Crow Jane (8 page)

Jim lifted her off the ground far enough to grab the hoof clipping in her pocket and extract it in a single tug.

“You can’t trust her, Jim,” the fairy said, and Jane saw her leather boots, with neat rows of shiny metal spikes running up past the ankle on the outside of each boot.
Crack!
She punched Jane in the back of her head with one of her wooden batons.

Ouch. Jane needed to stop getting hit. She raised one arm, and when the fairy’s next blow came down, she caught it on the flesh of her forearm and managed to wrap her fingers around the wood.

“Stop,” she ground out through the hot blood in her mouth.

She heard an animal scream, and guessed it was the Mare. She felt surprisingly bad for having led the beast to its death. She’d killed and betrayed so many of her own kind, it struck her as incongruous that she should feel like shedding tears for a flesh-eating horse.

She rolled away on her shoulder, dragging the long steel blade with her free hand until it fell out of her body with a wet
pop
.

Jim stood to one side. He held the hoof and looked vaguely puzzled.

“Oberon’s tail,” Twitch gasped, staring at Jane and stepping back. “You hear a thing a thousand times, but you don’t believe it until you see it.”

Jane spat blood onto the muddy gravel and lay back. She couldn’t breathe now; felt like she was drowning and she was sure it was blood in one of her lungs. It didn’t matter. She knew it wouldn’t kill her, and in a few moments, the pain would pass. She spat out blood again. “Oberon doesn’t have a tail.”

Twitch snorted. “And God doesn’t have teeth, but that didn’t keep anyone from swearing by them for a thousand years, did it?”

Jim bent and slowly picked up his sword. He looked around.

Jane sat up. The Swordbearers loomed large and not far away. A collective step forward, Jane thought, and they could bring their swords down together and reduce the meat packing plant to charred brick and burned ribs. Why weren’t they attacking?

And what had happened to her mirror?

And what was really going on here?

“How do you know God doesn’t have teeth?” she asked.

“Ah,” the fairy sighed, “how do you think? Hadn’t you heard he was one of us?”

Jane dragged herself to her feet. The blood had stopped gushing down her chest, but she felt weak and her ka was all but gone, a dim pulsing within her barely worthy of the name. “If God really is one of the folk of the Mirror Queendom,” she cracked, “that would explain why Heaven always seems to get everything backward.”

“Sir?” a voice elsewhere on the rooftop called. “Sir, this is a … this is a crime scene, and I have to ask you to leave.”

Jane turned and saw the Legate, in his mantelletta and galero, stomping her direction across the rooftop. Behind him came two of his big sedan slaves, and now Jane saw that they were indeed golems; they breathed heavy, with their mouths open, and she could see the Hebrew characters tattooed on their tongues.

After the Legate came two law enforcement officers, Sheriff’s deputies, Jane now saw. The younger man, with buzzcut hair and a thin mustache, walked in front. He called out to the Legate, asking the red-caped man to stop and getting a cold shoulder in return. Behind him came an older, heavier deputy, with a beard and a paunch and his hand resting on the butt of a gun at his hip.

“And you there,” Mustache continued, pointing at Jim. His finger trembled. “Drop your sword, sir, so we can have a polite conversation about what’s going on here.” The deputy looked around at the Bearers of the Sword that surrounded the building. “A polite conversation that also made some damn kinda sense would be a nice bonus.”

Jim tightened his grip on his sword, but frowned like he didn’t understand the Deputy’s words. Jane was sure she had seen him somewhere before, though not recently.

“Thank you, Qayna,” the Legate said. He stopped and sat on the metal casing of the generator. “You’ve done exactly as we’d hoped.”

“Funny,” Jane bluffed. “So have you. It’s over.”

“Everyone here should consider himself under arrest!” Deputy Mustache insisted, pointing his pistol at the ground beside the Legate. “You with the sword, put it down … now!”

“Raphael,” the Legate said, and his voice sounded old. “Can we end this?” The golems lurked behind him like exclamations marks waiting to jump onto all of his sentences.

Deputy Beard drew his pistol, a large-caliber revolver. “You heard the man.” He raised the gun.

“Thanks, pard,” Deputy Mustache glared at Jim.

“It’s over,” Beard said.

Bang!

Deputy Mustache fell to the ground, bleeding from the back of his head.

“Thank you, Rafi,” the Legate said. “Now, let’s get down to a little business, shall we?” He removed from under his mantelletta a familiar piece of sealed and folded parchment, and waved it until it caught Jane’s attention.

Raphael and the Legate were in cahoots, Jane realized.

She’d been set up.

***

Chapter Eight

“There never was any renegade,” Jane said calmly. The mirror gate must not have worked because the Legate, or someone working with him, had pinned it shut. She looked at Jim, blinking and shaking his head like he had water in his ears, and wondered if the Legate had done something to the singer, too.

“No, there wasn’t,” Beard agreed. He held his gun with antsy hands, and not with the sure calmness of an experienced shooter. “Or rather, there hasn’t been one yet. Soon, there’ll be many.”

He laughed, and the Legate laughed with him.

“Jim?” Twitch asked, but got no answer.

Jane’s curse-driven powers of recuperation were kicking in, and she was starting to feel stronger.

“This has all been a trap,” Jane added, ruminating.

The golems growled an objection in unison.

“No,” the Legate objected, showing his palms in protest and waving back his sedan team. “What trap? This has all been an invitation. We wanted to arrange a meeting of certain key people.” He waved the letter again, tantalizingly. “I assure you that I have only the best of intentions.”

“You wanted us to meet you under guard,” Jane pointed out, nodding at the Swordbearers. “And stoned.”

The Legate waved a hand and muttered something under his breath; that he was a sorcerer came as no surprise, and Jane wondered how good he was. Jim shook his head, his eyes suddenly cleared. He raised his sword an inch or two and took half a step forward, but then halted at the Legate’s upraised hand.

“Please, James,” the Legate said. “I had to be sure you wouldn’t run. But as a sign of good faith, I’ve cloaked this entire building with wards of silence. Please feel free to join the conversation. I
want
to hear what you have to say.”

Jim narrowed his eyes and flared his nostrils.

“Oh, you shouldn’t imagine me using the unreliable, spotty, flaring wards of your erratic little wizardling,” the Legate assured him. Then he laughed. “Believe me, I’m just as anxious as you are not to be heard by His Lowness at this moment. We’ll talk to Lucifer when the time is right, but not before.”

“Call off your dogs,” Jim rumbled. His voice had something of the trumpet in it, and reminded Jane of the voices of the Fallen. The golems growled at him as if prompted, but the Swordbearers remained impassive and still.

“You must understand me clearly.” The Legate’s eyes were serious. “We are going to have a conversation now, and that conversation
will
—
absolutely
and
without question
—go the way I want it to. The Bearers are just here to see to that.”

Deputy Beard holstered his pistol and sneered at Twitch. “Miaow.”

Twitch hissed at him through her teeth.

Jane stared at the Deputy. His true identity—the name and nature of the being that lurked inside the Deputy’s body, animating and controlling him—was still sinking into her consciousness. “Raphael,” she said softly. “It has been a very long time.”

“Qayna,” he nodded.

“I don’t usually go by that name.” Jane itched all over. It felt like the ink of her tattoos crawled under her skin at the sight of the person who had first etched them into her. She spat on the gravel.

“There is war coming,” the Legate intoned. “War in Heaven. Michael and his angels against the dragon.”

“The Revelation of John,” Jim said. “The refuge and comfort of every crackpot for the last two thousand years.” Something burning behind his eyes suggested to Jane that he didn’t quite believe his own words.

“War is inevitable!” Raphael shot back. “You can’t build a kingdom on lies!”

Jane disagreed: “I’m not sure you can build a kingdom on anything else.” She was recovering from the shock of realizing that she was again seeing Raphael, and now she felt anxious to shoot him.

If not for the fact that her own death was in play, a golden worm baiting a tiny hook, she’d have shot him already.

“Cynic!” Raphael was shocked.

Jane shrugged, not meeting the Messenger’s eyes. “I’ve been around too long to be an idealist. What are you going on about?”

“Accept for the moment that war is coming,” the Legate said. He shrugged. “Accept it because, if nothing else, I will start that conflict myself. The questions you should be asking yourselves are
what do I want out of the coming and unavoidable conflict?
And
how am I going to get it?
”

“The war between Michael and the dragon.” Jim raised his eyebrows. “You’re planning to invade Hell?”

“The dragon is a poetic image.” The Legate folded his hands piously in his lap. “Perhaps
I
am the dragon.”

“So Michael throws you to the earth,” Jim followed the logic dubiously, “and you become Satan. You have strange aspirations, Legate. Even my father didn’t
want
his fate.”

Jane stared hard at Jim, wondering how much he knew, and wondering whether it was true that Azazel hadn’t wanted his throne.

“Poetry!” the Legate hissed. He composed himself again.

“Who knew that the titles of the head of the Infernal Council were poetic?” Twitch laughed skeptically. “The Infernals, anyway, seem to take them very seriously.”

“It might have been the title,” Jim muttered to the fairy, “or it might have been the fart jokes.”

Jane felt as nonplussed as the Legate looked.

The man in the mantelletta shook off his confusion. “Forget the Bible. Here’s the point. Each of you is carrying a bargaining chip. I will not deceive you or play the coquette—I want what you have, and I will pay.”

“
We
want,” Raphael corrected him, but the Legate ignored the angel.

Jane looked around at the Swordbearers, gigantic and fiery, immobile in the clouds of smoke that their burning threshed out of the sorghum around their feet. “In other words,” she said with deliberate impudence, “you want to kill me, and in exchange, you’ll let me torture and kill Raphael first.”

The Angel-Deputy chuckled, but turned a little pale. Jane stared him down with an eye full of thousands of years of constantly nurtured hatred.

The Legate fixed her with a stare. “I want the Calamity Horn,” he said. “The gun capable of killing even immortals.”

“Except me,” Jane pointed out. “To my grave disappointment.”

“Forgive the pun,” the fairy snapped out reflexively.

“I never forgive puns,” Jim grunted. “They remind me too much of what I’m missing by holding my tongue all the time.”

The Legate smiled patiently. “So you don’t need to fear handing it over. Besides, you already know that your death is within my gift.” He waved the letter at her. It was so close that Jane could
smell
the parchment and the sealing wax.

Jane’s crow settled beside the Legate on the metal box.

Within his gift. That sounded right; the Legate wasn’t trying to kill her outright, but was offering her the chance to be able to die. He was doing more than offering—he was selling it, pretty hard.

“I don’t fear much of anything at this point. Still, I’m curious.” Jane squinted at the big singer. “You must be invading Hell, right? I mean, there are precious few beings this gun is capable of hurting that you couldn’t just take down with the Swordbearers. But even the Fallen, they can be beaten with flaming swords.” She glared at Raphael, remembering the obliteration of Ainok. “So why the gun?”

“And seven priests,” the Legate said in answer, “bearing seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark of the Lord went on continually, and blew with the trumpet.”

Jane snorted. “You don’t need to quote me chapter and verse on this stuff. I was there for most of it.”

“There for what?” Twitch asked. “I don’t know either the chapter or the verse. I’m not much of a reader.”

“Joshua’s priests blew seven horns and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down.”

Jim looked at her with a curious smile. “What was that like?”

“I was on the wall.” Jane shrugged. “It hurt like hell, but I survived.”

“And I saw the seven angels which stood before God; and to them were given seven trumpets.” The Legate’s eyes twinkled.

“Back to Revelation? Seven priests with trumpets before the ark, seven seraphim with trumpets before the throne.” Jim shrugged. “Sort of a match, I guess, but lots of things come in sevens. Seven sages of Greece. Seven colors in the visible spectrum. Snow White and the seven dwarfs. So what?”

A long spate of gunshots ended in an abrupt equine scream.

Jane frowned. “Seven bullets in my gun is so what,” she realized out loud.

“The first angel sounded,” Raphael quoted, “and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, you son of a bitch?” Jane remembered the fields of her youth, the moist, firm feeling of earth between her fingers. She almost yanked the pistol out and started firing.

“You think the seven bullets in her gun,” Jim pointed at it to underline the insanity of the idea, “are the seven trumpets of the apocalypse? This is what I’m hearing from the Legate of Heaven?”

“Ah, I hate this stuff,” Twitch muttered. “Jehoshaphat begat Arad who begat Shem, gobbledy-gobbledy, can’t we just skip to the part where we start shooting? Why is life on this side of the mirror always so tedious?”

“Maybe,” Jim said, “just
maybe
, we can avoid the shooting this time.”

“I doubt it.” Jane stared hard at the angel who had tattooed her body, thousands of years ago.

“Gavrilo’s Horn,” the Legate said. “Don’t you see?”

Raphael continued; spittle flecked his chin. “And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea.”

“Prophecy is prophecy.” The Legate nodded. “It will be fulfilled, whatever I do. I am merely trying to discover a way to fulfill it … advantageously.”

“And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star—”

“Shut up!” Jim snapped.

Raphael arched his eyebrows and closed his mouth.

“Bat-shit crazy.” Azazel’s son shook his head. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t walk away from you and your madness.”

“Because I will give you what you want, James.”

Jane looked into the singer’s eyes and saw the truth: he was curious, and he was tempted.

At that moment the rooftop’s door opened and the other rock and rollers staggered out. Eddie led the way, sawed-off shotgun in his hands, and behind him followed Mike holding a two-by-four and Adrian squinting through his sorcerer’s lens.

The golems turned to look at the newcomers and raised their fists defensively, but didn’t attack.

Jim raised a hand, palm out, to stop the band’s advance.

“Careful!” Adrian shouted back. “There’s all kinds of crazy warding and hexes on this building!”

Jim nodded slowly.

“We had this conversation before, Raphael,” he said.

“No. I tried to have this conversation, and you refused.”

While they were looking at each other, Jane carefully slipped the edge of her duster aside, to be sure she had a clean draw when she needed it.

“What do I want, then?” Jim asked.

“Jim, don’t do it,” Twitch urged his friend.

“Whatever you want,” the Legate told him, “you can get it with power. Power brings all good things. Power, and money, which is the same thing.”

“That’s true!” Adrian called out, and Mike elbowed him in the chest.

“I could have any woman I wanted,” Jim suggested.

“They’d line up.” The Legate smiled a pimp’s greasy grin.

“Hey!” Mike threw in. “Share!” Adrian elbowed him back.

“Wealth.” Jim grinned. “The kingdoms of this world. All I have to do is bow down to you.”

“All of them could be yours. And you don’t have to bow down to anyone, including me. You’ll never have to bow down to anyone ever again.”

“I could finally afford to fix the leaky radiator on the van.”

The Legate’s smile became uncertain. “You could have any car you wanted.”

Jim’s smile disappeared into a flat, hard line. “I want the damn van.”

Raphael shrugged. “So keep the van,” he said.

“He’s saying
no
.” The Legate frowned.

Jim raised his sword and shook its basket hilt at the Legate’s galero. “I’m saying you don’t know me from Adam,” he growled.

“Tell me what you want.”

“No!” Jim snapped. Suddenly, he seemed huge, and his voice echoed over the rooftop so loud that even the Swordbearers appeared to stir a little at the sound. “You tell me what
you
want, Legate! What are you doing chasing me down in the middle of nowhere? What do you want, the hoof, is that it? All this for a toenail clipping?”

The Legate and the angel were both silent. Jim towered taller than either of them with his naked sword in his hand, threatening and dangerous.

“If it’s just a toenail clipping,” the Messenger said slowly, “why don’t you give it up?”

Jim barked a short “ha!”

“What is Heaven?” the Legate asked.

“You’re asking the wrong guy,” Jim snarled. “I’ve never been.”

“Heaven is a palace.” The Legate sniffed. “It has gardens, like any palace. The air of Heaven is delicious with the tinkle of fountains and running water. It has a staff, with servants who perform different functions. Some are guards and warriors, others clerks and scribes, still others guides and major-domos.”

“And presumably some gardeners,” Twitch added. “Won’t anybody think of the poor plants?”

The quip cut through all the tension and endeared the fairy to Jane, and she winked. Twitch arched an eyebrow back, in surprise and maybe fear.

“At the center of the palace complex is the audience chamber,” the Legate continued. “Here the angels keep burning the eternal fires, maintain the perpetual cloud of incense, and so forth.”

“Get to the point.”

“Beyond the audience chamber lies the throne room,” the Legate continued, unperturbed. “But within the throne room, and at its veil, stand the seven seraphim.”

“I remember these guys,” Jim agreed, and nodded in Raphael’s direction. “Your boy was making fun of them, last time we met.”

Raphael shrugged.