imagining them as spells of pathfinding, and envisioning the golden umbilical cord as a path.
A path that went straight up into the sky.
He tried to remember the wards inside the Silver Eel’s restaurant, shaping his incantations to leave them intact, but let him and his friends—those touching him—pass through.
Without warning, the third Fallen emerged from the sphincter, nearly leaping out, the portal was so worn now. Maybe that one was Semyaz, Adrian thought, and then he saw that the last of the Fallen carried a prisoner in his arms.
It was Jim.
He was as tall and heroic-looking as ever, with his sculpted face and long hair, and he wore his prairie shirt, jeans and rider’s boots with flair. But Semyaz carried him tucked under one arm easily, like a small child. Jim snapped his head back and forth, but to no effect. Tendrils of darkness wrapped around his chest like chains, pinning him and leaving him unable to free himself. Adrian felt his chest constrict and his breathing become shallow.
Jim was trapped. Adrian had reshaped the wards of restraint and imprisonment, and in this twisted house of flesh that was Adrian’s shadow, he had trapped Jim in the role of dream-Ade, the helpless little boy.
Holy crap.
Eddie lurched forward, his hand slapping into Adrian’s. “Go!” the guitar player yelled. He didn’t see Jim.
Adrian didn’t want to leave Jim, but he didn’t know how to save him, either. It didn’t matter—at this point, his body and mind marched down the path he had already set for them, and it was too late to make them turn.
He felt like he was watching his own lips mumble from the outside, and he heard his own voice as if from far away. “Per Wepwawet Mercuriumque semitam sequitor,” the far-away-Adrian said, just as Adrian had planned.
And then far-away-Adrian disappeared, and so did everything else.
***
Chapter Seven
Wet flesh rasped his face, like the tongue of a dog. Like the tongue of a dog so big that Adrian could fit inside its mouth. Adrian tasted bile in the back of his throat.
He opened his eyes. They hurt like needles had been shoved into both of them, but he saw just fine. He was in the long upstairs hallway of the house. Not the real one, the horrible dream-shadow house made of body parts. He saw Mike’s and Eddie’s backs as they rammed the wardrobe up against the hallway’s lone window. The wardrobe snarled and snapped at them, but they kept out of reach of its grinding jaws.
They were wearing jammies.
“Son of a bitch,” he groaned. “It didn’t work.”
“Oh, it worked just fine,” he heard Twitch say. Swiveling his head, he found the fairy, standing at the top of the stairs and looking down them with a sturdy meat club in her hands. It might be the shower curtain rod, he thought idly. “You got to miss the nasty part. Again. Well done, Adrian.”
Wham!
Eddie and Mike slammed the wardrobe against the wall again. White light shone around the edges, and Adrian thought he saw white fingers slammed under the woody flesh.
Wararargh! chomped the wardrobe, throwing a rain of warm spittle on all of them.
“Adrian!” Eddie barked. He dug his heels into the moist red floor and threw his shoulder into the wardrobe. “A fireball’d be nice about now!”
Adrian patted around on the floor and found the tawny eye. He picked it up and hesitated.
“That’s going to smart,” Twitch warned him.
“I look that good, huh?” He tried a devil-may-care grin.
“Even better,” the fairy said. “You’re bleeding out both eyes.”
“Nothing ventured,” Adrian bluffed. “You know.”
He touched his own face. He felt like tenderized steak all over so he hadn’t noticed, but Twitch was right. He had blood under both eyes, as well as on his upper lip and trickling down his neck. “Ugh,” he groaned.
Wham!
Eddie tumbled to the ground as the Fallen on the other side of the wardrobe hammered against it. Mike jammed his fists into the red rubbery walls of the window well and leaned back hard. Elaine Canning, again looking like Mouser in rose-spotted pajamas, jumped forward to throw herself against the wardrobe with the bass player.
“Mierda!”
Adrian pushed the tawny eye into his eye socket. The searing pain was so intense and so immediate that his whole body contracted in a spasm, and the eye promptly plopped back out again. It stared at him from a puddle of wet fluid on the floor, smeared in guilty, inadequate blood.
Adrian shuddered, almost crying. “I can’t do it!”
He grabbed the eye and stood,