Devil Sent the Rain (2 page)

He had the heavy feeling that he’d forgotten something, something that might turn out to be important, but he couldn’t figure out what it might be.

Maybe he was just missing his smartphone.

The stage was small; they always were, in the dives this band played in. Jim plucked his microphone from its stand and retreated into the shadows on the stage while the other players took their places. Twitch scooted onto the seat behind her minimalist drum kit and produced her drumming-and-fighting batons while Adrian sat behind his arsenal of sonic devices. With a touch in just the right spot, a door dropped open in a special compartment he had bolted onto the underside of his organ, revealing the stubby little Ingram MAC-11 inside. The subcompact submachine gun was his weapon of choice, when the lead began to fly—it only fired .380 ACP rounds, but it fired an awful lot of them, and it was small enough to hide on his instrument.

Just in case, he told himself.

The hall had a high ceiling and tall windows that struggled to hold back the wind and rain outside, which were starting to sound like a hurricane. Adrian took a moment to edge his volume knobs up. No self-respecting rock and roller could let himself be drowned out by mere
weather
.

Then, also just in case, he bit down on two sticks of nicotine gum.

He’d never been a smoker; he just really, really wanted to stay awake.

“Evening,” Eddie doused the polite and slightly high applause that scattered around the room. “We’re the Notarized Genuines.”

“Notorious!—” Adrian snapped, but it was too late—Twitch had already kicked into the tattoo that launched their opening song, “Kingdom Come.”

Eddie shrugged at Adrian, turned his back and staggered into the
A-C-D
chord pattern that made up most of the verse.

“Down on the corner stands a man with his back to the wall
,” Jim sang. He had a haunting voice, that out of sheer gravitas and charisma sounded like it had reverb in it, even when he talked to you face to face. Which he didn’t do often, since he kept his mouth shut other than when he sang, for fear of being overhead by his father, His Lowness Lucifer, High Prince of Hell, the former Messenger of Heaven Azazel.

Adrian played the modest right hand arpeggio that went with the verse, adding single bass notes with the thumb or ring finger of his left hand.

He leans on a streetlight he thinks is a tree.

He opens his tired fingers, lets the bottle fall.

To an invisible friend, he says hey, do you see?

Adrian added a full chord with the left hand, jumping big and powerful into the mix. This was how he liked his music, how he liked everything—Adrian overwhelming and dominating. Even Jim struggled to be heard over Adrian’s sound, and shot him a glare out of the corner of his eye that made Adrian back off just a notch.

The crowd must be drunker than he thought; their dancing was an erratic shuffle, and they bumped at each other like they were circling for a fight. Adrian shook his head and made sure he had the MAC-11 close to his hand if he needed it. He had the taser in his jacket pocket, too, repaired by hand as they’d cruised across the nothingness of Kansas, but he couldn’t be sure how much charge it had in it. And if he absolutely had to pull out the big ones, he had a candle stub and knew how to summon fire with it.

He was ready for any barroom brawl that might come his way.

He saw Mouser at the back of the room, talking to the big Swedish-looking bartender. She looked like she might be looking at him, so he nodded during the chorus.

Whoa, whoa, my kingdom’s come.

Whoa, whoa, my kingdom’s come.

My kingdom’s come.

By the end of the chorus, the crowd’s dancing had become really erratic, but as Adrian dropped away the left-hand power, they cooled down a bit. Not drunk, he decided. Maybe they were stoned, high on something that was twisting their perceptions. He’d done LSD himself, and mescaline, more than once on his climb to power. It hadn’t strengthened his ka, it hadn’t given him any great insights, and all that toxic stuff, not to mention the weird memories, piled hard and heavy into his shadow, much worse than steak or any carnal romp. It had taken him months of fasting and flushing to get it out of his system when he’d realized it was slowing him down and gone cold turkey. Something like that might be throwing the crowd off-kilter, he guessed, making their movements all herky-jerky.

Jim sang another verse.

“In a plywood hotel downtown lies a girl with no name.

“She’s got a twelve-year-old body and dry withered eyes.

“She pushes the breath through her lungs and the blood through her veins.

“She stares out a bullethole window at the darkening skies, and she says.”

Mouser and the big Swede seemed to be arguing now, and Adrian frowned a little, without losing track of where he was in the song. She was a cool enough kid, even if she couldn’t get her mind off sex, and she’d let him play with her toys, so it bugged him to see her picked on. If, he reminded himself, that was what he was seeing. Besides, it didn’t bother him all that much; he didn’t believe in liberty and justice for all, and if it turned out such a thing did exist, he wouldn’t want it. What Adrian Pew wanted was power.

He kicked his sound up for the chorus again, careful not to drown Jim out this time. Not that he was afraid of Jim, but he respected the guy, and he needed him. Jim was the one who was carrying Azazel’s hoof, taped to his belly, and he was the one who would connect them with Hell. Eddie did all the talking, but he was really just Aaron to Jim’s Moses.

Whoa, whoa, my kingdom’s come.

Whoa, whoa, my kingdom’s come.

My kingdom’s come.

The second chorus transitioned into the bridge and Adrian pulled out the stops, flooding the stage and the hall with the rotary tones of his Hammond. As the big
A
chord, seven notes strong including a low
A
played by Adrian’s foot, blasted out into the crowd, they stopped dancing.

Wrong reaction. Adrian frowned and piled on more notes as he climbed into the
C
.

The dancers straightened. It wasn’t a natural movement, they straightened with the stop-gap, spastic motions of a rictus smile, like some unseen power had jammed a rod up each dancer’s spine, turning them into grotesque puppets. People in the crowd who’d been sitting slammed their backs upright first, then lurched to their feet like the rod was extending downward through their hips and legs.

Jim, silent during the bridge, backed away from the edge of the stage, and Adrian saw that he was standing close to where his fencing saber hid behind a stack of amplifiers. Mike and Eddie edged back from the front of the stage, but it was small enough that there wasn’t much of anywhere for them to go.

Could they
all
be on drugs? Was the water laced?

Or was the shit about to hit the fan …
again?

Adrian pushed up through the
D
and into the
E
, Twitch carrying him forward on a thunder of snare drum beats, the dancers straightening their entire bodies though their heads hung limp, like screen doors pinned to the frame by single hinges.

And then they began to vomit.

“The hell with this!” Adrian dropped the chord and grabbed the MAC-11. Twitch stood up, and Mike and Eddie faltered in their playing. Their wall of rock and roll sound slammed once against the back wall of the room and then stilled. The pounding of the rain on the windows became gigantic.

A beer glass, knocked to the floor, shattered like thunder.

Then Adrian realized what he’d forgotten, and plucked the Third Eye from his pocket. It was a lens, a bit of old natural volcanic glass that had been polished into a monocle and worn by generations and generations of sorcerers, pinched into their eye sockets. This was his prize possession—most of the rest of what he did magic with was bits of string and wax, chalk and hair made potent by the knowledge he’d stolen from his uncle, despite his uncle’s curse, his threats and the constant fear in which Adrian had lived.

He’d stolen the Eye, too, because it was a powerful artifact. When he looked through it, he saw invisible things. He saw spells that were invisible to the naked eye but that existed as tangled lines of power. He saw through arcane disguises and illusions. He could also focus spells through it, which made them more powerful but tended to make them unpredictable, too, a little trickier to control. He thought he could use it to see even more—maybe much more—only he didn’t know how to use it.

He’d stolen it, after all. Plucked it from its hiding place and then used it to blast its real owner into oblivion. He didn’t even really know what it was called; his uncle had always called it the
Eye of Agamotto
, but that was obviously a joke. It was a joke Adrian didn’t really know how to untell, until he could find a better name for the thing.

He squinched the Eye into place and almost immediately dropped it. Inside the dancers he saw worms. Tall, eyeless, limbless things, limp and boneless but muscular, and the worms wrapped around the spines of the dancers and made them move, like hands inside felt puppets. He saw lines of power, too, a web of many overlapping spells and wards splattered along all the walls, the floor, and the ceiling.

He also saw Mouser struggling with the big Swede; he was worm-filled, but she was not. She slapped him with her palms and clawed at him with fingernails, but he only laughed.

Then the first of the dancers exploded. Adrian nearly dropped the Third Eye fumbling it back into his pocket, and was just in time to see several more explode behind the first. Ribbons and shreds of flesh erupted in all directions as the human beings came apart and collapsed like bloody, discarded cocoons. What emerged from each flaccid heap of flesh bore no resemblance to a worm; they were pure monster, vaguely humanoid with hooked talons and a third set of limbs between arms and legs, that looked like it could function as either. Around the gaping maw of needle-like teeth, Adrian couldn’t see anything that resembled a face or even a head. They scuttled forward like praying mantises, four lower limbs propelling them while clawed hands groped to the attack.

“We’re in trouble!” Adrian yelled, realizing he was way, way too late. A wave of fatigue swished over him like a slow tide of warm chocolate, lulling him to dark oblivion. He bit his own tongue, hard, right through the wad of stimulant gum in his mouth. The flavor instantly changed from peppermint to blood, but he stayed awake.

“No shit!” Eddie shrugged out of his guitar strap and swung his Fender Toronado like a real ax, slamming the red body of the instrument into the snapping teeth of the foremost of the creatures. Jim bounded past him to hook one of the monitors with the toe of his boot and fling it into the onrushing mass of beasts, pummeling one of them in the chest and knocking it sideways.

In the back of the hall, the Swede exploded and fell away like the meat disguise that he was. The demon inside grabbed Mouser with four limbs, cutting off her shriek instantly.

Adrian raised the MAC-11 and fired.

***

Chapter Two

“The girl!” Adrian shouted. There wasn’t any good reason for him to care about her, except that she was the only other human in the room. Heck, she’d distracted him with her toys and her sexual fascination, and that wasn’t likely to have been an accident. She’d lured him in. He ought to hate her, and be happy to see her get what she had coming.

Only she was arguing with the Swede, and she was still human. And that made her look like an innocent, a dupe.

“The window!” Eddie snapped back.

Twitched hurled herself past Adrian, shifting shape as she did so into her silver horse form. She pounded aside one of the gnarled mantises and raced for the nearest window.

The demon, slightly off-balance from its jostling with the fairy, let rip a throaty, whining squeal and lurched at Mike. It rose up as it charged, running on two legs and slashing with the talons of all four of its upper limbs.

The bassist, tangled up in his strap and unable to get his gun out of the back of his belt, fell backward, raising his instrument up in front of him—

“
Chingón!
—”

SQUELCH!

The body of the bass guitar planted against the stage floor like the butt of a spear, and the head sank into the monster’s chest. Steaming green sludge sprayed Mike and the floor around him. It reeked of bile and Adrian almost choked.

He didn’t let it stop him, though. “It’s nice to see the bass fighting on our side, for a change!” he shouted at Mike. “Spencer would be proud!” A good joke was worth choking on.

“Spencer?” Mike struggled to kick the dead mantis-demon off his bass with one foot while he balanced on the other.

“The last bass player!” Adrian reminded Mike. Spencer had died impaled on the bass by some nameless thing with tentacles instead of arms, before Eddie had doused it with gasoline and lit it on fire. The bass had been too valuable for a guy with Eddie’s packrat mentality to leave behind, and he’d insisted on cleaning it himself.

“
Huevos
,” Mike muttered, freeing the instrument and kicking the dead mantis off the stage with a loud
thud
.

Adrian aimed the little Ingram and squeezed the trigger, sweeping the floor ahead of him with short bursts as he ran.
B-rap-p-p-p! B-rap-p-p-p! B-rap-p-p-p!

Beasts wailed and threw themselves aside or fell under his withering fire. A wave of fatigue dragged at the back of Adrian’s eyeballs and thick, warm tendrils of sleep crawled up his legs and chest, beckoning him down into comforting silence.

He slapped himself in the face. Damn his uncle, and his uncle’s curse.

To his right he saw Twitch the horse raise her hindquarters and kick at the lower panes and frame of one of the windows. With a tremendous shattering sound, glass and twisted metal exploded into the room, driven with nailgun force by the wind outside.

Four monstrous arms wrapped around Adrian’s bicep while he was distracted. Sharkish teeth gaped wide as the thing bellowed into his face, its breath reeking of rotten meat and, surprisingly, cheap gin. Adrian could see eyes, this close to the creature—it had lots of them, tiny, beady little things, arranged in a circle around its muzzle like so many beauty moles on a grotesque, rubbery lip. He planted the muzzle of the MAC-11 against the creature’s Adam’s apple and squeezed off several rounds. It fell back in a spray of stinking green pus, its talons tearing the skin of Adrian’s biceps and the fabric of his jacket.

He hoped its touch wasn’t poisonous.

Twitch, now in falcon form with a long silver tail, struggled to try to get out the window, but couldn’t overcome the wind and rain that crashed in like a river. Jim sprinted forward to the edge of the stage and threw himself in the fairy’s direction, like a stage dive, only he held a naked sword in one hand and the crowd waiting to catch him looked anxious to devour his flesh. Mike and Eddie were both untangled from their instruments and followed Jim at a dogged stumble, pistols out and firing.

Twitch turned away from them and focused on the girl.

The thing that had been the Swede had wrapped its jaws around her shoulder and bit down. Mouser screamed as her blood stained her torn shirt, beating the beast in its circular array of shrunken eyes with the tablet.

Adrian ducked under another monster—it seemed almost too intent on getting to Jim to even notice him, once he stepped out of the way—and raised the machine pistol. Mouser shoved the tablet into her attacker’s mouth and wedged it open. It reared up to plunge down upon her again—

“Drop!” Adrian yelled—

Mouser might not have seen him, but she heard his voice, and fell—

b-rap-p-p-p-p-p-p!

Adrian emptied the last of the clip into the monster’s funnel-shaped head. It exploded like a watermelon in a Gallagher stage performance, and the creature’s body dropped.

Adrian scooted around the end of the bar. He shot a glance towards the stage and saw the rest of the band, backed into a corner around the shattered window and fighting off the swarming creatures. If anything, the wind and the rain seemed to be holding the monsters back as much as the band’s weapons, but the weather also made it impossible for Twitch to fly out.

They’d all have to jump, Adrian guessed. Oh well, twenty feet or so wasn’t too much of a fall—as long as one of them made it without breaking a leg and could drive the van. If the wind hadn’t actually flipped the van upside down, of course. Once they were inside the van, its wards of obfuscation and silence should help them evade pursuit and get away.

The six-limbed thing still trembled and shuddered as Adrian kicked it out of the way, switching to a new clip.

Mouser looked up at him, terrified. “I thought it was some kind of gag,” she squeaked, meeting his eyes.

“Yeah, I’m laughing my ass off,” Adrian grumbled, now wondering why he had bothered saving her. He grabbed her by her forearm and pulled her to her feet, looking at the cuts on her shoulder. There were a lot of them, and they were bleeding, but they didn’t look too deep. He tucked the Ingram under his arm, grabbed a bar towel and wrapped it around her injury.

“The big guy, Fafnir or whatever,” she continued, a little hysterical, “he said they were going to play a prank on you with your gear. He promised me fifty bucks if I kept you distracted. He said you wouldn’t be able to keep your eyes off a shiny electronic toy.” She sobbed, but just once, like a hiccup full of tears.

“Son of a bitch.” Somebody knew him too well. But who could that be? And if they knew him well enough to know how much he liked gadgets, what else might they know? Obviously, whoever it was knew how to find the band. They’d set a trap, and the Notorious Gentlemen had stepped right into it. “I’d make a joke about thirty pieces of silver,” he snapped, “but even my delusions don’t have that much grandeur.”

Adrian’s heart pounded in his chest and his throat felt constricted. Stay awake! He told himself and slammed his knuckles against the hard wood of the bar. He looked back across the hall and saw Twitch the falcon soaring again, but this time into the center of the room, flying with the cold, wet blast of the wind over her friends’ heads.

Squeeeeeeal!

Adrian turned, fumbling to get control of the pistol. He kept his eyes open only long enough to see four flailing talons come lunging at him across the bar—

* * *

Knock, knock, knock.

Adrian knew he was dreaming. That didn’t make it any better.

“Come in, Ade,” his uncle called from behind the cracked door.

Adrian pushed the door open, screaming silently. He didn’t want to see his uncle. He tried to look at the floor, but he was only dreaming and he couldn’t control what his dream-self-did. His dream-self looked up at his uncle.

No! he wanted to yell, but couldn’t.

The boy Adrian had never said “no,” and had never been able to say what he always suspected: that it had been his uncle who had killed his father. In his dreams, Adrian could only watch his nightmares replay, again and again.

“Don’t you want to learn about wards of silence?” his uncle asked. His uncle’s head was a wolf’s head, but not the head of a real wolf—it was cartoonish, with a long muzzle like a clown’s oversized shoe, complete with a slack lower jaw for a floppy sole and a slavering tongue that hung wet and pink and threw hot drops of saliva around as his uncle talked.

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.