‘Seven sons, seven daughters,’ Penelope confirmed. ‘She remembered the lessons of her own ascension to the throne and, in an attempt to prevent the same from happening to her children, divided up her lands among her sons, for all the good it did them. History doesn’t even remember their names. Those of us who still carry her magic know the names of her daughters, though. It was to them that she left her true inheritance, split into seven equal parts.’
‘Jyoti,’ Jane remembered, the common ancestress of both Penelope and the Dalcacus. ‘Hasina, and Anila – she was the one whose descendants Hasina wiped out after Salem.’ She frowned, trying to remember any of the other four names she had read in Rosalie Goddard’s journals. ‘Anulet?’
‘Amunet,’ Penelope corrected. ‘A nasty piece of work, that one. Maya, of course, but hers are all gone now. There was Sumitra, who is oh-so-indirectly responsible for this lovely kitchen we’re sitting in now. And the youngest was Aditi. She’s the one your people came from, Blondie. A little slip of a thing; all eyes, really. And conscience, more’s the pity.’
Jane pitched forward on her stool. ‘You know them?’ she whispered. ‘You’ve spoken with them?’
Penelope smiled and leaned back a little in her small wooden chair. Jane was, she realized belatedly, looming over the other woman, but she didn’t seem to care or even especially notice. ‘I speak with the dead,’ she explained. ‘Nearly all the day long, in fact. I live with them. I breathe their air, walk in their footsteps, wear their fates like jewels. I know them all by reputation at the very least. Even those who lived at the dawn of humanity itself.’
A million questions popped into Jane’s head at once, but Penelope was there for a specific reason and she felt honour bound to try to focus on that. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she began slowly. ‘No one in generations has been able to stop Hasina, even when they’ve known who she is and what she’s doing to stay alive. But her sisters were just as strong as she is, and her mother would have been even stronger. I bet if they’d known what she was going to do, they would have been able to keep her from ever moving into her first new body.’
Penelope’s mouth twisted thoughtfully. ‘Probably,’ she agreed. ‘They might even be able to give you some pointers – or they could, anyway, if we could talk to them.’
Jane’s mouth opened and then closed again. When she managed to make it form words, she heard a faint pleading tone in her voice. ‘Isn’t that what you do, though?’
Penelope didn’t seem ruffled in the slightest by Jane’s skepticism. She pushed her thick glasses a little higher on her nose and sighed. ‘Even experts in their fields have limits. Or were you going to tell me that you know where Ambika and her daughters are buried? And that you have some previously unknown spell to reconstitute their skeletons, since I doubt any of them was in a hermetically sealed tomb. They have truly returned to the dust by now, and no one even knows which dust.’
‘Having the body, though – the bones, really – makes up for just about any other lack,’ Emer had said once. And what was the rest? ‘If you’re truly adept and you have someone’s bones, you can call them back for real.’ But they didn’t have any bones, and they didn’t have anything else, either. The first witches’ belongings were long gone, and everyone who had known them was long dead. Even if Penelope was every bit as good as her remarkable reputation, she couldn’t be expected to work miracles out of thin air.
‘Even an heirloom would be a long shot anyway, wouldn’t it?’ Jane asked, finishing her train of thought out loud. ‘Anything but a skeleton would, when the person has been dead so incredibly long. Even if we found something that one of them owned, it wouldn’t be enough.’
‘It wouldn’t.’ Penelope’s accented voice was crisp and calm.
It’s not an urgent problem to her, Jane realized darkly. It’s just a job. If we all die in some futile attempt to take out Hasina, she’ll take her payment and just disappear.
Before she could voice her annoyance, however, Penelope spoke again. ‘You may well be correct that one of those original witches could help us. But without their bones we could never raise them, not even a fleeting shadow of what they left on the world. So we will have to pursue other avenues.’
‘I don’t suppose you have any in mind.’
‘Of course I do,’ Penelope replied, unperturbed. ‘Hasina transfers bodies using a spell. It’s a difficult one that requires tremendous power focused through impossibly convoluted conduits, but still, a spell. Something like that doesn’t just end once the body switch is complete – it takes effort to maintain her presence there for the rest of that body’s life. It’s performed the one time, but it continues indefinitely.’
Jane took a moment to process that information. The orb she had used to become Ella Medeiros had sort of worked that way, she realized. It had functioned on a strict time limit, fueling her disguise for exactly twenty-eight days. After that it had vanished – burned up or collapsed on itself or just winked out of existence, perhaps. Jane wasn’t sure. She had been on the street when the spell ended, far from the orb, watching André’s handsome face grow increasingly murderous as he realized who she was. But Hasina’s spell would not self-destruct that way; it must provide a different sort of energy, so that casting it once would continue releasing that energy until the spell was cast again. ‘Okay,’ she agreed. ‘But we tried to stop her from finishing the spell, and we got beaten. Now it’ll keep her in Annette’s body until the next time she needs to perform it, and once she has new heirs she can do that whenever she wants. We won’t be able to predict it, and we know from experience that we won’t be able to interrupt it, so—’
‘Do you need me here for this?’ Penelope interrupted. When she seemed convinced that Jane would be quiet, she continued. ‘The spell is cast, but it’s still working,’ she explained slowly. ‘If we learn enough about the spell, then we may be able to disrupt its effects, to change the way it works on Hasina’s soul.’
‘We could break the connection,’ Jane said, realizing what Penelope meant.
Penelope held up a warning hand. ‘Maybe. But it would be best if we knew every last detail of the spell in question, and only Hasina knows all that. You’ll have to tell me everything you know about it, and then Emer and her family need to do the same. Don’t leave anything out. If you can’t remember the exact words that your grandmother’s diary used on the subject, then I’ll need to interview it, as well.’
‘I remember.’ She knew Gran’s words by heart, and of course she had seen the spell under way, hadn’t she? Abruptly, the smell of smoke filled Jane’s nostrils, and she felt an angry heat licking at her skin. She closed her eyes against the remembered flames. Snap out of it, her brain urged frantically, but she couldn’t. Then at least use it, she told herself. See what you saw. There were shapes in the darkness, and she needed to know what they were. Lynne’s tall, trim form was outlined against the atrium’s windows, and next to her something glowed with an unearthly light.
But I didn’t see; I didn’t see. Annette’s dark, predatory eyes kept getting in her way, and attacks had come from every side. Jane was confused and disoriented, her lungs on fire.
Then a door banged open and Dee was there, her face as fierce as any Amazon’s. Dee saw, Jane thought with relief, and her world jolted and shifted and realigned until she reached the moments when she had looked out through Dee’s amber eyes. Something bubbled in between Annette and her twin crones, giving off the same unearthly glow that Jane had seen earlier. Somewhere far away, as though in a different world, she felt her lips trying to form words to describe the odd substance. But her real self was trapped here with Dee, hearing the terrible rising rushing noise, watching as Belinda and Cora withered and collapsed, and turning away as the light began to pour from Annette’s suspended body.
Then the blood was back, flowing freely down her shirt just as it had on almost a nightly basis since Dee had been murdered. Jane choked on it, gagging as she tried to speak. The darkness rus
hed at her like an angry tide. She tried to swim against it, choking and struggling, but it came faster and deeper until she was buried.
From a great distance she heard more shouting, another door slamming open, running feet. Then something soft and warm was pressed against her forehead, and her body remembered how to open its eyes. When she did, Emer’s green ones were peering back into them, and her tiny, fine-boned hand held a damp washcloth to Jane’s head.
‘I don’t know what kind of a ship you’re running here, Emer,’ Penelope said, looking thoroughly unconcerned, ‘but this one seems to have a touch of that posttraumatic stress thingy that the young people are always going on about these days. You can go upstairs and lie down for a bit, Blondie,’ she added, her tone more gentle. ‘I’ll start with the other interviews while you pull yourself together.’
Jane stood unsteadily and was mortified to see Maeve and Charlotte and even Harris and Leah peering into the kitchen through both of its doors. Her head throbbed painfully, but she managed a weak smile and even a little wave before dragging herself up the stairs toward her bed.
Behind her, she heard Penelope’s voice again. It was softer now, but she could still make out the chiding words. ‘You should have told me that the girl has experienced death, Emer,’ she scolded. ‘Even if it was only by proxy. You know that sort of thing leaves a mark.’ Jane couldn’t make out the reply, but she held herself perfectly still at the top of the stairs, holding her breath until Penelope’s next words floated up to her. ‘You’re lucky I came when I did. I can’t even imagine the mess that you might have made of things without my help.’
Chapter Twenty-four
WHEN JANE CAME downstairs the following morning, the atmosphere in the farmhouse had changed perceptibly. Penelope was the only one missing from the kitchen. At first Jane assumed that she was off doing some strange ritual or research – but none of the Montagues would meet Jane’s eyes, and she realized the reason behind Penelope’s absence. They sent her away, she thought with uncanny certainty. This is a family meeting, and she wasn’t welcome.
‘Sorry,’ she blurted lamely, and some of the pale faces in the kitchen turned her way. ‘I can just—’ She waved vaguely toward the stairway’s other outlet toward the formal dining room. Sit outside until you’re done. Walk into town and get a muffin. Disappear.
‘Thank you, Jane,’ Charlotte said stiffly, and Jane felt her own cheeks flush a mortified shade of red. She spun to leave, but Maeve’s voice caught her before she could go more than a step.
‘Wait,’ her friend snapped. Her voice was raw with frustration, and Jane wondered how long the five of them had been arguing already. ‘This concerns her as much as any of us.’
‘Not quite as much,’ Harris mumbled, but he was staring into his coffee so fixedly that Jane had trouble making out the words.
‘That’s not fair, and you know it,’ Maeve began, but Charlotte clicked her tongue and her niece and nephew quieted down, though petulantly.
‘Annette Doran, or Hasina rather, contacted us this morning,’ the redheaded woman explained, straightening her silk Carine Gilson robe conscientiously. ‘It’s set off quite a stir, as you can see.’
Jane shot her a strained smile. ‘ “Contacted us,” ’ she repeated, putting a question into the word. But the guilty, awkward looks on the faces around her told a different story. Oh. Not ‘us,’ then. ‘Them.’ Whatever Annette’s message had been, it separated her from the group as neatly as a knife.
‘She had an offer,’ Harris explained. Maeve opened her mouth to protest, but before she could speak, he cut her off. ‘What? That’s what it was.’
‘So says Mr. Everything-Is-a-Trap,’ Leah muttered under her breath, picking a paper napkin into smaller and smaller shreds with her YSL-logoed fingernails.
‘Will someone just tell me what’s going on?’ Jane felt guilty pushing them on what was clearly a sensitive subject, but she didn’t think she could stand any more oblique and unhelpful bickering.
‘Annette has offered us a trade,’ Charlotte finished crisply. ‘She claims that, if you meet her tomorrow evening, she will leave the rest of us alone.’
Emer looked at her sadly. ‘She’s offered my family one hundred years of amnesty.’
Jane considered that for a moment. André had insisted that it was impossible to make any kind of truce or deal with Hasina, because she had lived far too long to consider a human deal permanent. But even with Annette’s instability, as long as Hasina was in charge they should be able to stick to a bargain that lasted a mere hundred years. There might be fewer witches in the world than there used to be – thanks to Hasina’s own hunting practices as much as natural attrition – but there were assuredly enough to keep her powered for a hundred years without even touching the Montagues. If there wasn’t too much of Annette’s angry, vengeful influence hovering around the body that used to be hers, then this could be the deal of a lifetime for Jane’s closest friends. I wanted to keep them safe, a little voice reminded her. That was always the point of this. ‘That sounds like a good deal,’ she said, then cleared her throat; there was something strange about the sound of her voice. ‘I hope you told her I would go.’
‘Obviously we told her to go to hell,’ Maeve said sarcastically. ‘Oh, no, wait. We said we’d think about it. Talk it over with you. Because Carrie – that’s our cousin, Jane, she’s in medical research – has invented this operation called a “sanity-ectomy,” and this morning we all went out and had one.’ She glared around the kitchen, but from the conspicuous lack of reaction Jane guessed that this wasn’t her first hostile outburst of the morning.
‘Oh. Well, it’s okay you didn’t give her an answer,’ Jane reassured all of them, trying to avoid Maeve’s furious glare. ‘Like Maeve said before, this concerns me, too. I appreciate you waiting to talk it over with me,’ she added, ignoring the fact that they hadn’t especially welcomed her into their discussion with open arms.
‘You’re fine with volunteering to stick your head into the lion’s mouth?’ Leah finished for her, perking up and looking genuinely interested. ‘Because that would have saved us a whole lot of moral ambiguity if you’d popped in and said so, like, two hours ago.’
‘We were holding a secret family conference,’ Maeve pointed out hotly. ‘Which, for the record, I said was totally pointless – two hours ago. We could have just told Annette to go to hell and then woken Jane up for brunch.’ In spite of her indignation, Maeve couldn’t seem to resist a glare and then a shudder at the plate of greyish eggs that sat, untouched, in front of her.
‘This “meeting” with Annette is a trap,’ Charlotte pointed out in a neutral tone that made it clear that she knew how very obvious that was.
‘Everything is a trap,’ Harris muttered.
‘Yes, everything is a trap,’ Jane agreed with a shrug. ‘But in this case it’s a trap for me, and a bargain for you.’
‘You would see it that way,’ Maeve glowered. ‘So the decent people among us thought we shouldn’t tell you about the offer at all.’ She turned her ferocious glare on Harris, who looked fixedly at his thumbs.
‘Maeve, berating people is not the way to convince anyone of your point of view,’ her grandmother corrected sternly. ‘Don’t tempt me to recommend charm school for you the next time your father checks in; it’s never too late.’ Jane felt a sudden pang; she would have really loved to belong to a whole, living family, and especially to this family.
‘I know you’re worried about me,’ she told Maeve softly, ‘but I’m worried about you, too. I brought this craziness into all your lives, and now I have a chance to end it.’ The two final words rang in her ears over and over again, and she tried to suppress a shudder. Am I really worth one hundred years? she wondered in the most private part of her mind. It couldn’t just be Annette’s anger driving such a generous offer; Hasina must really want Jane. Two magical parents, she mused, and one of them part of her old blood vendetta. I guess I do have family, after all. She didn’t k
now what attracted Hasina more – Jane’s own substantial magic, or the fact that a living witch had popped up from Anila’s line after all this time – but the combination must be irresistible.
‘I did think that you had a right to know, Jane, but I. . .’ Emer trailed off, handing Jane a mug of steaming tea and pressing her hands gently to her mouth as if to search for her missing words.
Jane wrapped her hands around the warm mug and gratefully took a sip. She doesn’t want me sacrificed, but she’s also responsible for all of them, and the rest of her family as well. It was an impossible position; no wonder Emer had been so quiet. ‘Annette intends to kill me,’ Jane conceded. ‘That doesn’t mean that she’ll succeed.’
Charlotte pursed her lips skeptically, but refrained from reminding Jane that they had already learned otherwise the hard way. Annette had been born powerful and had only grown more so. Serving up Jane’s magic to her on a silver platter was hardly the best course of action, even if she vowed not to use it against the Montagues. Something about the thought nagged at the edges of Jane’s mind, but with so much attention on her she couldn’t focus on what it was.
‘This is my life we’re talking about here, so it’s my choice,’ she said flatly, making eye contact with Emer in particular. ‘I know I’m a guest in your home, so you can kick me out onto the street if you really don’t approve of my decisions. I guess you could even knock me out and tie me up to keep me from going – or you could try, at least.’ She raised an eyebrow at Maeve, mimicking the exact angle that Lynne Doran had always used to make her feel about three inches tall.
Maeve half stood as Jane crossed the kitchen toward the door to the back lawn, but Jane flicked her eyes in warning, and her friend froze in place. Jane imagined her stuck there as she crossed the dewy grass toward an ivy-covered gazebo that overlooked the ocean. To her surprise and relief, Maeve didn’t follow her.
Ignoring the stone benches that ringed the gazebo’s lattice walls, Jane stretched out lengthwise along its cool slate paving stones, spinning the plain silver ring on her right hand as she struggled to catch hold of the thought that had half formed in the kitchen. It came to her in a flash. The deal that Annette had offered was for Jane, but Jane was just a person. She had been born with magic and inherited even more, but the magic wasn’t an inseparable part of her. Gran had poured her own into the ring that was currently on Jane’s finger – and Lynne had given hers to Jane inside an ancient, rune-covered athame.
The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) Page 16
