The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) (11 page)

Annette and Malcolm traded an awkward sidelong glance, and Jane suddenly felt that she was intruding on something private. She glanced around at the Lacoste-wearing strangers with their bright cocktails and expensive beers, wishing for a moment that she could join them. They looked so happy and
normal,
not at all like people staging an intervention to prevent the survival of a bloodthirsty immortal spirit.
Then again,
she thought wryly,
we probably don’t look like that, either
.

Jane pretended to study a menu, trying to give the siblings enough distance so that they wouldn’t feel crowded. Malcolm cleared his throat uncomfortably, then took a deep breath and began to explain the Dorans’ true heritage to his sister.

‘I can only imagine how hard this is to hear, after you’ve wondered about your birth mother for so long,’ he finished. ‘The family that you come from is a seriously screwed-up one, Annette, and you deserve so much better. But I’m here, and I’ll always be here for you.’

‘Did
she
tell you all this?’ Annette asked when he paused, indicating Jane with her chin.

‘She didn’t have to.’ Malcolm pressed gently on his sister’s arm to turn her back toward him. ‘There were clues all over the place. I heard hints and suspicions from a lot of people before I got back here and learned that Jane had put them all together. And I’m glad she did, because you’ve only just come back to me, and I don’t want to lose you all over again.’

Jane felt her throat swelling a little at the emotion in his voice, but Annette’s face could have been chiseled from flint. ‘I’m sure it was an awfully long twenty years for
you,
’ she snapped. ‘Why don’t you ask her about that, too?’

This again
. Lynne’s hold over her daughter was so strong, she had Annette convinced that Jane was responsible for everything that had gone wrong in her life – even things that had happened when Jane was barely a toddler. ‘I didn’t know,’ Jane interrupted, then paused as a server passed perilously close to their table, balancing a tray laden with drinks. ‘I didn’t know that Gran had anything to do with your kidnapping until after I’d found you again,’ she resumed in a lower voice. ‘I didn’t even know about magic at all until after Gran died. She never told me any of it. I grew up a lot more like you than I think you realize, actually.’

She was aware as the last words were leaving her mouth that they were a bit of a risk, but Annette seemed interested rather than offended. ‘Your magic . . . did things?’

‘Not like yours,’ Jane admitted, ‘but yes. It happened a lot, and Gran would get upset and angry, and I wouldn’t know why. She was always afraid. I understand her much better now, but it doesn’t erase the things that happened, or how I felt for all those years. It doesn’t undo the loneliness and confusion, and all that time I spent thinking I could never be part of the world.’ She shook her head, trying to shake away the memories, but they clung to her like smoke. ‘Maybe we don’t get to be, really.’

‘Our mother took nearly everything from Jane,’ Malcolm added into the silence that followed. ‘She’s about to take everything from you. Think hard: Haven’t you had any doubts these last few weeks?’

Annette pressed her full lips together, her jaw tensing a little into its familiar stubborn set. ‘Has she encouraged you to make friends?’ Jane prompted. ‘Join any clubs or charity organizations? Look for a job or take classes or anything?’

When his sister didn’t answer, Malcolm picked up Jane’s line of questioning. ‘I’m sure you’ve been doing a lot of “catching up” and “bonding,”’ he guessed. ‘Has she let you do that with anyone other than her?’

‘Just because she doesn’t want me hanging out with traitors and kidnappers,’ Annette started hotly, indicating first Malcolm and then Jane with her defiant glare, ‘doesn’t mean she’s some kind of creepy body snatcher.’

‘The fact that she’s going to transfer her essence into you five nights from now, on the other hand . . .’ Jane muttered, gripping the leather menu in her frustration.
I glossed over this part when I imagined our rescue plan,
she admitted to herself. Somehow she had let herself think that Annette would naturally see the truth – despite the fact that when she said the truth out loud, it sounded ludicrous, even to her.

The air around them seemed to grow perceptibly warmer, and Jane smelled something that reminded her of burning leaves. The candle on the table between them flared suddenly to life, its flame stretching to an impossible height. Annette’s eyes had widened into bottomless black pits. Jane narrowed her own in response, focusing her energy on the flame, which flickered obediently down to a normal size.

‘Here’s the thing,’ Malcolm hurried to interject, glancing nervously back and forth between the two witches. ‘It’s a spell with a deadline. We’re trying to block it, but the farther away from her you are when it starts, the better our chances of success. If you could give us a heads-up about the exact timing of the spell, that would be a bonus, but the real problem is that if you’re in the same room as her when it happens, the transfer will only take a split second. The most helpful thing would be if, five days from now, you leave town. Get as far as you can, so that we maximize our chances of intercepting her. Then you can come back in the morning, and if it turns out that we were wrong about everything, I promise to drop this whole thing forever.’

Annette hesitated and looked to Jane for confirmation, allowing the candle to extinguish in the cool afternoon air. ‘We’d never ask you to hurt your mother,’ Jane agreed. ‘We’re not trying to convince you to attack her out of the blue, or run away for good, or do anything else you can’t take back. It’s just one night. One night, and it will save your life.’

There was a long silence as Annette looked down and twisted her fingers together. ‘For this spell you think she’s going to do,’ she said finally, so softly that Jane had to lean forward to hear, ‘would she maybe need some of my hair?’

Malcolm gently pulled her hands apart and pressed one between his own. Emer and Dee had both speculated that Hasina would ‘anchor’ the spell to its intended victim, but the forewarning didn’t stop a chill from running down Jane’s spine anyway. She set her menu aside and began tracing the patterns of the table’s wood grain with one fingertip.

‘I want to leave now,’ Annette whispered. ‘I could get farther away if I went right now. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

Malcolm’s voice was steady, low, reassuring. ‘There’s no way she’d agree to you taking a trip now, with the deadline so close. And if you left without a word, she’d know you were onto her. She’d find you, for one thing, but first she’d take out Jane and all the other people who are trying to help us. There’d be no one left to stop her, and then you would be gone, for real. I know it’s scary, but your best chance is to wait.’

‘And you can’t let her guess that anything is wrong,’ Jane added, glancing back up when Annette remained silent. ‘She thinks you believe that you two are rebuilding your family. It’s the only reason you got out alone today, and it’s the only way you’ll avoid getting tied up for the next five days.’

‘Literally,’ Malcolm agreed, squeezing Annette’s hand for emphasis. ‘She’s done that to both of us before; she wouldn’t hesitate with someone she needs as badly as you. You have to make her trust you enough to let you move around freely until the moment comes when you can escape.’

‘Is this the kind of thing you two had to do?’ Annette asked plaintively. This time, when she tilted her face up to include Jane in the question, her eyes were soft and completely without resentment. ‘Was there all this . . . horribleness, back before you ran away?’

Jane locked eyes with Malcolm for a moment, remembering how carefully they had planned their own escape from Lynne. It hadn’t worked at all the way they’d intended, so it was impossible to be as naïvely optimistic this time as she had felt back then. But Annette already looked miserable, and there was nothing to be gained from telling her the whole truth. ‘It was a little like this,’ she admitted, ‘but we have much more outside help this time, and a better idea of what we’re up against. It’s still scary, and we still have to be really careful. But we are going to get you out of this.’

Malcolm nodded in emphatic agreement, and Annette managed a wan smile. Jane smiled back, and some of her imaginary hope began to feel real.
It’s going to work,
she repeated to herself, and it sounded a little less implausible every time.
She’s with us now, and it’s going to work
.

Chapter Twelve

S
PIRITS IN THE
Montagues’ brownstone had started to flag a little under the uncertainty of their planning, but the news that Jane and Malcolm had finally gotten Annette’s cooperation brought new life to the little group. Jane herself felt absolutely elated for three whole days. But then the doubts started to creep back in, and by the morning of their planned attack she was thoroughly worried about the enormous task in front of her. It was all well and good to be able to get into the mansion, and great that Annette had agreed not to be in it, but there was still no way of knowing what might be waiting for them on the other side of that door.

Jane had every confidence that whatever Hasina needed for her spell
would
be there, of course. The mansion was Lynne’s fortress; she wouldn’t trust her preparations anywhere else. But there was no way to know for sure what form those things would take, or how they would be guarded. Dark magic required dark materials, and nightmares crept back into Jane’s sleep, full of grinning skulls, pools of blood, and fire, always fire.

To compound her worries, the timing of their assault on the huge stone house was perilously uncertain. Annette had reported overhearing Lynne mention something about ‘midnight’ to her twin cousins, but Lynne’s meeting with Jane in Central Park had been sometime midafternoon, which meant the spell could easily take place several hours earlier. Annette’s information had divided their group and created a creeping sense of uncertainty. Jane had decided that the consequences of arriving late were worse than those of being too early, but she could tell that Malcolm, in particular, had serious reservations about her decision.

So when Malcolm approached her that morning, asking if he could help Annette get to safety instead of joining the assault on the Park Avenue house, she felt a distinct sense of relief. Her feelings for him were still wildly complicated, and she needed to focus on the monumental task at hand without that distraction. His place was with his sister, helping her get quickly and safely out of the house, while hers was here, making it safe for them both to eventually return.

Besides, the biggest advantage that Malcolm brought to the table was an intimate knowledge of his former home, the need for which had been eliminated thanks to Dee and Maeve’s dedicated work. Playing with variations of the spell Jane once used to find Annette’s old belongings, they had succeeded in tweaking it so that it would lead her to Hasina’s spell ingredients instead. The modifications hadn’t been easy – Harris lost half an eyebrow in the experimentation, and Maeve had spent an entire day unable to speak anything but Gaelic – but Dee guaranteed that this final spell would work. Annette needed Malcolm much more than they did at the moment.

Breaking in and finding the spell ingredients was only the first step. Once inside, they would have Lynne’s creepy twin cousins to contend with – and Lynne herself, of course. Jane knew that even without her magic, Lynne Doran’s slender, couture-clad form was still the scariest thing that would be waiting for them inside 665 Park Avenue.

Once we’re past all that
– Jane forced her brain to move on –
the end of the plan is solid, at least
. Emer had spent every moment of the last two weeks fashioning a wooden box. Though it looked, on the surface, almost nothing like the whimsical spirit box Malcolm had brought Jane, whenever she glanced at it out of the corner of her eye, she kept thinking it was hers. They were, after all, both designed to contain souls. When Hasina’s spell forced her essence out of Lynne’s body, Emer’s box would trap her before she could travel to Annette’s. All they needed to do was make it to that one vital moment – if only the obstacles in their way didn’t seem to multiply every time Jane counted them.

She tried to distract herself with a walk in the roof garden, meditation in the sauna, cup after cup of Emer’s fascinating homemade herbal teas . . . but the bustling preparations of her friends chased her from room to room until she began to feel like a trapped animal.
I can’t let them see me scared,
she thought: against all odds they had succeeded in making her vague, unlikely plan possible. It would be unfair and unkind to let her nerves take anything away from that remarkable accomplishment, especially now, when they were so close to putting their ideas into action.
So close to following me through an unbreachable door into a nest of angry witches and making them even angrier,
Jane’s brain corrected. She pushed away from the breakfast bar, dropped her stoneware mug in the dishwasher, and all but ran out of the kitchen.

But the tension in the sitting room seemed to crackle almost audibly, giving Jane a stress headache from the moment she walked in.

‘I don’t even know what this does,’ Harris exclaimed, picking up a waxed-paper bundle and then tossing it back onto the coffee table. There was a sudden, blinding flash and a small puff of smoke, and Dee and Maeve took shelter behind the striped couch.

‘That was
supposed
to be edelweiss and a little basil,’ Emer called reprovingly from across the room, where she was occupied with a length of rope and a tiny silver knife.