Crow Jane - D. J. Butler Page 0,5

instantly recognizable as a fey creature, and as Twitch, by its possession of the same long silver horse’s tail. With a powerful flap of its wings, the falcon snapped out of Jane’s hands and up to the top of the paper towel dispenser. It shrieked, a sharp and piercing cry, and then Twitch was again a lithe, androgynous drummer wearing leather and spikes. The crow gazed dully at them both, unfazed that it had to share its perch so long as it wasn’t sharing with Jane. And the fairy, of course, didn’t see the crow at all.

Twitch struck the wall with her heels and kicked off. Her drumsticks leaped into her hands in mid-air as she soared over Jane’s head, striking with a drum major’s rat-tat-tat of hard blows.

“Twitch? What’s going on, chingón?” the voice at the door insisted.

Jane blocked several blows of the fairy’s batons with her forearm, ducking as the other woman sailed over her. She had an instant’s regret that she had let herself be distracted, but then decided that this was a development she could use.

“Mike!” the fairy shouted, landing lightly on her feet by the cracked toilet. “Help!”

She was outside the wards of silence, and Mike heard her. “Huevos!” Jane heard him shout, and then a shoulder was thrown against the door.

Jane let the wards of silence drop and kept fighting.

She gained space for herself with a series of sharp thrusts. The fairy parried and retreated until she was forced to hop up and stand on the toilet seat itself, back against the old lead plumbing. Then Jane whirled, throwing her duster up behind her like a cloak to impede and distract her fey combatant. With a swipe of her forearm, she cleared the mirror of foam and then finished her spin arms first, catching and deflecting another flurry of blows from the fairy. She kept her right fist closed around the lump of quicksilver, and the iron blade in her left.

The crow watched, unmoved.

“Hold on!” Mike shouted. “Eddie! It’s Twitch!”

Reinforcements were arriving. That suited Jane just fine, so long as they didn’t include Jim.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The doorknob burst inward and clanked to the floor, and then the latch flew off its screws.

Jane forced the fairy back again with the cold bite of her iron knife, muttering an Adamic incantation as she did—

then turned and leaped for the mirror.

The bass player shouldered into the room, leading with his pistol and following with his burly frame. Behind him came the guitarist, shorter and wiry and also holding a gun.

“Are you leaving so soon?” Twitch shouted, and Jane felt the creature strike her in the back, wrapping long fingers around Jane’s shoulders as the surface of the mirror faded, became translucent and then transparent, revealing behind it an endless maze of stairs and corridors and two surprised faces—

“Dammit!” someone yelled behind her in the restroom—

and then Jane felt the cool veil of the mirror’s unsubstantiated presence pass over her like a film of water and she was through.

But she had come with a passenger.

The fairy bit her again, in the neck.

Jane hit the ground rolling forward, onto her fingertips and the top of her head and then she slammed down onto her back on the stone floor, hard—

smashing Twitch.

“Oomph!” the fairy grunted.

“Halt!”

Two girl-boyish fey faces loomed over her—the faces of Queen’s Rangers, no doubt—over spears pointing down. One had flame-orange hair and a fox’s tail and the other was striped, head and tail, like a badger; both wore leather jerkins and greaves, the breastplates carved and painted with Mab’s emblem, the tree and lightning bolt. Their spears were entirely wooden, their tips sharpened by fire.

The Queen’s Rangers were scouts, warriors and sentinels; they patrolled the infinite maze that was the Outer Bounds of the Mirror Queendom.

Jane ignored the Rangers and stood; Twitch was too stunned by the impact with the floor to stop her. The Outer Bounds stretched around her in all directions, an explosion of halls, staircases, shafts and pits with glass windows in every flat surface. This was a defense mechanism, Jane knew, a classic maze to disorient and deter outsiders. Any ordinary human who managed to stumble in through a gate would find himself bewildered and lost, and the fairies could easily kill him or, if it so struck their puckish senses of humor, let him wander forever.

Jane was no ordinary human, and she knew how to make her way.

“I say again, halt!” cried Foxtail in a shrill voice that whistled through his nose.