The Dark Glamour

by Gabriella Pierce

  “Good. Now, thing two: you mentioned an e-mail about your wedding bouquet at some point during all that mess you just told me. Can you back up to that, please?”

  Jane shrugged. “I get a lot of junk,” she explained; she hadn’t even realized that she had mentioned that completely extraneous detail. She wondered how long she had babbled on for, altogether. But Misty waved her hand in a circle, encouraging her to go on, so she sighed. “It’s all just part of having the wedding of the century, apparently. Theknot.com has been sending me e-mails—one a week at least—with all these discounts and copies of the stuff Lynne had at mine and Malcolm’s. You know: ‘where to find the hottest dresses’ and all of them look just like mine, or half-off on the same kind of bouquet I had. I can’t decide whether Lynne would be proud she’s set all these trends, or irritated that people are stealing her ‘exquisite’ taste. Probably both.”

  “That’s a membership site,” Misty said, as if it were somehow significant, and Jane frowned as she shrugged again. “They make you put in your wedding date when you sign up,” the older woman added, still staring searchingly at Jane. “And yours has passed.”

  “You’re just going to have to tell me what you’re getting at,” Jane told her helplessly.

  “They should be sending you ads for thank-you notes, not dresses. Are you sure those e-mails are really coming from that site?”

  “Who else—” Jane’s jaw dropped open, and she sprang out of her chair.

  “Back here,” Misty told her tersely, pointing to an alcove beside the curtain that divided the two parts of the store.

  Jane didn’t remember if she had ever noticed the older-model Dell sitting on a shelf inside it, but she certainly noticed it now. Her fingers flew over the keyboard, even tapping frantically on the sides of it while the slow machine strained to obey all her commands at once. After what felt like much longer than it probably was, she had rescued the last four e-mails from her trash and had them side by side in narrowed windows on the screen. “They look legit,” she murmured doubtfully, clicking on first one, then another, and scrolling around to see every part of them.

  “Sure, except that no major Web site just gives out customer service info like that anymore,” Misty scoffed, pointing to two numbers at the bottom of one of the messages.

  Jane smiled and started to agree, but then she actually looked at the numbers. The first one was a normal American toll-free number. The second one, labeled “International Callers,” had an international country code in front of it. “I’ve shopped on U.S. sites from France,” she told Misty slowly. “That’s not how they do it. International callers can’t always use toll-free numbers, so they just give a different local one. They don’t just pick a random country and tell the whole world to call that.” She clicked on the next window, and then yelped in triumph: the toll-free number was the same, but the “International Callers” number was completely different. She opened a fifth window, making it tiny so as not to cover the others, and searched for a directory of country codes. “Brazil,” she declared, closing the first e-mail with a flourish. “Then Chile.” She clicked the second one off the screen. “Ecuador.” Click. “And then . . . um . . . Laos.” Her face was flushed as she stared at Misty. “Malcolm is in Laos.”

  Misty grinned, and Jane felt her own smile widening. The muscles of her face felt a little creaky after the drama of the last twenty-four hours, but there was no mistaking it: she was coming back to herself. “Not South America anymore,” Misty pointed out helpfully, and Jane practically giggled; Lynne may actually have been on Malcolm’s trail, but then he had jumped clear to the other side of the globe. He was still safe, as far as she knew, and now she might even be able to get in touch with him. In an emergency, she told herself steadily, or when I have good news.

  “And I’ve got one last piece of good news,” Misty told her seriously, and Jane’s attention snapped to her tanned face. “Jane, Anne’s still in London.”

  Jane recoiled physically. “Is that supposed to be a joke?” she asked, genuinely stung. If it was, it seemed uncharacteristically unkind.

  “You know where she is, you twit,” Misty clarified, rolling her eyes. “You didn’t brawl with André and scare her away, or tell her the truth and freak her out. She’s exactly where you left her, and no one knows you know but you.”

  Jane frowned. “But I can’t get anywhere near her.”

  “You don’t need to,” Misty nearly exploded. “You think Lynne can’t afford a ticket to Heathrow?”

  “She’d give me anything for that information,” Jane realized slowly. Fragments of thoughts began to coalesce in her mind: the deal she had been thinking of striking with Lynne back before everything had gone to hell. “Okay. Now I need to run some ideas by you.”

  It’s not perfect, she warned herself, but she could feel the telltale energy returning to her limbs. She felt hopeful, almost giddy, and she knew what it meant. Jane was, once again, on the verge of a daring, dangerous, and brilliant plan.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Jane hurried along one of the paved paths that curved downtown through Central Park. She felt almost foolish, thanks to the stares she kept getting from other park-goers; upon reflection, the trench-coat-and-giant-sunglasses uniform that she had taken out of retirement for this occasion seemed to be attracting more attention than it was deflecting. Apparently, it’s more conspicuous in the park on a nice day than around the Port Authority in March.

  But it was too late to change, and she enjoyed the safe, cocooned feeling the outfit gave her. She needed every ounce of advantage she could get, anyway: she was on a particularly nerve-racking errand. Just the thought made her want to pull the collar of her coat a little more tightly closed, but she reminded herself sternly that, for the first time in a while, she was walking into an unpleasant confrontation while holding all the cards.

  It was harder to hold on to that thought when she came around a bend and found Lynne, tall and stern and immaculately groomed as ever, standing in a small clearing under a chestnut tree. Waiting. Jane gulped down the lump in her throat and stepped off the path, feeling her red-painted Louboutin stilettos sink into the grass. Lynne’s eyes raked slowly from Jane’s vertiginous platform heels to the top edge of her oversize sunglasses, and Jane suspected that her mother-in-law once again disapproved of her wardrobe. Mine . . . Ella’s . . . until I start wearing nothing but Chanel, that’ll never change, she thought ruefully, and was gratified to see Lynne’s eyebrows pull together at her obviously unexpected smile.

  She respects confidence, Jane reminded herself, fixing the smile in place as if with glue. In Book and Bell the day before, this had all seemed fairly straightforward, but now, face-to-face with the woman who had ruined her life in an impressively thorough way, it was harder than she had expected to remember that she had the upper hand.

  Lynne spoke first. “I believe you said you have some information for me,” she snipped impatiently, and Jane felt stronger by the moment as she registered the tension in the other woman’s voice. “I assume it has something to do with my son.”

  “It doesn’t,” Jane croaked, and cleared her throat hurriedly. “It’s about your daughter.”

  Lynne’s face was so immobile that it looked entirely different. “Jane Boyle? You mean my daughter-in-law. Although, of course, I love her like my own,” she finished with a cruel smirk that made Jane shudder in spite of herself.

  “She sent me here,” Jane went on, visualizing the words she had practiced with Misty just before she said them. “But I meant your actual daughter. Malcolm Doran hired me to find Annette.”

  Lynne’s expression turned thunderous, and Jane braced herself: when witches got that angry, bystanders weren’t always safe. But Lynne was, of course, an expert in her craft, and nothing changed except for the air between them. “Annette is dead,” Lynne finally said in a voice like a snake’s hiss. “You of all people should know I couldn’t be tricked into believing such an obvious lie.”

/>   Jane felt magic building in the older witch like a battery charging. She realized that she had to get the truth out quickly before Lynne lost her patience and attacked, and she braced herself just in case her time was running out too fast. “Stand down,” she snapped, surprising both of them. But Lynne was still listening, so she decided to go with it. “I have proof.” As slowly as she dared so as not to spook Lynne more, she reached into her handbag and pulled out her phone. She had already primed the photo of herself and Anne that Elodie had obligingly sent that morning (without so much as an “I told you so,” Jane noticed appreciatively). She tossed the phone gently to Lynne, who caught it deftly.

  Bitch just had to be coordinated, too, floated across Jane’s mind. Most of her attention, though, was occupied watching every one of her enemy’s muscles for sudden movements. The chestnut trees around them waved gently in the breeze, and where the late-April sun dappled Lynne’s face, Jane could see that her skin looked unusually thin and tired. Lynne didn’t speak or move, but she almost seemed to shrink into herself as she took in the photo.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” Jane told her eventually, “but you were lied to.” It wasn’t the full truth: she didn’t know the exact mechanics and she hadn’t gotten confessions from any of the perpetrators. But she had already decided that she wasn’t going to sell out the Dalcascus just yet. There was no real need to, since they would lose so much from Annette’s return already—and probably have to run for the hills anyway, lest Anne recognize them and spill the beans. Besides, implicating them might make Jane seem petty or vengeful, and she needed Lynne to believe and respect her in order for her plan to work.

  Lynne stared at the screen for several long minutes. Sparrows sang in the bushes, and a red-tailed hawk wheeled overhead. Jane could hear children’s laughter somewhere nearby, although no one passed their little clearing close enough to be seen. She wondered if the magnetic charge of their magic helped keep passersby away; she certainly would have avoided their current spot if she hadn’t had to be there.

  When Lynne’s voice sounded again, Jane jumped a little. It was hoarse and broken and nothing like her usual controlled purr. “Where?” she gasped. Her dark eyes swept up to meet Jane’s, and Jane was stunned by the change in them. Lynne had always been cool, commanding, thoroughly in charge. Now, with her widened eyes and softened, uncertain mouth, she looked like a supplicant.

  “I can tell you exactly how to find her,” Jane went on. She said the words just as she had practiced them, but inside she felt shaken by the rawness of Lynne’s need. That was the whole point, she tried to tell herself. It was harder than she had ever imagined, to bargain when Lynne looked more like a distraught mother than an arch-nemesis. Jane shivered a little in the warm spring sunlight and reminded herself that she had to be as careful as possible, just in case. “But I’m going to have to insist on some terms, of course.”

  Lynne nodded absently, glancing at the picture every few seconds as if she were afraid it might disappear. “Name them.”

  Jane cleared her throat again, still feeling unpleasantly guilty. “First, my employer insists that you immediately call off the search for him and his wife,” she delivered quite smoothly, all things considered. “The police, the reward . . . it all needs to go away. Everyone must stop looking for Malcolm Doran and Jane Boyle, including you.”

  “Of course.” Lynne frowned, and Jane reminded herself that she was only useful to Lynne in the absence of Annette, anyway. That condition had been, by far, the easier of the two.

  “And then there’s my fee. I took this job on commission, so to speak. I will need you to turn over your magic to me right now in exchange for Annette’s current name and address.”

  Jane held her breath; she had no idea what kind of reaction to expect, but fireworks didn’t seem unlikely. Rendering Lynne powerless was the only safe way to reunite her with Annette. For one thing, it made it that much less likely that she could ever change her mind and come after Jane. For another, it made it much less likely that she would make Annette miserable. Lynne could be a good mother, Jane had eventually decided, if she had to give up being the perfect witch. Besides, if she picks Anne over her power, I won’t feel so guilty about turning Anne over to her, she thought anxiously.

  Lynne reached into her handbag.

  “What are you doing?” Jane demanded anxiously, rallying her own magic into something like a shield, but Lynne just smiled dismissively.

  When the older woman removed her hand from her purse, Jane recognized the object she was holding as a silver athame. “Tell . . . Malcolm . . . that those terms are more than acceptable,” Lynne announced placidly, and held the slim dagger up to her lips. She closed her eyes, and the earth spun sickeningly under Jane’s feet. Lynne inhaled and Jane felt as though she were being smothered, and then Lynne exhaled onto the athame. Even in the relatively warm air, Jane could see her breath fog up the mirrored surface briefly, and then it disappeared as if the blade had absorbed it. And then there was nothing at all in the small clearing except for Jane, Lynne, and the small silver object Lynne was tossing gently back across the grass to her.

  She didn’t even hesitate, Jane marveled, fumbling to catch the athame. There was no question of a trick; she could feel Lynne’s magic in the object. It coiled against her fingers below the surface of the silver, and Jane shuddered involuntarily as she shoved it into her own purse. She had believed that Lynne would trade anything for Anne—had been counting on it, in fact. But somehow the speed and ease of Lynne’s capitulation had caught her completely off guard. She truly does love her daughter, Jane decided, feeling almost awed. For the first time since she had come up with the whole idea, she actually felt good about bringing the mother and daughter back together. Against all the odds, she suddenly felt sure she was doing the right thing, rather than just the right thing for her.

  “Her name is Anne Locksley now,” she told Lynne softly, and then went on to tell her every detail about her daughter’s second life that she could think of. The only thing she left out was the involvement of the Dalcascus in Annette’s disappearance. There was a decent chance Lynne would eventually figure out that part of the story on her own, but the woman’s easy sacrifice had given Jane a happy glow she didn’t want to risk having tarnished just yet. She liked this side of Lynne . . . and would be just as happy to be far away if the old, vengeful side ever came back out again. “I assume that this concludes our business,” Lynne said finally. Jane scanned Lynne’s face for any hint that this was all an unfathomably elaborate hoax, but Lynne’s peach-lipsticked mouth remained soft and vulnerable.

  “Please give your employers my best,” Lynne told her briskly, tossing Jane’s gold Vertu back as an afterthought. She hesitated for a moment, her eyes boring into Jane’s, and Jane was unaccountably surprised to see that her onetime nemesis’s eyes still had the strange, contact-lens-like layer of darkness over their irises. Somehow I always assumed that that was a result of her magic, Jane realized. I guess it’s just the way she looks. It made sense, of course: both Malcolm and Anne had quite dark eyes. But something about Lynne’s had always looked unnatural to Jane, tacked on somehow over her real eyes.

  “I will,” she replied hesitantly, and then forced her voice to steady. “I’m sure they would want me to wish you the same.”

  Lynne smiled an absolutely unfathomable smile, and for a second Jane didn’t know if she wanted to hug the woman or run for her life. She did neither, though, because Lynne followed the strange expression up with even stranger words. “I always did see some of myself in you . . . Ella.”

  By the time Jane had fully processed that parting shot, Lynne was halfway down the path. But she said that to me, Jane suddenly remembered, not to Ella. She had told me I reminded her of herself on my wedding day.

  Jane took a few steps back to the paved path and sank down onto a nearby bench, fighting the urge to laugh out loud. Lynne had seen through her disguise. There was no way of knowing how or even when the
older woman had figured it out, but it didn’t really matter. Lynne had willingly—eagerly—accepted Jane’s terms, and all her magic was now safely stowed in the athame in Jane’s purse.

  I took her magic, and she knows who I am, and all she could think about was getting to Anne, Jane marveled, and slowly a weight she hadn’t even realized she’d been carrying began to lift from her shoulders.

  I did it.

  She practically skipped out of the park. She couldn’t wait to tell Dee . . . and Malcolm.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The next morning, Jane found herself sitting on her hotel bed, staring at Lynne’s athame. It was more or less the same position she had spent the entire previous afternoon and evening in, but it didn’t feel old yet. The thin, double-edged blade was as long as Jane’s hand, and its mirrorlike surface seemed to almost absorb the earth tones of the bedroom. The handle of the athame was made of silver, as well, but the similarities ended there. Every inch of the hilt was deeply scarred with strange symbols and letters, and it was so tarnished that only a few gleams of the metal were still visible underneath the black crust. It was beautiful, really. The only problem now was deciding what to do with it.

  The most obvious choice, of course, was to take its power for herself. She remembered the way she had picked up the silver ring Gran had left for her; she remembered her immediate conviction that it was hers. She felt sure she could do this again with the athame, and let its magic flow into her the way Celine Boyle’s once had.

  It was an attractive option in a lot of ways. She would be at least twice as powerful as she already was—more than powerful enough to keep any remaining enemies at bay. She would be unstoppable . . . or she would feel unstoppable, at least, and therein lay the problem with that plan. The magic in the blade was Lynne’s, and Lynne was—or had been, at least—pretty impressively evil and power-hungry. Jane had never heard or read anything to make her think there was such a thing as good magic or bad magic, but there certainly were bad witches out there, and she was reluctant to inject their current into her own veins.