Devil Sent the Rain - D. J. Butler Page 0,27

tight, and he didn’t immediately emerge from the other side.

Scrabbling with his feet, he got purchase with his bare toes on the struts of the shelving and inched himself forward. The opening tightened as he pushed, and Adrian struggled to slip his arm in alongside his head. He couldn’t breathe, his heart hammered, he thought he might lose consciousness.

This was a house, he told himself. It was in his shadow, it might be part of his shadow, but it was modeled on the house where he’d learned wizardry, the house of his nightmare. That house had had an inside and an outside, like any house did. This one would have an outside, too. It had to.

Of course, he couldn’t be sure what was out there.

Then he got his fist holding the eye up next to his mouth, and the forced passage allowed him to breathe again. He kicked forward, slid, wiggled, groped his hand forward—

pop!

His hand holding the eye poked out into space on the other side. Adrian’s head was still in the trembling, meaty tunnel, but suddenly, he could see.…

Through the eyeball in his hand.

“Sumfabish,” he muttered through tightly clenched lips.

The house of Adrian’s apprenticeship had been a nineteenth-century creaker on a genteelly decaying street in upstate New York, gnarled with vines and shrouded from its neighbors by several ragged rows of maple trees. What Adrian saw outside this building was a tempest of color and noise. Streaks of red and gold fell past the eye like lightning, dropping away into darkness, and he felt water.

With a mighty kick of his legs, Adrian pushed his head out.

He filled his lungs with the air outside the building and looked around. He saw the streaks of light and followed them down, looking for ground. But there was no ground where he thought there ought to have been, no carpet of green grass and wildflowers untouched by a mower, no laid path of flat stones circling the house. There was a fall that might have been infinite, for all the perspective that Adrian had, and at the bottom, there was a maelstrom of color and sound. Rain pelted the back of Adrian’s head as he stared down into the crimson and gold pinwheel, slowly rotating and crunching with a sound like an infinite rockslide, like a river of stones the size of the Mississippi, grinding together forever.

Adrian wished he had something impressive and witty to say, but he didn’t. No one would have heard him, anyway.

Then someone grabbed his ankles—

for a heart-stopping moment, he thought he was going to be dragged back inside by the Fallen—

but instead he was pushed.

“Holy shit!” Adrian yelled, and grabbed for any support he could find. The real house, the house of his subjugation and misery, had been overgrown with strong old creepers. They were the reason Adrian’s uncle had made him sleep in the basement—it would have been too tempting, his uncle said, to climb out the window on the vines if his bedroom had been on the second floor. Not that Adrian hadn’t been allowed to leave the house, but he’d only been supposed to do it with his uncle’s permission and under wards of tracing.

Adrian slammed his empty hand against the side of the house and found a vine. He grabbed it.

Only it didn’t feel like a vine. There was no bark, no leaves, and the fibrous cable he gripped was far too straight to be a naturally growing vine. It felt kind of like rope, of a thick and particularly scaly kind. It reminded him of something, but in the panic of the moment as he grabbed at it, he couldn’t think of what.

Adrian’s feet shot out of the sphincteral passage and spun out into space. He bit off a scream and tried not to let go as suddenly the weight of his body was all on the strength of one arm. His legs arced out sideways and he tumbled once completely around, like a hot dog in a gas station’s heating rack, before his body slammed into the side of the building, in a thick tangle of the heavy cable. Flakes of something shook off the wall on impact and fell on him like ash or fake snow.

The building trembled, sending a ripple through the thicket of cables. Adrian smelled a thick animal musk, and suddenly, he realized what he was holding onto.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. The rope was hair.

Adrian lost his breath. His heart thumped once in his chest