Devil Sent the Rain by D. J. Butler Page B

warm water that snaked down his back, and braced himself.
    To hell with the firebolt. To hell with trying to bar the path to the Fallen. He needed to get them all back to Kansas City, and pronto. They’d have to come back for Jim, if they could. And if they couldn’t, well, Jim’s body had the clipping of Azazel’s hoof in Kansas City. Adrian coughed, crouched to get down into cleaner air, took a deep breath and jammed the tawny eye over his own eyeball.
    He felt blood spurt out onto his face and winced. A tun-tun-tun-tun-tun machine gun pulsing exploded inside his head and his vision blurred and skewed sideways. Adrian grabbed his temples and dropped onto his knees and elbows.
    “Aaagh!” his mouth filled with hot fluid and he coughed and spat as much of it as he could onto the floor. He forced his eyes open and found himself staring into a puddle of yellow-gray slime, like bile, or worse.
    But he could see the umbilical cord again. “Touch me!” he gasped to the others, trying to wind up the incantations again that he had begun on the ledge of hair outside.
    “You’ve got to be joking!” Eddie, again in his sleeveless jacket and combat boots, kicked and punched at one of the Fallen, who tried to emerge from the stairwell. Adrian saw the angel’s name-plate and silently cursed his inability to read the Primals. That was stupid and pointless of course—Adrian would never be able to read the Primals, and it wasn’t his fault. Still, the sense of powerlessness and frustration almost overwhelmed him.
    The white angel grabbed for Eddie’s jacket, but Twitch threw herself in the way, slamming aside long-fingered, lightning-colored hands with her improvised club.
    “We’re busy!” Mike grunted.
    An increase in the white glow from the lower story told Adrian where the third Fallen was. He raised his arms and opened himself to channel ka-energy through the umbilical cord.
    “ Per Wepwawet Mercuriumque semitam —”
    With a flash of pain that Adrian saw as much as felt, the eye popped out of his head.
    Adrian screamed and dropped to the floor.
    His breath tightened and his vision turned black. He fell into a dark, dark pit—
    “There must be another way out, yes?”
    The voice belonged to Mouser. She knelt over Adrian, dragging him away from sleep. Adrian’s spine tingled with discomfort from her being so close, but it helped that she was wearing jammies. It made her look like a big kid, and not a woman.
    “Murmph.” Adrian spat bile from his mouth and rummaged around until he found the tawny eye again. It looked dented and bruised, a little knocked out of shape from being inside his eye. He heard thuds and cursing that told him that his friends were fighting, though he couldn’t see it.
    “I do not believe you are devils,” Elaine Canning said.
    “Handsome is,” Adrian agreed, and threw up a little more.
    “But if we are to flee, we must flee now.”
    Adrian nodded. His mouth was sour with fluids of his stomach, and as he spat to clear it he pointed at the ceiling. “There’s an attic,” he said. “And an exit to the roof.”
    “And then what?” she asked. “We fly away?”
    “More or less.” Only Adrian didn’t know whether he could do it. He felt like he had a harpoon through every opening in his head, which throbbed and shook and oscillated around him like a satellite in orbit. Even in the best of circumstances, he wasn’t sure his spell would work—he didn’t really know what the umbilical cord was or where it went.
    Elaine Canning nodded. “You open the door, and I’ll free the others.”
    “You have some weapon I don’t know about?”
    “I have a plan,” she said, standing. “I would trade it for a good horse pistol, loaded and primed.”
    Adrian snorted. “Wouldn’t we all, sister?”
    He lurched to his feet and staggered down the hall.
    The trapdoor in the ceiling was easy enough to find. He’d begun this bizarre journey climbing down out of the attic through the pull-down