Free Crow Jane by D. J. Butler

standing on top of the lightning bolt-bearing case, Jane raised her arms to the roiling sky and called the Messenger. Angels didn’t have true names, not in the way humans did, because the ka, the ba , and the body of an angel were not separate things, needing a name to bind them together and casting a shadow over the space among them. An angel was a unitary creation, a spiritual point rather than a cluster, and it had no secret name. Therefore, she couldn’t compel it; so instead, she invited it.
    Jane called in Angelic when she could remember the Angelic words clearly, and when she couldn’t, she supplied the deficit with Adamic. The two were kissing cousins, anyway, and often shared vocabulary—though Angelic, as far as Jane knew, had no profanity at all. So much the poorer.
    She touched the fragment of Azazel’s hoof and let the feel of the object drift into and seal her message with its tangibility. She spoke words of offer and negotiation in her incantation, telling the renegade that she had the thing he was looking for, that they could join forces, that together they could have what they both wanted.
    They were lies, and a trick, and in her heart she planned murder.
    The circle carried her words up into the heavens, soaring through and against the rain that pelted down. Lightning flashed in a chain along the horizon as she finished, and a vortex of silver in the dark clouds absorbed her false oaths, sucked them in and spun them out in all directions like meteorites slung at the far corners of the world.
    When she was certain the angel would hear, Jane stopped. Her ka ached within her and her body’s wounds, still in the final stages of healing, itched and stung. She dropped her arms and stepped down to the gravel rooftop, duster rustling and hat pounding like a drum from the fat raindrops.
    The crow flapped its wings as if irritated at what she had done, and glared at her balefully. If a flesh and blood bird had given her such a look, she would have cursed at it and blown all its feathers off.
    A car approached on the highway now, and Jane stepped forward and crouched at the edge of the roof to watch. Light poles were few and far between on this stretch of road, but the vehicle slowed as it passed underneath one, in front of the saddler’s, and she got a clear look at it. It was a brown van, hammered as only the van of a bottom-feeding rock and roll band can be, and she knew instantly who was inside. She was impressed, though, that they’d caught up with her so quickly. The van killed its speed and then its lights, and then it disappeared in the shadow of a small copse of trees.
    She needed Azazel’s hoof to bait the trap for the renegade angel, but that was surely what the band must be after. Jane considered her course of action for brief seconds, and then jogged down the stairs.
    She needed to hurt them, slow them down, keep them out from under her feet. And she had no fire left in her ka.
    The Mare stayed where she had hitched it, razor teeth bloodied by its contented grazing on chilled beef. She pulled the beast away, earning an irascible snort of protest, but no more—decades ago, she and the animal had had it out over which one of them was to be mistress, and they both knew that Jane was the rider and the Mare was her mount.
    She left the lights in the plant on. If the band really was following the hoof, they wouldn’t believe she was still in the building. But maybe, if she left the lights on, the band would think she was trying to lure them into an ambush. That might at least keep them off balance.
    She led the Mare out the back door of the plant and swung into the saddle easily. She kicked the beast into a canter and headed for the edge of the lot, where the boundary between the meat packing plant parking lot and a furrowed field of tall, storm-quaking sorghum was marked by a rail fence.
    The Mare easily jumped the fence, plunging into the tall cultivated grass without fear or hesitation. Jane