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