Crow Jane by D. J. Butler

get it back? Could they have communicated with Jim somehow?
    Jane holstered the Calamity Horn and pulled the hoof from her pocket. Examining it slowed her pace, but running forward into unknown peril was a fool’s choice, and the band seemed occupied with the Queen’s Rangers anyway.
    The hoof was curved like a crescent moon, wide as two of Jane’s fingers and thick as one. It was yellowish in the light of the Outer Bounds, odorless and smooth like ivory, like a stone worn from millennia of lying in a river bed.
    Except, Jane’s fingers found with practiced probing, for one tiny little chip.
    Either the power that had smoothed the hoof fragment out—the waters of Dudael, Jane guessed, having been there recently and seen the holding pit of her one-time conflicted antagonist—had missed a tiny divot, or since the hoof’s extraction from the waters, someone had cut from the inside a tiny flake, a chip the size of her own pinky’s nail.
    Which could be how they were following her.
    Jane cursed, her words of annoyance shaking dust from the lintel of a doorway under which she passed and sending a scuttling thing like an orange centipede scurrying for cover. She sent some of her precious reserves of ka-force over the clipping where her fingers had been, searching for the connection she guessed must exist—
    and there it was. Jane felt it with her ka like a ribbon of water, tenuous, subtle and invisible, stretching away into the maze behind her. It must be the wizard Adrian, she guessed. These thieves feared other criminals, and so they had taken measures to allow them to track the hoof if anyone stole it from them.
    She considered briefly how this impacted her plan and decided that it was a good thing. The more noise these loose cannons of rock and roll made, the more likely they were to attract the renegade, which was all Jane cared about. The band was nothing to her, the hoof was nothing, even Azazel was nothing; she just wanted to carry out the task appointed by the Legate and get her reward.
    And kill Raphael.
    The crow flapped ahead of her in the maze.
    It wheeled in front of two figures, who waited before a window in the wall the size of a ladies’ compact mirror, or the rear view mirror of a motorcycle. They stood tall, straight-backed and regal.
    Jane put the hoof away and drew the Horn.
    “You travel cloaked in myth,” one of the figures smiled gently. She was a tall, thin woman with pale skin, long hair like spun gold and a crown of oak leaves on her head. She wore a green gown and green slippers the color of dew-spattered grass.
    “I bought the coat in Sydney,” Jane said. “You supposed to be Mab, then?”
    “Am I?” the Queen arched an eyebrow. “Australia is a long way from Kansas, in mortal space.” The waves of her efforts to seduce Jane splashed around them all and rebounded off the walls, but Jane was unmoved. It was like smelling rotting meat—she couldn’t miss the stink, and she certainly didn’t want to take a bite, however widely the person offering it might grin. Even without the quicksilver in her palm, Jane was resistant to the charm of the fey folk, but with it, she was immune. “But I see you travel as one of us.”
    Jane shrugged. “I get around.”
    “You must be tired.” These words came from her companion, a man of the same height, with jet black hair and an identical crown. “Why don’t you rest with us? I’m sure we have a lot to share.” He was also dressed in green, in a tailed coat and velvety green trousers and he, too, stank of seduction like fly-blown meat.
    “Let me pass.”
    “You are the Marked Woman.” Now his voice sounded wheedling and, ever so slightly, uneasy.
    “So that gives you a hint as to why your Glamour doesn’t affect me. It should also tell you that you really ought to get out of my way,” Jane said. It was hard to be certain, but she thought the gunfire was getting closer. She didn’t want to fight, if she could avoid it. The fairies in