Crow Jane - D. J. Butler Page 0,8

coordinate well with the suit and tie of the wizard Adrian. Fashion, like everything else, was a boring, unstoppable cycle.

“And at this party, right? This woman comes up to President Coolidge and says ‘I bet my friend I can get you to say more than two words.’” She seemed proud of herself for remembering this banal story about a dead, unimportant president.

Jane remembered Calvin Coolidge; the best she could say about him was that he didn’t have delusions of grandeur. Which, on reflection, was an unusual quality in a politician.

Jim smiled politely and kept walking towards the hallway. He clenched and unclenched his fists, which Jane read as a sign that he was itching for action and wished he had a weapon in his hand. She was happier, of course, that he didn’t.

She stumbled onto the tracks a few feet away, feigning drunkenness, as Jim reached the railroad tracks and the little plank bridge. She saw clearly now that he had something under his shirt, against his belly.

“What was Coolidge’s answer?” Big Hair looked like she was on the edge of her seat.

“‘You lose,’” Jane said, and she stabbed Jim with both knives.

She’d heard the story, too.

Jane’s knives were not enchanted, but they were good sharp steel and they cut flesh effortlessly. Jim yelped and fell back, and Jane grabbed for his belly—

but Jim wasn’t collapsing, he was rolling, and as Jane’s fingers brushed fibrous, sticky bands on the hard, flat stomach of the bar-band singer, he was gone, out of reach. Her two knives went with him, one in his hip and one in his side, and she narrowly avoiding getting kicked in the face.

Hot red blood spilled onto the planks, unhidden by Jane’s wards.

Big Hair shrieked first, but Sequins screamed louder.

Jane rushed forward to close the gap, whipping smaller knives from their sheaths on her forearms and slashing overhand, trying to cut the big man. He moved like an acrobat, though, staying just beyond the glittering razor edge of her blades. His first tumble backward landed him in a handstand, one hand on each of the metal rails of the abandoned train track that ran across the floor of the bar, and then he sprang further away again, landed on the tips of his boots, and shuffled backward immediately. The spurting arc of blood trailing behind him spattered across Jane’s duster and, from the suddenly ramping volume of the shrieking behind her, might also have ruined the girls’ outfits.

Slash, slash, duck and dodge, and then suddenly Jim snatched two beer bottles off a table as he passed and hurled them at her. Jane batted one aside with an elbow and let the other hit her in the shoulder. The crow swooped between her and her target in a cruel and taunting maneuver, obscuring her aim for a moment and pricking her in one of the few remaining sensitive spots in her soul.

In the fraction of an instant during which she hesitated, Jim pulled the knives from his own body and charged to attack.

The yelling was more general now, and Jane could hear the voice of the bartender in the tumult. “Everybody cool it!” he barked in his Appalachian twang. “Now!”

Boom!

That would be one barrel of the man’s shotgun. Jane wasn’t at all worried about the firearm, nor was she too concerned about the bartender himself, despite his unusual perceptiveness, but she didn’t want the rest of the band to come back out of the restrooms and interrupt. Especially the wizard, but in a band whose drummer was an Outcast from the Mirror Queendom and whose organ player was a sorcerer, who knew what other hidden talents and threats might lurk?

Besides, the singer Jim was amazing. He met her every attack with a parry or a sidestep, and he fought like the furniture and people around him were a third weapon constantly at his disposal. He flicked tumblers at Jane with the tips of her own knives, and kicked stools in her direction, and when a scar-faced man with a bandanna covering his shaved head—maybe a bouncer—moved to intervene, Jim tripped him and kicked him into Jane’s way like he was rolling a barrel down a gangplank.

Time to take decisive action.

Jane launched her effort with a fierce counterattack, genuinely hurling herself at the singer’s jugular and crotch with staggered, alternating blows. She did her best to cut his flesh, but she was unsurprised when his lightning speed and panther-like athleticism kept him out of harm’s way.

Nor was she surprised