The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3)

by Gabriella Pierce

  A faint glow near Lynne became visible against the dim light filtering through the windows. Jane squinted at it as she upheld her magical shield, trying to see clearly. It was definitely inside the room with them. But Annette was still inching closer, and her nearness was searing the air and sucking it dry of moisture. She’s been learning, Jane thought, coughing sickly.

  She reached down through her veins again, trying to separate some magic from what was keeping the shield around her in place. It was confusing at first, like she was looking through two pairs of eyes at once. But she managed to grip some into a ball and hold it for a moment, ready to strike—

  ‘I do wish you had told me what you had in mind, Annette,’ Lynne said suddenly, and Jane held her magic back, momentarily distracted. ‘Soon you’ll be far too powerful to bother with these little revenge scenarios; you have nothing to prove to these insects. Be a dear and kill them so that we can get back to it.’

  A bolt of energy darker than the half darkness around it glanced off the side of Jane’s protective bubble, grazing her shoulder rather than hitting her squarely in the back. Belinda, she thought through gritted teeth. Her whole shoulder felt numb and heavy, and Annette had almost reached the edge of her shield. The heat was already intense, and Jane knew that she absolutely couldn’t allow Annette to get inside her magical barrier. She felt for the edges of her shield and retracted it toward her body, pulling it into a dense sort of second skin.

  ‘I would have thought that you had had enough of party-crashing, Jane,’ Lynne went on in her deadly purr. ‘Have you missed us so much that you simply couldn’t stay away?’

  ‘Shut up,’ Jane grunted, forcing her magic out and forward in a solid wall. Annette stumbled backward, and Jane gulped a quick lungful of the relatively clear air.

  Her vision seemed clearer as well, but the odd glowing near Lynne was as indistinct as it had been earlier. There was a large shadow moving in front of it, which Jane slowly realized was the lank hair and large, bowed shoulders of Charles Doran. He was pacing back and forth, agitated and nervous, in front of . . . in front of what? she wondered again. Nothing behind him seemed to provide a source of the unnatural light, which was vague and shimmering. Something about it nagged at the edges of Jane’s mind, but by then Annette had regained her balance, and Jane turned back to her, fumbling for what remained of her magic.

  ‘Mother’s right, you know,’ Annette hissed. ‘In a few minutes I’ll be too powerful to care whether Malcolm dies, or you live. You just had the bad luck – or bad planning – to show up while I still do care.’

  A heavy crash sounded from somewhere behind her, and one of the twins screamed shrilly. Pain? Fury? Triumph? It was impossible to tell without taking her eyes off Annette and Lynne, and Jane was sure that if she did, it would be the end of her. She pressed the tattered remains of her magical shield together into an intense new knot just below her heart. Her skin felt naked and exposed, but there was no way around it: she couldn’t attack and defend and keep an eye on whatever Charles and Lynne were hovering around by the far windows.

  She jabbed outward with her power, thinking of snow and icicles and the wind off the mountain slopes in Saint-Croix-sur-Amaury as she did. She didn’t have any particular reason to think that it would help, especially not enough to offset Annette’s unnatural pyrotechnics, but the atrium chilled perceptibly and the tall girl seemed to almost shrink in on herself. A bright-green flare shot past from the elevator, and Jane saw a moment of intense pain on Annette’s square-jawed face. She pressed her focus forward harder, feeling her flagging energy surge as Annette cringed back another step.

  A shadow flickered behind Annette, and Jane barely ducked down in time as a heavy silver platter flew past the place where her head had been moments before. She was less quick with the stoneware pitcher that followed: it caught her squarely in the rib cage and knocked the breath out of her lungs in a single painful rush. The room whirled sickeningly, and she fell forward, managing to catch herself painfully on one knee. It took her a full, panicked second to figure out that she was facing entirely the wrong way, back toward the pitched battle for control of the elevator. Emer held the door almost closed, she and Maeve ducking out from behind its cover to fire spells at Belinda and Cora. The twins’ swirling grey forms were closing in, and they didn’t look tired at all.

  Flames ripped across Jane’s still-numbed shoulder, setting her sweater ablaze and blackening the long ends of her hair. She tried to turn toward the assault, but then the pain came, cutting downward across her body and doubling her over. For a long moment she had no idea where Annette was, or Maeve, or even her own magic; she was alone in the middle of the floor with the fire and the pain. Then there was a stabbing in her lower back – not magic this time, but the point of a boot. Annette kicked her again, viciously, and Jane fell forward to curl in the fetal position as she tried to think of something, anything, to buy herself some time. Her magic was reduced to tattered shadows at the corner of her consciousness; she could barely feel it, much less control it.

  Then in a strange, frozen moment of clarity she realized what was glowing at the far end of the room: Hasina’s spell must be there, setting off the powder on Jane’s eyelids. And Lynne started lobbing spare parts at me when it looked like I might have an edge on her daughter. Her mind flashed inexplicably to the moment twenty-eight days earlier, in Central Park, when Lynne’s face had been filled with wonder at the knowledge that Annette was still alive. It was followed quickly by Annette’s broken expression five days earlier, when she seemed to realize that her mother was her enemy. And then she saw Malcolm: the molten pools of his eyes, the thick waves of hair that glinted with gold lights, the way that one corner of his mouth tended to quirk upward in amusement – and she felt somehow stronger.

  Jane rolled instinctively, feeling the air stir alongside her ribs as Annette tried to kick her again, but missed. Her vision felt blurred as she struggled to her feet, and it took her a moment to make sense of what she was seeing. The door to the back stairs was hanging open as two dark shapes darted inside one after the other. The cavalry. The hall lights glittered briefly off Dee’s long black hair; Harris had already come through. Cora McCarroll fell to the burned floor, twitching and spasming – and Jane tore her attention back toward Annette, who was advancing warily, her dark eyes flickering from Jane’s face to her hands and back again.

  ‘I can’t believe you ever thought we had anything in common,’ she rasped, her low voice a strange, feminine echo of Malcolm’s. ‘You’re nothing. I’m a part of this.’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Jane saw Dee moving stealthily along the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows, circling them. Her hair danced wildly as she passed two panels that had been shattered in the fire. She wasn’t sure what Dee was up to, but she did know that she didn’t want the Dorans to notice her. ‘ “This” will be the last thing you ever do,’ Jane retorted. ‘But if you’re feeling suicidal, go ahead. I can take out Hasina just as easily after she’s wearing your skin. My mistake was thinking that you’d want someone to try to save it.’

  Annette lunged at her in response, raking her arm with four sharp fingernails that left a fiery trail of magic behind them. Jane spun away just as a hoarse scream filled their end of the atrium, and something like fireworks erupted near the elevator in a shower of sparks and light. Jane whipped around to see Dee, her hands clutching that strange glowing light, bent precariously backward by the grip of Lynne’s slim hand in her hair. She went for the spell, Jane realized with a surge of hope. They’d lost any hope of securing the house waiting for the perfect moment to destroy Hasina, but they could still destroy the spell components.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Annette moving and spun back to meet her attack, but Annette seemed not to even see her anymore and was instead charging toward the struggling figures of her mother and Dee. Jane reached both hands out toward the running girl, forcing a focused jet of power through them with every molecule of her will. An
nette stumbled and fell heavily to the floor, her ankles tangled in Jane’s magic. Jane caught up to her quickly, placing her body squarely between Dee and Annette before the girl could regain her feet. She flexed her magical shield open again.

  She was much more tired than she had been the first time, though, and she could feel thin spots and even gaps all over its wall. Behind it, Annette rose to her feet, a thin trail of blood sliding down her chin. Jane risked a quick glance back at Dee, who had broken away from Lynne.

  When her eyes came back to Annette’s face, though, there was something truly horrible about the girl’s smile. Her mouth seemed to move, but Jane couldn’t hear any words – she couldn’t hear anything at all, she realized, though the thought seemed to come to her from a great distance. Annette’s hands spread out wide, each one holding something that Jane couldn’t see but somehow knew was sinister, and then she clapped them together and Jane’s world spun sickly.

  Everything went black.

  Chapter Fifteen

  SOUND FILTERED IN, and light – far too much light. Jane knew that some of the sounds were voices, but it seemed like an unreasonable amount of effort just now to remember what words were. Her head lolled back against something firm but pliant, and she hoped that she could stay there. She closed her eyes more tightly against the light and drifted.

  Hours or seconds or no time at all later, Harris set her down on her feet, holding her firmly upright by the shoulders while shouting something at her. We’ve done this before, she managed to think, but something was different this time, and it was starting to bother her a little. Figures moved out of the ruined doorway; her eyes wouldn’t focus that far away, but she could locate them by their hair. Red, white. One, two.

  That was wrong, and something else was, too. She tried to ask Harris about it, but her mouth wouldn’t make the right shapes. He wasn’t paying attention, anyway: he fumbled with something out of her line of sight and then half lifted, half pushed her onto a cool leather seat. A car, she thought confidently, but her pride at remembering the right word was swallowed by her realization that she was in the wrong place.

  ‘I . . . go there,’ she managed as Harris slid into the driver’s seat next to her. Her speech was getting more distinct, but she couldn’t pull her muscles together to point exactly where she meant. She sort of waved, turning her body a little, just enough to catch a glimpse of Maeve moving the limp red hoodie out of the corner of her vision.

  His jaw clenched violently as he started the car. The jaw worked back and forth for a moment, and Jane watched it, fascinated. ‘We have to go,’ he snapped. ‘We couldn’t – we had to get out.’

  The car jumped forward, pressing Jane back against her seat. No, not mine. ‘Dee,’ she gasped. The hoodie; the hair; the tall figure bent backward in the atrium.

  ‘She was pinned down all the way across the room, and we had to go,’ Harris repeated, and now she could hear the brokenness in his voice. ‘I got you, though,’ he added. There was no relief to the statement, no real emotion; nothing but the practical satisfaction of checking an item off a grocery list.

  ‘Turn around,’ Jane grunted, dragging herself upright with more effort than she thought it could possibly take. ‘They’ll think we’ve gone.’ She reached gingerly inward, checking for magical damage to match the total collapse of her nervous system. The hum of her magic was faint, but to her relief it was there, and the pulse grew a little stronger as she followed it. Her power would come back, she knew, along with her coordination and the mental organization that was getting sharper by the minute. ‘Turn around,’ she insisted again, but he just kept driving.

  ‘They know she’s with us,’ he said hollowly. ‘They know we – they’ll want to trade. Ransom her. We just had to get away, and they’ll tell us what they want, and send her back.’

  Jane stared at him. ‘Harris,’ she began softly, but stopped when she saw his knuckles go white around the steering wheel.

  ‘We’re too strong to attack as long as you’re with us,’ he explained. His manner was so patient and rational that she could almost taste the screaming panic underneath. ‘They’ll have to keep her, to trade.’

  Jane’s mind was clear, she realized finally: it was Harris who was still in the fog. ‘We don’t have anything they want,’ she explained tiredly. His jaw kept working back and forth, but other than that she saw no sign that he had even heard her. Is that actually true? she wondered suddenly in the painful silence that followed. She did still have one last thing of Lynne’s: the ancient-looking silver athame into which she had poured all her power. A few generations’ worth of accumulated magic wouldn’t mean much to a witch as long-lived as Hasina, but it might be enough of a reason for her to keep Dee alive.

  Jane reached across her body to hold the edge of the back of her seat and struggled to turn herself partway around. The red hoodie lay between the two women behind Harris like a pool of blood. Still holding on carefully with her right hand, Jane reached for the sweatshirt with her left. She knew that they all must be aware of her actions, but they made no move to help her, and Harris’s eyes stayed riveted on the road.

  Her phone tumbled out of the folds of the hoodie as she lifted it, and the screen flared briefly to life from the movement. Its screen was cheerfully devoid of any alerts, and she shuddered: Where was Malcolm now? Annette had implied that he was still alive, but Jane’s silent phone suggested otherwise. She let it fall carelessly onto the seat.

  ‘I’m going to try to see where she is,’ she told the side of Harris’s immobile face, pulling the red hoodie onto her lap.

  She had done this magic twice before: once with a great deal of preparation, and once with a great deal of energy. She had neither this time, but it was some help that the sort of detached trance-state she needed her mind to slip into was familiar to her now. It helped even more that her grip on consciousness was already a little shaky. She clutched at the hoodie for a moment, then felt her grip relax as her inner self drifted loose from her body. Show her to me, she pleaded desperately, coaxing and cajoling any of her magic that would still respond to her, and aiming it toward the sweatshirt on her lap. Let me see what she’s seeing right now. Dee’s amber eyes filled her mind, then her long, calloused fingers, her hoarse, husky laugh. Her own body tugged back at her, tired and burned and needing her, but Dee couldn’t afford to wait, so Jane yanked herself away harder.

  With a final, sickening wrench she was free, and then she was trapped.

  I’m not, she realized a second later. She is. Dee was seated on the blackened floor of the atrium, bound hand and foot, with her back pressed against one of its windows. The huge room seemed unnaturally quiet after the chaos that had raged there just minutes before. Charles was nowhere to be seen; Jane guessed that he had only been allowed in the atrium at all to lend his brute strength to the Dorans’ fight. Now that it was over, only the most vital core of the family remained.

  Annette, Cora, and Belinda were huddled in a close circle around something that bubbled and hissed, while Lynne paced behind them, glancing over their shoulders impatiently. The spell, Jane realized. It must be almost ready. The four of them had probably spent all the previous twenty-seven nights just like this, she realized; how foolish of her to imagine that Annette might ever believe the worst of the mother who had saved her from a life she hated. Nothing like evil to really bond a family together.

  ‘Do you still like magic?’ Lynne asked her suddenly. Jane tried to jump, but of course she couldn’t: Lynne was speaking to Dee, not her. ‘You’re hardly the first witch-groupie to get stuck in the middle of this sort of thing, you know, but most have better sense than to go looking for death.’ Her dark eyes were intent as they flicked back and forth from Dee to the sitting witches. ‘A little slower,’ she instructed, and across the half-dark room Jane saw Annette’s dark-gold bob nod in acknowledgment. ‘It should feel like your heartbeat controls it.’

  Dee said nothing, and Jane wondered if she were restrained somehow fro
m speaking, or simply afraid. She has to be gagged, Jane decided after a long pause; Dee would never have let a comment like that go without some kind of snappy response.

  ‘It’s a tremendous privilege for you to see this, of course.’ Lynne turned back to Dee, apparently satisfied with whatever Annette was doing for the moment. ‘It’s normally quite the . . . family matter. But Jane is family, I suppose, and I expect she’ll be along shortly.’ She leaned down toward Dee’s face, scanning it closely. ‘Or are you there already, dear?’

  I’m here, Jane thought fiercely, although she meant it more as a comfort to her friend than an answer to Lynne. Neither of them could hear her, anyway, but it was the only thing she could do, so she thought it again. Dee, I’m here with you.

  ‘It often happens this way.’ Lynne sighed. ‘I get quite attached to a body – they’ll tell you I’ve outgrown caring about that sort of thing anymore, but it’s not true. Family is a different matter: after the first seventy children or so, they stop being such a big deal. Most of them live such short lives, and the new ones don’t even look like me anymore. It’s been so long since I could recognize my features – my own, I mean – in any of them. But the skin I wear, the mind I live inside . . . I can actually become quite sentimental about that. I’ll be sorry to see Lynne Doran go, but I’d be sorrier to see her live on after I’ve left her behind.’ Jane shivered in her own mind, though Dee remained still and silent.

  ‘It’s the sort of thing that hangers-on like you can’t even imagine.’ The tall, chestnut-haired woman resumed her restless pacing. Jane saw Dee’s legs shift suddenly, and guessed that she was trying to kick or maybe trip her as she passed by, but if Lynne even noticed the attempt, she didn’t bother to respond. The bubbling thing between the seated witches gave off a pale, sickly gleam that illuminated the faces around it, which were glassy-eyed and drawn with exhaustion. Annette was frowning, her brow coated in a fine layer of sweat that glistened in the unnatural light.