The Dark Glamour (18 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“S
o she’s a pyro?” Elodie asked skeptically, tapping a croquet ball toward a wicket with one hand while sipping a mimosa from the other.

“No,” Jane insisted, turning her own mallet over a few times in a futile attempt to find a version that felt correct. “It’s not on purpose. Remember how my computer was constantly going down?”

“That cute IT guy thought you were into him,” Elodie agreed. “So did I, actually. This isn’t the best example of how this stuff isn’t on purpose, now that I think about it.”

“I wasn’t into the IT guy!” Jane squeaked indignantly, wincing when some heads turned their way. She had come straight from Anne’s little flat to meet Elodie, but Elodie had been in the middle of a mandatory garden party thrown by her parents. Jane had arrived to find the Dessaixes’ spacious lawn full of well-dressed and slightly tipsy diplomats. The hosts had prudently invested in a heated tent for shelter, but to Jane’s surprise, the sun had finally come out, and spring was well under way.
I guess it sneaks up on you when it rains nonstop for days,
she admitted wryly, watching a pair of yellow birds chase each other around a stand of purple irises.

In her gloomy, rainproof city wear, she had felt distinctly out of place, but fortunately Elodie’s clothes fit Ella’s body a lot better than they had ever fit Jane’s. Jane did suspect that the skirt of her borrowed pastel sundress was meant to be knee-length, but overall she looked the part of an embassy wife with nothing more dangerous on her mind than thank-you notes. “Trust me, Anne has no idea that
she
did any of that stuff.”

“So she could do it again,” Elodie pointed out, hitting her ball once more and then hopping up and down in triumph for reasons Jane didn’t fully follow. “Like, if you tell her some really upsetting, crazy, life-changing thing, she could barbecue you.”

“Not like it would be better to just spring Lynne on her,” Jane argued reasonably. “I have to tell her
something
first.”

“So what do you tell her that will minimize the freaking out, both now and later?”

Jane poked at her croquet ball, but could tell from Elodie’s face that she was probably pushing it in the wrong direction. It was a question that had certainly been on her mind, but she didn’t have an answer. She could, of course, just knock Anne over the head and drag her back to New York, but Jane wouldn’t have the advantage of André’s private jet on the way back, and she suspected that they’d be stopped before they got out of Heathrow.
And I hear that, since September 11, people are a little more alert to stuff like unconscious women being shoved into the overhead compartments.

Still, the idea of Anne’s flat, or an airplane, or half of New York, catching fire with Jane in it was profoundly unappealing. “I could tell her she’s won a free trip through some lottery she must have forgotten entering,” she offered.

“And then, when she gets there, that part of the prize is a free family?” Elodie sent her ball sailing in a perfectly straight arc, but looked annoyed about it. Jane wondered where on earth she had been trying to hit it, but didn’t want to ask after nearly half an hour of pretending she had the slightest clue what she was doing.

“Trust me, being in that family does
not
come for free,” she countered, sipping at her Manhattan. It was a little early in the day, she had thought, but no one at this particular party seemed to care about things like that. Although Elodie swore it had been under way for only an hour, two very prim-looking women had removed their shoes and were mincing happily through the pool of a large, white-tiled fountain.

“I don’t know,” Elodie mused, but there was a twinkle in her espresso eyes. She had straightened her bouncy black curls for the occasion, and Jane noticed with surprise that the two of them—usually as different as night and day—looked remarkably alike at the moment.
She could be my sister . . . my sister with much better cheekbones.
Jane smirked at the irony of being jealous of her own fake looks. “You got the wedding of the century, plus a whole second identity out of the deal.”

Jane frowned. “I
still
get junk mail about that stupid wedding, you know. Apparently this month trailing-sweet-pea bouquets are half-off. They don’t seem to get that I already used mine.”

Elodie raised an eyebrow, casually knocking her croquet ball into a post set in the ground, without even looking at it. “I win. Now can we focus, please?”

“Was it close at all?” Jane asked stubbornly, gesturing at the finished game with her mallet. Elodie rolled her eyes, which Jane took for a No. “Gran told me the truth in a letter,” she continued more seriously. “But what really made me believe it was just before, when I put her ring on and felt it for myself. And you needed to see me do . . . something . . . before you were convinced. Maybe she
needs
to start another fire, to really feel what’s going on in her.”

Elodie rolled her eyes again, which Jane took to mean “You’re even worse at strategizing than you are at croquet.”

“Or I guess I could just tell her,” Jane concluded resolutely. “Some of it—most of it. Leaving out as much as I can about me, but telling her about her. And her family—or most of it. As much of the truth as I can to get her attention without scaring her away.”

“And you think you know how much that is now?” Elodie looked unconvinced. “After meeting her all of three times?”

Jane knew her friend had a point—after all, Jane still had no idea what had happened to Annette in the first place. She didn’t have answers to most of her questions, in fact, but she was increasingly conscious that the third week of her disguise was already half over, and that by the time she met Anne the next day, it would feel “nearly gone.”

Even more important, she felt as if she at least knew
something
about Malcolm’s missing sister now, even after just three short encounters. The girl had had an awful life because of her magic, and had no idea where she had come from, and underneath her stubbornly guarded front, she was also deeply lonely. It wasn’t as much information as Jane had hoped for—and she hoped she could get a little more the following afternoon, before making her big revelation—but it was still something, and if it was all she could find out, it still might be enough. Jane needed Anne . . . but by now she felt fairly confident that Anne needed her right back.

She tossed her hair off her shoulders—it really seemed to be growing too quickly—and opened her mouth to tell Elodie what she had been thinking, but at that moment, Elodie had the same look on her face, so Jane decided to hear her out instead. “I didn’t know where to find you, and then this has all been so wild I forgot,” she began, and Jane blinked, trying to follow along. “A box of your grandmother’s things came to the apartment a couple of weeks ago. The postmark was recent, but it looked like it had been through a tornado, so I think La Poste beat it senseless, lost it, and then put a new sticker on before they finally delivered it. Of course, then I didn’t even know where to send it, so I guess they’re not all to blame.”

Jane felt an electric spark run all the way down her spine and then on to her toes.
Gran
. She had thought the hidden ring and letter had been Celine Boyle’s final message to her—could there be more? Gran had never been the sentimental type, but her harsh exterior had hidden a fierce and abiding love for her granddaughter. Jane felt her eyes sting at the possibility of finding one more tangible shard of that love. “What’s in it?”

“I didn’t open it, dummy—you were missing. There was a manhunt and a reward. I wasn’t thinking,
Oh, maybe she wants Gran’s old sweaters, wherever she is with her murdering druggie of a new husband
.” Elodie’s voice was a fierce whisper, but Jane still looked around furtively. The linen-suited men and large-hatted women around them, however, continued to ignore them thoroughly, and no one seemed to be in earshot at all.

“Good point,” Jane whispered back. She dug around in her purse until she found one of Ella Medeiros’s calling cards, printed with the number of her suite at the Lowell Hotel. “Can you forward it here? To Ella,” she added for extra emphasis.
Not Caroline Chase . . . or Jane Boyle . . . or Amber Kowalsky from the Milwaukee passport, with her crazy facial piercings. No wonder I’m not sure who I see when I look in the mirror anymore.

“Sounds good.” Elodie pocketed the card and twirled her croquet mallet casually in the air, nearly knocking over a tray of drinks from a waiter who ventured a little too close. When the frightened-looking man was safely out of range again, she smiled conspiratorially at Jane.
She totally kills this spy stuff,
Jane thought enviously.

“Want to come back to New York with us?” she asked hopefully. She let herself imagine it for a moment: she and Elodie holed up at the Lowell, giggling over room service and plotting Jane’s next move. But deep down she knew she had already taken up about as much of her friend’s time as Elodie could afford to spare. Besides, Malcolm had met Elodie a few times, and who could guess how much Lynne had learned from him before Jane had rescued him? “Don’t answer that,” Jane said, impulsively leaning in to give her friend a long, close hug. “You’ve already done so much.”

This close to her goal, Jane couldn’t afford any kind of mistake . . . and she could carry out the last few steps on her own. She had to.

B
y the time she got back to her hotel room, Jane was feeling tentatively optimistic—almost confident. Her plan was hardly foolproof, but it felt right to tell Anne as much of the truth as she could without putting herself in certain danger.
We orphans have to stick together, after all,
she thought, sliding off her cork-heeled wedges and kicking them toward the closet.

She even felt optimistic about Anne’s ultimate fate at the Doran mansion. True, Lynne was currently pretty evil. But it was hard to imagine her
staying
so evil once her prized daughter was safely back home. Surely she would be grateful for such an unexpected gift . . . or, at the very least, she wouldn’t need to scheme so hard once her legacy was secured. According to Malcolm, the shock of losing Annette had driven his mother half mad with grief. In her desperation, she had risked a dangerous last-ditch pregnancy, helping it along with dark magic . . . which had backfired and damaged the brain of the child, who had turned out to only be a son, anyway. Fully deranged from this second loss, Lynne had hidden little Charles away in her attic and concocted ever-more-sinister plots to secure her family’s legacy. It might be too late for Lynne to really change who she had become, but undoing that first loss might steady her a little, and give her back some of her lost peace, Jane reflected absently, flipping open a folded piece of paper on her nightstand.

“Dearest Ella,”
she read in André’s bold, sinuous, precise cursive.
“I’m sorry to tell you that I must leave for France rather sooner than I had hoped. Although I would love to continue to share London with you, I will be leaving tomorrow evening. Sadly, I cannot rely on seeing you before then, so I hope you will forgive my saying good-bye this way.”

“Passive-aggressive,” Jane muttered: although the note was superficially pleasant, clearly André had not forgiven her in the slightest for refusing to share her information with him. He would have to stick with his original plan of heading to France and turning Saint-Croix-sur-Amaury upside down looking for clues.

But so much the better, she decided. Everything that mattered to her was safely out of her tiny hometown—including the one last box she hadn’t even known about. She could deal with André glowering at her from across the English Channel while she convinced Anne to come to New York with her. And once she did, André’s tracking efforts wouldn’t matter anymore. He and Katrin could search high and low for Jane Boyle: by the time she reappeared, she would be useless as a bargaining chip. Lynne wouldn’t need her for anything—and so neither would the Dalcascus.

For now, she was safely hidden behind Ella’s face. Ella was the one who would be hunted when everything was said and done. Ella would be the one who had snatched the merger out from under the Dalcascus’ noses, and Ella would be the one who showed up in New York with the missing Doran girl in tow and a short list of demands. If anyone was out for payback of any kind, they’d be chasing a woman who didn’t exist.

She let the note fall back onto the nightstand, then let herself fall backward onto the quilted bedspread. Her feet bounced happily into the air, and she felt like her eighteen-year-old self again on the train to Paris: all her troubles behind her, and an unimaginable new adventure ahead.

Chapter Thirty

J
ane ran up the steps to Anne’s flat, this time ignoring the peeling paint in the shabby, industrial hallway. She rehearsed her speech over and over again in her head, trying to make sure she remembered it all in the correct order. She was so busy polishing her wording that she collided squarely with a blond, faux-hawked young man who had been heading the other way. A rainbow of old-fashioned vinyl records spilled across the slick tile of the floor, and Jane made a halfhearted attempt to help him scoop them up.
Courtesy is nice, but I have an appointment,
she fretted, shoving a couple of the records haphazardly into the man’s black-fingernailed hands. She ran on before he could thank or berate her, breathlessly mouthing the beginning of what she planned to tell Anne when she arrived.

On the fifth floor, Jane stopped to smooth down her hair and straighten the twisting waistband of her skirt, glancing anxiously toward Anne’s door. There were four on that level, all a dark, uneven-looking green color that had carelessly been spread over their built-in peepholes. Number 18 was down a short extension of the hallway, and Jane headed toward it so briskly that the heel of her shoe skidded out from under her on the worn tile of the floor.

“Damn it,” she hissed, balancing precariously on the other leg and rubbing her ankle. Righting herself, she limped tentatively a couple of steps toward the door.

Around the moment she realized her ankle wasn’t really hurt at all, she also realized something was actually wrong. She stopped again, holding perfectly still this time. The soft rise and fall of a voice wafted out into the hall, and Jane tried to quiet her own breathing, which was still a little rough from her rush up the stairs. She leaned back toward the main hallway, trying to figure out what had bothered her, but as she moved, the voice got even softer. She took a careful, silent step in the other direction, toward Anne’s door, and the sound got clearer. It stopped and was replaced by the deeper rumble of a second voice.

Anne wasn’t alone.

Crap
. Had she misread Anne’s apparent loneliness? It could be impossible to tell her the truth about her past if she had other people over. Jane bit her lip so hard that she drew blood.
Now what?

She hesitated in the hallway, feeling suddenly, horribly exposed by the open, echoing space around her. Her next move depended, she decided, on what she found inside the flat. She was a little early, after all. Perhaps a friend had dropped by unexpectedly, or the exterminator was overstaying his welcome. Even if a lot of people were there, she might still be able to get Anne alone.

It could still work out,
she told herself, turning Gran’s silver ring on her finger. It would certainly help to know what she was dealing with before she walked into the middle of it. She had never tried to read someone’s mind through a closed door, but this seemed like a good time to start.

She leaned against a cold, painted cinderblock wall, closed her eyes, and centered her mind directly behind her eyelids. Breathing slowly and deeply, she let the magic begin to talk to her, tingling in her extremities and swimming through her veins until she could almost see each drifting, shining particle of it. She felt the kind of powerful stillness that Dee always encouraged her to try for, and she smiled a little to herself.
Everything will be just fine,
her magic whispered, and she sent it through the door as easily as if the hinges had been standing empty.

The first thing she encountered inside was a smooth, blank wall that her magic couldn’t find any purchase on.
Anne,
she decided immediately. Her mind felt just like Katrin’s had, back when Jane had thought of her as “Mystery Witch.” The sameness reassured her, and she slid her mind away from the slick surface of Anne’s. Feeling her way instinctually, she moved back and forth in a slow zigzag through the rest of the room. Although she couldn’t see the inside of the flat, she remembered the basic floor plan from the day before. She suspected that Anne was on the dusty floral couch, and felt pretty sure her mind was sweeping the rest of the seating area in her tiny living room. After a long few moments, she found another person in the room, closer to Anne than she had initially expected to find anyone.

That person’s mind was a perfectly protected blank, just like Anne’s.

Jane’s magic recoiled so hard that her head made a dull cracking noise against the wall behind her; her entire body felt bruised.

There was another witch in the room.

Had Lynne found Annette first somehow? Was it one of her twin cousins in the living room? Katrin was still in New York, trying to find Caroline Chase. There were surely other witches in the world that Jane didn’t know about yet, but there weren’t supposed to be very many. The odds that one of them would just happen to be in Anne’s flat right as Jane was about to reintroduce her to her family seemed astronomically small.

With all her senses as alert as she could get them to be over the storm of adrenaline flooding her system, Jane took a couple of hesitant, tiptoeing steps toward the dark green door. A burst of laughter from the other side nearly sent her scurrying around the corner, but in the same moment, she realized who she was hearing. She stalked back to the door, forgetting to be cautious in her shock, and pressed her ear against the cold paint.

“Kathy was so sorry she couldn’t come,” André rumbled on the other side of the door. “She worries about you, you know.”

Kathy, Kathy, Kathy . . .
Jane’s heart flipped. Kathy was Anne’s so-called best friend.
Small world,
she thought grimly, trying to wedge her body a little more firmly against the door. Anne murmured something in an understanding tone, but her voice was too low for Jane to make out the words.

Surely André knew who Anne really was—he wasn’t the type to befriend solitary orphans just for fun. And besides, his sister would have been able to tell immediately that Anne was a witch, and Harris had said there was no one in André’s life who hadn’t been vetted by Katrin.

“We’re working on a huge deal in New York,” André replied to a question Jane couldn’t hear. “Kathy has taken over a lot of the family stuff from Mom the last few years, so she’s running the show. But when this trip to Alsace came up, I figured it was a good chance to check up on you.”

Jane’s heart began to pound so hard she thought it must be audible through the door, and she pulled back a little.

“She’s always been so clever,” Anne answered sadly. “I’m sure they must need her just constantly.”

“Mmhmm.” André cleared his throat. “I’m lucky to have such a dedicated sister, or else I’d never get any time off, myself.”

“You never seem to as it is,” Anne murmured.

Jane’s mind spun chaotically.
Katrin
did
vet this “friend” of André’s. Katrin has known her since she showed up at the orphanage in London after going missing across the ocean. With amnesia. And invisible to Lynne’s magic.

“I’m just sorry you can’t stay a little,” Anne said wistfully. “It’s been, what, nearly four years now? Of course, that visit was just Kathy. So I guess you guys trade off seeing me.” She giggled a little, but it sounded both strangely controlled and a little hysterical.

“You look well,” André replied absently, and Jane seethed. The Dalcascus, she was quite sure, were the “friends” who had taken an interest in little Anne from the beginning, the ones she referred to as “like family.” The ones who had looked high and low for her real parents, and kept tabs on her in the years since her mysterious arrival.
She might see them as family, but to them she’s something else entirely.
Jane glowered.
To them she’s just the little girl they kidnapped over twenty years ago.

She stepped away from the door, and for a moment she considered blowing it off its hinges to confront André. Her anger sent fiery shoots of magic through her throat and hands, and she let the fury build, seeing an electric red tide rise behind her eyes.

“You really can’t stay?” Anne asked. Her words were a bit clearer now. “I’ve got a friend coming in a few minutes; I’d love for you to meet her.”

“That’s nice,” André muttered, and he sounded louder, as well. “But I’ve risked being late for my flight as it is.”

“Of course,” Anne answered quickly, and from her muffled tone Jane guessed that she had ducked her head. “It was really nice of you to come by at all.”

Jane heard footsteps approaching the door, and her body reacted instinctively. She ran as quickly and quietly as she could back to the main hall, all thoughts of a confrontation forgotten. Anne would never trust Jane if she attacked the girl’s “family” right at her threshold. And to keep him from warning Katrin that she was on to them, Jane felt sure she would have to kill André. She felt her body shaking with adrenaline by the time she reached the stairs, and hysterical tears replaced the sea of red in her vision. She could fight, but she couldn’t really win.

Her feet flew down the stairs, but she could hear the door opening one flight up. She could hear their familiar voices more loudly now, and André would be able to hear her racing footfalls in another second, too. Her heart ready to explode, she risked a glance downward: the staircase was laid out in a fat, lazy spiral. The central opening was wide enough that she could clearly see the steps on the levels below. If he looked down once he reached the stairs, he would see her. She shook harder, nearly missing her footing on a slickly worn step.
He can’t see me.

She darted off the staircase at the next opportunity, but there was no door to close behind her. The one just to her left, however, had no number on it, and, sure that she could hear his shoes on the staircase, she shoved her now-wild magic into its lock and then wrenched back hard. The door swung open with a creak that sounded almost surprised, and Jane leaped into the tiny electrical closet it had been concealing, dragging it magically shut behind her.

It was dark inside, and she nearly screamed out loud when the bare bulb screwed into the ceiling glowed to life. But she could feel what was happening easily enough: she had too much magic and too much fear and too much anger in her system all at once, and that usually ended only one way.

André’s footsteps were just passing her floor. She held her breath, but she heard a fuse pop into uselessness behind her back, and then another. Loud cursing came from somewhere farther down the hall, and André stopped on the stairs.

Please, just go,
she wanted to scream. But as she thought it, her magic knocked out both the light above her head and the ones in the hallway outside. It was completely dark; no more light filtered in from under the door. And André wasn’t moving.

She squeezed her eyes shut so hard that tears welled up, but she couldn’t stop the chaos in her heart. She could feel the smooth wall of nothingness that was André just steps away from her, and she tried so hard to break through it that she thought she might accidentally push him down the stairs instead. She shuddered, killing another fuse with a sickening pop.

Just when she thought she might completely lose it and burn the place down, André began to move again, and Jane slumped first against the wall behind her, and then down to the ground. She stayed there for a long, long time after she was sure he must be gone.