Jane said. “Always you. Well, not for long.”
The Legate had offered Jane a flare-scroll to get the renegade’s attention, but Jane had declined. Such a device would only alert her prey that he was hunted, and she knew how to contact the Messengers. It was a skill she had learned from her Father—though not one he’d ever meant to teach her.
Her ka was beginning to recover from her exertions at the bar and in the Outer Bounds. It wasn’t much, but it should be enough—she needed very little. The rooftop itself was covered with gravel, which made it a poor surface for her purposes; the little rocks would make it impossible to draw an unbroken circle. There was a big metal box that housed a generator, though, or something to do with the building’s power system. Jane chuckled at the lightning bolt decals on the side of the device, took a Sharpie from her pocket and drew a careful circle, three feet across, on top of the case. Around the outside of the circle she drew a second, meticulously inking in a line that was tidy, perfect, and steadily parallel to the inner one. She filled the space between with Adamic words—a name, single repeated over and over again, and words of calling.
When she was done she climbed atop the box and stood inside the circle. The wards themselves, the words and the circle, generated power, and she rested a moment within them, feeling the warmth as her ka slightly replenished itself. For a moment she was tempted to wait, to sit within such a circle and restore her depleted reserves.
She had been waiting six thousand years; couldn’t she wait another day?
But Mab’s folk knew what she had, she thought, and they wanted it. And the rock and roll band, ragged and disorganized though its members were, was tenacious and motivated and had proved to hold more than one surprise for Jane. It might hold others still, and it would be coming after her and the hoof.
And fundamentally, she thought, fixing her eye on the black bird that had dogged her vision down the millennia, she didn’t want to wait any longer. With the Calamity Horn at her side, she didn’t think she needed to.
Jane raised her arms and began to chant, not in Adamic, but in Angelic. She knew fragments of the language, in the way that modern American kids all knew oddments of Spanish, because it had been in the air, part of the environment of her childhood. These specific words, the ones she now incanted, were a rhyme she had heard Father repeat every winter, many, many years ago.
Jane’s plan was simple. She would summon the renegade Messenger, and when he appeared, she would kill him. Just as she had wanted for a long, long time.
Recently, Heaven had come around to agreeing with her.
* * *
Three days earlier, sitting in a slowly-cooling bubble bath, Jane had realized that she was paralyzed.
She had smelled the candle smoke in the same moment, with its thick reek of cinnamon and blood, but it was too late to do anything about it. The Legate paced slowly into her hotel room. He held the candle in his hand, its flame sputtering red like a Fourth of July sparkler.
He wore red, as befitted his office. He was dressed at least a century out of style, even for one holding his office, in a half-cape-like mantelletta over white sleeves, and a broad circular galero that almost looked like Jane’s own hat, though with a flail-like tail. The similarity in their outfits only repulsed Jane; she wore her hat and duster for utility, and this man wore his garb as a statement of affection for the past.
Jane had lived through the past—nearly all of it there was that a human being could claim to have experienced—she remembered it well, and she felt no longing for it. What she wanted was to move forward, to move on.
The Legate smiled an ageless smile, raised his red candle in one hand and drew out a folded piece of parchment with the other. From where she sat, Jane could see the red sealing wax on the parchment, imprinted with the image of a pair of crossed keys. “I hold a letter,” he said, in a voice that was both withered and greasy, like a three-day-old hot dog on a gas station counter.
Jane looked to be sure that the Calamity Horn sat on a hand towel beside the bathtub, in