Devil Sent the Rain - D. J. Butler Page 0,36

floor in a rolling tangle of elbows that bounced and headed in Adrian’s direction, fists pummeling and feet flailing.

Adrian tightened his grip on the tawny eye and danced out of the way. “The roof!” he yelled. His words were snatched away by the storm and he wasn’t sure anyone had heard him, so he yelled louder, “GET ONTO THE ROOF!”

His friends weren’t in jammies anymore, but Adrian’s view of his ka-umbilical cord had not reappeared—nor had Elaine’s chains. He needed to see the cord and be able to tap into its power again if he was going to get them all out of there, but he didn’t want to put the eye into his head too early. He’d wait until the last possible second this time.

He skittered aside again as Jim and Semyaz rolled back his direction—

and something slammed him from behind.

“Oooomph!” Adrian hit the floor of the attic, hands out in front of him—

and lost his grip on the eyeball.

He groped after it, missed, watched it roll away from him, felt fingers knotting themselves into his short hair, saw the eyeball fall down through the open hatch of the pull-down stairs—

wham!

His face cracked against the floor. For a slab of warm meat, it was surprisingly solid, and Adrian hurt.

“You had your chance,” his uncle told him. Adrian felt a knee between his shoulder blades, pinning his chest to the floor, and he wiggled to try to escape.

He failed.

Wham! His face slammed into the floor again. Darkness slithered all around him like a jar of snakes. He saw Elaine Canning’s hoop skirts, slick and shining from the rain and glowing red and green from the psychedelic lights, flash past him. She kicked Semyaz in the head, and then Jim punched the Fallen’s eye.

Good for them, Adrian thought, a little hazily. Fighting to the end.

“Weakling.”

The fingers in his hair pulled his head back again, and Adrian prepared for the impact. Maybe this would be the blow that finally did it, he thought. He couldn’t possibly hurt any more than he did, and it would just be like falling asleep. He’d passed out a thousand times, thousands of times, and the thought of losing consciousness held no terrors for him.

Though if he was going to go like this, he kind of wished he’d eaten a T-bone steak first. And a milkshake.

And wouldn’t his losing mean that his uncle had won?

Adrian jammed his forearm under his face.

Thud!

His arm softened the blow. The collision of his head with the crook of his own elbow, together with the image of his uncle grinning triumphantly as he died, snapped Adrian’s thoughts into clear focus.

“You were never strong enough to follow the way of the wizard,” his uncle snarled softly above and behind him. “I should have seen that from the start.”

He pulled back Adrian’s head again.

Adrian rolled sideways, hard. His uncle cursed and slipped off, bouncing to the floor in a swish of silk and soft leather. Adrian punched his uncle as hard as he could with the knuckles of his left hand, right in his astonished expression. Backhanded and off-balance as the blow was, it couldn’t have hurt very much, but it would do; his uncle fell back and let go, a trickle of blood showing at the corner of his mouth.

Adrian threw himself forward and into the hole in the floor.

He didn’t need to beat up or kill his uncle. But without the tawny eye, he had no idea how he could possibly escape.

He sucked air into his lungs as he dove, and nearly spat it all back out again when he hit the water. It was like diving into ice, a thousand needles poked him everywhere in his body at the same moment and he felt like the water was flaying off his skin.

He opened his eyes.

The house was gone. There was no hallway, no wardrobe, no bathroom, no windows, no banisters, no staircase, no walls or ceiling. There was a bottomless well of cold, wet darkness. Down beneath him, lights flashed like explosions in the deep, sending up bright colored beams and bubbles of gray smoke. Between him and the lights, monsters drifted back and forth, big scaly leviathans of the deep, with glowing escae before them and misshapen heads and limbs.

Above the monsters, but slowly drifting down, sank the tawny eye.

Adrian spun himself in the water, wishing he were more of a swimmer, and scissor-kicked to move downward. He reached out a hand, almost far enough to close his fingers around