Devil Sent the Rain - D. J. Butler Page 0,24

a lot of them on his forearms, but Mike was taking a beating.

Adrian’s ankles felt cold and wet—looking down, he saw that two inches of water flooded the floor of the study. It sluiced in sluggishly from the vent from which he and the rest of the band had emerged only a few minutes earlier.

On the other side of the room, someone slipped out and the door closed. Adrian couldn’t quite make out the figure, but it wasn’t young dreamself-Ade, it was taller than that, and it had been wearing rider’s boots. Elaine Canning sank to the floor sobbing, and she was totally changed. Mouser was gone entirely; Elaine’s ba wore a hoop skirt and a blouse with bell-shaped sleeves, she had her hair wrapped in what appeared to be wire and there were chains wrapped around her body. Chains that glowed red-hot.

Down from the ceiling in the center of the room came a white ray of light. Its presence, invisible before, surprised Adrian so much that it took him a moment to see where the ray went. It dropped through the ceiling, turned in the middle of the room and ended right smack in the middle of Adrian’s chest. Now that he could see it, he imagined that he could feel it, too, an electric umbilical cord. The line wasn’t his ka, and wasn’t itself an energy source, but somehow it was a conduit. Energy flowed through it.

His eye hurt from the strain of seeing these things.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, and then he felt sleep sloshing over him in thick waves. “Per Volcanum ignem mitto.”

He stretched out his hand and light and fire erupted from it. The blast struck the nearer half of Uncle-wolf square in the chest and obliterated him, shattering him into tatters of darkness that wisped away in the corners of the room.

The heat in the room instantly became almost unbearable, and it also dried the air out. Adrian felt warm and that made him feel sleepy, though he also felt like he could breathe freely for the first time since coming to this dream-place. His throat and chest were tight, and blackness crowded in around the edges of his vision.

The further half of Uncle-wolf dodged the firebolt, bounding around and under it as Adrian blasted away. The shelves flattened themselves to avoid the beam and the books wobbled into the air like fat, awkward birds, flapping their covers to get airborne. Don’t hate us! Adrian scorched as many of them as he could, but he couldn’t see well and his aim suffered. He swiveled his body and turned his aim to try to catch the wolf.

It knocked aside Elaine Canning and raced for the door. Adrian slammed his firebolt on the door tightly, swelling the channel of power to bursting and filling the doorframe with heat and light. The ka-energy felt good running through him and he wondered where it came from. When the beast turned back on him he was ready, and shot straight for its chest.

At the last moment, it turned to the side and sprang for the wall—

Adrian scorched a furrow of charcoal-burnt flesh out of the wall following it—

and the wolf disappeared with a splash into the wall vent.

Adrian snapped off the firebolt. He rolled back and forth on the balls of his feet and his vision yawed. “That’s the way of the wizard, bitch.”

Then he collapsed.

* * *

Adrian crashed to the floor in a puddle of cold water and woke up.

“Ungh,” he groaned, wiping his face and dragging himself up onto his elbows. “Where am I?”

“You tell us,” Mike said.

His uncle’s eye popped out into his palm, and Adrian forced himself to look around without it. Mike, Eddie, and Twitch looked even more mangled than he remembered, and were dressed in kids’ pajamas again. Eddie’s arm where Uncle-wolf had chewed on him looked particularly bad. Elaine Canning was there, too, looking like Mouser again. All four of them had tired and nervous looks on their faces.

Two things that might have been a top-loading washer and dryer squatted in a small room, opposite a teetering set of shelves. The washer and dryer were pot-bellied and covered with scales, though, and they literally squatted on taloned legs, in several inches of water. The shelves that in Adrian’s memory held detergent and clean clothing here bubbled with caustic, fiery-looking liquids in glass ampules. The tiny chamber had two doors, and they were both shut. All the light in the room came