Devil Sent the Rain - D. J. Butler Page 0,38
his clenched fist.
But that was silly, of course. The eye might be something real, but it, too, was a manifestation of something in Adrian’s own shadow. The tawny eye wasn’t the Eye of Agamotto.
Whatever it was, though, it worked.
Adrian kicked and thrashed with his arms to right himself again, and looked up. He felt like he’d been fighting and sinking for eons, but a dark shadow above him, with a rectangular sliver of light in the middle of it, looked like it must be the floor of the attic—as if that made any sense—and it was almost within reach.
He clawed towards the light.
A face met him just below the doorway, a slit-nostrilled, fang-mouthed face, flat as a dinner plate and sloping backward to a tiny forehead. A jutting lower jaw trembled, pointing teeth like sabers at Adrian. Behind the face, a long body like a shark’s or a whale’s stretched out into the murk.
Adrian met the monster’s gaze.
It opened its mouth.
“Piss off!” Adrian snapped, and then kicked up and into the attic past the puzzled, hesitating fish.
He should have been gasping for air when he broke through the jaw-pull-down door, but he wasn’t. He hurt all over, though, and he was freezing.
“Adrian!” he heard Mike shout, and then the big bass player and Elaine Canning in her hoop skirt and big sleeves, plastered to her forearms by the cold water, grabbed Adrian by his collar and shoulders and dragged him out.
He was careful to pull his feet away from the edge, just in case the fish changed its mind.
“Adrian, how do we get out of here?” Mike asked.
“Is the moment come to fly?” Elaine added.
Rain and wind pelted his body and Adrian struggled up onto all fours. The attic roof was entirely gone and the attic floor floated on a turbulent, choppy sea like a raft of meat. Eddie, Twitch, and Jim battled the three Fallen, but with Semyaz’s arms no longer occupied, they were being beaten back. Eddie took punch after punch to his shoulders and side from one of the angels, and especially to the raw and bloody place on his arm where Uncle-wolf had gnawed on the guitarist. Twitch could do little more than dodge the onslaught of attacks that came her way, slapping ineffectively back with empty hands. Only Jim had the strength and athleticism to get any punches in, hammering forward with fists and elbows, and occasionally throwing up a sharp knee. Even he was looking haggard.
“Yeah,” Adrian agreed. “It’s time to fly.”
“Though what we do when we get back to the club is anyone’s guess,” Mike muttered. “Carajo, over there these guys are twenty feet tall.”
“Yeah,” Adrian said, reluctantly bringing the tawny eye up to his face, “but over there we aren’t surrounded by a sea of … whatever. So we get out of here, and we run like hell.” A cold wave sloshed over him as he spoke, like punctuation.
Mike nodded.
“He who fights and runs away,” Adrian said. It was a dumb saying, since he who fought and ran away more than likely just kept on running. His limbs felt like cold lead. “Though I’m sure you’ve heard that before, and don’t give a rat’s ass.”
“Right now,” Mike grinned, “I give every rat’s ass I have.”
Come on, Adrian told himself. This is all just in your head, and none of it can hurt you. He shoved the tawny eye into his eye socket. And screamed—
“Aaaagh!”—
and fell to the ground, clutching his head. Pain lanced him like bullets, his head forced the eye back out, and he bled. This isn’t real, he told himself. It isn’t physical. I don’t have this much blood in my body. How can I still be bleeding, how can this even hurt me at all?
“Huevos,” Mike muttered.
“What aid do you require, sorcerer?” Elaine leaned over him.
“That’s it,” Adrian laughed weakly, wiping blood from his face and trying to stand. “I need another sorcerer.”
“Michael,” she said to the bass player.
“Mike,” he said. “Well, anything but Mikey … Michael’s fine.”
She ignored him. “We have to free James.”
James? “Jim?” Adrian asked. A flurry of blinking and a torrent of tears began to clear his eye.
“Follow me!” Elaine Canning turned and charged into the fight.
Shaking his head, Mike lumbered after her.
Adrian stared. The seventeenth-century woman hustled right past Jim and dove at the angel he fought. The angel tried to step sideways and ran right into Mike’s tackle, and between the two of them they dragged the white, fist-throwing personage to the ground.
Adrian