Chapter Two
“The girl!” Adrian shouted. There wasn’t any good reason for him to care about her, except that she was the only other human in the room. Heck, she’d distracted him with her toys and her sexual fascination, and that wasn’t likely to have been an accident. She’d lured him in. He ought to hate her, 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 watermelon in a Gallagher stage performance, and the creature’s body dropped.
Adrian scooted around the end of the bar. He shot a glance towards the stage and saw the rest of the band, backed into a corner around the shattered window and fighting off the swarming creatures. If anything, the wind and the rain seemed to be holding the monsters back as much as the band’s weapons, but the weather also made it impossible for Twitch to fly out.
They’d all have to jump, Adrian guessed. Oh well, twenty feet or so wasn’t too much of a fall—as long as one of them made it without breaking a leg and could drive the van. If the wind hadn’t actually flipped the van upside down, of course. Once they were inside the van, its wards of obfuscation and silence should help them evade pursuit and get away.
The six-limbed thing still trembled and shuddered as Adrian kicked it out of the way, switching to a new clip.
Mouser looked up at him, terrified. “I thought it was some kind of gag,” she squeaked, meeting his eyes.
“Yeah, I’m laughing my ass off,” Adrian grumbled, now wondering why he had bothered saving her. He grabbed her by her forearm and pulled her to her feet, looking at the cuts on her shoulder. There were a lot of them, and they were bleeding, but they didn’t look too deep. He tucked the Ingram under his arm, grabbed a bar towel and wrapped it around her injury.
“The big guy, Fafnir or whatever,” she continued, a little hysterical, “he said they were going to play a prank on you with your gear. He promised me fifty bucks if I kept you distracted. He said you wouldn’t be able to keep your eyes off a shiny electronic toy.” She sobbed, but just once, like a hiccup full of tears.
“Son of a bitch.” Somebody knew him too well. But who could that be? And if they knew him well enough to know how much he liked gadgets, what else might they know? Obviously, whoever it was knew how to find the band. They’d set a trap, and the Notorious Gentlemen had stepped right into it. “I’d make a joke about thirty pieces of silver,” he snapped, “but even my delusions don’t have that much grandeur.”
Adrian’s heart pounded in his chest and his throat felt constricted. Stay awake! He told himself and slammed his knuckles against the hard wood of the bar. He looked back across the hall and saw Twitch the falcon soaring again, but this time into the center of the room, flying with the cold, wet blast of the wind over her friends’ heads.
Squeeeeeeal!
Adrian turned, fumbling to get control of the pistol. He kept his eyes open only long enough to see four flailing talons come lunging at him across the bar—
* * *
Knock, knock, knock.
Adrian knew he was dreaming. That didn’t make it any better.
“Come in, Ade,” his uncle called from behind the cracked door.
Adrian pushed the door open, screaming silently. He didn’t want to see his uncle. He tried to look at the floor, but he was only dreaming and he couldn’t control what his dream-self-did. His dream-self looked up at his uncle.
No! he wanted to yell, but couldn’t.
The boy Adrian had never said “no,” and had never been able to say what he always suspected: that it had been his uncle who had killed his father. In his dreams, Adrian could only watch his nightmares replay, again and again.
“Don’t you want to learn about wards of silence?” his uncle asked. His uncle’s head was a wolf’s head, but not the head of a real wolf—it was cartoonish, with a long muzzle like a clown’s oversized shoe, complete with a slack lower jaw for a floppy sole and a slavering tongue that hung wet and pink and threw hot drops of saliva around as his uncle talked.
No more silence! Adrian screamed inside, but his dream-self was more hesitant. No more cooperation!
“I think I can do that one. C-can we talk about wards of shielding?” he suggested.
His uncle’s study was red-ribbed and fleshy, like the inside of a whale. His uncle sat at his desk. Adrian the dreamer knew that if you pulled the top left-hand drawer all the way out and reached under the desk, you could find a small hidden shelf. That was where his uncle kept the Eye, and Adrian knew it because in real life, years ago, he had found the Eye and stolen it. Dream-Adrian didn’t know anything about it.
Dream-Adrian was trapped.
Books leered wetly at Adrian from sagging shelves on the walls, flapping their covers open and shut suggestively and chanting in a collective whisper.
Silence, silence, just between us!
“Of course we can.” The wolf smiled, tongue bouncing on his chest.
“Now?” Dream-Adrian’s heart hammered so loud it almost drowned out the books.
“In a bit.”
“What about some combat magic?”
The wolf’s eyebrows launched off his forehead in skeptical mockery. “Fireballs and death touches, you mean?”
Dream-Adrian nodded. Run away! Adrian screamed. This wasn’t exactly a memory, it wasn’t a particular scene through which he had ever lived, but it was the epitome of a thousand scenes from his childhood, and he knew how it had to end. “Or maybe something smaller. Like a stunning spell?”
Uncle-wolf frowned, retracting his tongue slightly into his mouth. “Traditionally, masters don’t ever teach apprentices combat magic. Combat spells are things a wizard teaches himself, when he is a man of full powers and mature understanding.”
“I didn’t know you only did things the traditional way.” Dream-Adrian’s jibe was so flat and understated, even Adrian couldn’t be sure it was really an attack. It was the most passive aggression possible, surrender with a joke so subtle it wasn’t even obviously a joke. Adrian cursed his own weakness and wished he could look away.
Silence, silence, this is the way of the wizard!
The wolf patted his knee and slid his wet, pink tongue out to its full length. “I can only do for you what has been done for me,” he purred, his voice low and husky.
Dream-Adrian edged closer to the wolf, muscles in his lower back tightening. “Can you teach me everything?” he asked. No, run away! Adrian screamed, tears flowing down his cheeks even though they didn’t. “I want to be a great sorcerer, like my father. Even better than my father.”
The wolf took Dream-Adrian by the wrist and drew him closer. “I know you miss your dad,” the wolf said. He smiled, but his tongue dangled so bright and long out of his mouth that it made the smile horrible to behold. “I’m your dad now. I’ll teach you everything you need to know to be a wizard. Then you can become like me.”
“Will you?”
No!
Uncle-wolf drew Dream-Adrian down and onto his lap. His tongue lay wet and heavy across Adrian’s back and neck. “Yes,” he promised. It’s a lie! “And I’ll teach you everything you need to know to be a man, too.”
Silence, silence, who is there to believe you, anyway?
* * *
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Adrian jerked awake, spluttering. His eyes felt red and puffy as if he’d been weeping, but they also stung from the splash of alcohol he’d just taken in the face. The vaporous sting of it filled his nostrils.
“Son of a bitch!” he spat.
“If you say so,” Twitch agreed amiably. “Now get up.”
She was in her man form, which was a bit physically stronger than her woman shape, and she pushed a shoulder under his arm as he dragged himself up the bar to his feet. He was splattered with green goo and had to kick aside the bodies of two six-limbed monsters to get up. When he did manage to clear his eyes and stand, he found Mouser, holding his MAC-11 with a defiant stare in her eyes.
Adrian heard howling wind, pounding rain, demons squealing, and guns going off, but the space around the bar was the eye of the storm. He looked down at the second monster corpse and saw that its head had been sawn clean off by a string of bullets.
“Good job,” he said.
Mouser nodded.
“Clip empty?”
She shrugged.
He wiped various kinds of moisture from his face and handed her the taser. “Take this, just in case. You’d be surprised what can get taken down by a good jolt from a taser.”
“What about you?”
“Don’t worry about our boy Adrian,” Twitch told the club gopher. “He’s a bottomless well of surprises.” The fairy slid up onto the bar and crouched there, ready to leap or fight, a wooden baton in each hand.
Adrian snorted and pulled his candle stub from his pocket.
“You’re going to fight with a candle?”
He did his best nonchalant shrug. “It’s a very specialized style of kung fu. And I never learned tablet fighting, like you did.” He pointed at the mangled device, scratched, cracked and covered in slime, where it lay on the floor.
She giggled, with a slight manic edge to her voice.
“What’s the situation, Twitch?” Adrian asked. He shoved bullets into the spare Ingram clip as fast as he could manage, out of a rattling pants pocket.
“They want Jim,” the fairy said, shaking a baton like a pointer.
Eddie and Mike shuffled forward, shooting, and as a result, they took their fair share of attacks, but Twitch was right—the brunt of the assault hammered down on Jim with brutal, unrelenting force.
The singer held his own, leaping onto tabletops to make great slashing attacks, and then when the monsters grabbed at his ankles, vaulting over their heads to ride their very backs, but he was slowing down, and there were dozens of them.
“That suggests a plan,” Adrian mused. Over the shuffle and scrape of the combat, the pistol fire and the howling of the wind, he could barely hear his own words. “Here, take this.” He snapped the full clip into the MAC-11 and handed it back to Mouser, then began reloading the other.
“The windows open over concrete,” Twitch told him sourly. “The wind’s too strong for me and the fall will be unpleasant for any of you.”
Adrian harrumphed and pocketed the full clip. “That dead end only underscores the awesomeness of my plan.”
“Which is?”
“Get to the van and get out of here. Rob a gas station to fill the tank.”
“Agreed.” Twitch laughed, a laugh like silver water that turned Adrian on a little bit, despite his fear and the waves of exhaustion lapping at his body. The frisson of arousal made him nervous, but only slightly. It was just Twitch, after all. “I was imagining you might tell me some of the intermediate steps.”
Adrian pointed. “Get Jim into the green room. These things follow him, we have them corralled.”
Twitch didn’t even linger long enough to say she approved. She just sprang into the air, horse’s tail trailing behind her, and the rest of her body metamorphosing into a silver falcon in a split second. She snapped her wings once and was across the hall, swooping among thrashing monsters and reappearing in her drummer form in a divot of cleared space among her three band-mates.
“Come on.” Adrian led Mouser by the wrist to the landing at the top of the stairs. He opened the door to the green room and positioned Mouser facing the hall. In the tumult of struggling limbs he could make out flashes of Jim, cutting his way through the monsters towards the stage and its green room entrance. Then Twitch the horse appeared in the fray, kicking a hole through the mound of monsters with her two hind hooves. Jim, Mike and Eddie broke into a run.
“Get ready,” Adrian warned Mouser.
“What do I do?”
“If they head this way, shoot them.”
“I can do that.” The gopher thumbed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and adjusted her grip on the MAC-11.
“By them I mean the monsters,” Adrian clarified, and then thought he should probably clarify even a little more. “The ones not in the band.”
He shot a glance down the stairs. It was quiet—no monster sounds, but no restaurant sounds either, and no music. Maybe all the diners had turned into wormy-twisted-six-limbed freaks, too. He heard the distant echo of storm sounds, and didn’t know if the restaurant’s doors were open or the wind and rain noises of the hall itself were bouncing back at him up the stairs.
B-rap-p-p-p-p-p!
Adrian snapped his attention back around to see one of the creatures explode into green goo. The herd of them charged at Jim, who stood in the green room door, holding them at bay, while Eddie, Mike and Twitch sprinted down the length of the green room in Adrian’s direction.
“Wow, these things are stupid,” Mouser observed.
“Good,” Adrian grunted.
Twitch bounded out of the green room first, followed closely by Eddie and Mike.
Adrian felt sweat run down his back and his forehead, and his breathing felt tight. Not now, he told himself, not now. He patted his pockets looking for the nicotine gum and couldn’t find it.
“We get outta here,” the Mexican bass player said, “remind me that I want to sharpen the head of that bass.”
“Not sure it needs it,” Eddie grumbled. “But it ought to have kill notches carved on the neck, that’s for sure.”
Adrian felt woozy. “Pinch me,” he said to Mike.
“Carajo,” Mike cursed, but did it immediately. “Don’t fall asleep now!”
“Come on!” Eddie yelled to Jim, and stepped out of the way.
Jim turned and ran.
Adrian saw him coming in stop-motion, feeling his own body slow down, and he screwed his entire will, all the force of his ka into one tiny point, the point through which he needed to cast his spell. My shadow is light, he told himself. The valley of the shadow of death is nothing. It’s sunshine, I’m awake.
Jim ran head down, his long black hair flying behind him and his blade pointed back. Behind him, racing on four legs at a shocking speed, gnarled and twisted necks extended to point their collective thousands of teeth forward, came the beasts.
The others stepped aside. Eddie reloaded.
Adrian felt Mike pinch his side, again and again, as the walls of the green room seemed to blur and slide away in sleep. That was going to leave bruises. He’d asked for it. He tried to focus on Jim, and on the horde that followed him.
Twitch disappeared from his vision.
Jim dove past him.
“Per Volcanum ignem mitto!” Adrian shouted. His uncle had never taught him a single attack spell, not one, but Adrian had taught himself this one, late at night on the rooftop with copies of the spellbook’s pages that he had scrawled out by hand, comparing them carefully with a lost (and, by Adrian, stolen) book of Pliny the Elder. Combat magic was hard, a lot harder than wards and illusions, especially when you tried to work it in the heat of the moment, but Adrian had learned this one spell by heart.
To hell with the truth. It had been a firebolt that set Adrian free.
Fire erupted from the stub of candle and through the Third Eye, a column of white and gold smashing through the ranks of the creatures. Adrian held it as long as he could, incinerating demonic flesh and obliterating their howls of protest, and when he felt himself slipping into sleep, he let the spell go and collapsed into Mike’s arms.
Mike slapped him in the face.
“Stay awake, chingado!” the bass player swore at him.
Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Adrian did.
Slam!
Eddie banged shut the door to the green room. “They’re not all dead!” the guitar player yelled. “Down the stairs, now! Now!”
Mike turned and half-dragged Adrian and Mouser both down the stairs under more fluorescent tubes, one in each arm. Spencer had been a little guy, like him, Adrian remembered. In that respect, at least, Mike was sometimes more useful. Also, he picked locks and stuff.
As his vision recovered, he saw Eddie fire off three short bursts with his Glock on automatic fire, then turn and pound his way down the steps on their heels.
“Where’s Twitch?” Adrian asked, stumbling to his own two feet as they hit the bottom of the stairs and plunged into knee-deep water.
“Really?” Mike was incredulous. “Outta everybody, the one you’re worried about is the one who can fly?”
“I’m right here,” Twitch called. “Sorry.”
In the center of the restaurant, above a wreckage of shattered tables, Adrian saw Twitch. The fairy was in her leather-bar-outfit-clad drummer’s shape, and she dangled in midair, in the clutches of a pig-headed, eagle-winged giant. Two more giants stood in the restaurant, to either side. One had the head of a bull, and the other was a centaur. Not a knobbly, ugly, twisted beast with six limbs like the things in the club above—the things behind them, Adrian thought nervously—but a beautiful woman with long chestnut hair and the lower body of a horse. Though the ceiling was twenty feet off the ground, each of the giants stooped slightly to avoid hitting it.
The restaurant was lit by incandescent bulbs hanging from long chains or set into the walls, which illuminated the giants’ knees very well but left their heads and shoulders in menacing shadow.
“Yamayol,” Jim snarled. “Ezeq’el. Semyaz.”
“Shit,” Eddie added.
***