by D. J. Butler
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.
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.