Blood and bricks, Jane thought with satisfaction, though part of her was distracted with wondering how Harris had liked being assigned to jewellery-sorting duty. As hard as it was for her to picture, though, he must be used to doing grunt work for witches by now. He’d probably been accustomed to it all his life, really; the fad of patriarchy had never caught on in magical families. Jane inhaled, then exhaled in a rush. ‘Okay. I feel it. We can try to go back to the circle thing now, if you want.’
Penelope nodded in sharp satisfaction and held up her paper again. ‘The jasper enhances the lower way stations of your magic’s path through your body. Its material is of the earth, and so is its spirit, so there is no balance. You will have to provide the power for the upper way stations only: like a carnival ride with the people all waving their hands up in the air.’
Jane frowned. She had hoped that her little breakthrough with the crystals would somehow make this part suddenly, wonderfully obvious, but apparently that wasn’t how it worked. ‘The circle carnival ride?’ she asked hopelessly, trying to adjust her vocabulary to Penelope’s rather eclectic one. ‘The one like a big wheel?’
The older witch snorted in disgust. ‘You don’t listen,’ she complained. ‘No, not that. Just because I say ‘circle’ doesn’t mean that it happens like a circle in the world. You think this is about shape, with magic?’
‘Of course not,’ Jane assured her, although even in her own mind she couldn’t say for sure how sarcastic she was being. ‘A circle, but not a circle like a circle is.’
‘Better,’ Penelope grunted, peering up through her lenses suspiciously. ‘Are you ready to try it, or just being funny again?’
‘Funny again,’ she had to admit. ‘Tell me about my ancestress. You said her name was Aditi, and something about her having too much conscience.’
‘Did I?’ Penelope asked, her blue eyes maddeningly vague now that the topic was one that interested her pupil. ‘Well. Before courts of law, before police, before the idea of hell or even the threat of damnation by history, because of course there was no such thing as history yet . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Back then, it wasn’t so important to be a good person, especially when no one was watching. Or at least, it wasn’t so important to everyone.’
‘Hasina,’ Jane remarked, although it was probably too obvious to require saying out loud.
But Penelope nodded amiably, her lips pursed and her eyes far away. ‘At first, she wanted to live forever because she thought that the last sister living would inherit their mother’s full power and have it all to herself. They didn’t know back then that magic was a part of the air and the earth and the fire in the human heart. It goes back into those things when a witch’s flesh ceases to hold it, and from those things it is born into every new witch. Fewer witches now, so more in the air. You pull it down like a string into your head, then down past your throat to your mouth, and move it into the earth below where it becomes air again.’
She raised one pencilled black eyebrow hopefully, but even though that had actually made a little bit of sense to Jane, she shook her head stubbornly. ‘Aditi.’
Penelope sighed. ‘When their first children were born, Hasina began to realize that she had misunderstood the nature of their gift. Their daughters were just as strong as they were, but they grew no weaker. Ambika’s power had been too great to be contained even in seven powerful vessels, or perhaps there had been power beyond Ambika’s in the world even after she had claimed hers. Either way, her grandchildren had magic, too, and Hasina realized that she could not simply wait for more to spontaneously come to her. Her inheritance was all that she had a right to, unless she staked a claim to more.’
‘By killing a witch.’ Jane’s own soul recoiled from such a horrible thought – as if killing weren’t bad enough, the only witches in the world back then had been Hasina’s closest relatives.
‘Jyoti.’ Penelope picked up the chunk of jasper, idly passing it from hand to hand. Her gaze followed it closely, but Jane knew that her mind was thousands of years away. She remembered that Emer had guessed Jyoti was Penelope’s and the Dalcacus’ common ancestress. Does she take it personally, since the dead are so real for her? Do old crimes feel recent? But it felt too intrusive to ask, so Jane just waited.
‘She was a troublemaker, and at first the others believed that she had come to some sort of bad end on her own. But there were rumors and whispers and suspicions, and finally Sumitra performed a powerful magic that allowed her to walk in the land of the dead. She found her sister and spoke with her, and then Hasina could no longer hide in plain sight. Amunet joined her happily; she loved any opportunity to have something that the others didn’t. But when she discovered that Hasina still only had what the rest of them had, the two quarreled.’
‘Wait,’ Jane interrupted. ‘What do you mean about not having anything else? She had killed a witch, hadn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ Penelope admitted, ‘but Jyoti was only the second witch ever to die. Her power flowed back into the air, and Hasina gained nothing. It was only after, as she battled with Amunet, that she remembered the way that their mother had breathed her last bequest into seven silver knives, one of which Hasina kept with her always. It was her most prized possession, and when she stabbed her sister with it she quickly pulled the blade back out and pressed it to Amunet’s lips while she died.’
‘And from then on, witches could steal each other’s magic,’ Jane recited dully; how much simpler would life have been if that accidental knowledge had died with Ambika’s daughters.
‘From then on, they have done so. Hasina more than any of them, of course, but do not think of the others as innocent lambs. In fact, their next move was to take Hasina’s daughter as hostage. Most of them wanted to use her as a lure, so that Hasina would meet with them to discuss terms and the four remaining sisters would kill her. But your Aditi refused. She said that magic was too new to the world for everyone to understand how to use it wisely, and she insisted that Hasina should be allowed the chance to mend her ways. She spoke for three days, and at the end they sent a messenger to Hasina saying that they would slit the little girl’s throat if Hasina did not return her stolen power and go into exile.’
Jane sighed; it was an almost depressingly familiar scenario. ‘But it didn’t work.’
Penelope snorted. ‘Of course not. Too much conscience, Blondie, and everyone you love dies screaming.’
Dee didn’t get a chance to scream. Neither did Gran. Did my parents, or Katrin? But Penelope had made her point all the same. ‘I have to break the cycle. I have to finally reject Aditi’s legacy and be ruthless.’
The words sounded powerful when she said them, but Penelope’s laughter was immediate and sincere. ‘That “cycle” has been broken thousands of times over the years. You think that just because you were related to someone hundreds of generations back, you are the same person? Our families are all full of good and bad witches; Hasina is the only one who never changes. After all, if you take just one more step backward, we all come from the same person. Just as much as you are Aditi’s, you are Ambika’s. And so am I: we are her own flesh and bone.’
‘ Flesh and blood,’ Jane corrected absently, echoing Malcolm’s words from earlier, then flushed as Penelope glowered at her. ‘Your way is fine; it’s just a common expression, is all.’
There was a long, tense silence, and in it Jane’s mind replayed the two phrases over and over, gaining speed until they jumbled together in a cascade of meaningless syllables. Flesh and blood. Flesh and bone.
‘We will go back to the circle now,’ Penelope told her stiffly. Her dignity was clearly wounded, but suddenly Jane’s brain was far too full for her to care.
‘We won’t,’ she corrected abruptly, her heart starting to race. Was it possible that magic could flow through loopholes? Of course it is, her magic hummed in her ears, pulsing like a second heartbeat. The spell is just a shape; the power is the power. The only thing that matters is having it.
Pene
lope cocked her head, her eyes nothing but frosty blue slits behind her glasses. But she seemed to sense some of the revolution going on inside of Jane, because she said nothing, waiting.
‘Get everyone,’ Jane said finally, when she was sure. ‘Get everyone in the kitchen now, and start getting yourself ready. We’re going to do some magic. All of us.’
Chapter Twenty-eight
JANE COUNTED SIX pairs of eyes riveted on her face and searched herself for any sense of nervousness or stage fright. But there was nothing but a cold, hard certainty. The Montagues stood in the kitchen, ranged like a rather peculiar army on the far side of the countertop, with Penelope hovering between them and Jane. ‘We’re going to raise the dead,’ she told the waiting assembly flatly, not bothering to try to decipher the various expressions that crossed their faces. ‘We’re going to raise Ambika, and she is going to come and take her daughter back to the grave where she belongs.’
There was a murmur of sound at that: a rush of whispers and mumbles that never quite blossomed into outright protests, although their intent was clear enough.
‘We can’t do that, Jane,’ Maeve said finally, so quietly that Jane wondered if her friend feared for her sanity. ‘You know we’d need something of hers, or people who knew her, or—’
‘I know.’ Penelope was looking at her a little too shrewdly now, so Jane kept her focus on the rest of them instead. ‘Emer, I think everything else that we need should already be in the house, right? And we still have a couple of hours. I was thinking you could set up in the sunroom once we’re done here; if you move the furniture, we should be able to make a respectable circle.’ Jane looked pointedly at Harris, who flinched a little under her intensity. ‘You too, please. I’m going to need everyone on this; it’ll take all our power and concentration together. She’s been dead a long time; it wouldn’t be easy no matter what we had of hers.’
‘But we don’t have anything of hers,’ Leah half whined. For a moment Jane thought that the girl might actually stomp her foot, but somehow she restrained herself. ‘You can’t just wave away the main ingredient like it doesn’t matter.’
‘Jane,’ Charlotte said in a more conciliatory tone, ‘I’ll be happy to help you try whatever you’d like, but with all the power between us we couldn’t call up so much as a shade of Ambika. Not enough to speak to us, even, or tell us what to do. I’d hate to see you rest your hopes on a séance that won’t even have its guest of honor present. Surely there’s something else we can do to help you better.’
‘This is it,’ Jane insisted, ‘and I’m not talking about a séance. Your mother told me that, with a person’s bones, someone like Penelope – a real adept – could call someone back into this world almost as fully as before they left it. Nothing less than that will help us, so that’s what we’re going to do.’
Harris bit his lip and dropped his eyes toward the floor, but he didn’t have to say anything for Jane to guess that he assumed the worst. He thought that she had cracked under the pressure and lost her mind, or that this was some elaborate plot for her to escape her fatal appointment with Annette. She could certainly imagine how incoherent she must sound at the moment, but the idea of explaining in explicit detail might literally make her sick.
‘With the bones,’ Penelope repeated, her voice like an icy gust rattling the windows. ‘With enough magic you can do anything, but even you don’t have that much, Blondie.’
Jane inhaled, then forced all the air out of her lungs. This was the hard part, but she knew it would only get harder if she stalled. She half raised a hand and then lowered it, resting it on the handle of an eight-inch chef’s knife of the type that Dee had especially favoured. Still sheathed in its butcher block, the knife felt awkward and unwieldy, but she knew how sharp it must be.
‘Penelope very kindly reminded me that all of us here are part of the shadow that Ambika cast across the world. We are a part of her, and she is still a part of us. We are’—she drew the knife—‘her flesh and bone.’
Maeve started forward, but her cousin was between her and the end of the counter and there was a confused pileup as she tried to get by. In those few seconds, Jane spread her left hand out on the cool granite countertop, the knife still held loosely in her right. Pinky, ring, middle, pinky, middle, pinky – but there was only one option that wouldn’t require her to contort her hand and maybe miss her strike, and if she waited another second she would lose her nerve. With a flash and a chorus of screams that she was only pretty sure weren’t her own, Jane brought the blade of the knife down in a shining arc onto the counter. When she lifted her hands again, the knife and one finger – her own left index finger – remained on the stone.
It felt cold at first, but not quite numb: more of an angry cold, like frozen steel against her bare skin. Then came the heat, searing up her hand and into her arm, and black spots flowered in her vision. She could feel herself beginning to sway a little, blood and red hair swimming in a confusing sea around her, but she couldn’t afford to go under; not now.
One, two, three, four. Four fingers, four corners, four directions. Four, three, two, one. The black spots receded a little, and Jane counted her breaths, from one to four and back again, and concentrated on not crying. She set her jaw and held her body poker straight, and when some of the shapes around her resolved, she saw that Maeve was pressing a crimson tea towel to her maimed hand.
With her good hand she picked up the finger from the counter, trying not to see it too clearly. It had been sliced cleanly off just above the knuckle, leaving three progressively smaller pieces of priceless finger bone in an unfortunately gruesome sheath of flesh. ‘Harris,’ she called hoarsely, and the commotion around her froze solid.
It was only five pairs of eyes on hers now – Maeve’s head was bent attentively over her injured hand – and the faces they stared out from were definitely paler than they had been before. Even Penelope looked shaken behind her thick glasses: she clutched at a few of the chunky necklaces hanging across her impressive bosom as if they might ward off Jane’s sudden madness.
Careful not to show the slightest sign of her absolute revulsion, Jane casually tossed the severed finger at Harris. He blanched even more and flinched again, but to his credit he caught it out of the air and didn’t let it drop. ‘Boil that,’ she told him in a reasonable approximation of her own normal tone of voice. ‘Boil it until it’s only bones; I don’t want to look at it. Penelope, tell everyone else how to set up whatever we need to call on Ambika. And, everyone else . . . do it. Right the hell now.’
She pressed her own right hand against the tea towel, pulling it gently away from Maeve so that she would know that Jane’s orders applied to her as well. It was warm and a little sticky, and bile rose in Jane’s throat. But there was nothing to do but keep it pressed to her bleeding knuckle and wait, while her six allies scattered in every direction to raise the dead.
Chapter Twenty-nine
JANE COULD TELL as soon as she entered the mansion that Annette had prepared it for battle. There was no one in the gold-and-marble entryway, and the elevator stood open, waiting, as it had never been that she could remember. Since Annette could have tried to kill her on the street or just inside the front door, Jane understood that Hasina’s need for correctness and propriety had forced her hand once again: there would be a real fight.
She stepped into the elevator, and its doors slid silently closed behind her. There was a strange tingling in her limbs, and especially in her wounded hand, where it became confused with the painful throbbing that lingered despite Leah’s best healing efforts. Ambika, she thought, bouncing on the balls of her toes, although of course it wasn’t quite. Even with their combined power and Jane’s sacrificed bones, Penelope had warned her that they wouldn’t be able to bind their common ancestress to the mortal plane for long. It would do her no good if Ambika returned to her final rest too soon, so Jane had to risk calling her too late. She slipped her right hand around the bulky silver amulet that Penelope had gi
ven her, fingering the strange dark stone at its centre, counting the floors as the elevator rose.
When its doors slid open again, Jane was thoroughly unsurprised to see the blackened floor and soot-stained windows of the eighth-floor atrium. At the far end, where Lynne had lurked before, she could clearly make out Annette’s silhouette against the mingled light from the streetlamps below and the full moon above. Partway along the side wall between them hovered a huge, indecisive shape that could only be her brother Charles. Jane stepped forward, pulling her magic around her like a shroud.
It was only then that she saw the third shape beside Charles, against the windows where Dee had been bound during her last moments of life. Her magic was so primed and ready that as soon as she wished to see it better, light flared through the atrium: cool, steady, and without any apparent source. What it showed her made her heart sink.
Annette stood at the far side of the huge room, immaculately dressed in vintage white Chanel with her hair pulled back so that only a few dark-gold waves framed her face. Charles stood vigilantly about halfway between them, looking much the same as Jane remembered him: unkempt, his slack face wearing a permanent expression of confusion and resentment. And behind him was the third Doran sibling, apparently unconscious and bound by something glowing and greenish to a splintered window frame.
Of course he didn’t just leave. By refusing Malcolm’s offer of help, Jane realized now, she had practically guaranteed that he would try some kind of doomed attack on his own. In the cool light of her magic it looked as though his attempt on his sister’s life had ended painfully: his mouth and one eye were swollen grotesquely, and she could only guess at the injuries she couldn’t see. She couldn’t bear to think about what he must have been through – and there was more to come. His well-intentioned but hopeless attack had put him in the middle of what was about to be an ugly battle. Her nails bit into her palms at the thought that he could be a casualty of the coming fight. I’ll fix this, she thought at him, willing him to hear her somehow. Just hold on, and I’ll send her where she can never hurt you again.
The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) Page 19
