The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3)

by Gabriella Pierce

  For a moment the world was perfectly still, and it was filled entirely by Malcolm. The warm lamplight glinted off a million curves of dark-gold hair, and his face seemed to almost radiate it. There was no thought, no weighing of the pros and cons, no decision to make: there was nothing for her to do but kiss him, and so she did. Everything between them had changed, and so in a way it felt like a first kiss, but of course it wasn’t that, really, and his lips fit to hers with the ease of long practice.

  He hesitated for a moment after the kiss could have been complete, giving her the opportunity to gracefully break away, but that was the furthest thing from her mind, and she pursued him with her mouth, then her hands, then her body.

  Her fingers found the hem of his thin T-shirt and sent it flying away from them. It landed with a whisper on an arm of the chair, dangling limply like a grey ghost. Apparently feeling that he had put enough of a good-faith effort into being restrained, Malcolm sent her own clothes sailing after his shirt piece by piece, pausing only to kiss the newly exposed bits of her flesh like a drowning man straining toward air.

  Everywhere his mouth or hands went, Jane could feel tiny sparks of pleasure bursting in her bloodstream, as if some sort of electromagnetism were drawing them together. Magic, she thought wryly, the best kind of chemistry there is. But it felt different, somehow, from her dark, desperate connection with André or the shivery current that used to draw her toward Harris. It’s not all the same, she realized. There had always been something between the two of them, but after everything that had happened, she had cynically assumed it was just good looks and the whisper of magic. And it was true that her blood knew Malcolm’s – she could feel it whenever he was near – but now her body and her heart did as well, and the three combined into an attraction that couldn’t be reduced to any kind of simple explanation.

  The bed seemed impossibly complicated to reach, so instead she just hitched herself forward, using the waistband of his pants as leverage and conveniently pulling them off in the process. Malcolm wrapped strong arms around her waist, pulling her closer, and she wrapped her legs around his and slid herself onto him. For a moment they sat that way: locked together with their faces just millimeters apart, touching in nearly every possible way. Then Jane began to move, propelled by her thighs with eager support from Malcolm’s arms, rocking along the length of him and back again until they both gasped together, stifling their cries with more kisses.

  Finally, spent, Jane let her head fall onto his shoulder. Her hair spilled down over his muscular back, shining like molten silver in the lamplight. Disentangling carefully so as to stay as close together as possible, they rearranged their limbs just enough to fall asleep on the rug where they lay.

  Chapter Nine

  SUNLIGHT STREAMED THROUGH the damask curtains, but Jane knew immediately that that was not what had woken her up. A soft buzzing sounded somewhere off to her left. She jerked her body up to sitting and rocked onto her toes, trying to ignore the distraction of Malcolm’s naked sleeping form as she attempted to take stock of where her clothes had landed the night before. The buzzing noise came again and she followed it across the room to where her bag lay underneath her crumpled Paige jeans and oversized Theory sweater. She fumbled inside with one hand and pulled on her sweater with the other, and somehow managed to flip open the rose-gold phone on the fourth ring while stepping out of Malcolm’s room fully – if not at all neatly – dressed.

  The Vertu phone – Ella’s phone, she realized belatedly, wincing at her oversight. She hadn’t been sure what to do with it once Ella didn’t exist anymore. It was far too beautiful to just discard, but she had been letting all its calls go to voicemail and had intended to keep doing so indefinitely. The number on its screen was an unfamiliar one from the Manhattan area code; Jane guessed that she would hear André’s voice on the other end of the line, growling with bad news. She took a last, longing glance toward Malcolm, but only one outstretched hand was visible from the hallway. ‘Hello?’ she said quietly, moving toward her own room for good measure. The rising sun hadn’t reached the skylights yet, and the floorboards were chilly, but Jane consoled herself that at least they weren’t creaking and giving her retreat away.

  ‘Hello?’ The voice on the other line was, she realized, definitely not André’s. ‘Ms. Me – um, Your Ladyship? Medeiros?’

  Silly colonials still can’t figure out titles, she thought with a lofty smirk, happy to ignore the fact that hers was entirely fictional. ‘Yes,’ she answered in a clipped approximation of Ella’s confusing accent. Not wanting to run the risk of blowing her disguise by bumping into anyone from where she claimed to be from, Jane had given Ella a bizarrely varied background that would have taken far longer than her monthlong existence to unravel.

  ‘This is Melanie Gabriel, calling from the Lowell Hotel,’ the voice on the other line told her with renewed confidence. ‘I’m calling to follow up with you regarding the recent fire incident here. I wanted to let you know that we’ve recovered a few undamaged articles from your suite. They’re in storage at the moment, but I’d be happy to have them shipped to you absolutely anywhere that you would like. The shipping and the storage are complimentary, of course,’ she added quickly, and Jane wondered how many threatened – or actual – lawsuits Melanie had had to field in the wake of the freak disaster.

  ‘Thank you,’ Jane replied, careful to keep her tone polite even as her mind was racing. ‘Undamaged articles.’ Clothes? Shoes? Nail polish? Probably not nail polish. Most of the items she had kept at the hotel were impersonal, trappings meant to shore up her disguise. But a few things meant a great deal more: a box that had been shipped to her all the way from her former desk mate in Paris, containing the last belongings she had of Gran’s. She tried to imagine the glass paperweights dark with soot, or the reading glasses with their familiar grey plastic frames melted into an unfamiliar shape. Or the diary, with its cover burned off and the char chasing Gran from page to page. The image was chilling, even though she understood that the grandmother contained in the woman’s journal was only a memory, not a living thing. Besides, if anything from the box had survived, something made of paper, cardboard, and fabric was unlikely to be it.

  Still, Jane realized as she gave the address to Melanie, if anything of Gran’s had made it through even semi-intact, it was one more link than she had had before. Souvenirs would be nice, but what I could really use is Gran’s advice. Jane clutched the phone so hard that she barely noticed the beeping of the dead line. ‘Right,’ she mumbled out loud, flipping her phone closed and pushing open the door to her bedroom.

  She closed the door behind her and stripped her worn, wrinkled clothes off again, tossing them carelessly onto the comforter. She tugged the thick terrycloth robe off the back of the door and trailed it along behind her on her way into her room’s en-suite bathroom.

  The steam and steady pressure from the shower’s many jets lulled her into a relaxed enough state to start pulling her thoughts together, and she let them come without forcing them. First there was Malcolm, and she let her mind wander over every breath, touch, and smile from the night before. Then she put those memories gently aside; as important as the experience had been to her, she couldn’t let it distract her from their goal.

  Less than two weeks to go, she thought grimly, working bergamot-scented conditioner down to the tangled blond ends of her hair. She had notified Lynne of Annette’s existence in the early evening, back when she had blithely believed that that would be the end of her troubles with the Dorans. That left just eleven days before Hasina’s spell should be ready – eleven days to figure out how to stop her.

  Jane longed to lay the problem at Gran’s feet – even dead, she suspected, Celine Boyle would have a firm opinion. But although she had only half listened to Melanie Gabriel’s explanations and apologies, she had retained the impression that it would take some time to get Ella’s belongings out of storage and into the mail. And, of course, there was still no reason to think tha
t Gran’s diary would be among them. By the time that she had rinsed the last of the lather from her skin, Jane had managed to put the box carefully out of her mind. There was only time left to focus on the present, and at the moment there was only one person in the world she could imagine talking to about that. Jane shrugged haphazardly into her clothes, pulling her damp hair into a ponytail as she made a quick mental estimate of the time: Was it too early for a social call?

  ‘You have to see this,’ Dee said happily, leading Jane up a dizzying set of staircases to a nondescript metal door.

  As Jane had suspected, moving in with the Montagues hadn’t changed Dee’s sleeping habits one bit. She sounded fully awake when she answered her cell phone, and by the time Jane made it uptown Dee looked like a well-rested woman who had already been awake for hours – which she most likely had been.

  Dee paused a bit melodramatically before throwing open the door, but Jane could immediately appreciate why: the view was as stunning as it was unexpected.

  The Montagues had made good use of the roof of their home, covering most of it in an idyllic garden. Trellises and vine-covered arches created one alcove after another, and wrought-iron benches and small statues peeked out from living walls of greenery. The air smelled of thick mulch and opening flowers, with the sharp, intense tang of a hundred different kinds of herbs. At the far end of the roof Jane spotted a far less witchy concession to modern living: a concrete patio surrounded an inset pool that glittered turquoise under the clear blue sky.

  Dee kicked off her shoes and strode across the grass to a bench in the middle of the lush, wild garden. Jane happily followed suit.

  ‘We’ve been talking it over,’ Dee said with no preamble, stretching her long limbs like a cat.

  Jane raised her eyebrows, surprised and encouraged that they had been working through things without her, as Dee went on. ‘Emer thinks that, the farther away Annette is when the spell happens, the longer the window you’ll have to interrupt it. It’s probably just the difference between half a second and three seconds, but that’s a big difference when you only have one shot, if you see what I mean. I know you’re working on getting to Annette, so that’s a solution in progress.’ Jane started to interrupt, but Dee stared her down before tossing her black hair over her shoulders and continuing. ‘Since the window will be so short no matter what, you’ll also need to be physically in front of Lynne when it comes. There’s no way you’ll be able to interrupt her at the exact right second unless you can see it happen. She wouldn’t do magic this major anywhere but her home, obviously, and we’re working on a way to narrow it down so you’re not stuck hunting her down through all eight floors. But, of course, you’ll have to get in first.’

  Jane straightened in surprise. ‘The magic-proof door,’ she blurted, her heart sinking. Her entry code couldn’t possibly still be working, and doubtless Lynne had cancelled Malcolm’s access as well. But without a valid code, the massive carved door and its antiwitchcraft enchantments posed a formidable barrier. If she couldn’t stop the spell early, then she would need to stop it at the moment it happened, and the only way to do that was to be there – inside of 665 Park.

  ‘We’ll figure out the door,’ Dee said confidently. ‘At the end of the day, it’s just a door.’

  Jane nodded, wishing she felt as confident as Dee seemed. ‘I slept with Malcolm last night,’ she heard herself say, and Dee’s expression went in about three directions at once.

  ‘Is that good news?’ Dee asked cautiously, but obviously couldn’t bring herself to stay that way, because her wide mouth curved up into a massive grin. ‘You said it like it’s good news.’

  ‘I think it is,’ Jane admitted, feeling an answering smile tug at the corners of her own lips. ‘It’s complicated, though. Obviously.’ When she and Malcolm had parted ways after their escape from the mansion, part of the reason had been that her feelings for him had changed. Learning that he killed her grandmother was something she’d been sure she would never be able to overcome. It wasn’t enough to know how Lynne had manipulated him, how she had twisted his guilt over Annette into a lifetime of obedience. It wasn’t even enough that he had defied her eventually and tried to protect Jane: atoning for his previous crimes couldn’t erase them.

  But since he had returned to her life, she explained to a raptly attentive Dee, Malcolm truly seemed like a changed man. He didn’t just regret what he had done to harm her; he was someone who never could have done it. The old Malcolm would have acted differently in hindsight; the new one would act differently even without it.

  ‘I think,’ she finished awkwardly, blushing a little. She remembered belatedly that Malcolm’s deception had cost Dee a lot, too: her apartment, her job, now her friends, and nearly her life more than once. ‘Does that sound crazy?’

  To her immense relief, however, Dee seemed far too preoccupied with Jane’s feelings to harbour any resentments of her own. ‘Do you feel crazy?’ she asked skeptically. ‘Jane, what you and Malcolm have been through isn’t the way normal people live. It’s not something you’ll find a bunch of self-help books about, and it’s not something that the usual rules can be applied to. If you can forgive him – if you can trust him – then don’t resist just because it sounds crazy.’ She frowned and picked at a chip in the pale polish on her fingernails, clearly choosing her next words very carefully. ‘Even the best relationships aren’t fairy tales,’ she finished softly.

  Jane pulled her feet up onto the seat of the bench, crossed her forearms over her raised knees and buried her face in them. Harris. Of course Dee was far too perceptive not to notice Jane’s awkwardness and jealousy once her friends had paired off. ‘I haven’t always been the most selfless and supportive of friends when it came to yours,’ she mumbled into her arms, and then nearly lost her balance as Dee shoved her sideways.

  ‘Shut up,’ she ordered in a friendly, almost cheerful tone, and Jane risked a peek out from under her hair. Dee didn’t look angry or even upset, just thoughtful. ‘You were what brought us together,’ she explained, her voice a little throatier than usual. ‘Helping you, caring about you, then missing you and worrying about you. I kept arguing that I should tell him you were still in New York after the wedding, but only because I knew you’d never let me.’

  ‘I wanted to,’ Jane admitted, resting a cheek on her forearm. A fat black ant moved purposefully across the bench between them, and she hitched her toes out of its way.

  Dee shrugged philosophically. ‘Things might have been different between you, between us, whatever, if he’d known about you. I was sure they were going to be, after he found out. You should have heard him when he realized that he’d seen you that night at the Dorans’ party and just walked out and left you there. I didn’t think good society boys even knew half those words.’

  Jane smiled in spite of herself, remembering her glimpses of him while she had been trying to get Annette alone, to warn her. ‘I thought he had come to back me up,’ she said. ‘But then he recognized Katrin and went rushing off to save you.’

  ‘I sort of hoped I would have to talk him into going back for you,’ Dee confessed. She tilted her head down a little, away from the sun, and her eyes were hidden in pockets of shadow. ‘You’re like a sister to me, Jane, but it wasn’t the easiest thing for me, knowing that you and he had a bond like that.’

  ‘We don’t,’ Jane told her sincerely. Even if things didn’t work out with her and Malcolm, she knew that she could never pursue Harris. Their moment had passed while she had been busy trying to save her own skin, and she felt certain that they wouldn’t have another. ‘I think he’s great,’ she admitted carefully, trying to make sure that she chose the right words. ‘And the magic makes things a little . . . volatile, at times. But he grew up around that kind of weirdness, so I’m sure he knows how to ignore it, and I’m learning. I’ve felt several different kinds of magical chemistry now,’ she pointed out, echoing her own thoughts from the night before, ‘and it’s no substitute for trust, under
standing, and commitment. It’s just the flash, and relationships are about substance. That’s what makes for real bonds.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Dee agreed amiably. Jane was impressed by her friend’s serenity and was glad for it. ‘However this thing between me and Harris started, it grew into something real. And I’m going to feel so much better about that now that you’ve actually said the words out loud, because it was too uncomfortable wondering how much drama was lurking below the surface.’

  ‘None,’ Jane promised, rolling her eyes. ‘I probably should’ve just talked it out with you ages ago, but I had this insane idea that the whole thing might blow over without any of these awkward conversations.’

  ‘Silly European,’ Dee sighed loftily. ‘Here in the New World, we understand that it’s impossible to just quietly deal with conflict. We have to talk about everything.’

  ‘I’m still trying to get the hang of you people,’ Jane muttered darkly. ‘I can’t seem to blink without being accused of shutting people out.’

  The ant’s meandering trail was followed by a glossy brown beetle, and Dee flicked it gently away. ‘I don’t hear Malcolm complaining,’ she remarked with a sly smile. Jane couldn’t resist poking her in the side, and both girls dissolved into a fit of giggles. Then Dee cocked her head to the side, listening intently. ‘I think I hear people moving downstairs,’ she explained when she caught Jane’s stare. She hopped up onto her bare feet, holding out a hand to help Jane follow. ‘I think it’s time to get back to my other mission around here.’