Crow Jane - D. J. Butler Page 0,4

remember what I’m going to do the second time you choose not to answer me?”

The fairy’s eyes rolled desperately in her head. “Kill me,” she hissed through chapped and shuddering lips.

“Kill you,” Jane agreed. She turned the knife so that its sharp edge now faced the fairy, and gently touched the blade to her neck. She heard a sizzle and smelled faint burning. “Now, are you ready to try again?”

Twitch said nothing, only shivered. The crow stared down impassively. After thousands of years and thousands of failed attempts, Jane still had to suppress the urge to throw the knife at the crow instead, to make a heroic lunge and grab the bird with its terrible, joyous burden, tearing into its flesh and feathers with her teeth and devouring it whole, drawing it into her body’s permanent embrace.

She blinked and exhaled, driving away the thought.

“I know that you and your friends stole Azazel’s hoof from the well in Dudael,” Jane said. “Understand me clearly: I know it was you. Unless you are content to die here and now, Twitch, child of Mab, tell me where the hoof is.”

Twitch swallowed hard and stared into Jane’s eyes. “Jim has it,” she said.

Good. Once the stone started rolling down the mountain, the fairy would be hard pressed to stop it. “Which one is Jim?”

“The singer,” Twitch said, and closed her eyes pathetically.

“Where does he keep it?” Jane asked.

“On his body,” the fairy admitted. “He keeps it taped … taped to his belly.”

Jane nodded. She wouldn’t have let it away from her person, either. “Is that where the hoof is now?” she asked.

Twitch hesitated, but only for a second. “He hasn’t let go of it since we got it,” she said. “It’s his.”

“What do you mean, it’s his?” Jane asked. “Is he your leader?”

“Yes,” Twitch said instantly. “The hoof belongs to his family. Really, his father.” Now that she had started talking, she couldn’t stop. “Jim is Azazel’s son.”

This thoroughly mediocre dive-bar band was quickly becoming the most interesting thing Jane had seen in a century. “What are you doing with the hoof?” she asked. She rationalized the question easily: she needed to gauge how much resistance would be put up when she took it, and whether Jim would try to take it back and thereby interfere with her plans. Really, though, she was curious.

“We’re going to Chicago,” Twitch said. Tears leaked from her yellow eyes and streamed onto the bathroom porcelain. “Eddie knows a hoodoo woman there, and we’re going to contact the Infernal powers and make a deal.”

“Eddie?”

“The guitar player. He sold his soul and he wants it back.”

“And what does Jim want?”

Twitch sobbed openly now. “He wants to be … he wants peace, I think.”

“And you want back?” Jane nodded at the foam-covered mirror. It felt strange to indulge pure curiosity. Strange and sort of pleasant. “Somehow, you can strike a bargain with Azazel that will let you back into the Shadowless Palace.”

Twitch nodded and shuddered. “I need his forgiveness,” she wept.

That was a queer thing to say and prompted more questions, but Jane shook herself mentally; enough games. Time to take quick action. “Do you know who I am?” she prompted the creature.

“You’re the Marked Woman,” Twitch nodded. “You’re Qayna, the one the humans call Cain.”

Jane raised the iron knife to plunge it into the fairy’s body.

Bam! Bam! Bam! came a hammering at the boor.

“Twitch?” called a man’s voice.

***

Chapter Two

“Twitch, we’re on in three. You in there?”

Jane hesitated a split second, considering whether she should hold the fairy drummer hostage and demand the hoof of Azazel in exchange. In that split second, she realized that the voice at the door didn’t belong to Jim the singer, and remembered that he had sat down, grinning, to drink a beer with the table of co-eds, so the person knocking must be someone else in the band.

In that same split second, Twitch bit her.

Jane cursed in Adamic (her native tongue had few true curse words, but they were very strong—Jane’s curse splashed cold water around the room as if she had punched her fist into the sink) and pulled back her hand. It was the hand with the bead of quicksilver cupped in it, and the fairy had craned her neck at an impossible angle to sink her yellow teeth into the flesh of Jane’s wrist.

She only pulled the hand away half an inch, but that half inch was enough.

A silvery falcon exploded into being beneath Jane’s hand, a broad-winged, beautiful bird that was