Crow Jane (2 page)

All the while, Jane pressed down with the iron knife and smelled smoke.

And all the while, the elusive, ever-present crow of her death perched on top of the paper-towel dispenser and stared down at her with a sour yellow eye.

Then the animal forms were gone, and the man and woman shapes, too, and Jane held the fairy against the sink in her true form.

She was a female, two feet high, with leathery gray skin and eyes that were completely yellow. Her belly and her dugs sagged, her cat-like ears and whiskers trembled. The one remnant of her more beautiful self, her silver horse’s tail, flapped soggily in the running water of the sink.

“What shall I call you?” Jane pulled the knife away, keeping it still in her hand and visible, but she held the quicksilver pressed to the fairy’s flesh. It would keep her from changing shape, or attempting to use her Glamour.

“I’m a fairy,” she croaked back. “I don’t have a true name, sorceress.”

Jane stared coldly down at the creature and flared her nostrils. “Don’t repeat the mistake of thinking I’m stupid, child of Mab,” she said. “I will happily release you from your exile with my iron blade.”

The fairy hissed through gapped yellow teeth. “How…?” she wrinkled her nose, looked at her own handiwork on the mirror, and slumped in defeat. “Twitch,” she said. “Call me Twitch.”

“Very good, Twitch,” Jane gave her prisoner positive reinforcement. “Now listen to me closely. I’m going to ask questions. You’re going to be tempted to evade them, or to lie. The first time you choose not to answer fully and honestly, I’ll cut you.” She held the iron knife in front of the fairy’s eyes as a reminder. “The second time you do so, I’ll kill you. Do you understand?”

The fairy nodded.

“Use words, Twitch.” Jane smiled.

“I understand,” the drummer agreed.

“Several days ago,” Jane began, “something was stolen in New Mexico. Something that Heaven considers very valuable, that had been in its keeping and hidden for thousands of years. The keeper fled.” No point identifying the keeper as the angel Raphael, or Jane’s real errand, or the bitterness of her feelings. “The thieves escaped. I have tracked them here.” No point explaining about the Mare, either. “Are you following me so far, Twitch?”

“Yes,” Twitch nodded.

“Now,” Jane said slowly. “I’m going to ask you the question that you are going to try to lie about. Remember this, child of Mab. The first time, I’ll only cut you.”

Twitch gulped.

“Where is the hoof, fairy?” Jane asked.

Twitch hesitated. “I … I don’t know,” she ventured in her bullfrog voice.

Jane nodded, affecting a sad face, and stabbed the drummer in her arm.

“Aaaaaaaagh!” Twitch shrieked again, a horrendous, piteous cry. She thrashed and wiggled on the sink, but Jane held her pinned, and kept the quicksilver firmly pressed to her chest.

Smoke billowed from the wound rather than blood, and stung Jane’s eyes.

“Stop! Please, stop!”

Jane pulled the knife back and regarded the fairy with stern eyes.

“I told you,” she reminded the ugly creature, “the first time I would cut you. Do you remember what I’m going to do the second time you choose not to answer me?”

The fairy’s eyes rolled desperately in her head. “Kill me,” she hissed through chapped and shuddering lips.

“Kill you,” Jane agreed. She turned the knife so that its sharp edge now faced the fairy, and gently touched the blade to her neck. She heard a
sizzle
and smelled faint burning. “Now, are you ready to try again?”

Twitch said nothing, only shivered. The crow stared down impassively. After thousands of years and thousands of failed attempts, Jane still had to suppress the urge to throw the knife at the crow instead, to make a heroic lunge and grab the bird with its terrible, joyous burden, tearing into its flesh and feathers with her teeth and devouring it whole, drawing it into her body’s permanent embrace.

She blinked and exhaled, driving away the thought.

“I know that you and your friends stole Azazel’s hoof from the well in Dudael,” Jane said. “Understand me clearly: I
know
it was you. Unless you are content to die here and now, Twitch, child of Mab, tell me where the hoof is.”

Twitch swallowed hard and stared into Jane’s eyes. “Jim has it,” she said.

Good. Once the stone started rolling down the mountain, the fairy would be hard pressed to stop it. “Which one is Jim?”

“The singer,” Twitch said, and closed her eyes pathetically.

“Where does he keep it?” Jane asked.

“On his body,” the fairy admitted. “He keeps it taped … taped to his belly.”

Jane nodded. She wouldn’t have let it away from her person, either. “Is that where the hoof is now?” she asked.

Twitch hesitated, but only for a second. “He hasn’t let go of it since we got it,” she said. “It’s his.”

“What do you mean, it’s
his?
” Jane asked. “Is he your leader?”

“Yes,” Twitch said instantly. “The hoof belongs to his family. Really, his father.” Now that she had started talking, she couldn’t stop. “Jim is Azazel’s son.”

This thoroughly mediocre dive-bar band was quickly becoming the most interesting thing Jane had seen in a century. “What are you doing with the hoof?” she asked. She rationalized the question easily: she needed to gauge how much resistance would be put up when she took it, and whether Jim would try to take it back and thereby interfere with her plans. Really, though, she was curious.

“We’re going to Chicago,” Twitch said. Tears leaked from her yellow eyes and streamed onto the bathroom porcelain. “Eddie knows a hoodoo woman there, and we’re going to contact the Infernal powers and make a deal.”

“Eddie?”

“The guitar player. He sold his soul and he wants it back.”

“And what does Jim want?”

Twitch sobbed openly now. “He wants to be … he wants peace, I think.”

“And you want back?” Jane nodded at the foam-covered mirror. It felt strange to indulge pure curiosity. Strange and sort of pleasant. “Somehow, you can strike a bargain with Azazel that will let you back into the Shadowless Palace.”

Twitch nodded and shuddered. “I need his forgiveness,” she wept.

That was a queer thing to say and prompted more questions, but Jane shook herself mentally; enough games. Time to take quick action. “Do you know who I am?” she prompted the creature.

“You’re the Marked Woman,” Twitch nodded. “You’re Qayna, the one the humans call
Cain
.”

Jane raised the iron knife to plunge it into the fairy’s body.

Bam! Bam! Bam!
came a hammering at the boor.

“Twitch?” called a man’s voice.

***

Chapter Two

“Twitch, we’re on in three. You in there?”

Jane hesitated a split second, considering whether she should hold the fairy drummer hostage and demand the hoof of Azazel in exchange. In that split second, she realized that the voice at the door didn’t belong to Jim the singer, and remembered that he had sat down, grinning, to drink a beer with the table of co-eds, so the person knocking must be someone else in the band.

In that same split second, Twitch bit her.

Jane cursed in Adamic (her native tongue had few true curse words, but they were very strong—Jane’s curse splashed cold water around the room as if she had punched her fist into the sink) and pulled back her hand. It was the hand with the bead of quicksilver cupped in it, and the fairy had craned her neck at an impossible angle to sink her yellow teeth into the flesh of Jane’s wrist.

She only pulled the hand away half an inch, but that half inch was enough.

A silvery falcon exploded into being beneath Jane’s hand, a broad-winged, beautiful bird that was instantly recognizable as a fey creature, and as Twitch, by its possession of the same long silver horse’s tail. With a powerful flap of its wings, the falcon snapped out of Jane’s hands and up to the top of the paper towel dispenser. It shrieked, a sharp and piercing cry, and then Twitch was again a lithe, androgynous drummer wearing leather and spikes. The crow gazed dully at them both, unfazed that it had to share its perch so long as it wasn’t sharing with Jane. And the fairy, of course, didn’t see the crow at all.

Twitch struck the wall with her heels and kicked off. Her drumsticks leaped into her hands in mid-air as she soared over Jane’s head, striking with a drum major’s
rat-tat-tat
of hard blows.

“Twitch? What’s going on,
chingón
?” the voice at the door insisted.

Jane blocked several blows of the fairy’s batons with her forearm, ducking as the other woman sailed over her. She had an instant’s regret that she had let herself be distracted, but then decided that this was a development she could use.

“Mike!” the fairy shouted, landing lightly on her feet by the cracked toilet. “Help!”

She was outside the wards of silence, and Mike heard her. “
Huevos!
” Jane heard him shout, and then a shoulder was thrown against the door.

Jane let the wards of silence drop and kept fighting.

She gained space for herself with a series of sharp thrusts. The fairy parried and retreated until she was forced to hop up and stand on the toilet seat itself, back against the old lead plumbing. Then Jane whirled, throwing her duster up behind her like a cloak to impede and distract her fey combatant. With a swipe of her forearm, she cleared the mirror of foam and then finished her spin arms first, catching and deflecting another flurry of blows from the fairy. She kept her right fist closed around the lump of quicksilver, and the iron blade in her left.

The crow watched, unmoved.

“Hold on!” Mike shouted. “Eddie! It’s Twitch!”

Reinforcements were arriving. That suited Jane just fine, so long as they didn’t include Jim.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The doorknob burst inward and clanked to the floor, and then the latch flew off its screws.

Jane forced the fairy back again with the cold bite of her iron knife, muttering an Adamic incantation as she did—

then turned and leaped for the mirror.

The bass player shouldered into the room, leading with his pistol and following with his burly frame. Behind him came the guitarist, shorter and wiry and also holding a gun.

“Are you leaving so soon?” Twitch shouted, and Jane felt the creature strike her in the back, wrapping long fingers around Jane’s shoulders as the surface of the mirror faded, became translucent and then transparent, revealing behind it an endless maze of stairs and corridors and two surprised faces—

“Dammit!” someone yelled behind her in the restroom—

and then Jane felt the cool veil of the mirror’s unsubstantiated presence pass over her like a film of water and she was through.

But she had come with a passenger.

The fairy bit her again, in the neck.

Jane hit the ground rolling forward, onto her fingertips and the top of her head and then she slammed down onto her back on the stone floor, hard—

smashing Twitch.

“Oomph!” the fairy grunted.

“Halt!”

Two girl-boyish fey faces loomed over her—the faces of Queen’s Rangers, no doubt—over spears pointing down. One had flame-orange hair and a fox’s tail and the other was striped, head and tail, like a badger; both wore leather jerkins and greaves, the breastplates carved and painted with Mab’s emblem, the tree and lightning bolt. Their spears were entirely wooden, their tips sharpened by fire.

The Queen’s Rangers were scouts, warriors and sentinels; they patrolled the infinite maze that was the Outer Bounds of the Mirror Queendom.

Jane ignored the Rangers and stood; Twitch was too stunned by the impact with the floor to stop her. The Outer Bounds stretched around her in all directions, an explosion of halls, staircases, shafts and pits with glass windows in every flat surface. This was a defense mechanism, Jane knew, a classic maze to disorient and deter outsiders. Any ordinary human who managed to stumble in through a gate would find himself bewildered and lost, and the fairies could easily kill him or, if it so struck their puckish senses of humor, let him wander forever.

Jane was no ordinary human, and she knew how to make her way.

“I say again, halt!” cried Foxtail in a shrill voice that whistled through his nose. “Friend or foe, and state your business!”

“My business is my own,” Jane said coolly. She sheathed her iron knife, but slowly, making sure that the fairies saw it first.

It had the intended effect; they both shuffled back a step and tightened their grip on their spears.

Jane kept the quicksilver in her fist—she’d need it to get through the Bounds, anyway—and deliberately doffed her broad-brimmed hat, letting her long black hair fall out behind her in its loose plait and allowing the Rangers get a good look at the tattoos all over her face. “And I’m no one’s friend. I’m a fugitive and a vagabond … hadn’t you heard?”

Both Rangers gasped. “The Marked Woman,” Badger growled uneasily.

“Let me pass,” Jane told them, replacing her hat. “You have no choice, anyway. You can’t kill me, and if you get in my way I’ll surely kill you. This one, though,” she turned and kicked Twitch hard in the belly, “this one is one of yours.”

She straightened her duster and walked on. She knew that she had the initiative, but she would only retain it if she kept moving.

“How did you even get in here, Outcast?” she heard Badger grunt behind her, and then came pummeling sounds that boded ill for Twitch.

Light shone in through all the windows around Jane. Each window let in luminescence of a different quality—noon’s blaze here, starlight there, and in a third place a fluorescent flutter—resulting in a dim and shifting patchwork of illumination in the maze Jane now traversed. Nowhere was there darkness, but nowhere was there any light a traveler could trust. She whispered instructions in her birth tongue to the drop of quicksilver, infused it with her ka, and then followed its directions as it strained within her hand.

The fey were overwhelmingly convinced of their own cleverness, but a little insight and a few basic tools were all one needed to handle them.

Before she’d activated the quicksilver, the crow had sat on a high step and stared at her. Now it preceded Jane up a staircase, across a needle-thin bridge, under a series of arches so low Jane had to stoop, across a vault the size of a football stadium and into a warren of twisting halls only a cubit wide. At her every step she heard the muffled swishing of things moving, just out of her sight, not quite in sync with the metallic jingle of her spurs; Jane ignored the sounds. The crow stopped at the window she was looking for, the gate she had willed her quicksilver guide to locate.

With a single word, Jane cleared the frosted surface of the window and looked through. She saw what she expected and hoped to see: the silvered back of the bartender John’s head, a row of bleary-eyed college boys flipping cups at the bar, and beyond them, a table with a circle of giggling young women chattering at the tall singer, Jim.

Azazel’s son. Azazel had had another son.

And Jim had the hoof.

Jane didn’t have an empty vial. She drew the FN Model 1910, the Calamity Horn, the weapon Heaven had loathed and now coveted, and fired off a round into the maze.
Bang!
the discharge echoed loud, but there was no mortal in earshot to be driven mad by it. The sound that Jane was looking for was the tinny rattle of the brass shell as it hit the floor. The noise might discombobulate Foxtail and Badger, but she was indifferent to their concerns.

Jane holstered the gun. She stooped, picked up the shell, and poured the quicksilver bead into it. She tamped a bit of wax from a candle stub in her pocket into the top to seal it; that would have to do for now. She pocketed candle and shell again and turned to face the window. She stretched to look down at the floor at John’s feet, watching his movement and his shadow. When he stood to calmly refuse another beer to a buzzcut boy who looked like he was on the verge of throwing up his last one, she cast the opening spell—

stepped through the gate, still mumbling in Adamic—

and touched down in John the barkeep’s shadow, safely invisible.

John stiffened, straightening his back and looking around him. The Appalachian wanderer knew too much; Jane stepped quickly away from him, exiting the print of his shadow and slipping out of his arm’s reach, letting the wards of dissembling take over again. She crouched quickly, stepping under the hinged flap in the bar leading out onto the floor at walking speed.

She looked back from the other side. For just a moment, she thought the bartender was looking directly at her.

Jane frowned, but then John’s eye wandered away, and the crow flew out through the mirror and soared above the tables.

She looked to her right, at the restroom hallway. The guitarist came hustling out of the ladies’ room with the bass player on his trail. They were headed directly for Jane, not seeing her for her wards of dissembling.

“Hey!” the heavy bass player called. That was
Mike
, then, the one who cursed in Spanish and looked like a drunk.

“Don’t be such a damned coward!” the black man hissed back. “What do you think’s going to happen if you’re alone for a minute?”

“You have no idea, Eddie!” Mike shook his head. The guitar player was
Eddie
.

Eddie grabbed the short organ player at the corner of the bar. He was dressed like an extra on an eighties television show, but he drank like a yogin—the glass in front of him had an egg in it, as well as fibers that might be some kind of grass, and it smelled like vinegar. “Adrian!” Eddie snapped. “In the can, pronto! It’s Twitch!”

“A friend in need,” Adrian chuckled, “and so forth. Especially Twitch.” He gulped his egg mess in one swallow, pulled his sleeves down to his wrists, and turned to follow his friends.

“Jim!” Eddie yelled, waving across the bar at the singer as they went.

Then Adrian stopped. Jane had a sense of foreboding and stepped into the edge of a booth full of men in cheap suits chattering over mozzarella sticks and olives. She hid her body behind the wooden column that formed the corner of the booth and peered around it.

Adrian pulled something from his pocket and held it up to his eye. As it touched his face, Jane saw it glint and realize that it was a piece of glass, a lens of some sort. She ducked back further into the booth, chanting quickly in Adamic to throw up the deepest, strongest wards of obfuscation and seeming she could. Her ka raged indignantly within her at the suddenness with which she tapped its strength, and she ignored it. Its fury felt like bad indigestion or a heart attack, but she knew it couldn’t kill her.

Then she held her breath.

Long seconds passed in which nothing happened, except that her omnipresent crow dropped onto the high seat of an adjacent booth and stared at her.

Soon enough, she thought, but she kept her mouth shut.

When she looked back around the column behind which she was hiding, she saw the organ player—the
wizard
—Adrian, moving with Eddie and Mike towards the restroom, and concluded he must not have seen her. They were going to rescue Twitch; Eddie and Mike needed their spellcaster Adrian to open the gate into the Outer Bounds. Jane was still acting, the rock and rollers reacting.

She relaxed a touch and released her wards.

“Holy shit!” the man nearest her spat out. He had big hands, a brush-like brown mustache and a slumping cigarette clamped between his teeth. “What just happened to me? Did I black out?”

“What happened to
you?
” asked his friend, a burly man with tomato stains on his blue shirt. “Jeez, I think I had an aneurysm! You all disappeared!”

A third man pulled a plastic cylinder from his pocket and tapped several white pills into his hand.

Jane almost laughed out loud at their collective confusion. In her haste, she realized, she had thrown wards over the entire table, and the men sitting at it had been blinded for the duration.

Not her problem. She saw Jim crossing the floor towards the restroom, a flock of young women around him, and she moved to intercept. He didn’t look fey, nor Angelic, so she drew two long knives, muttered up a quick ward of seeming to make herself look innocuous, a drunk and stumbling fraternity buffoon, in a stained baggy t-shirt and expensive jeans.

“I get it, I get it!” one of the girls giggled. Her jacket was a shell of sequins around a bubbling core of young fluff. “This is like Calvin Coolidge, right? Isn’t there some story about Coolidge not talking much?”

Jim arched an eyebrow and nodded in the direction of the restrooms. Jane didn’t relish the idea of stabbing Azazel’s son; nor did she relish the thought of another six thousand years of lonely wandering.

“Silent Cal,” her friend agreed. She had big hair that looked like it would coordinate well with the suit and tie of the wizard Adrian. Fashion, like everything else, was a boring, unstoppable cycle.