Devil Sent the Rain

by D. J. Butler

  No more silence! Adrian screamed inside, but his dream-self was more hesitant. No more cooperation!

  “I think I can do that one. C-can we talk about wards of shielding?” he suggested.

  His uncle’s study was red-ribbed and fleshy, like the inside of a whale. His uncle sat at his desk. Adrian the dreamer knew that if you pulled the top left-hand drawer all the way out and reached under the desk, you could find a small hidden shelf. That was where his uncle kept the Eye, and Adrian knew it because in real life, years ago, he had found the Eye and stolen it. Dream-Adrian didn’t know anything about it.

  Dream-Adrian was trapped.

  Books leered wetly at Adrian from sagging shelves on the walls, flapping their covers open and shut suggestively and chanting in a collective whisper.

  Silence, silence, just between us!

  “Of course we can.” The wolf smiled, tongue bouncing on his chest.

  “Now?” Dream-Adrian’s heart hammered so loud it almost drowned out the books.

  “In a bit.”

  “What about some combat magic?”

  The wolf’s eyebrows launched off his forehead in skeptical mockery. “Fireballs and death touches, you mean?”

  Dream-Adrian nodded. Run away! Adrian screamed. This wasn’t exactly a memory, it wasn’t a particular scene through which he had ever lived, but it was the epitome of a thousand scenes from his childhood, and he knew how it had to end. “Or maybe something smaller. Like a stunning spell?”

  Uncle-wolf frowned, retracting his tongue slightly into his mouth. “Traditionally, masters don’t ever teach apprentices combat magic. Combat spells are things a wizard teaches himself, when he is a man of full powers and mature understanding.”

  “I didn’t know you only did things the traditional way.” Dream-Adrian’s jibe was so flat and understated, even Adrian couldn’t be sure it was really an attack. It was the most passive aggression possible, surrender with a joke so subtle it wasn’t even obviously a joke. Adrian cursed his own weakness and wished he could look away.

  Silence, silence, this is the way of the wizard!

  The wolf patted his knee and slid his wet, pink tongue out to its full length. “I can only do for you what has been done for me,” he purred, his voice low and husky.

  Dream-Adrian edged closer to the wolf, muscles in his lower back tightening. “Can you teach me everything?” he asked. No, run away! Adrian screamed, tears flowing down his cheeks even though they didn’t. “I want to be a great sorcerer, like my father. Even better than my father.”

  The wolf took Dream-Adrian by the wrist and drew him closer. “I know you miss your dad,” the wolf said. He smiled, but his tongue dangled so bright and long out of his mouth that it made the smile horrible to behold. “I’m your dad now. I’ll teach you everything you need to know to be a wizard. Then you can become like me.”

  “Will you?”

  No!

  Uncle-wolf drew Dream-Adrian down and onto his lap. His tongue lay wet and heavy across Adrian’s back and neck. “Yes,” he promised. It’s a lie! “And I’ll teach you everything you need to know to be a man, too.”

  Silence, silence, who is there to believe you, anyway?

  * * *

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Adrian jerked awake, spluttering. His eyes felt red and puffy as if he’d been weeping, but they also stung from the splash of alcohol he’d just taken in the face. The vaporous sting of it filled his nostrils.

  “Son of a bitch!” he spat.

  “If you say so,” Twitch agreed amiably. “Now get up.”

  She was in her man form, which was a bit physically stronger than her woman shape, and she pushed a shoulder under his arm as he dragged himself up the bar to his feet. He was splattered with green goo and had to kick aside the bodies of two six-limbed monsters to get up. When he did manage to clear his eyes and stand, he found Mouser, holding his MAC-11 with a defiant stare in her eyes.

  Adrian heard howling wind, pounding rain, demons squealing, and guns going off, but the space around the bar was the eye of the storm. He looked down at the second monster corpse and saw that its head had been sawn clean off by a string of bullets.

  “Good job,” he said.

  Mouser nodded.

  “Clip empty?”

  She shrugged.

  He wiped various kinds of moisture from his face and handed her the taser. “Take this, just in case. You’d be surprised what can get taken down by a good jolt from a taser.”

  “What about you?”

  “Don’t worry about our boy Adrian,” Twitch told the club gopher. “He’s a bottomless well of surprises.” The fairy slid up onto the bar and crouched there, ready to leap or fight, a wooden baton in each hand.

  Adrian snorted and pulled his candle stub from his pocket.

  “You’re going to fight with a candle?”

  He did his best nonchalant shrug. “It’s a very specialized style of kung fu. And I never learned tablet fighting, like you did.” He pointed at the mangled device, scratched, cracked and covered in slime, where it lay on the floor.

  She giggled, with a slight manic edge to her voice.

  “What’s the situation, Twitch?” Adrian asked. He shoved bullets into the spare Ingram clip as fast as he could manage, out of a rattling pants pocket.

  “They want Jim,” the fairy said, shaking a baton like a pointer.

  Eddie and Mike shuffled forward, shooting, and as a result, they took their fair share of attacks, but Twitch was right—the brunt of the assault hammered down on Jim with brutal, unrelenting force.

  The singer held his own, leaping onto tabletops to make great slashing attacks, and then when the monsters grabbed at his ankles, vaulting over their heads to ride their very backs, but he was slowing down, and there were dozens of them.

  “That suggests a plan,” Adrian mused. Over the shuffle and scrape of the combat, the pistol fire and the howling of the wind, he could barely hear his own words. “Here, take this.” He snapped the full clip into the MAC-11 and handed it back to Mouser, then began reloading the other.

  “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 the
ir 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!