The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3)

by Gabriella Pierce

  I was trying to help you, you psychotic bitch, Jane thought furiously. Dee’s worth twenty of you, and she wanted to help you, too. If it meant getting her back now, I’d set you on fire and walk away without a second glance.

  A shudder ran through Lynne’s thin body, and an answering one shook Annette so hard that Jane thought it must be rattling the girl’s teeth. Lynne slipped a little glass vial from the pocket of her Chanel jacket and smiled wanly in the general direction of Dee. But her eyes seemed so far away that Jane doubted she really saw anything in the room anymore, except for the bubbling substance and her daughter’s vacant face.

  ‘Usually I let the spell be the judge,’ she murmured, watching the small coven fixedly. ‘It’s deadly more often than it’s not, thankfully; I never do enjoy watching my last shell wander around without a true owner. But you and your meddlesome friends have made it so that I can’t participate in the ritual this time. Without it, there’s no risk to this body at all, so I have to decide its fate all on my own.’ Her eyes flicked toward Dee with a quick flash of irritation before locking back on Annette and her cousins. ‘I hold you entirely responsible for how positively vile this will taste.’ She unstoppered the vial and tipped its purplish contents into her mouth, grimacing as she swallowed. Another tremor ran along the length of her body, and the vial dropped, forgotten, to smash on the floor.

  The sound it made was almost completely drowned out by a strange roaring, rushing noise that Jane realized must have been in her ears all along, steadily growing louder until it was impossible to ignore. She watched as one of Lynne’s perfectly manicured hands reached up to clutch briefly at her chest before she fell to the ground in front of Dee. Her body twitched a little every couple of seconds, her chest rising and falling in the shallowest of breaths, but her eyes rolled grotesquely and her lips had a tinge of blue underneath their customary peach lipstick.

  Dee looked away from her, though, so Jane had to do the same. Annette was rising. Not standing: rising into the air as if in the grip of some huge, invisible hand. The twins remained on the ground, but whatever was holding Annette seemed to be affecting them, too: the small grey women looked even smaller and greyer, as if they were drying out somehow from the inside. Jane could see their skeletons beneath their skin, and then right through it. The bubbling thing between them grew bigger and brighter as they seemed to shrink in on themselves, and Jane realized that they were feeding themselves to it in some way that Dee’s eyes couldn’t perceive. One of them slumped forward as a ghostly green light began to radiate from Annette’s eyes, mouth, nose, fingertips, from every bit of exposed skin that Jane could see. In another moment it was blinding, and the atrium lurched and spun into darkness as Dee turned away and shielded her eyes as best she could with her thick curtain of hair. This was when we needed to be there, Jane thought, and she would have clenched her fists if she could feel them. We just needed ten minutes more, and Annette took them from us.

  When Dee turned back to the Circle, the unnatural light and the bubbling substance were gone, and Annette’s feet were planted firmly on the charred floorboards. Dee barely had time to take in the three still, lifeless corpses around her before Annette turned her way, and Jane quailed inside her body: Annette’s eyes had changed. They were still their same dark color, but even in the dimness of the ruined atrium, Jane could see that there was something different about them. It’s as if she’s wearing contacts, she thought, remembering where she had seen this before. Whatever used to make Lynne Doran’s eyes so strange was looking at her now through Annette’s.

  ‘That’s better,’ Hasina purred through Annette’s full-lipped mouth. Then she pressed it closed tightly, rolled her shoulders in their sockets, rose onto her tiptoes and settled back down again, with a contented smile that Jane had never seen her wear before. ‘Now, I think Jane’s seen enough, don’t you? She can stop trying to interfere and “rescue” poor, helpless Annette. And I certainly don’t want her to trouble herself with breaking in again to rescue you.’ Her lips curved up cruelly. ‘Believing in magic gets you nothing, you idiot wannabe witch. The only thing that matters is having it.’

  She raised one hand and pointed, aiming a blood-red fingernail carefully at Dee’s throat. Before she could scream or Jane could react at all, Annette slashed her hand sideways, the nail cutting through the air with a soft, dangerous hiss. There was pain, and there was something warm and thick spilling down the front of her shirt, and then the room spun and Jane was gone.

  For a few heartbeats she was bodiless, frozen in absolute blackness with nowhere to go and nothing to move in order to get there. No mouth to scream through; no legs to kick; no heart to break into a million pieces.

  Then she was back in the leather seat of Harris’s electric-blue Mustang, Dee’s red hoodie resting limply on her lap. Her hands tightened reflexively around the soft material, but it was cold and lifeless and no consolation at all. She bent down and buried her face in it, feeling hot tears begin to flow. Her body shook, then doubled over as she was racked with sobs.

  In some dim corner of her brain she registered the feeling of the car slowing down, then drifting to the right. It came to a stop, and somewhere beside her she heard Harris begin to cry as well.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE CAR’S HEADLIGHTS flashed over flat, well-fitted stones as Harris turned the car off the main road and onto a driveway. Jane blinked, trying to make sense of the indistinct shapes rising around them: a grouping of buildings silhouetted against the starry sky. Jane caught a quick glimpse of iron-bound wooden doors before they were replaced by a long row of wooden boxes on either side of a wide aisle. A barn, Jane thought hazily. He drove us into a barn.

  ‘This is the family farm,’ Maeve’s voice said softly in the darkness, and Jane nodded, her foggy brain putting together that they had driven to the Montagues’ compound in the Hamptons.

  The stalls on the left were closed, but the doors of the ones on the right were all wide open. Jane could make out the darkened headlights of a car in each one, and so was unsurprised when Harris spun the wheel and turned into an empty stall about two-thirds of the way along the centre corridor. When she stepped gingerly out onto the concrete floor, Jane heard soft whinnies from one of the closed stalls on the other side of the aisle, and the sound of something heavy shifting around inside. Half cars, half horses, she thought. How modern.

  They crossed the stone courtyard in silence, Maeve carrying Dee’s hoodie like a fallen banner. Lights were on in the main house, and when she stepped inside, Jane stopped short. Pacing back and forth across the great room, looking for all the world like a caged lion with his tanned skin and dark-gold mane of hair, was Malcolm. She hadn’t fully processed the fact of his presence when Harris stepped around her to rush at him.

  She wanted to interfere, or at least protest, but the short walk from the car had already made her feel a little woozy, and all her body wanted to do was sag against the doorframe. Harris’s attack caught Malcolm completely off guard and the two rolled off, out of her line of sight.

  She heard running footsteps on the staircase somewhere overhead; no doubt more Montagues. Gritting her teeth, Jane pulled her aching body slowly upright, trying to ignore the way the room pitched and swayed as she moved.

  ‘Back to your corners,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘Harris, back off.’

  She took a careful step forward and saw Malcolm’s head lift to look at her as she did. But then Harris’s hand swung up from somewhere below the couch and clipped him on the ear, and the two of them were off again. Jane tried halfheartedly to dig around for any magic left to her, but she knew it was futile. She had nothing left.

  A light touch on the shoulder made her jump, and she turned to find a pair of worried brown eyes peering into hers. A regal woman with a cloud of red hair piled on top of her head was standing in front of her, partially blocking her view of a sullen-looking teenaged girl who practically vibrated in her eagerness to get closer to the action.


  Jane inhaled, letting the air fill her lungs and expand her rib cage, and feeling the pain in her shoulder flare as the muscles in her torso moved. ‘Hasina killed Dee,’ she told the two newcomers shortly, guessing that they must be Emer’s daughter and granddaughter, Charlotte and Leah. Dee had mentioned them once or twice. She would have preferred to break the news a little more gently, but assorted freckles and red hair kept swimming in front of her, and she had to communicate the key points quickly in case she was going to pass out again. ‘Harris is trying to kill Malcolm, over there.’ Her shoulder refused to respond to her instruction to gesture toward the floor of the great room, and she remembered belatedly that it had been injured somehow during the battle in the atrium.

  ‘Well, that won’t do,’ Charlotte replied crisply and moved out of Jane’s line of sight. After a few more thumps and a couple of barked orders, Harris stood, panting raggedly, beside his watchful sister. Malcolm, a few new scrapes and bruises decorating his handsome face, had moved to a corner near the fireplace, and finally the rest of the Montagues filtered into the centre of the room to join the pair of siblings there.

  ‘I just got him patched up,’ Leah exclaimed, stepping toward Malcolm to run a finger across the beginnings of a black eye. ‘Harris, look what you’ve done!’

  ‘What I’ve done?’ Harris exploded, so viciously that even Maeve shrank away from him. ‘He got her killed!’

  ‘He nearly died, too,’ Charlotte told him quietly, slipping over to rest a calming hand on his sleeve. ‘That horrible sister never met him today; she sent some thugs to do it instead. It was only luck that we found him in time.’ She frowned, deeply worried lines forming on her pale skin. ‘I thought it best to get him out of the city immediately.’

  Jane stepped forward tentatively to peer closer at Malcolm’s wounds. ‘In a few minutes I’ll be too powerful to care whether Malcolm dies, or you live.’ Annette had wanted to punish him; Hasina would have just killed him. ‘Found him?’ she repeated absently, running a finger along a tear in Malcolm’s sleeve.

  ‘At your apartment,’ he told her softly, and Leah heaved a dramatic sigh.

  ‘When you didn’t come back, we thought you might be regrouping at the apartment downtown,’ she explained, her tone faintly accusatory. ‘But the only one there was him. Looking much, much worse than now,’ she added as an afterthought.

  ‘They took my phone first thing,’ Malcolm apologized, spreading his empty hands as if to demonstrate.

  ‘Of course they did,’ Harris snarled. ‘You had a great excuse for staying out of the firefight tonight, and then these mysterious strangers conveniently prevented you from warning us that your own dear sister was there, waiting for us. Because you told her we were coming!’

  Charlotte and Leah were adamant that Malcolm had been too gravely wounded for it to have been a smokescreen, which Harris insisted was exactly what Malcolm wanted them to think. It didn’t help matters that their impressive healing skills had made it difficult for Harris or even Jane to see the extensive injuries that the women described. And at the end of the day, it’s the Montagues and the Dorans. Even Emer seemed reluctant to stem Harris’s vitriol, and Maeve was still too shaken by Dee’s death to say much of anything at all.

  ‘Enough of this,’ Jane finally forced herself to say, and was pleased to note that her voice sounded almost strong. Every head in the room swiveled her way, and the arguing stopped.

  ‘Jane, I didn’t know anything about this,’ Malcolm rumbled softly. She wanted to go to him, lean her head against his chest, and let him tell her that everything would be all right, but she couldn’t. It won’t, anyway, no matter what he says. ‘Please let me make it up—’

  ‘How?’ Harris spat, the word twisting his handsome mouth into an ugly shape. ‘You mean you want to buy your way out of this, just like everything else? How much is she worth to you?’ Jane noticed that he hadn’t said Dee’s name since they’d left the mansion, and she understood. She was terrified, too, of the fresh pain that had come with the sound of it.

  ‘He didn’t mean it like that,’ Leah insisted, trying to step toward her cousin, but Charlotte pulled her daughter back and held her close.

  Didn’t he? Jane wondered. The faces before her wavered a little in her vision, as if she were looking at them through uneven glass. She wished that she were still leaning against something solid. Harris’s angry words of warning before they had gone to the Dorans’ mansion came back to her vividly. Can my judgment really be trusted where he’s concerned? She would never believe the worst of Malcolm, but was it possible that she’d been too eager to always believe the best?

  ‘I’ll do whatever you need, whatever you ask,’ Malcolm answered simply, lifting his hands and then dropping them back helplessly to his sides. ‘I know I can’t undo what’s happened, but my last offer cost one of you her life. If it’ll help you, you can have mine.’ Harris looked grimly interested in that offer, but Emer turned away in obvious disgust.

  ‘No one is dying,’ Jane corrected him tiredly. ‘Enough people have died.’

  ‘Not quite enough,’ Maeve muttered, softly but not so low that she couldn’t be heard by everyone in the room.

  ‘Hasina is alive,’ Malcolm agreed. Jane thought that that was a rather generous interpretation of Maeve’s remark under the circumstances, but she wasn’t about to correct him, and Maeve didn’t either. ‘She’s wearing my sister’s face and she killed your friend. So let me kill her.’

  An uneasy silence settled over the room, and glances flicked nervously between Malcolm and Jane. André warned me to kill Annette from the beginning, she remembered, and her stomach churned. And even Emer had endorsed it as a last resort. If I had listened ... She had ignored every reason not to trust Annette. She had committed them to a dangerous plan that hinged on the reliability of an unstable stranger, and it had cost them so much more than she would ever have willingly paid. But even if killing Annette were the only answer now, could she really let Malcolm do it?

  ‘I can get close to her in public,’ Malcolm insisted urgently, and Jane saw interest on a few of the assembled faces. ‘Some event, some party. To everyone there I would just be her brother; even if she saw me coming, she would have to try to stick it out. She cares about what people think more than anything,’ he went on, picking up speed in his enthusiasm. He was right about that, Jane knew: Hasina’s desire for a huge society wedding between Jane and Malcolm had been the reason Jane was able to escape her the first time.

  ‘You make it sound so easy,’ she murmured, her mind spinning.

  ‘I don’t expect to get away with it.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s not that hard to kill someone if you don’t mind getting killed, yourself.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ she countered, stepping back, away from him. She swayed a little, but her legs held her. ‘I thought you had changed.’

  Malcolm opened his mouth to argue, but then closed it again. Confusion pulled his dark-gold eyebrows together tightly. He seemed completely at a loss.

  ‘You think he was in on this with Annette?’ Leah demanded, hands on her skinny hips and head cocked angrily. She tossed her perfectly straight strawberry-blond hair over her shoulder in a gleaming cascade.

  ‘I don’t,’ Jane clarified quickly, glancing around the room to make eye contact with everyone. She didn’t want them to have any doubts about her certainty that Malcolm was not on Annette’s side. ‘Can we have a minute?’

  Emer, Charlotte, Leah, Maeve, and finally a very reluctant Harris filed slowly from the room. Jane waited until they were completely gone before she spoke again. ‘You can’t make everyone’s problems go away by killing them,’ she began, and Malcolm’s dark eyes widened in surprise.

  ‘This isn’t – I don’t know what you—’

  Her heart broke for the pain written across his face, but she couldn’t give in to it: her bad judgment where Malcolm was concerned had already cost Dee her life. ‘You make a mistake, you think you can fix it just l
ike that,’ she went on when he sputtered to confused silence. ‘You don’t think about the consequences; you just want the mess to disappear so you can go back to your happy life and never feel bad again. I thought you had grown past that, but you haven’t.’

  ‘I have.’ Malcolm’s voice was low and throbbing with sincerity.

  Jane closed her eyes, wanting to believe him but knowing that she couldn’t trust anything she wanted so badly. When she opened them, he had crossed the room to stand just inches from her and was holding his arms out as if to gather her in. ‘You can’t stay here with them – with us,’ she told him. His arms fell to his sides in defeat. ‘I need you to leave. I know you want to be a part of this, and I thought you could, but you can’t. And I can’t let you try anymore. I can’t lose any more people I love to your need for redemption. You’ll have to find that somewhere else.’

  She expected an argument, or at least a protest. But Malcolm simply stared into her eyes for a long minute, until he seemed to find something there that satisfied him. Then he leaned down and kissed her forehead gently, his warm lips lingering only a little longer than the gesture required, and turned to step out of the door of the farmhouse.

  Jane swayed a little and rested her palm against the ivory wall for support. He didn’t even argue, she thought dully. Did that mean that he knew she was right? Or that he thought she was too far wrong to even reason with?

  She heard a soft rustling noise from the kitchen, and the muffled sound of a voice. She couldn’t stand to go there, though; she knew she would never be able to walk into a kitchen again without feeling Dee’s absence like a physical wound. She circled around the ground floor in the other direction instead: past a darkened sunroom, through an even darker formal dining room, to a staircase, where she removed her flats so as to make as little noise as possible.