Devil Sent the Rain by D. J. Butler Read Free Book Online

vomit.
    Ezeq’el the centauress leaped forward, plunging her hooves into the muddy water to trample Jim.
    The singer threw himself to one side, scrambling from pillar to table to pillar and groping in the water for his weapon.
    Adrian saw his chance and took it. He jumped to the nearest large nexus of ward lines on the wall, pinned the end of the string to its center with his thumb and chalked four quick glyphs around it. “ Per Mercurium vim extraho, ” he murmured, gagging on the string and jamming the Eye over the top of his thumb for good measure. He had to charge his battery before he could use it to get them out.
    Fire coursed through him, making the walls shudder and all his flesh pimple up into tingling prick-points of limbic agitation. He felt his ka fill and then flood like the room around him, and he struggled to direct it, raising the Third Eye and pressing it against the chalk marks against the wall and, for good if somewhat irrational measure, against the candle stub.
    “ Per Proteum, ” he choked, hearing gunfire and seeing Twitch fall into the water with a large splash out of the corner of one eye. He wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted from the spell, which was a bad deficit when you starting throwing magical power around. Really, he’d be a lot more comfortable if he could be attempting this operation with a little less pressure on him. He needed something shape-changing; something that would transform the trap so that it would restrain the Fallen but not the band would be ideal.
    Jim lunged at Semyaz, swinging a length of timber in both hands, and the boar-headed giant snatched him off the ground.
    Adrian’s own shadow loomed up large, jaws gaping like it wanted to swallow Adrian whole. It was swollen, too—somehow in refilling his ka, he had poured power into other parts of him. In Adrian’s head, it was hard to tell apart his looming shadow and the giant Semyaz, holding Jim pinned in his grip.
    Adrian chanted his name, trying to catch his balance among the five parts. “ Per Proteum  …”
    Mike slammed into the wall next to him, losing all the breath in his lungs in a single whoosh that was painful to hear. The big guy dropped his gun and then sank into the water with it.
    Adrian’s shadow seemed to him to be another Adrian, only taller and stronger, and grabbing him by the throat.
    “ Per Proteum insidias, ” Adrian tried again. He imagined the lines of the wards moving across the wall, reforming to create new wards—
    with a sick feeling in his stomach, he realized that the shadow looming large over him, his own shadow, had the head of a cartoon wolf and a long, dangling tongue—
and then the darkness took him—
    “ Insidias muto —”
    And he fell.
    * * *
    Dream-Adrian stumbled through the house of flesh wearily. He’d been up all night on the roof, reading Pliny’s De Occultata Historia again and comparing it to his copy of his uncle’s pages. He’d finally managed to ignite the wick of a devotional candle he’d stolen from his uncle’s private chapel, but only after soaking the wick in oil first, and that seemed like cheating. Or if not cheating, then useless—you couldn’t go into combat hoping your enemy would coat himself in inflammable liquid beforehand.
    His uncle certainly wouldn’t, and his uncle was the enemy that Adrian imagined defeating, over and over again. Crushing, decapitating, mutilating, and above all, burning to a crisp.
    He dropped the pull-down stairs slowly, stopping to give the hinges a touch of oil, as he always did. Only in the dream-state, the hinges were muscular, like the hinges of a jaw, and Adrian oiled them by rubbing them down with his hands. He felt unclean and violated.
    Part of him, tucked away, knew that he was dreaming. That part wondered if Adrian was under the river of filthy water on the restaurant floor and beginning to drown. A dream might seem eternal in the few seconds it would take his body to fill its lungs with water and slip