Jane snapped her faux-lizard wristlet open and slid her cell phone out. The screen flared to life, displaying what she had self-consciously been looking at over and over throughout the previous week: the last of the fake ‘junk’ emails that Malcolm had sent her, so that she would know how to contact him. She scrolled to the bottom and tapped the number tacked on to the end of the email.
The line beeped in a measured, foreign-sounding way, and Jane waited patiently. Finally she heard what sounded like a voicemail tone, followed by an expectant, staticky silence.
‘It’s me,’ she said shortly. ‘I wanted to wait until I could tell you that everything was safe again. It mostly is – for you, I mean. But Annette’s alive, and she’s in danger, and I don’t really know where to go from here. Malcolm, I think it’s time for you to come home.’
She cut off the call and slid the phone back into her purse as she stood up, brushing dust off her clothes and stepping out of the alley.
Chapter Three
THE LOWELL HOTEL had changed since Jane had stayed there. She paused across the street from the stately building, taking in the three upper floors whose windows were dark and cracked. She took a deep breath and crossed the street, heading for the hotel’s gold-rimmed doors. Inside, the smartly dressed staff looked oddly subdued, and a steady stream of workers in heavy-duty breathing masks passed through the marble-floored lobby.
Jane peered through her oversized sunglasses, inexplicably nervous that the woman at the front desk would recognize her. I’m wearing a different face and body, she reminded herself; the last time she was here, she had been Ella Medeiros, an heiress of vague origins. She had performed a complex spell to change her appearance and hidden under a new identity to protect herself from Lynne Doran. Crossing the lobby as quickly and quietly as possible, Jane headed straight for the bar, breathing an audible sigh of relief when she saw that the one person she had been hoping to see was still right where he belonged.
‘My enemy,’ André Dalcacu rasped, his Romanian accent thicker than she remembered. He raised a cut-crystal tumbler full of dark amber liquid toward her in a toast, but as he did Jane realized that even he was different: his half-mocking smile, which had become so familiar over the past month, seemed somehow skewed.
Jane pulled off her sunglasses, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the softer lighting of the lobby bar. Now she was close enough to see the long, angry scar running along André’s right cheek, curling toward the corner of his mouth. It added a perverse hint of mystery to his already-handsome face, and Jane had a feeling that once it faded it would look positively rakish. At the moment, though, it still looked painful. She felt the impulse to reach out and stroke his damaged skin.
Instead she took another minute to collect herself, glancing around for André’s sister, Katrin, as she arranged her Badgley Mischka hobo bag on one of the empty armchairs. The chain of its strap slithered down the red leather with a small sigh, and Jane echoed it as she sank into a second chair. ‘You were hunting me,’ she reminded him. He caught her staring at his scar, and she tried not to blush. ‘Annette did that to you,’ she said softly.
‘She came up to my suite – my former suite,’ he confirmed, his words coming a little more slowly and carefully than Jane remembered. He winced a little. ‘She was already angry that I had helped you. Katrin was there, but Anne—’ He shuddered, and shook his head.
‘Annette’s much stronger than Katrin,’ she finished.
André’s thick lips twitched. ‘We tried everything to convince her that we were only trying to protect her, to do what was best. . .’
The Dalcacus were one of the less powerful magical families, and in order to survive, they had always been opportunistic. Many years ago, André and Katrin’s parents had helped Gran whisk Annette away from Lynne and put her in hiding overseas, hoping to end Hasina’s unnaturally long life – and her reign of power – by taking away her last healthy, young female blood relative. Once Annette was safely contained in British foster care, the Dalcacus sent André and Katrin, then just children themselves, to keep track of her, posing as her closest – and eventually her only – friends. Their attention had meant everything to the lonely young woman, although hers had meant significantly less to them. To the Dalcacus, Annette was a time bomb, a hostage, and a deep, dark secret all rolled into one. They had only kept her alive to secure Celine Boyle’s continued cooperation. But they hadn’t bothered to make sure Annette was happy: as long as she had a pulse and didn’t run into any Dorans on the street, the Dalcacus had fulfilled their side of the bargain, as far as they were concerned. ‘She didn’t believe you,’ Jane interpreted when he fell silent, and André sighed in agreement.
‘Katrin lifted the block from my mind, so that she could see,’ he began. Witches could read minds, including those of the men in magical families – the males carried magical blood, but wielded no power of their own. Most witches protected their male kin with spells that blocked others from learning their family secrets. ‘I wanted her to know that she was in danger, and that we wanted to help her. But she saw . . . everything.’ His black eyes closed, this time from pain that had nothing to do with his burns.
‘Annette saw that your parents and my grandmother stole her from Lynne when she was little,’ Jane filled in, a bitter note creeping into her voice. ‘She saw that she was only an obligation to you, never a friend. She saw that you knew where her family was all along, and that you could have protected her from all those terrible fires if you had really wanted to. She figured out that she was only ever a chess piece to everyone.’
André nodded. ‘We tried so hard to protect her from Hasina, and now look where she is.’
‘I’m still trying to protect Annette,’ Jane admitted. ‘I want to stop Hasina from taking over her body. The spell takes a month to cast; there’s still time to stop her from completing the transfer. But there’s so much I don’t know about Hasina, and how her magic works. I need all the help I can get. Yours and Katrin’s. Where is she, anyway?’
‘My sister has recently discovered the health club,’ he replied, with a small twinkle in his black eyes. ‘The poor rowing machine may never recover. So that’s what you’re here for, then – recruiting?’
‘Look, no one’s asking you to go in on matching sweatshirts,’ she told him peevishly. The Romanian siblings were lifelong mercenaries. As Ella Medeiros, her interests and Andre’s had lined up for a short while – in more ways than one – but, as she found out, he had been hunting Jane Boyle all the while. ‘But your family has invested a lot – a lot – in trying to keep Hasina from inhabiting a new body. And the last time she saw you, Annette did a nasty number on the side of your face and took out a few floors of this hotel as collateral damage. I’m not asking you to be altruistic; I’m telling you that we’re on the same side. Whether we like it or not.’
‘You’ve made that claim before,’ he said mischievously, and Jane vividly recalled the feel of his hands on the smooth skin of her thighs. No, she reminded herself strictly. Ella’s thighs.
She cleared her throat, ducking her head to hide how flustered she suddenly felt, but she was sure André’s keen black eyes didn’t miss a thing. She snapped her head back up. ‘You know, I’m not that great with fire – yet.’ She saw André flinch ever so slightly, and studiously ignored it. ‘But my friends would probably say that I just need some practice. I could go back over you limb by limb – you appreciate that kind of attention to detail, as I recall – and get all that skin Annette missed.’
André stared at her for a long moment, and Jane tried to remember if she had ever seen him speechless before. She had no intention of torturing him for information, of course; the thought alone made her feel light-headed. But she didn’t want to fall into some ‘nice and therefore harmless’ category in his mind, either. He was still looking at her carefully when Katrin stepped into view. Her sharp angles and long, flat planes looked somehow less dangerous in workout gear than they had in cocktail attire,
but the look on her face was unmistakably deadly. Something flashed at the edge of Jane’s vision – the glitter of glass, headed in her direction.
‘Stop it,’ Jane snapped as her own magic sprang into immediate action.
In less than a heartbeat, Katrin was pinned down in a free armchair, the jagged edge of a shattered champagne flute pressed to her windpipe. The rest of the glasses fell to the floor, as lifeless as they had been before. Jane glanced around cautiously, but there was no one else in the dimly lit bar to notice what had just transpired.
‘I come in peace,’ she told Katrin more levelly, ‘and your brother and I were managing just fine. You can stay if you want, but you’ll have to behave yourself.’
Katrin nodded carefully, so as not to cut herself on the glass, and Jane let it fall to the floor with a pretty tinkling sound.
André watched her with amusement for a few seconds, then flicked his eyes back to Jane. ‘Lynne didn’t have the full measure of you,’ he said approvingly, and the skin on the back of her neck crawled a little.
Lynne had once told Jane that she reminded her of herself when she had been younger, and Malcolm’s father had echoed the same sentiment. Is this what being a witch means? Getting pushed and pursued and tricked and trapped until everything really is kill or be killed? Of course, she reasoned to herself, back when Lynne had been Jane’s age, she had only been Lynne. Doubtless Hasina’s daughters were born with a bit of a mean streak, and being raised by their immortal ancestress couldn’t help. But if Lynne had stayed Lynne, she would have at least had a chance to grow into the sort of woman Jane hoped to be. Just like Annette deserves, she thought fervently. That’s the whole point: to give her the chance to be who she is.
‘Anne is a mess,’ André told her bluntly, and Jane blinked rapidly at him. She waited, sensing that he was ready to tell her some, if not all, of what he knew. ‘She was always an angry girl. She would latch on to people, build them up in her mind as her saviors, and then they would do something to upset her and she would act as if they had deliberately tricked her into loving them just so that they could let her down. I know you don’t think much of our guardianship of her’ – he twisted a wry smile at his sister, who huffed and looked away – ‘but considering how long we managed to be in her life without setting the little pyromaniac off, I make no apologies.’
‘She had no control over that,’ Jane protested, the heat and fear of her recent dreams pressing in on her again. There was a charred, ashy quality to the air in the lobby that she hadn’t noticed at first, but now it was all she could taste. She brushed a few strands of blond hair off her face. ‘Don’t you understand how magic works, when no one’s taught you to use it?’
As if to punctuate her plaintive question, the lights in the bar area flared to brightness, and the clerks behind the main desk looked up curiously. Jane swallowed against the dryness of her throat, searching out her stray tendrils of power and containing them, and the lighting returned to normal. As a child, secluded in the French countryside with her austere, reclusive grandmother, Jane had always thought she was simply cursed when it came to electronics. It was only when she became aware of her magical abilities that she learned lights and computers responded to the flares in her magic – and the real reason Gran had fought to keep her hidden away from the world all those years.
‘You understand,’ Katrin purred in her clipped English. ‘We know your grandmother told you nothing. But tell me, did the lights go off when you were reading a book, or had a song stuck in your head, or even when you stubbed your toe?’ Jane started to answer, but Katrin cut her off. ‘No. Your magic got loose when you were angry, or frightened . . . when you were out of control. Our Anne was plagued by fires in every home because she was extremely out of control.’
‘She was a child,’ Jane argued, but Katrin’s words had effectively sown doubt. Jane had caused plenty of electrical trouble growing up, but the damage was minor: radio static, burned-out bulbs, constant computer restarts. The real light shows hadn’t happened until her life had been turned completely upside down. How angry did Annette have to be for the fire to trap a family of four inside their house? Jane wondered with a sudden all-over shudder. Her next fire was a month later, and even more fatal. Annette hadn’t been starting small fires in wastebaskets or making the room uncomfortably hot: she had set off major blazes as a child and was still doing it now.
‘She’s all grown up,’ André replied softly. ‘But that makes it easier, doesn’t it? That she’s so unstable?’
Jane frowned, uncertain of what he meant. His olive-skinned fingers caressed the cut crystal of his tumbler in a thoroughly distracting way. ‘Easier – how?’
Katrin clicked her tongue impatiently. ‘Because my brother thinks that you’ll feel bad about killing Anne, no matter how much better it will make things for all of us. Hasina has plagued witches for far too long, as you know from personal experience. But he’ – she jerked a bony thumb toward André – ‘says that still wouldn’t be enough for you, if Anne wasn’t a danger in her own right, as well.’ She rolled her eyes in profoundly expressive disgust.
Killing her? Had it really come to that? Gran’s help had been contingent on André and Katrin’s parents keeping Annette alive, and Jane had no intention of striking any other kind of deal. ‘I want to banish Hasina,’ she corrected. ‘Or if I can’t, then force her into some kind of truce or something where she agrees that her current life will be her last. I don’t want to kill anyone – the whole point of this is that I’m trying to save Annette.’
The Romanian siblings looked at each other meaningfully, then back at Jane. ‘Hasina won’t honor a truce,’ André told her. He held up one hand to prevent Jane from interrupting him and leaned forward. ‘You say you don’t know enough about her, so I’m telling you, all right? She’s lived too long to really be human anymore. Humans act with one eye on the grave, but it’s been thousands of years since Hasina has seen her own lurking in front of her. We’re specks to her, mayflies who live and die in a day. She has no equals, so she will never keep her word.’ He shrugged, his muscular shoulders rising and falling. ‘Banish her if you can, but if you miss your chance, it will be gone. She’ll stalk us, and you, and all our children and grandchildren, if you live long enough to have those. She kills witches, you know. That’s why there are so few of you left these days. Whether she does it for fun, or to eliminate rivals, or some inhuman reason of her own, no one knows. All we know is that, with her, there can be no truces, no deals, no peace.’
Jane sighed. Deep down she had felt that Hasina wouldn’t be open to any kind of compromise, but it made her task that much harder. ‘So, banishing. Do you have any idea how I can do that?’
Katrin snorted, fishing an energy bar out of her gym tote and tearing the cellophane viciously. ‘Kill her vessel, and her sons for good measure. We’ll handle the two of them if you want, but that’s the best offer you’ll get here, Baroness.’
‘We’re done here,’ Jane snapped, standing abruptly. She slung her hobo bag over her right shoulder, glancing around to make sure there was nothing she had missed. ‘I’ll find a way to get rid of Hasina on my own.’ She took a moment to stare each Dalcacu in the eyes until both looked away from her steady gaze. ‘I am going to do whatever I can to protect Annette. But let’s be perfectly clear about this: her brothers – both of them – are under my protection. Touch either one and Hasina won’t be your biggest problem anymore.’
She spun toward the door and strode out, but not before catching the ghost of a smile on André’s face.
Chapter Four
BY THE TIME Jane returned to Washington Square Park, her right leg was throbbing again, and her head felt nearly as wretched. As she climbed the stairs to her apartment, she wondered for the thousandth time if she was insane for turning down the Montagues’ offer to stay with them at their Upper East Side brownstone. A little company would be nice right about now. But she knew that wherever she went, danger followed, and beyond
that, she wasn’t quite sure where they fit into all this – stopping Hasina was good for the whole magical community, but just how involved should the Montagues really be?
‘So my fortress of solitude it is,’ she muttered to herself, fishing around in her hobo bag for her Christofle key chain. A sound from the other side of the door caught her attention, and she froze. Dee still had a key of her own, but she hadn’t been back to the apartment since she went to stay uptown.
Jane felt for her magic, which was as tired and out of sorts as the rest of her. She struggled in vain for a moment to bring it into some semblance of order, but it slipped away maddeningly, dancing around the edges of her control. Screw it, she decided abruptly, jamming her key into the lock. Anyone who tried to sneak up on her was in for a nasty surprise of their own.
‘Hello?’ she demanded, slamming the door shut behind her. ‘I know you’re here.’ There was a pause, and then a distinct clang as something fell in the kitchen. She sighed in relief. Dee. Cooking up something delicious, she hoped.
‘In a minute,’ a familiar voice rumbled – but it wasn’t Dee’s. ‘I don’t want your omelette to burn.’
Jane ran into the galley kitchen so fast that her feet barely seemed to touch the floor. Malcolm. He stood over the stove, a broad smile on his handsome, tanned face.
‘Forget the omelette.’ She grabbed his arm and dragged him into the living room. ‘I’m just glad you’re okay.’
‘You’re the boss,’ he said, sinking down into the buttery leather couch beside her. ‘I can’t cook anyway,’ he added, spreading his hands helplessly.
‘I know that,’ she agreed, wrinkling her nose at the distinct smell of burnt eggs. ‘It was a nice thought.’
His eyes focused on hers. ‘You called, and I came,’ he said simply. ‘Bearing gifts.’ He held up a small wooden box, pieced together from at least half a dozen different woods that came together to form a five-pointed star on the lid. Although there was a clear break to indicate where it should open, it seemed to be sealed shut.
The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) Page 2
