Crow Jane Read Free Page A

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