Crow Jane - D. J. Butler Page 0,15

as her forearm and looked like a gigantic toenail clipping, polished and smooth. It was the right size to be Azazel’s. Of course, when she had first known him, he had had feet.

The hooves—and the wings—had been his mark, but they had been his own doing.

“You’ll risk the wrath of Mab and Oberon,” thud! “for this wretch?”

“If Mab and Oberon ain’t pissed off with us already,” the guitar player laughed out loud, “they’re just about the only ones.”

As Jane removed the blade from her heart, a sudden gush of hot fluid spilled out, but she felt the flesh of the pierced organ knit together almost instantly, and then the wound shut and the blood stopped. An ancient ward kept any of her blood from staining the duster, so it dripped onto the floor instead.

She took the shell-rigged-into-a-makeshift-vial from her pocket, removed the wax and poured the blob of quicksilver out into her palm.

BOOM!

The sound of an explosion deafened Jane for a moment, and shock waves knocked her against the wall. When she stood again, moments later, she could hear animal yelps, the scrabbling of paws on stone and a pair of running feet.

“Twitch!” Eddie hollered. “We’re on!”

“You think I care about the show?” Twitch called back. “I’m going to kick that bitch in the forehead!”

The wizard muttered something Jane couldn’t hear.

“Are you sure?” Eddie asked.

“Go!” Adrian yelled.

Then the pair became a crowd of feet, and the rattling hoof beats of a horse.

Jane incanted in Adamic and followed the silver bead in her palm. Its movements were subtle enough that she had to keep an eye on the wiggling drop, and couldn’t rely on her sense of touch alone. Staring into her own cupped hand slowed her, but even worse was the fact that the bead led her backward, straight into the teeth of her pursuit.

Wondering how many fey eyes had already examined her and seen what she was carrying, Jane slid the hoof into the inside pocket of her duster. She pinned it with her elbow against her side to keep it secure, and drew the pistol.

The gun was an FN Model 1910, a mediocre old semi-automatic pistol at best, vintage turn of the twentieth century. This particular pistol, though, was unique. Its serial number was 19074. It had been purchased by the Black Hand and its owner, the Serbian enthusiast Gavrilo Princip, had taken it at midnight, on June 27, 1914, to a shadowy crossroads outside Sarajevo. There a veštica with the face of a young girl but the hands of a crone had anointed the gun with boiled fat extracted from the body of a murdered priest and pronounced over the weapon a dreadful curse.

Jane had been watching from the shadows.

The next day, young Princip had killed the Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand with this same pistol, and started World War I. The gun, famous to those who followed it as the Calamity Horn, was a killer of kings; that was its blessing, and the purpose for which Princip had wanted it. There was no creature its bullets could not wound, Angelic or Infernal, cursed or anointed.

It could even wound Jane. But it couldn’t, as she found out on the third day after the veštica had done her work, kill her. Not even with a bullet through the temple. So all Jane’s tedious labor in training the veštica and in nurturing the nationalistic madness in young Gavrilo had gone to waste. Her scheme to end her life had failed, and instead millions of others had died.

The madness that the gun caused was, apparently, an unintended side effect of the witch’s enchantment.

The quicksilver bead in her palm tugged Jane to the right into a square room several paces across, with a circular shaft in the center of the chamber and a ceiling that was so far away it was invisible. At the same moment that Jane saw the bead, she heard the horse clatter into the room in front of her. She looked up and fired three quick shots.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The echoes were infinite and deafening, a wave of sound that crashed out of the cursed gun and blasted along the passageways in all directions. The horse reared in surprise and went down in a tangle of hooves and wings and bright-splattering blood.

Right behind the horse rushed in the three rock and roll musicians, and the wave of sound struck them full in the face. For a moment, they seemed to hang suspended in mid-air and their faces contorted with