‘So they tried to use regular nonwitches to do the job?’ Jane was appalled; it was like trying to smother a forest fire by throwing fluffy bunnies at it. Then again, she thought, maybe it was clever. Hasina was deeply dedicated to fitting in with the rest of society and would go to extraordinary lengths to seem socially ‘correct’ – maybe even far enough to get ensnared in a well-laid trap.
‘They used the locals as camouflage,’ the diary confirmed, ‘or at least they tried. Some of Hasina’s more minor relatives were actually caught up in the executions, but of course Hasina herself wasn’t touched. When she discovered that Anila’s family was behind the hunt, she killed every last witch in their line.’
Jane exhaled slowly. ‘Malcolm said that a couple of the witch families were extinct.’
Gran’s memory nodded, but Jane knew her well enough to understand that her agreement was qualified. ‘The witches in them, at least. Hasina continued to seek out Anila’s children for several generations, until there was no real hope that magic would ever resurface in their line. But there were a few children – distant relatives, mostly males – whom she was willing to ignore.’
‘Until one of them married a witch,’ Jane finished for her. Even if her father had been generations removed from any of his family’s actual magic, the attraction of one magical being to another might have been there; faint, but there. Gran would have known who her daughter’s suitor really was – even if he had no idea himself – and knowing that the marriage would draw unwelcome attention, she had opposed it. But Angeline had married Jane’s father anyway, leaving Gran with no choice but to hide the couple with all her fierce strength, including convincing him to change his name. As a daughter of not one but two magical lines, the infant Jane inherited more power than any other infant in her generation – maybe even more than Annette. Hasina would never stop until she had found the child and taken her magic . . . and her life.
But Angeline had insisted on raising her daughter as a ‘normal’ girl, free of the magical world and the danger that came with it. She moved her family to North Carolina, hoping to leave her past behind, and Gran had tried to respect her wishes. And that’s how my parents died, Jane realized. ‘Tell me everything,’ she told the image. ‘Please. Start from the beginning.’
The image exhaled with a touch of loving exasperation. Jane longed to throw her arms around her, but she knew she would have to settle for listening. Around them, the darkness spun, shimmered, and resolved. Jane saw a sandy-haired young man in a well-tailored but well-worn suit. He sat in a one-piece plastic chair in front of a massive window, and Jane saw a line of bullet-nosed airplanes waiting on the other side. The young man held a boarding pass in his hand, and he kept flexing open its paper sheath to read the numbers on it again and again. ‘Your father’s name was Matthew Vincent,’ Gran’s voice began, and Jane listened raptly.
Chapter Twenty
THE SUN WAS low on the horizon by the time Jane emerged from Gran’s diary. She was exhausted, and her mind was reeling from the massive volume of new information she had taken in during the afternoon. She felt like there was too much in her now to be contained in her one bedroom, or even in the entire sprawling house. She needed the open sky around her rather than walls pressing in, so she pulled a soft wool wrap around her shoulders and slipped outside.
She crossed the lawn quickly, and without even thinking found herself face-to-face with Dee’s little stone marker, nestled carefully into a flat space between the dunes. She had no idea where Emer had gotten it on such short notice, but then she supposed that the Montagues specialized in putting troubled souls to rest, so of course they must have some rather macabre supplies on hand. The narrow stone stood just under a foot high, and although it was brand-new, its edges already looked a little weathered and worn. A pentacle was carved into its smooth front surface; its other sides had been left rough and unfinished. Dee would have said that it was perfect, Jane knew, and her eyes filled with tears.
‘I miss you,’ she whispered, dropping down to kneel on the grass before the marker. It was springy and damp, and she felt moisture seeping into the ballerina-like chiffon layers of her skirt. But it wasn’t really hers, and she didn’t care, anyway. Her entire heart was swollen with longing, so full it felt like it might burst.
Dee, Gran, Maman, Papa . . . even Malcolm, or who I thought Malcolm could be. Harris, whom I used to think might become more than a friend, and now he’s even less. ‘I miss you,’ she said again, brushing Dee’s marker with her fingertips but speaking at least a little bit to all of them. The stone was still warm from the heat of the day, although the sun had disappeared behind the house and a few stars were peeking out of the sky over the water. It has life, Jane thought irrationally; it has some of her fierce kinetic energy in it.
‘I found out why Hasina is so dangerous,’ she told the stone softly, dropping her gaze to her lap and twisting her fingers together. ‘She’s like a vampire, only with magic instead of blood. She can’t produce it herself anymore, so she has to keep taking it. She tried to get Gran’s, and she probably took my mother’s after she ran her car off the road.’
Saying the words out loud made them feel more real and frightening, but it also calmed some of the chaotic whirlwind of her thoughts. So she kept talking, pouring out every detail of what Gran’s diary had told her, using as many of the exact words as she could remember. She added in her own conclusions, as well as the questions that still remained. In the end she just talked, telling Dee everything that had crossed her mind in the days since her friend’s violent death.
By the time she had finished, nearly the entire sky was covered in a thick carpet of stars, and the fat white moon had cast a trail across the water. It ended on the beach just on the other side of the dunes, and Jane felt as though she could cross the sand, step out onto the gleaming ocean, and walk across to the other side.
‘You would know what to do now,’ she said, sighing. ‘I wish I had taken your advice from the very start. Remember when I accidentally showed Lynne that I knew about my magic, and she sent Yuri to your place to bring me back? You told me to run then, but you never blamed me for a second when I insisted that I knew better. I could have gotten out of the city, and you could have kept working at Hattie’s bakery, and Annette could still be an anonymous barmaid in London. But I thought I was outsmarting Lynne, playing on her weaknesses. I knew she wouldn’t take any risks with me before that insane wedding, and I thought that meant the same thing as being safe. I thought Malcolm knew his family best, and he would be able to keep us hidden from them, and that on my own I couldn’t do anything. And I should have listened to you instead, because you were the one who taught me how to do so many amazing things, and you knew I’d be fine as long as I didn’t get cocky enough to actually try to take on Lynne Doran.’
And time went on, and I listened even less. She hadn’t so much as called Dee during the first few miserable weeks after the wedding. Instead, she had stubbornly waited until she had figured things out on her own before contacting the one person who could help. The one person who was always happy to. Dee had been a perfect, loyal friend, yet Jane had let them drift apart, never imagining how little time they had left.
‘I was jealous,’ she whispered, glancing over her shoulder instinctively to make sure that no one had come out from the house after her. The moonlight shone on the perfectly manicured lawn, green and glossy and completely empty. ‘I had that silly crush on Harris, and I didn’t want to see you two getting closer, building something real between you. I let a stupid infatuation come between our friendship. And I thought if I ignored the problem, things would eventually go back to normal.’ She laughed a little, regretfully. ‘Okay, I thought you would break up and he’d throw himself at me and you would get used to it. Either way, I thought we would have years, decades even, to get back to the kind of friends we started as.’
Dee would have made sure that they did, Jane knew. Their talk on the Montagues’ roof just a couple
of weeks earlier was proof of that. But Jane would have known it even without any evidence. Real friendship created real faith, and her relationship with Dee was one of the realest she had ever known.
‘I wish I’d been a better friend,’ Jane told her sincerely. ‘If I was, you’d be here to tell me what to do next. And I’d do it.’ She hesitated, plucking at layers of her skirt. ‘I can’t run away from this anymore. I should never have tried to save Annette – and I’m so, so sorry. It seemed like the right, noble thing to do, but if I’d really understood what I was risking, that I was putting more on the line than just myself, I would never have done it. But I’m not concerned about protecting her anymore. I’m just sorry that I didn’t see it that way before, when you were still here.’ She bit her lip, feeling Annette’s magic slice through her throat again. The pain had been icy for a moment, then Dee’s blood had flowed hotly out onto her skin. By the time Jane was thrown clear, it felt as if her skin were on fire. ‘I have to fight. I can’t just hide, hoping that Hasina takes someone else for fuel, and die alone in my bed after sixty years of looking over my shoulder every minute.’
But what could she do? Even with the help of the Montagues, which was no sure thing anymore, another face-to-face confrontation was out of the question. What do you do when you can’t fight and you can’t walk away? Gran might have known, and Dee might have had an idea, but Jane was alone.
The little marker seemed to almost glow in the moonlight, and Jane reached out and touched it again on impulse. It was still warm, and she wondered if it really was just leftover heat absorbed from the sun. Maybe Emer did something special to it, she guessed, pleased at the thought. Perhaps she had some magic like the witch who had given Malcolm the spirit box, and she had made the stone reflect Dee’s substance somehow. It was a relief to know that someone was out there shepherding the dead, when so many of the people in Jane’s life had died. I should ask her, and I should ask her to teach me what she does.
A little part of her hoped that the warmth in the stone wasn’t Emer’s magic at all, but Dee herself, letting Jane know that she had heard. The crazy swirl of noise in her head had stilled, and although she was still tired, she felt somehow refreshed. She’s helping me, even now. After everything. ‘I’ll come back,’ she offered tentatively, absurdly afraid of being rejected by the inanimate object in the grass. ‘I’d like to, I mean. I wish I could make up for what happened to you.’ The tears she had blinked back earlier welled up again, and this time they rolled down her cheeks to fall silently to the ground.
By the time she stood up to return to the house, her thigh and calf muscles had gone stiff and wooden. She made a futile attempt to smooth her skirt with her hands, gave up, and trudged back across the moonlit lawn to the darkened house. She looked up once, and for a moment she caught sight of a face, and a flash of reddish hair, in one of the black upper windows. Red hair didn’t narrow it down much on the Montagues’ farm, but Jane knew instinctively that the watching face belonged to Harris. She had nothing to say to him, though, so she pretended not to notice and made her way back to her room alone.
Chapter Twenty-one
A GHOSTLY LIGHT GLOWED in the middle of Jane’s darkened room, only to disappear almost as soon as she walked in and saw it. What the—? It blinked again, and this time she recognized it as the screen of Ella’s cell phone. She had dropped it onto her bedspread earlier that day when she dumped out the contents of her purse in a frustrated hunt for lipstick. She kept her hands out searchingly in front of her as she crossed the pitch-black room, bumped into her bed with her thighs, and mumbled a curse as she started to feel around on the bedspread. Just as she found the cool metal edges of the phone it lit up again. ‘2 Missed Calls.’
Jane flipped it open curiously, and an odd abortive beep was followed by the sound of an open line. The call timer had ticked up to five seconds before she realized that someone must have called at that exact moment. ‘Hello?’
‘Thank God,’ André growled, although he didn’t sound especially thankful. ‘Where the hell have you been?’
Jane glared at the phone, aware as she did how pointless the gesture was. ‘Burying a friend,’ she growled back. Who the hell did he think he was? She hadn’t been at his beck and call as Ella, and she certainly wasn’t about to start now.
But André didn’t seem surprised or cowed by her anger; his tone remained just as harsh as before. ‘At least you got to bury her,’ he snapped. ‘I don’t even know what happened to my sister’s body.’
Jane sat down heavily on the bed. Katrin? She hadn’t liked Katrin at all, and was sure that the feeling had been mutual, but Jane couldn’t help feeling a grudging respect for the tough Romanian witch. She may not have had much magic, but she had been clever, ruthless, and relentlessly devoted to her family. Not to mention almost brilliantly devious.
To her horror, when André spoke again it sounded distinctly like he was crying. ‘That crazy bitch killed her. Her hotel room is basically a crater. Jane, I know you were going after Hasina. What the fuck did you do?’
‘Nothing,’ Jane half shouted, half wailed. She hadn’t even been able to keep her own allies safe.
‘You didn’t even try?’ André prodded viciously, and Jane closed her eyes.
‘Of course I tried,’ she snapped into the phone. ‘I even got into the house, but Annette turned on me, okay? Maybe with some more help, we could have . . . that is . . . she beat us. She killed my friend, knocked me out, and became Hasina.’ It hadn’t happened in quite that order, but the timeline wasn’t exactly a huge issue right now. ‘And for the record,’ she added bravely, testing the edges of her grief, ‘I never got my friend’s body back, either.’
‘I’m sorry.’ André’s tone was perfunctory, but the fact that he had bothered to offer a condolence at all was a little surprising.
‘I’m sorry about Katrin,’ she offered in return, and a short silence crackled along the line between them.
Finally André cleared his throat hoarsely. ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’
Death never does, Jane thought grimly. ‘Annette’s really, really strong,’ she pointed out. ‘I know your sister was smart, but if Annette wanted to kill her, there isn’t much she could have done to protect herself.’
‘That’s just my point.’ André’s voice crackled with impatience. ‘Annette – Hasina – is strong right now. She had a ton of magic already; their family has always been savvy about breeding magic with magic. She shouldn’t have needed to kill another witch for years. Decades, even.’
Jane’s mind spun. It was true: Hasina’s magic would seep out of her new body, but slowly. When he demanded to know what I’d done, he assumed I’d drained her magic off somehow, like when I made Lynne give up hers. He thought I’d created Hasina’s motive for killing his sister. No wonder he was so angry. But less than a second later, another thought crowded that one out. ‘You said you didn’t know why Hasina killed witches,’ she said accusingly. ‘But you do. You have all along.’
There was another silence, substantially less sympathetic than the last one had been. ‘My darling Jane,’ he said at last, ‘you and I hardly have an expectation of openness and honesty. It was never that sort of relationship between us.’
‘I expect you to act intelligently, at least,’ she snapped back. ‘Maybe if you’d told me about Hasina’s little magical storage problem—’
‘Nothing,’ André hissed. ‘If I had told you, then nothing. I told you she kills witches, and that was all you needed to know. Katrin said that even that was telling you too much; that if you didn’t know you might be careless, and she would catch you first and buy more time for the rest of us. My family comes first, Jane, and I put them at risk by telling you anything.’
Jane sucked in a breath to retort, but the fairer part of her brain had to admit that he had a point. Would she have proceeded differently if she had known why Hasina was a murderer? Probably not – she would have been just as determined to keep the ancient witch
from changing bodies, and she wouldn’t have had any better ideas of how to do it. ‘Okay,’ she agreed finally. ‘I do not forgive you, but I agree that knowing the whole truth wouldn’t have changed what I did.’
‘You would have still charged in to save the day.’ He was mocking now, but at least he sounded a little less furious. ‘Ever give any thought to retiring from public service? The public would probably appreciate it.’
Jane closed her eyes and leaned back onto her pillow, eliciting a startled cry from Maki, whose tail she narrowly had missed. Her pillow was warm and indented from the cat’s huge body, and she knew that she was probably getting fur mixed in with her hair, but it was impossible to care about that sort of thing right now. ‘Staying out of harm’s way apparently isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,’ she pointed out tartly.
To her relief, he took her gibe in stride. ‘New York City is harm’s way,’ he countered. ‘This entire godforsaken country, in fact, has been nothing but a death trap for witches since Hasina first set foot on its shores. Our parents had a stroke of luck here, finding little Annette, but it was a terrible mistake to think that that meant we would enjoy the same good fortune.’ He snorted. ‘ “The American Dream,” indeed – if that nonsense applies to anyone, it most certainly isn’t witches.’
He’s right, Jane realized somewhere down in the pit of her stomach. Hasina came here and wiped out the witches in my father’s family, kept the Montagues living in fear of her, drove my gran out of the country, and killed my mother when she came back. Back in Paris, Jane used to have a firm policy of never dating American men – a policy she had broken for Malcolm – which may have been even smarter than she realized at the time. ‘You’re leaving,’ she said – a statement, not a question. Making a stand wasn’t in André’s nature, and at this point it was hard for Jane to completely blame him. She had known that being a witch was dangerous, but she hadn’t truly appreciated what ‘dangerous’ meant until now.
The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) Page 14
