Crow Jane - D. J. Butler Page 0,2

walking fast.

The fairy moved off alone.

Wellman’s had been built in a structure that had once housed a railroad station. Its walls were two stories tall and made of brick, and its windows and ceiling had a Gothic look about their arched apices. Bare light bulbs hung in straight rows from very long wires, and the crow wheeled slowly around them. A length of track still ran along one wall in a bed of gravel, terminating at either end in blank brick. The restrooms squatted off a short hall tunneling out perpendicularly from the bar, over a bridge of planks that had been nailed into place to limit the tripping opportunities for drunk patrons with urgently pressing bladders.

The fairy skipped over the bridge and headed into the restrooms.

Jane followed. She prepared as she went, slipping an iron knife—not steel, iron—into her right hand and a digging a small glass vial from the pocket of her duster with her left. She checked the vial visually as she passed under a light bulb to be sure she’d grabbed the right one—the glob of quicksilver inside slid back and forth and she smiled without pleasure.

The wards of dissembling were her general travel disguise because they were so simple to erect and so costless to maintain and they did the job—mostly Jane didn’t bother people. She just didn’t want to be noticed. Unfortunately, the wards of dissembling would lose effectiveness if she walked directly up to the fairy. As the drummer stepped into the mouth of the restroom’s hall, she cast a long, pale shadow by the hallway’s lights. Jane stepped firmly onto the shadow and spoke a few words.

If anyone in the hall had heard the words, they would have been unable to decipher them, or even remember the sounds, two seconds later. She had spoken in the tongue of her birth, a language that hadn’t been spoken on earth for millennia, and which most humans were no longer able, by divine fiat, to understand. The language was Adamic, and Jane understood it because she had been born before the Great Tower, the Confusion of the Tongues, and the First Scattering. She was subject to the Fall of Adam—indeed, she was its firstfruits—but not to the Curse of Babel.

She spoke her spells in Adamic because it was one of the Primals, and a powerful language for magic. As soon as she had spoken this one, and willed some of the force of her ka into it, some of the fire and energy that was the power-component of the collection of spiritual things most mortals knew as their soul, she became invisible. Everything looked the same to her, but she knew that to any other observer who had been able to see her at that moment, she would have vanished into the fairy’s shadow.

The shadow pulled her now and she walked faster, padding behind the long silver hair and silver horse’s tail of the drummer. The fairy pushed at the GENTLEMEN door first, found it shut, and then opened LADIES. Jane followed her in, nimbly slipping through before the door thudded shut.

The fairy latched the door and Jane drifted out of the way, tightening her grip on her weapons. She wanted the creature fully distracted when she made her move, and she could afford to wait.

Then the drummer turned to the mirror over the sink, looked into it with a fierce eye and spat on the glass. That move piqued Jane’s curiosity, and as the fairy filled her hands with blue-foaming soap from the dispenser over the sink and then smeared it all across the mirror, she considered. Was the fairy an outcast? A criminal? An exile?

What was she doing here? Jane wondered.

And could she still enter the Mirror Queendom?

She had been waiting for the fairy to be distracted, she realized, and instead she had distracted herself. Jane whispered several more words of Adamic and willed into place wards of silence. As the silver-haired drummer shook foam from her hands, splattering it on the broken red tile of the floor, Jane attacked.

She struck with the iron knife first. She didn’t stab, because she wanted the fairy alive, at least for the moment. Instead, she leaned forward with her elbows and forearm, leading with the blunt edge of the blade. The first notice that the fairy had of the attack was Jane’s iron knife suddenly pressing into the back of her neck.

The iron burned her at the touch. Smoke and a burning smell—not the bitter stink