Crow Jane Read Free Page B

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