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giant to the space where he remembered leaving the van. The band’s ride was still there, but it was smashed into two pieces, like an enormous tree had fallen down right across the middle of it.
    Or an enormous foot.
    So much for his mobile wards of obfuscation. Adrian shivered.
    A mangled mantis-demon limb drifted past him in the water.
    “You’re not leaving,” growled Yamayol, the bull-headed giant. As if to punctuate his sentence, he flexed his body in a weightlifter’s pose, clenching his fists and making the gray scales covering his entire body ripple.
    B-rap-p-p-p!
    A flash of light and a whiff of smoke beside Adrian told him that Eddie was firing his Glock back up the stairs.
    “Call off your minions, Ezeq’el!” Jim yelled.
    “Why?” the centauress asked. Her voice boomed, but also purred sweetly. “I think they give you all the right incentives.”
    B-rap-p-p!
    Mike jammed rounds into his .45 as fast as he could and Adrian turned to look up the stairs. The foremost of the monsters rasping down the stairs fell under Eddie’s bullets, but there were more behind.
    “What do you want?” Jim barked. He looked like the statue of a Viking hero in some Scandinavian port, standing upright and determined with his sword in his hand and the rain crashing off his body. His voice echoed like he was standing on a reverb plate.
    “To reign in Hell!” hissed the boar-headed giant, and smashed his lizard’s tail into the water, stretching wide his wings to their full span, so they filled the restaurant. That would be Semyaz, Adrian thought. Big shot in Hell, and troublemaker.
    “Better to reign,” he muttered, “et cetera.” Damned if it wasn’t a thought he’d had himself, a thousand times.
    “Screw you!” Jim hissed.
    Semyaz flicked his arm and smashed Twitch into the ceiling. The fairy’s blood spattered down in a fine mist, mixed with concrete dust. She yelped, but it was a muffled sound, and after the impact she shifted through several shapes then ended in horse form. Semyaz still held her in mid-air like she was a doll. She whinnied softly, shaking her bloodied head.
    Squeeeeeeeal!
    B-rap-p-p!
    No time for Twitch now.
    Adrian whipped around, facing up the stairs just as Eddie’s pistol clicked loudly, the clip empty. A trio of windmilling monsters leaped into the air, crashing down upon the band like comets. Sleep grabbed the base of Adrian’s brain and choked him, dragging him away from the conflict, but he shook it off.
    He fell to his knees in the water, raising the candle stub and the lens and aiming up the stairs.
    “ Per Volcanum ignem mitto! ” he shouted again, and loosed his entire ka-energy reserve into the candle. The coruscating burst of flame stripped paint off the cement walls, shattered fluorescent tube lights and reduced the leaping creatures to a rain of falling muddy ash—
    he passed out—
    felt himself plunge into water and rebound off the hard floor—
    he came up spluttering. And with empty hands.
    “Shit!” he yelled, and plunged back into the water. He heard gunfire around him, but it was muted by the water in his ears, and by the shock. The stream rushed past him, and he realized that, as deep as it was, it was still flowing downstairs and into the lower level of the building. That was an awful lot of rain.
    A whole dead mantis-thing bumped against him, charred black from the waist up. He cursed and kicked it away.
    “Adrian!” Mike yelled. “You got ’em, cabrón , you got ’em all.”
    “Screw that!” Adrian shouted. “I lost the Eye!”
    Somewhere, Jim was shouting. “I wouldn’t be Heaven’s plaything, Semyaz! I won’t be Hell’s, either!”
    “Why do you care?” Ezeq’el the centauress asked. Yamayol and Semyaz just sounded angry and menacing; she sounded curious. Adrian didn’t pay all that much attention—he kept pulling up bits that felt like the Third Eye, but turned out to be fragments of crockery, broken plates and glasses.
    He chanted his own