couldn’t see clearly—even with the Third Eye—but that he knew must contain the name and the ka of each of the fallen angels.
Beneath them and about them lay the penumbras that were their shadows. In high school, Adrian had laughed so hard he’d fallen out of his desk when some idiot with a Bachelor’s degree had tried to explain to him and the rest of the class about the unconscious mind, as if he was saying anything new, true, or insightful. Every wizard for the last five thousand years had known the five parts of every human being: ka, ba, and body, bound together with a name, all together casting a shadow. Duh. That was the first lesson you learned if you ever wanted to achieve any level of magical power.
Messengers—angels who were not among the Fallen—didn’t have five parts, but the Fallen were like humans in this respect. Ka, ba, and body made a person. Name bound it together and therefore the true name of any person was the key to being able to command him to do your will—within the appropriate warding. Shadow was the touch the whole bundle left on the world around it. Other than the body, it was all invisible to the naked eye. Through the Eye, some of it could be seen.
Adrian had heard different stories about the animal limbs of the Fallen—that they were divine punishments, or that Heaven itself had taken to vivisecting the Fallen and experimenting on them in some kind of effort to undo Adam’s mistake, or even that the Fallen had for some demented reason chosen themselves to graft animal parts to their own bodies. Adrian wondered if maybe they wanted to be beings of five parts for some reason, but that was speculation. He wondered if Jim knew the truth of it. He didn’t really know how old Jim was, after all, though he didn’t think the singer had been around before the Flood, when the Fallen had made their play and lost.
The pig-headed one had something else on his chest. It looked like a red rose, throbbing with light.
The Fallen stood in a ruin that had once been a decent little restaurant. The windows were all shattered and water flowed through the room like it was raining sideways, and hard. The floor was a muddy river full of splintered wood, shifting and treacherous in the yellow-shadowy light. All that Adrian could see with his meat eyes. Through the Eye, he saw again the lines of power that ran around all the walls and webbed across the windows. They tied together intricately, and he couldn’t immediately make out what they did, but he thought there were elements of shielding, restraint and domination in the lines. They were elaborate and very precisely drawn, and they practically throbbed with energy. More energy than he’d ever seen; whatever they did, the wards did it very, very well. He was pretty sure the band was trapped.
Without trying to be obvious about it, he shot a glance past the swishing lizard’s tail of the boar-headed giant to the space where he remembered leaving the van. The band’s ride was still there, but it was smashed into two pieces, like an enormous tree had fallen down right across the middle of it.
Or an enormous foot.
So much for his mobile wards of obfuscation. Adrian shivered.
A mangled mantis-demon limb drifted past him in the water.
“You’re not leaving,” growled Yamayol, the bull-headed giant. As if to punctuate his sentence, he flexed his body in a weightlifter’s pose, clenching his fists and making the gray scales covering his entire body ripple.
B-rap-p-p-p!
A flash of light and a whiff of smoke beside Adrian told him that Eddie was firing his Glock back up the stairs.
“Call off your minions, Ezeq’el!” Jim yelled.
“Why?” the centauress asked. Her voice boomed, but also purred sweetly. “I think they give you all the right incentives.”
B-rap-p-p!
Mike jammed rounds into his .45 as fast as he could and Adrian turned to look up the stairs. The foremost of the monsters rasping down the stairs fell under Eddie’s bullets, but there were more behind.
“What do you want?” Jim barked. He looked like the statue of a Viking hero in some Scandinavian port, standing upright and determined with his sword in his hand and the rain crashing off his body. His voice echoed like he was standing on a reverb plate.
“To reign in Hell!” hissed the boar-headed giant, and smashed his lizard’s tail into the water, stretching wide his