Crow Jane Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 when he stabbed her, sinking her blade into her belly.
    She let herself go slack and stare.
    The screaming of the college girls was very loud in her ears.
    Jim sank the second blade into her back, between her shoulder blades. Jane felt it bite deep into her heart, and she grimaced in pain.
    Jim stared at her fiercely. His lips mouthed words: “ Who are you?” This close, she knew his face. He looked so very much like his brother.
    How odd, Jane thought. How very nearly amusing.
    She let the hammering pain force one of her knees to buckle, not losing contact with the big man’s gaze. He caught her from falling and repeated his lips-only, silent query.
    “Easy with the lady, mister,” Jane heard, and in the corner of her vision she saw the bartender, John from North Carolina, arrive. He held his shotgun leveled at Jim, and the singer frowned. “I saw as it was her who attacked you first, but I reckon it’s time for all the stabbin’ to be wrapped up.”
    Jane grabbed the strapping on Jim’s belly with one hand and cut at it with the knife in her other. It was duct tape, and as the tape and the object wrapped in it came away in her hand, she head-butted Jim the rock and roll singer in his handsome face.
    Jim staggered back, blood spattering down his face from his nose.
    John turned to object and she ran him over, knocking him to the ground with her shoulder in his midriff. Unexpectedly, a rush of feeling coursed through her. Searching her memory, she recognized it as glee. With any luck, she thought, she might be dead by morning.
    And she’d take that angelic bastard with her.
    She shouted the Adamic incantation of her spell as she vaulted over the bar, spraying blood on everything she touched. The crow flapped its wings and plunged into the Wild Turkey mirror ahead of her—
    and then she jumped again, into the glass and gone on the tail of the black bird.
    ***

Chapter Three
    Qayna—who, millennia later, would be known as Jane—came home from her fields and found Abil waiting.
    He was cleaned up, out of his customary kidskins and leggings and instead wearing a white tunic and sandals. His hair was oiled, and he smelled of flowers rather than of the herd. The whole family stood behind him, Father, Mother, Shet, the younger children. Behind the family, towering above them and crackling white, stood one of the Messengers, his six wings flapping steadily behind him as if to keep him in flight, though his feet appeared to touch the ground.
    They were all waiting for her.
    * * *
    Qayna had been in the fields because she worked, as everyone worked. She never felt unsafe, however long she was alone—the beasts, for the most part, didn’t molest her, and there were not yet any other people besides her immediate family—and she accepted the work. Her mother, though, in hushed tones when they were alone together under a comforting moon, had often told her of a time when all their kind had been only two, and there had been no such thing as work and no risk of starvation or any other kind of death, only love and tending the plants of the garden. Mother’s stories of discovering the infinite variety of life and nurturing it so that it could blossom to its fullest thrilled Qayna’s heart in a way she could not make Abil understand, and she tried to be like Mother in her daily tasks, her contribution to feeding and clothing the family.
    Abil chose instead to work with Father. Qayna was the oldest, but Abil was second, and he was nearly Father’s height and serious when the rest of the children were a gangly troop of