“It’s me,” Jane told her unnecessarily. “It worked.” The sky is blue and Lynne’s a witch.
“Oh my God, Jane, I thought you were—” Dee stopped, apparently trying to make a huge mental adjustment. “It worked?”
Jane glanced quickly at her hands; they were still the same glowing shade of brown. The half-moons under her nail beds stood out in even brighter contrast than Dee’s. “Didn’t it?”
Dee waved her cookie dismissively. “Of course, it’s just . . . we kept checking on you, and then Misty had to go, but I kept checking, and you still looked like you the whole time. And you wouldn’t wake up, and now it’s— Oh, you must be starving.”
“Are those hazelnut?” Jane asked helpfully, tilting her new chin toward the cookie.
Dee looked at it as if she had no idea how she had come to be holding it, then shook herself all over. “White chocolate–cherry,” she corrected with a little more of her usual confidence. “But samosas first, and— Well, there’s a lot, actually. I cook when I’m worried. And for God’s sake, Jane, you haven’t eaten in two days.”
She disappeared back into the kitchen, leaving Jane frozen in place this time. She cleared her throat; it seemed to take longer than it did in her real body. “I haven’t what in what?” she called out to the doorway that Dee had just vacated.
Her friend’s tangle of black hair reappeared, although the rest of her body remained occupied by the stove. “I know you didn’t touch the food I left before the spell, and then you were out all day today. We were really starting to panic, you know.”
“I don’t . . .” Jane whispered, then raised her voice again. She could hear the note of hysteria in it, but felt that a little panic was probably in order about now. “Today?”
Dee reappeared fully in the doorway, this time holding a plate. Jane could smell oil and the soft, low note of chickpeas, and her taut stomach growled fiercely. Dee opened her mouth to say something, but a loud, bell-like chime interrupted her. Her amber eyes darted to the front door and then back to Jane. “Shit,” she whispered. “Jane, I really thought we needed—”
Today? Jane walked automatically to the front door, her mind still trying to wrap itself around this new information. She heard Dee frantically trying to apologize for something or other behind her back, but she couldn’t focus on that right now: someone had come to their apartment in the middle of some unspecified night. Feeling a little reckless (she had, after all, just pulled off a seriously empowering amount of magic), Jane swung the door open without so much as checking the peephole.
He’s not so tall anymore, was her first thought, but the rest was still the same: the short, coppery curls, the dancing green eyes, the long, lean muscles that made a leather jacket look better on him than on just about anyone else she could think of. “Harris.” She breathed, and stepped—almost fell—into his arms. He stayed perfectly still, and at first she imagined that he must just be surprised to see her.
It was only after she had been clinging to his unresponding body for a good ten seconds that she realized that he had no idea who was hugging him. Apparently, the spell had left some things the same, though, because the tiny currents of electricity that curled under her skin whenever she was close to him were responding just as emphatically as ever. Jane pulled herself gently away.
“Excuse me,” she improvised. “I’m from, erm, Brazil. We hug.” She stepped back and shot a pleading look at Dee. The fact that Harris was here at all suggested that Dee was starting to have second thoughts about concealing Jane’s whereabouts, but a new face gave them a chance to keep her secrets. “Please come in.”
Dee had been gesturing frantically to Jane, but stopped as soon as Harris could see her. She opened her arms and accepted his hug while Jane chewed the inside of her cheek; theirs looked a lot more enjoyable than her one-sided gaffe had been. “. . . At this time of night,” Dee was saying.
What time? Jane wondered. She inched to where she could see the digital clock on the oven. She assumed that it was broken when she saw 12:14, but then remembered that she was in America, where they used twelve repeating hours instead of twenty-four. After midnight on Saturday, then . . . or actually Sunday, I guess. She had slept through Saturday. And of course, she realized, Dee had called Harris when Jane had headed into hour twenty-four of her magical coma. She could hardly blame her friend for that. And as the son of a son of a witch himself, raised on his grandmother’s stories and lore, Harris was a pretty smart choice to call for help.
“I don’t think I’ve officially met your . . . friend,” Harris said, and Jane’s eyes snapped over to him as if they had a mind of their own. It was as though the air around him were somehow brighter than in the rest of the room.
“My roommate,” Dee corrected as Jane started forward with her right hand outstretched for a more formal greeting than her first one. “She . . . um . . . Ella. This is my roommate, Ella.”
“I’ve heard all kinds of nice things about you,” Jane told Harris automatically, hoping this was enough of an explanation for her greeting him by name. And body-check.
“Charmed,” Harris replied, turning her proffered hand to kiss the back, and Jane felt her unfamiliar lips curve up into an unfamiliar smile.
She searched her empty brain for some sort of nonchalant reply, but just then Dee appeared between them with a plate of lukewarm samosas. “It turned out to be nothing, of course,” she told Harris conversationally, and Jane admired her coolness. “Our downstairs neighbor came home drunk and tried to get in here. It woke us up, and we’d already Netflixed Paranormal Activity earlier, so we were a little freaked out. I decided to stay up and cook a little, and then I guess the guy came back, because there were all kinds of weird noises and scratching at the door, and it completely freaked me out.”
To her surprise, Jane felt the skin on her arms rise in goose bumps even though Dee was making the whole thing up. She’s really good. “You should have called the police,” Harris told Dee gently, rubbing her upper arms reassuringly. Jane clapped her hands over her own upper arms. “But of course I’m always happy to come play hero for the two of you,” he added, flashing his wide, easy smile that never failed to make Jane want to smile back.
His bright green eyes met hers and narrowed curiously for a moment. Jane inhaled and looked away as casually as she could manage, feeling a familiar heat rising in her cheeks. He’s so close, a rebellious part of her thought, and she felt an intense longing to just tell him who she was.
“We know,” Dee assured Harris, moving the plate out to the side and leaning her body a little closer in to his. “Thank you so much.”
“I guess, now that we’re all safe again, I’ll go back to bed,” Jane made herself say. Normal people have normal lives, and I want that for them. And once I fix things with Lynne, I’ll be able to have that, too. Or something more like it, anyway. The thoughts sounded hollow, and she shrugged her shoulders irritably, feeling a dull ache in their tired muscles.
“I should, too, actually,” Dee admitted guiltily. “This Kate woman called earlier; she’s starting a catering company and heard I did pastry.” She glanced back at the food-covered surfaces of the kitchen. “I guess we can call tonight ‘interview prep.’ ”
“That’s great!” Jane told her warmly. “I had no idea. Let me know if I can help at all.” Like lend you clothes that we’re both a little too tall for now, or act like a stranger off the street who adores your cakes, or snuggle with your new boyfriend. Or anything. She smiled ruefully at her hopelessly one-track mind. It would get better once Harris and his pesky magical blood were a safe distance away, and then, she knew, she would be able to be properly happy about how Dee was getting her life together post–Hurricane Jane. Right now she could settle for ignoring her baser impulses and acting the part of a good friend.
“I’ll let you two sleep, then,” Harris offered gallantly, heading for the door but detouring toward the kitchen. “Although, if you could spare a little something for the long,
lonely subway ride . . .”
“I’ll wrap the cookies for you,” Dee suggested, and Jane had to fight the urge to kick her in the shin. Following a short flurry of activity in the kitchen and a good-natured wave, Harris was gone. When Dee closed the door behind him, Jane felt her body finally relax.
Dee turned and raised an awkward black eyebrow at Jane. “Ella?” Jane asked, a little incredulously. “Like Ella Enchanted?”
“Like ‘she,’ in Spanish,” Dee admitted sheepishly. “My mind went blank. But use the ‘enchanted’ thing if you ever write your memoirs or something, okay?”
“It’s a deal,” Jane promised, making a long-overdue beeline for the kitchen.
Chapter Ten
The heavy, carved-wood doors of number 665 swung open, and Jane jolted to attention. She had been staking the place out from a Starbucks across the street, set a little bit back on Sixty-Eighth Street, from about nine that morning, but so far hadn’t seen a single useful thing. A couple of the youngest McCarrolls, the grandchildren of Lynne’s cousin Cora, had left with a nanny shortly after Jane had started watching. Blake Helding, the son of Cora’s twin, Belinda, had staggered in around ten thirty in what looked an awful lot like last night’s clothes. But between then and almost noon, she had seen nothing but comings and goings through the staff entrance, and she was starting to feel both discouraged and over-caffeinated.
Jane leaned forward toward the window, checking automatically to make sure her sunglasses were still in place. It was probably overkill, since she had acquired a completely different face and body since the last time she had seen anyone who lived in the Dorans’ mansion, but a habit was a habit. Besides, she reflected, if I’m trying to act like I belong in their circle, getting recognized as “that chick who was stalking the house” would probably be counterproductive.
The woman who emerged from the dark stone archway was so thin she looked brittle, with massive sunglasses like Jane’s and a telltale head of completely implausible highlights. Laura. Blake Helding’s wife—probably distinctly irritated with her husband’s so-late-as-to-be-early arrival home—was striding away down the block, and Jane nearly knocked over her stool in her hurry to get outside and follow her. She stayed behind her onetime almost-friend and across the street, careful not to get caught at a corner by the changing traffic signals. She guessed that Laura would have taken one of the family cars if she’d been planning on going far, and three short and one long block later, Laura proved her right.
Sunday at noon—brunch time, Jane realized belatedly as she watched Laura saunter into 212. She chewed her lower lip thoughtfully and considered the merits of staying right where she was. She only had twenty-eight days, one of which was half-gone: an abundance of caution was not what was called for here.
She stepped out onto the street, first nearly breaking an ankle in her viciously pointy, strappy shoes and then narrowly missing getting hit by a delivery truck. Crossing the rest of Sixty-Fifth Street more carefully than she had begun, she checked to make sure that a couple of crisp fifty-dollar bills were readily available in the pocket of her vintage, chain-strap Chanel minaudière.
She strolled past the line of waiting patrons as if she couldn’t see them; she was busy locating Laura and her three trophy-wife friends, anyway. “One for brunch,” she told the host in the bored, lofty tone that she had learned from the Dorans.
“Do you have a reservation?” he asked pointedly, his wispy blond mustache twitching strangely.
Jane pulled the bills deftly from her purse and rested them on his wooden stand, still folded between her slim mahogany fingers. “The banquette near the back is fine,” she told him softly, releasing the bills. They drifted down across his reservation book like a rumor, coming to rest just above his pale, dry hands. He hesitated briefly, and then they were gone before Jane had even seen his fingers move.
“This way, please,” he told her diffidently, leading her to the white-draped table she had suggested. She thought she heard an annoyed murmur from the line behind her, and she made herself remember to strut rather than slink.
She slid along the soft brown leather of the bench; he moved the table in a bit closer to her and hurried back to his post. She saw his right hand move to his left sleeve as he went, and then to his inside jacket pocket, and smiled: Malcolm would be so proud of her. A shrill laugh pierced her reverie, drawing Jane’s somewhat jittery attention to one of Laura Helding’s friends, a woman with slick, professionally straightened hair, whom Jane faintly remembered as the wife of some athlete. Her bare bronzed shoulder was so close that it almost touched Jane’s. Laura herself was seated across the table from Jane’s neighbor, but Jane still felt sure that, if she wanted to, she could reach over and touch Malcolm’s second-cousin-in-law.
So close, she thought tensely, but now what?
As if in answer, a waitress arrived at Laura’s table with three Bellinis and a Bloody Mary. Now I wait, Jane realized with a sudden flash of insight. Now I let her get a little tipsy. Laura had always been even more outgoing than usual when she had a cocktail or three in her angular body.
Jane suited action to thought, setting her purse on the table and picking up the menu. Over her fluffy Niçoise omelet (which was barely an omelet and not remotely Niçoise, to Jane’s authoritatively French eye, but was absolutely delicious all the same), she thought she noticed Laura eyeing the beading on the minaudière, and reminded herself that she wasn’t going into this mission completely blind. She knew a lot about Laura, after all: the woman liked private sales, loved one-of-a-kind anything, and loathed her husband in a good-natured sort of way.
Jane took a sip of her water and then a sip of chardonnay, reached into the tiny purse, and dug around for her new Vertu Constellation phone. It had been expensive—shockingly, heart-stoppingly expensive—but during the nerve-racking days of choosing the spell and locating the Forvrangdan orb, Dee had managed to convince her that she needed a power accessory. At the time, Jane had grudgingly written it off as retail therapy, but now it was practical in a whole new way: it was exactly the sort of accessory that Ella, socialite acquaintance of the Doran clan, would have. And since she couldn’t wear her engagement ring around the Dorans, of course, she would have to get comfortable spending money on other eye-catchers. Plus, so pretty, she cooed silently, stroking the smooth ceramic of its keys.
Laura noticed it, too, out of the corner of her heavily lined eye, and Jane thought she read approval in her expression. So far, so good. But glances weren’t invitations, and Jane gritted Ella’s small, even teeth and dialed Dee.
“I’m on my way to the interview with that caterer,” Dee answered crisply. “Is everything okay?”
“You’re late,” Jane drawled, forcing herself not to hush her voice the way she normally would. The real players didn’t worry about who heard them. She tried to copy the light, lovely accent her old friend Elodie had spoken with: a mix of British English, Haitian French, and boarding-school Swedish. The memory of the week the two girls had spent in the Dessaixes’ posh London home crashed over Jane like a wave, but she twisted the edge of the cream-colored tablecloth between her fingers and fought down the nostalgia.
“No, it’s at—” Dee initially sounded confused, but then stopped abruptly and Jane guessed that she had caught on. “Oh my God, which of them is there?”
“I don’t even care about your stupid excuses,” Jane insisted, raising her voice a tiny bit more. “I can tell that you’re hungover, anyway.”
“Well,” Dee pointed out reasonably, “you did keep me up past midnight with your coma drama. Who wouldn’t drink, with such a crazy roommate?”
Jane had a fleeting moment of regret that she had called Dee instead of their answering machine, which probably wouldn’t have distracted her with wiseass remarks. But it was too late now, and she determinedly soldiered on. “Do you think I couldn’t just check with Alfred and ask when he drove you home? Do you think he keeps your secrets when I sign his paychecks, you idiot? But,
you know, it’s not even worth my time; I don’t care enough.”
“You’re so mean.” Dee pretended to pout. “Also, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be your ne’er-do-well lover or your bratty teenager.”
“Just get your things and get out.” Jane sighed. “Forget brunch, forget us, forget everything. Be gone by the time I’m back from Garren, and don’t bother the staff with carrying your crap.”
“Bitch,” Dee remarked good-naturedly. “And to think I was going to make enough dinner for both of us.”
Jane clicked her phone shut with a disgusted snort and signaled to one of the ubiquitous blue-clad waitresses. “Champagne,” she mouthed broadly.
To her barely containable delight, Laura snapped her French-manicured fingers briskly to get the waitress’s attention before she could fill Jane’s request. “Bring the bottle,” she ordered, and then turned to Jane. “On me, of course. It sounds like you’ve had about enough of freeloaders for the day.” She smiled at Jane, who had a momentary pang of guilt at using, arguably, the nicest adult associated with the Dorans. But, she reminded herself, when she brought Annette back to her family, everyone’s life would get better, including Laura’s. It was a deception but not really a betrayal: Lynne would probably thank Laura for bringing “Ella” into their lives. And then Ella will disappear for good, and all the loose ends will vanish with her, and Malcolm will be safe and I can go on with my life. It was almost easy to smile and raise her quickly produced glass in a toast when she kept all of that in mind.
“To cutting dead weight,” Laura suggested archly. The five women clinked their glasses high above the table and sipped.
“I don’t know what it is about men,” Jane sighed tragically. “The moment they get comfortable, they turn into little children. Do they not know how terribly unattractive that is?”
The Dark Glamour Page 7
