt, the eye popped out of his head.

Adrian screamed and dropped to the floor.

His breath tightened and his vision turned black. He fell into a dark, dark pit—

“There must be another way out, yes?”

The voice belonged to Mouser. She knelt over Adrian, dragging him away from sleep. Adrian’s spine tingled with discomfort from her being so close, but it helped that she was wearing jammies. It made her look like a big kid, and not a woman.

“Murmph.” Adrian spat bile from his mouth and rummaged around until he found the tawny eye again. It looked dented and bruised, a little knocked out of shape from being inside his eye. He heard
thuds
and cursing that told him that his friends were fighting, though he couldn’t see it.

“I do not believe you are devils,” Elaine Canning said.

“Handsome is,” Adrian agreed, and threw up a little more.

“But if we are to flee, we must flee now.”

Adrian nodded. His mouth was sour with fluids of his stomach, and as he spat to clear it he pointed at the ceiling. “There’s an attic,” he said. “And an exit to the roof.”

“And then what?” she asked. “We fly away?”

“More or less.” Only Adrian didn’t know whether he could do it. He felt like he had a harpoon through every opening in his head, which throbbed and shook and oscillated around him like a satellite in orbit. Even in the best of circumstances, he wasn’t sure his spell would work—he didn’t really know what the umbilical cord was or where it went.

Elaine Canning nodded. “You open the door, and I’ll free the others.”

“You have some weapon I don’t know about?”

“I have a plan,” she said, standing. “I would trade it for a good horse pistol, loaded and primed.”

Adrian snorted. “Wouldn’t we all, sister?”

He lurched to his feet and staggered down the hall.

The trapdoor in the ceiling was easy enough to find. He’d begun this bizarre journey climbing down out of the attic through the pull-down stairs that looked like a jaw, but somehow, they looked much worse when he stood below them. More monstrous, more disgusting, bigger. A loose lip dangled to expose yellow teeth the size of fists and permit a trickle of house-slobber to splatter down on him.

Adrian shook his head and tried not to throw up.

He looked back down the hall. Eddie and Twitch hammered back and forth with one of the Fallen now, and Elaine Canning stood above them, holding something in her hand that might have been a brick or a raw steak. Mike slid slowly away from the window, pushed by the angel beyond it.

The Fallen looked different, not seen through the tawny eye.

They looked like his uncle, only angelic. Down to the glowing white smoking jacket. It all began to make sense to Adrian. He had relocated the Fallens’ trap into his own shadow. They were trapped by it as well as the band, now, and all of them were separated from their kas, and Adrian’s out-of-control spell had put the Fallen into the role of his dream-uncle, just as it had put Jim into the role of his dream-self.

Knowing what had happened didn’t give Adrian any kind of clue what to do about the mess he’d made.

He had to jump twice—he was broken and tired—but he sank his fingers into the juicy, flaccid lower lip of the door into the attic and grabbed hold. Then his weight opened the door, dropping the jaw so that a staircase the color of old ivory could rattle slowly down and into place.

“Ready!” he shouted, but then gasped.

He felt a cold chill down his spine, and wheeled to look behind him.

There was nothing there, only lopsided, irregular doors, staring blankly. They led in New York to rooms with unfinished floors, rooms full of boxes and uninteresting books, rooms that smelled of mothballs and formaldehyde.

But here? Adrian had no idea.

He groped for his taser reflexively, but caught himself before his hand got to where the stunner should be.

“Now!” Elaine Canning yelled.

Adrian spun in time to see the seventeenth-century damned woman hurl her brick of mortar-flesh. The Fallen, struggling with two attackers at the top of the stairs as its comrade reached past to land occasional long-armed licks of its own, ducked—

but not fast enough.

Whack!

The angel took the brick in the face and fell back down with a
splash
.

“Yes!” Without meaning to, Adrian pumped his fist in the air.

He looked into the stairwell and got a clear view of the two Fallen, tangled together and rolling in water that was nearly up to the level of the hallway floor. Neither held Jim, so that probably made them Yamayol and Ezeq’el, with Semyaz banging at the window.

Unless they’d gone ahead and tossed Jim into the void outside.

Could they do that, even if they wanted to? Or would Adrian’s spell, that put Jim into his own nightmare role, protect Jim from that horror as it subjected him to others? Magic, Adrian snorted. It might not be an art, but it sure wasn’t a science.

Elaine Canning came sprinting up the hall in his direction, jammies flapping heavily in the humid air. Twitch followed, and then Eddie yanked Mike away from the window and dragged the big bassist with him to bring up the rear.

WHAM!

The wardrobe slammed forward to the floor, and over his friends’ heads, Adrian saw tattered flaps of a membrane, halfway between a punctured eardrum and a torn fortuneteller’s curtain. The membrane glowed pink where it blocked his vision, and through the big, flapping, ragged tear in the center he saw an intense white light, accented slightly with tendrils of darkness, like ivy growing up a column. Wind and water rushed in through the suddenly open window.

Cold water spilled up out of the stairway, flooding the hall floor like an overflowing toilet. The Fallen sloshed and flailed at the banister, trying to drag themselves out of the icy pool.

“Go!” Eddie shouted.

Adrian stopped staring and scrambled up the jaw-stairs. The steps were hard and sharp under his bare feet, and the teeth were slick and difficult to get a good grip on. His blood quickly mingled with the brook of slobber that lubricated the ascent, and he banged both his knees and the palms of his hands. The tongue lying in the middle of the jaw was rough and he pawed at it like a dog running on all fours; his hands found good traction in the squashy pink tissue and he threw himself as far as he could into the attic.

He landed, gasping, on the warm attic floor. Dim light, flashing in various colors, trickled through trembling window-membranes.

The room was dark and close. He heard pounding feet behind him, almost as loud as the pounding rain on the roof overhead, and guessed that the others followed, but he couldn’t make his body turn to see or help them. His field of vision darkened and narrowed, his breath tightened, his heart rattled in his brainpan.

You cannot fall asleep now, he ordered himself. Not now.

And then he realized that he wasn’t alone.

Soft brown leather house slippers and black silk trousers told him whom he was looking at even through his tiny, straining vision. Adrian coughed and spat on the floor.

He heard footsteps behind him, but they faltered.

“You stole something from me,” Uncle-wolf said.

Adrian forced himself to lift his head. His vision cleared a bit, and he could see the smear of blood his own face left on the floor.

“You stole
everything
from me,” he said.

Uncle-wolf clicked his tongue and made a sound like purring. “My books,” he growled. “My time and tutelage. My patience.”

“My freedom,” Adrian shot back. He’d never talked to his uncle this way in real life, he’d never really resisted at all. He’d only fought back in secret, stealing spells and teaching them to himself, until the night that he snuck into his uncle’s bedroom and incinerated him and his bed in a blazing Vulcan’s Kiss.

“The Third Eye,” Uncle-wolf said. There was an impatient strain in his voice now, and Adrian forced himself to look up. The cartoonish wolf’s head sneered angrily at him, tongue dangling only just barely out of his mouth. As Adrian looked at him, the tongue extended a little further. “You took the Third Eye. Give it back.”

“You took my innocence!” Adrian snapped.

Crash!
 

The floor shook. He heard creaking noises and felt the floor of the attic yaw to one side like the deck of a ship in a storm.

“Adrian!” Eddie shouted.

Adrian lunged up onto his knees and then to his feet. He had to hop to keep his balance, but he managed to stay upright. The wolf towered enormously over him, impossibly so since he seemed taller than the ceiling was high, and jabbed an accusing finger in his direction. Adrian scooted sideways to get out of the way of the blaming finger, winding one hundred eighty degrees around his uncle, and saw the rest of the band.