Devil Sent the Rain - D. J. Butler Page 0,1
turned to look around the room, “but no mirrors? How do you expect a girl to do her makeup?” She fluttered her long silver eyelashes and then winked.
“You’re a girl?” Gopher asked, then looked flustered.
“Hypothetically,” Twitch said, and Adrian managed not to laugh. Twitch was girl enough when she wanted to be. At other times, she was a horse, a bird or a boy. The sheer strangeness of the fairy, and her magical nature, made her feel safe for Adrian. She reeked of sex half the time—Mab’s people had that gift—but it wasn’t really sex, so it didn’t bother Adrian. And he knew she was happier for the fact that there were no mirrors in the room.
“Grandpa Archuleta fought in the war,” Mike was still gnawing away at the chip on his shoulder about his ancestry. “World War Two. He was a gunner in the Navy.”
“Yeah?” Adrian raised his eyebrows. Low-hanging fruit. “Which side was Mexico on?”
He didn’t like the green room much, either. For one thing, unless it was caffeinated, the water was useless to him. He’d need caffeine before the night was over, or he’d be slapping nicotine patches onto his arm. He wasn’t sure they helped—he knew for a fact they didn’t stop the curse from affecting him one hundred percent—but he thought they had some effect, anything was better than nothing, and it was worth a shot. Also, the candy bars were okay, but they weren’t great. Sugar was a nice energy kick for a short burst, and that might come in handy, but a candy bar wasn’t karmically perfect. The sugar and the nuts would weigh into his shadow and put a drag on his ka. Some wizards were happy to tolerate the dead weight, because they liked their steak and candy bars and because, honestly, it wasn’t all that much weight. Adrian found it unacceptable. He was a high performance machine, a two hundred megaton sorcerer, and when he needed to explode out of the silo on full burn, he wanted to be able to really light it up. He needed eggs, preferably organic and free range, but any egg at all would be better than any candy bar.
Thinking of sorcery, he remembered that he needed to check the club for traps. He reached for the Eye again—
“Hey, do you want to double check your pedals and effects on this diagram I made?” Gopher Girl held up her tablet and Adrian saw what looked like a circuit diagram, but in color and three dimensions. The view rotated under her fingers as she moved them in a slow circle. He looked at her fingers and tried to ignore the rest of her.
“Everything worked at the sound check,” he mumbled, but he was fascinated by the pictures of his own stompboxes. He pointed at a missed connection. “The drum machine runs through the Fuzz Face.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” he said, “I tested the fuzz beats, they work. I guess you just missed it. But how did you do this? What kind of app are you using here?” His hand slapped in vain at the pocket where he usually carried the smartphone. Damn angels. “May I?” He touched the individual pedal icons and saw little windows with their specifications open up. “Is this homemade? I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It’s the club’s,” Gopher Girl grinned. “It’s proprietary.”
“Yeah? I dig proprietary inventions, I’m a tinkerer myself. What other cool stuff do they have?” Adrian saw that the circuit diagram included the fixed elements of the club’s sound, too—mixing board, PA, and so forth.
“It keeps track of the play list.” She showed him with a tap. “And it checks it against what you actually play, and automatically updates the club’s blog.”
“Did we agree to that?” Adrian didn’t think any of the Infernals used the Internet—that was why he had felt comfortable using a smartphone, once he had carefully disabled certain tracking components inside—but the Legate of Heaven was human, and he probably did. He probably had an email address and a Facebook account, if you knew where to look. If you tweaked your settings just right, you could probably get a date with him on Match.com.
He tried not to imagine what those settings would have to be.
“Not to any recording,” she agreed quickly, shaking her head so that her ponytail shook like the horse’s tail on Twitch’s rump. She pointed at Eddie. “He said no recording.”
“Good.” Adrian relaxed a hair. If Eddie was going to act all large and in charge,