Crow Jane - D. J. Butler Page 0,13

trees. She dropped her clothes as her brother slammed her against a stone wall cluttered with dried tree branches. Stray thorns dug into the flesh of her belly and thighs and her blood marred the virgin rock. Though her sandals and tunic fell into the thicket, she kept possession of the knife, and as Abil pounded her against the stone again, she tightened her fingers around it.

“Stop!” the Messenger cried.

“This is the First Precept!” Abil raged, and threw his body against hers. He was awkward and animal and he approached her from behind and butted her, like a ram subdues a recalcitrant ewe.

“I …” the Messenger hesitated.

Qayna fought back with her ankles and elbows, and Abil pushed her harder against the rock.

“Obey!” he snapped wolfishly.

She wiggled around and pushed him away with both feet, feeling the rough stone abrade the skin of her back with the force of the blow. “Abil!” she cried. She was trapped by the thorn trees and the stone, and the knife in her hand seemed both pitiably small and laden with doom. “I am no beast!”

“You must!” Abil snarled. “It is the will of Father and Mother! It is the will of Heaven!”

“It is not my will!” she shouted back.

The Messenger was silent, and Abil threw himself forward—

Qayna swung the knife fiercely, aiming for Abil’s chest, willing the blade to wound and subdue her brother—

but the weapon had darker plans.

The point of the small knife sank into his throat and Abil’s blood gushed over her, surprisingly hot on her water- and wind-chilled body. Abil thrashed and jerked, and pulling himself off the blade only opened the wound and caused his blood to spill faster.

Qayna stared in shock as her brother, and would-be Bond mate, staggered away from her clutching at a gaping hole in his neck, fell backwards into the embrace of a tree of thorns, and crashed to the ground.

Qayna still held the knife, slick and warm. For long seconds, it was all she could do to focus her entire will on not fainting.

Slowly, she looked up at the Messenger, uncertain how he would react. The Messenger looked back at her, and in his clear, translucent eyes she saw deep reserves of will and sudden, terrible insight.

The Messenger drew himself up to his full height, like a mighty oak tree, and suddenly he opened his robe. His glowing body was even more finely-muscled than Abil’s, as if it were the light and the original at the same time, and Abil’s newly-acquired man-body were merely a shadow.

“And now … daughter of Eve?” the Messenger rumbled. He spoke slowly, but as he spoke he picked up speed, as if he were making up his mind. “Now what do you choose, since you have learned the unstoppable power of your own free will? You are a rebel against the First Precept. Will you rebel with me?”

Qayna fled again, scrambling through trees that clutched at her and tore her flesh. She scrambled up the stone and way, staring back at the Messenger behind her. “Who are you?” she demanded. Mother had taught her the First Precept, and though Qayna feared and rejected it, she knew that it didn’t mean that the Messengers were supposed to mingle with the mortals entrusted into their care. “You defy Heaven, too!”

“I am Azazel,” the Messenger called back, smiling brilliantly, “and you teach me that I need not care.”

“I want nothing from you!” she cried at the terrible, naked figure.

“Remember me, mortal!” the Messenger bellowed, his rumbling voice rebounding against the sky itself.

Then Qayna tumbled out of the top of the canyon and left the Messenger Azazel behind.

* * *

She ran naked and bloody, holding nothing but the knife that had killed her brother. That night, she butchered lambs from Abil’s herd and hid from the eyes of Father and Shet, who wandered the hills crying her name and Abil’s. She wondered what had happened to the Messenger Azazel, and why he had not reported his own failure, or Qayna’s crimes.

She traveled at night, taking comfort from the rebel moon and nursing the thought that if she was a disobedient child, she had learned from a Mother with a similar streak. By day she lay in the hollows of rocks, ate the flesh of her stolen lambs and chewed on roots she dug out of the ground. When she slept, she dreamed that the stones around her were the grinding, merciless arms of her dead brother, Abil.

On the third day, they found her.

It