Free Devil Sent the Rain by D. J. Butler

Twitch—
    crack!—
    into the door. She bounced off it and fell heavily to the ground.
    “Oberon’s teeth!” Twitch groaned, rolling over. She still had blood in her hair from her earlier beating—though that been in the physical world, and not in this weird dream-space—still, any way you sliced it, Adrian thought, Twitch was having a bad, bad day.
    He wanted to charge and attack. It wasn’t his lack of weapons that held him back, it was the fact that he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the other scene that was playing out in the room.
    Young Ade sat on his uncle’s lap, and then big hands went where big hands shouldn’t ever go. Adrian couldn’t look away and he couldn’t quite watch it, either, so he was grateful for the tears that stung his eyes and partially blinded him.
    The crisp crunch of splintering wood brought Adrian’s attention back to the wolf. With its long jaws it had bitten the coat rack in half, but big Mike still managed to land the first blow on the beast, jamming the jagged end of the wood into the monster’s chest.
    Roooooooaaaaarrrrrr!
    The wolf howled in rage, but it seemed like an overreaction—the coat rack had sunk into its ribs, but Adrian didn’t even see blood. The creature lunged forward, bounding on all fours and slamming its body into the bass player, hurling him into the corner and pouncing on him.
    “Get off, dammit!” Eddie roared, and threw himself onto the beast’s back.
    With his vision still focused on the space the wolf had vacated, Adrian’s eye landed on something else—his uncle’s desk.
    And he thought of the secret shelf.
    Did the Eye exist in this strange place? And might he be able to cobble together some kind of spell, if he had it? The Eye wasn’t a power source, but if there were ka-energy here, the Eye would help him find and use it.
    Though … wasn’t that what had brought him here in the first place?
    He lurched forward. His limbs moved slowly and he felt like he was swimming through water, but he pushed ahead. Behind him he heard snarling and snapping noises, and the dull thumps of punches connecting with their targets.
    He turned to look and saw a tangle of wrestling flesh.
    And Elaine Canning. The woman who talked like a crazy person about Roundheads and theology stood unmoving, looking at young Ade and his uncle, and wept.
    Adrian stopped sluggishly, turning himself to look forward again. His uncle still sat on his chair with young Ade on his knee. He had one hand inside young Ade’s clothing, but he patted his other knee with his free hand and smiled without humor or pity at Adrian, his tawny eyes cold.
    “Sit down, Adrian,” he uncle said in a withered voice.
    This was wrong. This was all wrong. He’d been inside his dreams of this moment many times before, and he’d never been a separate person from young Ade. The boy version of himself stared at him now with horror in his eyes, and pity.
    “You son of a bitch,” Adrian said. He wanted to bellow, but his voice came out like a strangled squeak. “I should have killed you.”
    “You did.” His uncle’s tongue slipped further out of his mouth as he spoke, becoming longer and thicker.
    “Not soon enough.” The chair was in his way, but there was something else, too. Something he couldn’t see, but that felt as solid as a brick wall, stopped Adrian from getting closer to the desk.
    “Don’t be bitter,” his uncle said. “It’s just the way of the wizard.”
    “Like hell it is.” With an exertion of his will like a push, Adrian threw himself forward. He banged his knee on the arm of the chair, under his kneecap, and then stubbed his toes, so when he tumbled to the floor in front of the desk his leg hurt with a pain that also made him want to laugh.
    He didn’t like the fact that his back was turned to his dream-uncle and the wolf, but so be it. Kneeling, he fumbled his way forward.
    “Chingón!” Mike yelled.
    Whack!
    Adrian yanked open the top left drawer and shoved his