out onto the floor at walking speed.
She looked back from the other side. For just a moment, she thought the bartender was looking directly at her.
Jane frowned, but then John’s eye wandered away, and the crow flew out through the mirror and soared above the tables.
She looked to her right, at the restroom hallway. The guitarist came hustling out of the ladies’ room with the bass player on his trail. They were headed directly for Jane, not seeing her for her wards of dissembling.
“Hey!” the heavy bass player called. That was Mike, then, the one who cursed in Spanish and looked like a drunk.
“Don’t be such a damned coward!” the black man hissed back. “What do you think’s going to happen if you’re alone for a minute?”
“You have no idea, Eddie!” Mike shook his head. The guitar player was Eddie.
Eddie grabbed the short organ player at the corner of the bar. He was dressed like an extra on an eighties television show, but he drank like a yogin—the glass in front of him had an egg in it, as well as fibers that might be some kind of grass, and it smelled like vinegar. “Adrian!” Eddie snapped. “In the can, pronto! It’s Twitch!”
“A friend in need,” Adrian chuckled, “and so forth. Especially Twitch.” He gulped his egg mess in one swallow, pulled his sleeves down to his wrists, and turned to follow his friends.
“Jim!” Eddie yelled, waving across the bar at the singer as they went.
Then Adrian stopped. Jane had a sense of foreboding and stepped into the edge of a booth full of men in cheap suits chattering over mozzarella sticks and olives. She hid her body behind the wooden column that formed the corner of the booth and peered around it.
Adrian pulled something from his pocket and held it up to his eye. As it touched his face, Jane saw it glint and realize that it was a piece of glass, a lens of some sort. She ducked back further into the booth, chanting quickly in Adamic to throw up the deepest, strongest wards of obfuscation and seeming she could. Her ka raged indignantly within her at the suddenness with which she tapped its strength, and she ignored it. Its fury felt like bad indigestion or a heart attack, but she knew it couldn’t kill her.
Then she held her breath.
Long seconds passed in which nothing happened, except that her omnipresent crow dropped onto the high seat of an adjacent booth and stared at her.
Soon enough, she thought, but she kept her mouth shut.
When she looked back around the column behind which she was hiding, she saw the organ player—the wizard—Adrian, moving with Eddie and Mike towards the restroom, and concluded he must not have seen her. They were going to rescue Twitch; Eddie and Mike needed their spellcaster Adrian to open the gate into the Outer Bounds. Jane was still acting, the rock and rollers reacting.
She relaxed a touch and released her wards.
“Holy shit!” the man nearest her spat out. He had big hands, a brush-like brown mustache and a slumping cigarette clamped between his teeth. “What just happened to me? Did I black out?”
“What happened to you?” asked his friend, a burly man with tomato stains on his blue shirt. “Jeez, I think I had an aneurysm! You all disappeared!”
A third man pulled a plastic cylinder from his pocket and tapped several white pills into his hand.
Jane almost laughed out loud at their collective confusion. In her haste, she realized, she had thrown wards over the entire table, and the men sitting at it had been blinded for the duration.
Not her problem. She saw Jim crossing the floor towards the restroom, a flock of young women around him, and she moved to intercept. He didn’t look fey, nor Angelic, so she drew two long knives, muttered up a quick ward of seeming to make herself look innocuous, a drunk and stumbling fraternity buffoon, in a stained baggy t-shirt and expensive jeans.
“I get it, I get it!” one of the girls giggled. Her jacket was a shell of sequins around a bubbling core of young fluff. “This is like Calvin Coolidge, right? Isn’t there some story about Coolidge not talking much?”
Jim arched an eyebrow and nodded in the direction of the restrooms. Jane didn’t relish the idea of stabbing Azazel’s son; nor did she relish the thought of another six thousand years of lonely wandering.
“Silent Cal,” her friend agreed. She had big hair that looked like it would