Crow Jane - D. J. Butler Page 0,19

beast and smoke; she always did. She snorted thickly in acknowledgement of her rider and Jane snorted back. The Mare was the last of the horses of Diomedes, a brutal, bullish man rumored to have been one of the many sons of the profligate Semyaz. The others had been killed centuries ago by an aimless scoundrel whom minstrels had turned into the hero Herakles. This one seemed to be immortal, and she was a fighter; the Mare would eat other animals, but her favorite food was human flesh.

Like Jane, the Mare traveled in disguise. The wards of seeming on her insured that to any casual passerby she appeared as a long, black, growling motorcycle.

“Come on, girl,” Jane patted the huge horse and whistled to the animal to calm it. She pulled a fresh vial from one of the saddlebags and poured her drop of quicksilver into it, tamping it shut and replacing it in her pocket. She checked the hoof to be certain it was secure, then clucked with her tongue and pulled the Mare’s reins to turn her around.

“Come on, girl,” she said again and headed in the direction of the meat packing plant.

***

Chapter Five

Jane rode once around the meat packing plant to be sure there were no cars parked on its asphalt skirt, cracked and riddled with potholes. Early in the morning, no doubt, there would be trucks and men to load them with butchered carcasses to be shipped off, a piece here and a piece there, to grocers and restaurants in Amarillo, Oklahoma City, and Wichita. By then, Jane hoped to be finished and gone.

And maybe dead.

She had no way to detect the renegade Raphael, but she guessed that he must be close, and would come quickly when she called.

Jane would have preferred to stave in the door of the plant by arcane means, but her ka was drained and weak. Under the crow’s humorless stare, she instead wrapped the Calamity Horn in a saddle blanket to muffle it and shot the lock off the back door. Inside the packing plant, she hit the light switches and looked around while she reloaded.

She stood in a small entry area with pegs on one wall heavy with lined white smocks like lab coats, red hard hats and gloves. Signs reminded employees to wear safety gear and shoes with good soles, and to punch out for any break longer than ten minutes. Human resources gibberish festooned much of the space, and there was one small office with a window that looked into the entry, dominated by a single desk and a horde of pencil stubs.

Too small for her purposes.

Jane passed into the main chamber of the plant, leading the Mare by the reins. The big room was refrigerated, and she pulled her duster closer across her chest against the cold as she looked around at a forest of cattle carcasses. The meat hung headless and shoulders down on hooks in snaking lines, from a door in the corner where Jane assumed the live cows were brought to be punched in the head, along conveyer belts where the meat was cut open and organs were removed and sorted, and finally ended in a thick grove of frozen chests that were fully prepared, and cardboard boxes full of organs and limbs, by a rolling cargo bay door.

The space was big enough for the renegade to move around in without immediately exiting. It gave Jane some cover, and limited entrances to have to watch.

The staircase up to the roof was wedged into a corner of the building between a supply closet and the back of the office. Jane hitched the Mare to a column within reach of plenty of good, if chilly, grazing, and climbed to the top alone.

A light rain was beginning to fall, and the wind picked up, threatening to rip away Jane’s hat as it gusted to storm levels. Jane scanned the horizon, noting the small clump of lights that was Dodge City—and Wellman’s, just at its outer edge—and the strip of shadow that was the highway, cutting among farm houses, tractor repair shops and a saddler’s on its way into town. That was the direction from which the rock and roll band would come, if they really could follow the hoof and they chose to come after her.

Maybe, knowing who she was, they would give up.

The crow cut, swooping, across her vision, becoming visible in the darkness for a moment by virtue of the light it blocked out.

“Still you,”