Crow Jane - D. J. Butler Page 0,16

sudden insight and anger.

Then Mike turned, raised his pistol—

and fired on his companions.

Eddie ducked, roared and fired back.

Jane veered right, skirting around the pit at her feet. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement within the pit, the rustling, quaking tremble of many-limbed things that were climbing inside, but then she was past it and gone.

“Selenen abiuro!” Adrian shouted, throwing a pocketful of ground and powdered something into the air—

Jane smelled an herb that might have been oregano—

Mike and Eddie dropped their guns, horrified looks on their faces—

and Adrian himself collapsed to the ground, unconscious.

Jane fled the room at a run, gun pointed at the ceiling and hoof under her arm. The Model 1910’s magazine held seven rounds, which left her only three shots. Really, she had not been thrifty with her ammunition. One shot would have been enough to induce madness in the rock and rollers, and the only reason she had fired more was the presence of the fairy.

The gun’s bullets injured fairies and could kill them, but its sound did nothing to their minds. This, Jane guessed, was because fairies were already insane.

A net struck her, flung from a passage to her right, and bowled Jane sideways. The snare was woven of something elastic and slightly sticky, and weighted with what looked like giant acorns. Under the force of the attack, Jane slipped to her knees, but she managed to avoid dropping anything.

“What is it, what is it, a big ugly outsider!” Three thin-bodied persons in leather armor sprang from a shadowed alcove and raced in a circle around Jane, shaking wooden spears over their heads. One had a skunk’s tail and coloring, one a monkey’s, and a third kept shifting back and forth between a humanoid shape and the shuffling, wheezing form of a small brown bear. “Outsider, topsider, flatworlder!” they chanted, not in unison. “Big-footed, ugly, smelly human!”

Beyond them, the crow settled onto a head-sized knob at the bottom of a staircase banister and glared at her.

Jane listened and thought she could hear Adrian chanting. Whatever had knocked the wizard out, his friends had him awake again, and he was probably dealing with Twitch’s injury. She also heard the pounding of many feet, and flapping wings.

Dragging the weight on her shoulders, Jane stood. The three fairies stopped and staggered back at the sight of her.

“Do you not know me?” Jane demanded slowly. “I am the Marked Woman.”

A horse whinnied behind Jane, in the maze of the Outer Bounds. The fairies before her slipped away, fear and embarrassment on their faces.

“We’re the Queen’s Rangers!” Brown Bear gruffed.

“Vengeance rides in my wake,” Jane added, beginning to get irritated, “sevenfold and hungry.” She shook the net with her hand and found that the fibers clung to her skin and the fabric of her duster and hat.

“We can’t!” Skunk squealed. “We can’t do it!”

The fairy raised his tail in excitement and his comrade Brown Bear grabbed it and yanked it back down with a look of warning on his face. “Duty!”

“Release me,” Jane said flatly, “or die.” She heard the horse Twitch coming after her again.

The fairies scattered. “It’s spider silk!” Monkey called over her shoulder as she scrambled under an archway no bigger than a cupboard door. “We can’t release you! You’re stuck until it melts!”

Jane muttered in Adamic and poured her ka into the spider silk net, burning it instantly into ash. She strode forward in the falling curtain of cinders, regretting the low, drained state to which she had reduced her ka and kicking herself for having been caught in an ambush set by fairies, of all creatures.

Gunfire erupted behind her, but her ears didn’t pick up the popping and snapping of bullets passing her, so she guessed the shots must be coming from the guns of the rock and roll band, and they must not be shooting at her.

The fairies were attacking them, too.

She picked up the pace, jogging. She was surprised and a little annoyed at how long it was taking her to get to her destination, though of course distance on earth and distance in the Mirror Queendom bore no correlation to each other. She wondered if she might have been better off just running out the front of Wellman’s in ordinary mortal space, but cut off the line of self-doubt immediately. She’d had no way of guessing the rock and rollers would be this persistent, and once she shook them, passage through the Outer Bonds would be a good