Devil Sent the Rain

by D. J. Butler

  “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.”

  “What do you need?”

  Adrian hesitated. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “With this eye in, I can see a line of energy running from me up into the sky. I think I can follow it and get us out, but the eye won’t stay in my head anymore.” He held the eye in his palm to show Jim.

  “That’s a weird damn sentence,” Jim said.

  “It’s a weird damn experience.”

  “Is that the Third Eye?”

  Adrian shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe an … analog of it, or something? We’re in my shadow here, so it’s a version of some real thing.”

  “Affected by your experience and perceptions.”

  “Yeah.” Adrian held the eye up and Jim took it from him. “Elaine seems to think you know some magic.”

  Jim pressed the tawny eye to his own socket. Strange as it was to push the thing into his own eye, it was stranger still to watch Jim’s eye take the object. The singer’s long-lashed eyelids slid forward like the two lips of a mouth and wrapped themselves around the bloody, squashed orb, sucking it in. Jim reeled back, a little unsteady, clenching his eyes shut.

  Adrian looked nervously past the singer at the rest of the band. Twitch was down on the ground and Eddie stood over the drummer, fists up defiantly as two Fallen swung at him. He couldn’t even block the punches now, but just shrugged into them, trying not to get knocked out or take the blows directly on his biggest wounds. The third Fallen stood, holding Mike by the throat and shaking him like a doll. Elaine Canning clung to his shoulders, biting and screaming, but it wasn’t clear she was doing any damage.

  Hurry, Adrian thought.

  Jim straightened and his eyes opened. One was silver and the other was tawny.

  “She’s wrong,” he said. “I’m no wizard. But I’ll do what I can.”

  “Do you have the umbilical cord?” Adrian asked him.

  Jim shook his head. “You do. And it doesn’t come from your belly button, it comes out of your mouth.”

  Of course. “It’s the string,” he realized out loud. “The string I swallowed as a conduit to the ka-energy of the ward I was trying to hack into.”

  “So you can follow it back out.” It wasn’t a statement. It might have been an order.

  “Yeah, I think so.” Adrian wasn’t as confident as he thought he sounded. “If I can see it or feel it.”

  “Here.” Jim grabbed Adrian’s hand and pressed it against his throat. Hand at his own Adam’s apple, Adrian could feel a soft, warm vibration, like a battery-powered plush toy giggling faintly for the ten thousandth time as its battery died.

  “Yeah,” Adrian agreed. “Get the others.”

  He started chanting. Chalk would be good, but he had none in his pockets. Fortunately, he had plenty of his own blood, and in streaky red lines he began tracing some basic wards on the fleshy floor around him.

  Eddie was on his knees when Jim hurled himself sideways into the angels attacking him. Adrian didn’t know if the whole Cyrano de Bergerac story was true—didn’t know what the story was with Elaine Canning, or how old Jim really was, or anything else—but the guy could fight. He spun horizontal like a log going down a river through the air. His boots kicked one angel in the face and with his hands he grabbed the long hair of the other and dragged it sideways with him into a muddle on the ground.

  “Go!” Jim shouted to Eddie.

  Eddie picked up Twitch and stumbled in Adrian’s direction. The fairy bled from numerous wounds in her body, and Eddie looked like he’d been chewed on by a pack of dogs. Beyond them, Jim kicked one of the angels out of the way and then drew the other back by its hair to punch it in the face—

  and paused.

  He squinted at the Fallen’s chest. He’s seen the chest-plate, Adrian thought.

  The third angel jumped Jim.

  “Mike!” Eddie shouted. The guitar player tossed Twitch to
Adrian’s feet in a crumpled heap and lurched to grab the bass player.

  Jim staggered sideways, punched in the temple, but Elaine Canning didn’t abandon the singer. She lunged into the fray, grabbing the third angel’s ankle and dragging it to the ground. Jim kicked that Fallen in the shoulder, flipping it over on its back and staring at its chest for a moment before one of the others grabbed him around the knees.

  “Go!” he yelled, falling to the ground.

  Adrian sucked in the cold wet air of the storm and tried not to think about even the possibility of passing out. He felt the warm vibration at his throat, visualizing it as the anchored end of the golden cord running into the sky, out of his belly and into the ward in the restaurant of the Silver Eel. He felt ka-energy under his fingertips, and coursing through his being.

  “Per Wepwawet Mercuriumque semitam sequitor,” he chanted, willing himself up the cord and into the Kansas City club.

  “I love you!” he thought he heard Jim say.

  He gritted his teeth, stayed awake, and passed from one storm into another.

  ***

  Chapter Nine

  SPLASH!

  Adrian hit the water, deep as his waist, choking. Around him he heard more splashing, thuds and muffled curses. His body was too numb to feel the cold, but on his face the filthy flow felt like ice water, and burned his skin. His hands tightened convulsively as he bumped into the hard floor, and he was a little reassured to realize that he held the Third Eye.

  Not the weird-dream meatball of the tawny eye, but the hard glass of his uncle’s monocle.

  Of Adrian’s monocle, dammit.

  He retched, gagged, and spit out the string running down his esophagus, then pushed up off the floor and arced out of the water, blowing grit and mud from his teeth like a porpoise emerging from a tank of sewage to spout out its blowhole. Around the rain- and river-blasted wreckage of the Silver Eel’s restaurant, he saw others doing the same—the band as well as the three Fallen—everyone regaining his balance in the howling wind and sideways rain of the storm.

  The dim and downward-pointing lights of the restaurant, even with a number of them shattered by the weather, were a relief from the shifting, psychedelic colors of attic-roof in Adrian’s shadow. Also, none of them looked like bugs or body parts, so that was a serious improvement.