Devil Sent the Rain - D. J. Butler Page 0,6

and be happy to see her get what she had coming.

Only she was arguing with the Swede, and she was still human. And that made her look like an innocent, a dupe.

“The window!” Eddie snapped back.

Twitched hurled herself past Adrian, shifting shape as she did so into her silver horse form. She pounded aside one of the gnarled mantises and raced for the nearest window.

The demon, slightly off-balance from its jostling with the fairy, let rip a throaty, whining squeal and lurched at Mike. It rose up as it charged, running on two legs and slashing with the talons of all four of its upper limbs.

The bassist, tangled up in his strap and unable to get his gun out of the back of his belt, fell backward, raising his instrument up in front of him—

“Chingón!—”

SQUELCH!

The body of the bass guitar planted against the stage floor like the butt of a spear, and the head sank into the monster’s chest. Steaming green sludge sprayed Mike and the floor around him. It reeked of bile and Adrian almost choked.

He didn’t let it stop him, though. “It’s nice to see the bass fighting on our side, for a change!” he shouted at Mike. “Spencer would be proud!” A good joke was worth choking on.

“Spencer?” Mike struggled to kick the dead mantis-demon off his bass with one foot while he balanced on the other.

“The last bass player!” Adrian reminded Mike. Spencer had died impaled on the bass by some nameless thing with tentacles instead of arms, before Eddie had doused it with gasoline and lit it on fire. The bass had been too valuable for a guy with Eddie’s packrat mentality to leave behind, and he’d insisted on cleaning it himself.

“Huevos,” Mike muttered, freeing the instrument and kicking the dead mantis off the stage with a loud thud.

Adrian aimed the little Ingram and squeezed the trigger, sweeping the floor ahead of him with short bursts as he ran. B-rap-p-p-p! B-rap-p-p-p! B-rap-p-p-p!

Beasts wailed and threw themselves aside or fell under his withering fire. A wave of fatigue dragged at the back of Adrian’s eyeballs and thick, warm tendrils of sleep crawled up his legs and chest, beckoning him down into comforting silence.

He slapped himself in the face. Damn his uncle, and his uncle’s curse.

To his right he saw Twitch the horse raise her hindquarters and kick at the lower panes and frame of one of the windows. With a tremendous shattering sound, glass and twisted metal exploded into the room, driven with nailgun force by the wind outside.

Four monstrous arms wrapped around Adrian’s bicep while he was distracted. Sharkish teeth gaped wide as the thing bellowed into his face, its breath reeking of rotten meat and, surprisingly, cheap gin. Adrian could see eyes, this close to the creature—it had lots of them, tiny, beady little things, arranged in a circle around its muzzle like so many beauty moles on a grotesque, rubbery lip. He planted the muzzle of the MAC-11 against the creature’s Adam’s apple and squeezed off several rounds. It fell back in a spray of stinking green pus, its talons tearing the skin of Adrian’s biceps and the fabric of his jacket.

He hoped its touch wasn’t poisonous.

Twitch, now in falcon form with a long silver tail, struggled to try to get out the window, but couldn’t overcome the wind and rain that crashed in like a river. Jim sprinted forward to the edge of the stage and threw himself in the fairy’s direction, like a stage dive, only he held a naked sword in one hand and the crowd waiting to catch him looked anxious to devour his flesh. Mike and Eddie were both untangled from their instruments and followed Jim at a dogged stumble, pistols out and firing.

Twitch turned away from them and focused on the girl.

The thing that had been the Swede had wrapped its jaws around her shoulder and bit down. Mouser screamed as her blood stained her torn shirt, beating the beast in its circular array of shrunken eyes with the tablet.

Adrian ducked under another monster—it seemed almost too intent on getting to Jim to even notice him, once he stepped out of the way—and raised the machine pistol. Mouser shoved the tablet into her attacker’s mouth and wedged it open. It reared up to plunge down upon her again—

“Drop!” Adrian yelled—

Mouser might not have seen him, but she heard his voice, and fell—

b-rap-p-p-p-p-p-p!

Adrian emptied the last of the clip into the monster’s funnel-shaped head. It exploded like a