Chapter One
“I don’t like this place,” Mike grumbled. The big guy shrugged deeper into his cracked leather jacket.
Rain thumped angrily on the skylight overhead, rattling the warped old metal and threatening to punch through the glass. Water trickled down the cement walls of the room, prickly-cold from the weather and lit in blue and gray by fluorescent tubes. Jim paced the room like a caged cat, looking into the corners and behind the furniture.
“What’s the matter, missing your serape? Don’t get thunderstorms like this in Oaxaca? No chiles rellenos in the green room?” Adrian needled Mike. Mike wasn’t particularly Mexican, had grown up in Texas or something, but he had Mexico in his family and he was sensitive about it. That gave Adrian all the room he needed to tease him.
The truth was, Adrian didn’t much like the club either. It was a dive, and dives got dangerous, even without the hurricane-force storm that was building outside. For that matter, the storm might keep attendance down, and that would create a different sort of problem. Fewer drinkers meant less cash for the band meant less gas for the van, and Chicago was still a long drive away.
The thought of clubs and the dangers they presented reminded Adrian that he still hadn’t checked this one for wards or other arcane traps, which was definitely his job. He was, after all, the resident wizard.
He reached into his pocket for his Third Eye—
“We can get chiles rellenos,” the club gopher chirped. She was young and cute, in a cream-of-the-math-major-and-gamer-girls-crop sort of way, complete with dark-rimmed square glasses and a ponytail. She clicked on her tablet and typed in a couple of characters, moving in closer to Adrian. Adrian grinned his best wolfish grin and tried not to back away. The gopher kept invading his space in a way that made it hard not to realize she was attractive. It wasn’t that he didn’t like sex, or girls, but Adrian was a wizard, and he couldn’t expend his ka-energy or burden his shadow with anything as frivolous as sex. “There’s a good Mexican place just down the street.”
“What is that, Yelp?” Adrian asked. He leaned over her to look at the map of Kansas City that sprang to life under her fingers. He missed his own app-loaded smartphone, which had been crushed by a renegade angel in New Mexico a few days earlier. Besides, if he focused on the cool toys, it helped him not to think about the girl who was holding them.
“Chingate,” Mike swore. “Both of you.”
“Ain’t nothing down the street but water, anyway,” Eddie threw in. “Every direction. I looked.” Eddie just had to assert that he was the boss, no matter how much of a second fiddle he would always be to Jim. The guitarist scratched himself under his arm, and Adrian knew he was reassuring himself that his pistol was still there. “I’d take comfort from the forecast that this is going to be a light rain, if I was able to take comfort from anything.”
In answer, thunder crashed outside the building. The rain stopped drumming and began to hammer.
“Not literally,” Gopher Girl agreed. “But we could send a bike.”
They stood in the green room of a club called the Silver Eel. The building had once been some kind of dockside warehouse, squatting low down on the water’s edge below a steep hill. The green room and performance space were on the upper floor. The green room was a rectangular slice taken off one end of the top floor, stuffed with ratty armchairs and a card table carrying a basket of candy bars and a huddle of water bottles. It had a door at each end, one leading onto the stage and the other into a stairwell that climbed down to the lower floors—there was a lounge and restaurant on the floor below them, at street level, and stairs that led further down, to space that was presumably at the level of the river. Adrian’s arms were still stiff from loading in up those stairs.
“You could send a boat,” Eddie suggested. “It’d get there faster.”
“Any port,” Adrian said, “et cetera.” In a storm. Obvious, though, wasn’t it? Say something useful, he kicked himself. Say something impressive.
As if to punctuate the lameness of his quip, a flash of thunder through the skylight came accompanied by an immediate BOOM! of thunder.
“Jeez,” Mike said. “That’s close enough, it could have killed somebody in the street.”
“Mexican food,” Twitch commented, swishing her tail as she turned to look around the room, “but no mirrors? How do you expect a girl to do her makeup?” She fluttered her long silver eyelashes and then winked.
“You’re a girl?” Gopher asked, then looked flustered.
“Hypothetically,” Twitch said, and Adrian managed not to laugh. Twitch was girl enough when she wanted to be. At other times, she was a horse, a bird or a boy. The sheer strangeness of the fairy, and her magical nature, made her feel safe for Adrian. She reeked of sex half the time—Mab’s people had that gift—but it wasn’t really sex, so it didn’t bother Adrian. And he knew she was happier for the fact that there were no mirrors in the room.
“Grandpa Archuleta fought in the war,” Mike was still gnawing away at the chip on his shoulder about his ancestry. “World War Two. He was a gunner in the Navy.”
“Yeah?” Adrian raised his eyebrows. Low-hanging fruit. “Which side was Mexico on?”
He didn’t like the green room much, either. For one thing, unless it was caffeinated, the water was useless to him. He’d need caffeine before the night was over, or he’d be slapping nicotine patches onto his arm. He wasn’t sure they helped—he knew for a fact they didn’t stop the curse from affecting him one hundred percent—but he thought they had some effect, anything was better than nothing, and it was worth a shot. Also, the candy bars were okay, but they weren’t great. Sugar was a nice energy kick for a short burst, and that might come in handy, but a candy bar wasn’t karmically perfect. The sugar and the nuts would weigh into his shadow and put a drag on his ka. Some wizards were happy to tolerate the dead weight, because they liked their steak and candy bars and because, honestly, it wasn’t all that much weight. Adrian found it unacceptable. He was a high performance machine, a two hundred megaton sorcerer, and when he needed to explode out of the silo on full burn, he wanted to be able to really light it up. He needed eggs, preferably organic and free range, but any egg at all would be better than any candy bar.
Thinking of sorcery, he remembered that he needed to check the club for traps. He reached for the Eye again—
“Hey, do you want to double check your pedals and effects on this diagram I made?” Gopher Girl held up her tablet and Adrian saw what looked like a circuit diagram, but in color and three dimensions. The view rotated under her fingers as she moved them in a slow circle. He looked at her fingers and tried to ignore the rest of her.
“Everything worked at the sound check,” he mumbled, but he was fascinated by the pictures of his own stompboxes. He pointed at a missed connection. “The drum machine runs through the Fuzz Face.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” he said, “I tested the fuzz beats, they work. I guess you just missed it. But how did you do this? What kind of app are you using here?” His hand slapped in vain at the pocket where he usually carried the smartphone. Damn angels. “May I?” He touched the individual pedal icons and saw little windows with their specifications open up. “Is this homemade? I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It’s the club’s,” Gopher Girl grinned. “It’s proprietary.”
“Yeah? I dig proprietary inventions, I’m a tinkerer myself. What other cool stuff do they have?” Adrian saw that the circuit diagram included the fixed elements of the club’s sound, too—mixing board, PA, and so forth.
“It keeps track of the play list.” She showed him with a tap. “And it checks it against what you actually play, and automatically updates the club’s blog.”
“Did we agree to that?” Adrian didn’t think any of the Infernals used the Internet—that was why he had felt comfortable using a smartphone, once he had carefully disabled certain tracking components inside—but the Legate of Heaven was human, and he probably did. He probably had an email address and a Facebook account, if you knew where to look. If you tweaked your settings just right, you could probably get a date with him on Match.com.
He tried not to imagine what those settings would have to be.
“Not to any recording,” she agreed quickly, shaking her head so that her ponytail shook like the horse’s tail on Twitch’s rump. She pointed at Eddie. “He said no recording.”
“Good.” Adrian relaxed a hair. If Eddie was going to act all large and in charge, at least he’d gotten it right, despite being from a pre-Internet generation.
“Here’s all the site will show.” Gopher Girl brought up a page showing the Silver Eel at night, window signs lit and the lights of downtown Kansas City sparkling across the river in the background. The day’s date was in the subject line of a blog entry, which announced that the Notorious Gentlemen would be playing, and a set list.
Adrian chuckled. He didn’t love the fact that the song titles were listed, but it would be hard for anyone to track them by those, since they issued no recordings and had no Internet presence themselves. Also, the sight of the band’s name for the evening amused him, since he’d come up with it.
BOOM! More thunder. Adrian shivered, feeling a little uncomfortable. It was the storm that was making him edgy, he decided. He’d get over it once he hit a hundred ass-kicking decibels with the Hammond.
“Jim?” Eddie asked.
Jim stopped against one wall and nodded. His long black hair was clumped together by the humid air and hung around his pale face like a picture frame.
“He’s nervous,” Mike observed to Eddie. He pocketed a couple of candy bars and bit the head off a third. The skylight rattled in its frame with a glass-against-metal chinking noise. “Aren’t you? Couldn’t they give us just a little booze?”
“Seeing your cousin again?” Eddie asked the question, so it was sincere, even if it sounded harsh. If Adrian had asked it, he would have been asking in mockery. Even as he asked, Eddie’s own eye slid sideways and he shuddered.
“No,” Mike said. “But it wouldn’t hurt to be a little bit buzzed … just in case.”
Gopher Girl looked confused, so Adrian tried to get her attention back on the tablet and away from the talk of ghosts. A wordless voice nagged him in the back of his mind, telling him he was forgetting something important. He ignored it. When the voices in his head could come up with actual words, then he’d listen to them. “What do you think the odds are of me getting a copy of some of these apps … what did you say your name was?”
“They call me ‘Mouser.’” Mouser smiled. “Like a cat. It’s ’cause I handle all the little stuff around here, the mice.”
“Curiosity killed,” Adrian started, and then realized he might sound like he was threatening her, “er, you know.” For a two hundred megaton sorcerer, he knew, he had a real gift for sounding like a numbnut.
Mike charged ahead. “I mean jeez, who wouldn’t be nervous, after those flaming, sword-swinging giants smashed up the meat packing plant around us. Plus, the flesh-eating horse, the flying snakes, the lamia … and … you know, all of it.” He looked sideways at Mouser, like he’d just realized she was there.
Mouser giggled. “You guys are funny.”
Adrian shook his head and let her laugh. “You don’t know the half of it, sister.”
“Yeah,” Eddie grunted, “life’s a bitch. Let’s play, collect gas money and hit the road. Maybe the bartender will give you a free beer.”
“Or you could pay me,” Mike suggested around a mouthful of nougat.
“Or I could use the money to get us to Chicago.” Eddie’s nostrils flared. He hadn’t gotten the sleeves of his green army jacket replaced, so he looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, only wiry and black and perpetually pissed off. “You do want to go to Chicago, don’t you?”
“Yeah.” Mike looked down at his feet. “Yeah, I wanna go to Chicago. Cagado flat tire.”
“You got a better car?” Eddie snarled. “Last time I saw that Impala of yours, it wasn’t going anywhere fast.”
“The van’s our ride,” Adrian agreed. He definitely wanted to go to Chicago. For all the horsepower he had running under his wizard’s hood, he didn’t have enough. He still worked shackled to his uncle’s curse, and that was a serious practical problem as well as a constant humiliation. Eddie, he knew, was anxious to back out of his deal with the devil. Adrian wanted to make one, and Chicago was the place to do it. “Mike’s just saying what we all think.”
“Yeah?” Eddie glared at Adrian, eyes quivering. He was a bit on edge, and no wonder. “What’s that?”
“He’s just wishing the van wasn’t such junk, so he could afford to have a beer.” Adrian grinned a grin he knew would irritate the crap out of Eddie.
“It ain’t fancy,” Eddie agreed. “It needs a little extra attention, sometimes. Some of it’s held together by duct tape, and I haven’t pimped it six ways to Sunday like you do to everything, Adrian. But my shit works.”
“Huh.” Adrian didn’t really want to get into a fight with the guitarist, who was a combat vet and a karate guy, but he couldn’t leave a target that easy be.
“What do you mean, huh?”
Adrian shrugged. “I have a different strategy.”
“Yeah?”
“My stuff isn’t shit.”
“Aren’t we on any minute now?” Twitch asked.
The intensity of the rain kicked up another notch, rattling the skylight in its frame and sending spritzes of cold water down through the gaps in the glass. Adrian pulled his jacket collar up around his neck and shivered. The silver suit was summerwear, really, lightweight and comfortable but not warm at all.
“You can go on now,” Mouser said. She smiled and held up the tablet for Adrian to see. “I’ll be listening to the songs.”
She disappeared out the far door leaving Adrian trying to ignore the faintest hint of perfume she left behind. Jim turned and led the way through the nearer exit, into a haze of cigarette smoke and the pungent biting tang of alcohol on the air. At least here the club owners had replaced all the fluorescent tubes with hooded yellow incandescents, neon signs and other lighting more appropriate to a temple of alcohol service. Rock band, hell, Adrian thought. Really, they all funded their quirky quests to undo their own personal damnations by working as traveling salesmen of beer.
He had the heavy feeling that he’d forgotten something, something that might turn out to be important, but he couldn’t figure out what it might be.
Maybe he was just missing his smartphone.
The stage was small; they always were, in the dives this band played in. Jim plucked his microphone from its stand and retreated into the shadows on the stage while the other players took their places. Twitch scooted onto the seat behind her minimalist drum kit and produced her drumming-and-fighting batons while Adrian sat behind his arsenal of sonic devices. With a touch in just the right spot, a door dropped open in a special compartment he had bolted onto the underside of his organ, revealing the stubby little Ingram MAC-11 inside. The subcompact submachine gun was his weapon of choice, when the lead began to fly—it only fired .380 ACP rounds, but it fired an awful lot of them, and it was small enough to hide on his instrument.
Just in case, he told himself.
The hall had a high ceiling and tall windows that struggled to hold back the wind and rain outside, which were starting to sound like a hurricane. Adrian took a moment to edge his volume knobs up. No self-respecting rock and roller could let himself be drowned out by mere weather.
Then, also just in case, he bit down on two sticks of nicotine gum.
He’d never been a smoker; he just really, really wanted to stay awake.
“Evening,” Eddie doused the polite and slightly high applause that scattered around the room. “We’re the Notarized Genuines.”
“Notorious!—” Adrian snapped, but it was too late—Twitch had already kicked into the tattoo that launched their opening song, “Kingdom Come.”
Eddie shrugged at Adrian, turned his back and staggered into the A-C-D chord pattern that made up most of the verse.
“Down on the corner stands a man with his back to the wall,” Jim sang. He had a haunting voice, that out of sheer gravitas and charisma sounded like it had reverb in it, even when he talked to you face to face. Which he didn’t do often, since he kept his mouth shut other than when he sang, for fear of being overhead by his father, His Lowness Lucifer, High Prince of Hell, the former Messenger of Heaven Azazel.
Adrian played the modest right hand arpeggio that went with the verse, adding single bass notes with the thumb or ring finger of his left hand.
He leans on a streetlight he thinks is a tree.
He opens his tired fingers, lets the bottle fall.
To an invisible friend, he says hey, do you see?
Adrian added a full chord with the left hand, jumping big and powerful into the mix. This was how he liked his music, how he liked everything—Adrian overwhelming and dominating. Even Jim struggled to be heard over Adrian’s sound, and shot him a glare out of the corner of his eye that made Adrian back off just a notch.
The crowd must be drunker than he thought; their dancing was an erratic shuffle, and they bumped at each other like they were circling for a fight. Adrian shook his head and made sure he had the MAC-11 close to his hand if he needed it. He had the taser in his jacket pocket, too, repaired by hand as they’d cruised across the nothingness of Kansas, but he couldn’t be sure how much charge it had in it. And if he absolutely had to pull out the big ones, he had a candle stub and knew how to summon fire with it.
He was ready for any barroom brawl that might come his way.
He saw Mouser at the back of the room, talking to the big Swedish-looking bartender. She looked like she might be looking at him, so he nodded during the chorus.
Whoa, whoa, my kingdom’s come.
Whoa, whoa, my kingdom’s come.
My kingdom’s come.
By the end of the chorus, the crowd’s dancing had become really erratic, but as Adrian dropped away the left-hand power, they cooled down a bit. Not drunk, he decided. Maybe they were stoned, high on something that was twisting their perceptions. He’d done LSD himself, and mescaline, more than once on his climb to power. It hadn’t strengthened his ka, it hadn’t given him any great insights, and all that toxic stuff, not to mention the weird memories, piled hard and heavy into his shadow, much worse than steak or any carnal romp. It had taken him months of fasting and flushing to get it out of his system when he’d realized it was slowing him down and gone cold turkey. Something like that might be throwing the crowd off-kilter, he guessed, making their movements all herky-jerky.
Jim sang another verse.
“In a plywood hotel downtown lies a girl with no name.
“She’s got a twelve-year-old body and dry withered eyes.
“She pushes the breath through her lungs and the blood through her veins.
“She stares out a bullethole window at the darkening skies, and she says.”
Mouser and the big Swede seemed to be arguing now, and Adrian frowned a little, without losing track of where he was in the song. She was a cool enough kid, even if she couldn’t get her mind off sex, and she’d let him play with her toys, so it bugged him to see her picked on. If, he reminded himself, that was what he was seeing. Besides, it didn’t bother him all that much; he didn’t believe in liberty and justice for all, and if it turned out such a thing did exist, he wouldn’t want it. What Adrian Pew wanted was power.
He kicked his sound up for the chorus again, careful not to drown Jim out this time. Not that he was afraid of Jim, but he respected the guy, and he needed him. Jim was the one who was carrying Azazel’s hoof, taped to his belly, and he was the one who would connect them with Hell. Eddie did all the talking, but he was really just Aaron to Jim’s Moses.
Whoa, whoa, my kingdom’s come.
Whoa, whoa, my kingdom’s come.
My kingdom’s come.
The second chorus transitioned into the bridge and Adrian pulled out the stops, flooding the stage and the hall with the rotary tones of his Hammond. As the big A chord, seven notes strong including a low A played by Adrian’s foot, blasted out into the crowd, they stopped dancing.
Wrong reaction. Adrian frowned and piled on more notes as he climbed into the C.
The dancers straightened. It wasn’t a natural movement, they straightened with the stop-gap, spastic motions of a rictus smile, like some unseen power had jammed a rod up each dancer’s spine, turning them into grotesque puppets. People in the crowd who’d been sitting slammed their backs upright first, then lurched to their feet like the rod was extending downward through their hips and legs.
Jim, silent during the bridge, backed away from the edge of the stage, and Adrian saw that he was standing close to where his fencing saber hid behind a stack of amplifiers. Mike and Eddie edged back from the front of the stage, but it was small enough that there wasn’t much of anywhere for them to go.
Could they all be on drugs? Was the water laced?
Or was the shit about to hit the fan … again?
Adrian pushed up through the D and into the E, Twitch carrying him forward on a thunder of snare drum beats, the dancers straightening their entire bodies though their heads hung limp, like screen doors pinned to the frame by single hinges.
And then they began to vomit.
“The hell with this!” Adrian dropped the chord and grabbed the MAC-11. Twitch stood up, and Mike and Eddie faltered in their playing. Their wall of rock and roll sound slammed once against the back wall of the room and then stilled. The pounding of the rain on the windows became gigantic.
A beer glass, knocked to the floor, shattered like thunder.
Then Adrian realized what he’d forgotten, and plucked the Third Eye from his pocket. It was a lens, a bit of old natural volcanic glass that had been polished into a monocle and worn by generations and generations of sorcerers, pinched into their eye sockets. This was his prize possession—most of the rest of what he did magic with was bits of string and wax, chalk and hair made potent by the knowledge he’d stolen from his uncle, despite his uncle’s curse, his threats and the constant fear in which Adrian had lived.
He’d stolen the Eye, too, because it was a powerful artifact. When he looked through it, he saw invisible things. He saw spells that were invisible to the naked eye but that existed as tangled lines of power. He saw through arcane disguises and illusions. He could also focus spells through it, which made them more powerful but tended to make them unpredictable, too, a little trickier to control. He thought he could use it to see even more—maybe much more—only he didn’t know how to use it.
He’d stolen it, after all. Plucked it from its hiding place and then used it to blast its real owner into oblivion. He didn’t even really know what it was called; his uncle had always called it the Eye of Agamotto, but that was obviously a joke. It was a joke Adrian didn’t really know how to untell, until he could find a better name for the thing.
He squinched the Eye into place and almost immediately dropped it. Inside the dancers he saw worms. Tall, eyeless, limbless things, limp and boneless but muscular, and the worms wrapped around the spines of the dancers and made them move, like hands inside felt puppets. He saw lines of power, too, a web of many overlapping spells and wards splattered along all the walls, the floor, and the ceiling.
He also saw Mouser struggling with the big Swede; he was worm-filled, but she was not. She slapped him with her palms and clawed at him with fingernails, but he only laughed.
Then the first of the dancers exploded. Adrian nearly dropped the Third Eye fumbling it back into his pocket, and was just in time to see several more explode behind the first. Ribbons and shreds of flesh erupted in all directions as the human beings came apart and collapsed like bloody, discarded cocoons. What emerged from each flaccid heap of flesh bore no resemblance to a worm; they were pure monster, vaguely humanoid with hooked talons and a third set of limbs between arms and legs, that looked like it could function as either. Around the gaping maw of needle-like teeth, Adrian couldn’t see anything that resembled a face or even a head. They scuttled forward like praying mantises, four lower limbs propelling them while clawed hands groped to the attack.
“We’re in trouble!” Adrian yelled, realizing he was way, way too late. A wave of fatigue swished over him like a slow tide of warm chocolate, lulling him to dark oblivion. He bit his own tongue, hard, right through the wad of stimulant gum in his mouth. The flavor instantly changed from peppermint to blood, but he stayed awake.
“No shit!” Eddie shrugged out of his guitar strap and swung his Fender Toronado like a real ax, slamming the red body of the instrument into the snapping teeth of the foremost of the creatures. Jim bounded past him to hook one of the monitors with the toe of his boot and fling it into the onrushing mass of beasts, pummeling one of them in the chest and knocking it sideways.
In the back of the hall, the Swede exploded and fell away like the meat disguise that he was. The demon inside grabbed Mouser with four limbs, cutting off her shriek instantly.
Adrian raised the MAC-11 and fired.
***