‘Perhaps we could keep this between the two of us,’ Jane suggested out loud, projecting her voice as clearly as she could across the burned floor. She gestured toward Annette’s two brothers; Malcolm stirred a little and Charles waved shyly at her. ‘This is no place for either of them.’
‘That’s what I said,’ Annette snapped, her hands clenching and unclenching as if she weren’t even aware of the motion. ‘I told you to come alone. I made it very clear.’
Jane bit her lip, feeling the pulse of the amulet against her breastbone. ‘I did,’ she argued, and it was true. Technically, her dead ancestress hadn’t arrived yet.
Annette took a couple of short, angry strides forward, until Jane could clearly make out the rage that twisted her features. ‘Then what,’ she practically shrieked, ‘is he doing here?’
She whipped one hand toward Malcolm, her manicured nail pointing straight for his heart. Jane opened her mouth to explain the mistake: she hadn’t known a thing about his plan and would have stopped him if she had. But before she could make a sound, Annette’s nail made a strange back-and-forth slashing motion in the air, and the words died in Jane’s throat as crimson blood began to seep from fresh wounds across Malcolm’s throat and chest.
He woke up then, and for a brief, strange moment their eyes met. ‘Jane,’ he mouthed, and his battered face relaxed into a smile before his eyes closed again.
No. She wanted to scream, to run to him, to throw her body across his and weep for days. But he was already gone; she could see him leaving. Something in him glowed against the sourceless light that filled the atrium: a white flash that moved through it. It flowed from his limp body to seep through the cracked windowpane and out into the night air beyond. She could actually see the light of his soul as it left, and even through her pain and shock and regret, it filled her with wonder.
‘You can’t imagine how boring this sort of pettiness has become,’ Hasina sneered. To Jane, her voice sounded like it was coming from the end of a long tunnel. ‘Love, betrayal, loss. It’s all terrifically shocking – the first three hundred times. Now it’s utterly dull. You, on the other hand, are a considerably rarer find. Generations of magic passed down through an unbroken bloodline, and magic on the other side. My dear, you’re one of a kind.’
‘Just me and Annette,’ Jane guessed. Was the girl even in there? It had seemed that way when she had allowed herself to show emotion over Malcolm, but now Hasina’s lens-like eyes betrayed no sign of her. She’s already forgotten him. Jane stole a quick glance toward the empty, slumped body still bound to the window frame, but she couldn’t bear to look at it for long.
‘Your child with my line would have been a miracle,’ Hasina went on. ‘A child from the lines of Anila, Aditi, and me . . . The entire world would have been at my feet, once I was in a body like that.’
‘The world is better off.’ Jane raised her right hand to her chest in a convulsive movement, finding the silver amulet and closing her fingers around it. Come to me, she thought: it was nearly a prayer. Come now.
The tingling in her limbs grew stronger, and in a moment it was matched by a humming from the floor beneath her feet and the air itself. Charles backed instinctively toward the wall until his body almost touched his brother’s lifeless one, but Hasina didn’t seem to feel the shift of the world around them yet. ‘Take that out of here,’ she ordered crisply, waving her hand again so that the glowing bonds holding Malcolm to the wall evaporated.
His body slumped forward, and Charles half caught it across one meaty arm. He stared into Malcolm’s beaten face uncertainly, examining each feature with, Jane thought, an expression of hope. My lover; his brother. His friend, when he had so few. ‘Take him out of here,’ she echoed gently, and Charles’s muddy brown eyes swung toward hers. ‘Take him and yourself out of this house, and don’t come back.’
Hasina made an angry retort, Jane knew from watching her face, but she couldn’t hear a word over the magic that had grown to a roar in her ears. Charles didn’t seem to hear it, either, because without a backward glance he lifted Malcolm’s bulk carefully in his arms and shambled toward the elevator.
Go quickly, Jane thought after him. Something else is coming.
Annette finally seemed to sense it, too, and Jane was mildly surprised to see tongues of living flame arc across the space between them, seeking Jane’s flesh with their angry heat. But each one died out before it reached her, drowning in the cool light that filled the room before they could even reach the shield of her magic.
Then Jane blinked, and when she opened her eyes again Annette wasn’t alone. Inside her somehow, but much larger, was the shape of another woman. It was hard to make out her features, because the light wasn’t quite right and she was, technically, invisible, but Jane got the impression of a long, flat nose, high, proud cheekbones, and a floodlike spill of coarse dark hair. Hasina.
Annette’s dark pools of eyes widened in sudden fear, and Jane knew without looking that a similar apparition must now be surrounding and emanating from her own body.
‘Ambika,’ she whispered, feeling the first witch’s phenomenal energy flowing through and around her own, ‘please. Take your daughter home.’
She felt the answer deep in her bones, the ones that she shared with Ambika. The ghostly presence of Hasina was a shock, a profound wrongness, a tear across the fabric of the world. She did not belong there, and the first witch’s mind joined with Jane’s in wholehearted agreement. It was long past time for Hasina to die.
Annette’s flames ripped through the floor this time, throwing up splinters of already-burnt wood as they raced toward Jane’s feet. She dove toward the windows, feeling the heat against her legs but narrowly missing being burned. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, Jane?’ the girl cried, and this time when she spoke Jane could hear two distinct voices blended into one.
Jane lashed out in return before she had even formed a clear idea in her mind of what form her magic should take – sloppy, Dee would have called it. But Ambika’s ghostly fingers trailed through the magic just as it left Jane’s own, turning it into a river of crackling electricity that made her hair stand on end. Hasina blocked the unnatural flood of lightning with a hastily constructed wall of darkness, but Jane felt a grim sort of satisfaction when it fell again and she saw that her enemy’s face-framing tendrils had gone flat and frizzy. ‘You don’t belong here,’ she told the shadow behind, above, within Annette. ‘You know it, I know it, and the woman who gave you life and magic knows it, too. Your descendants may have welcomed you in, but the rest of us want you gone.’
Then something glowed between Hasina’s shadowy hands, and Jane had no time to think about anything anymore except for parrying and returning violent volleys of magic. Snakes boiled out of the ground around her feet, and a sudden tornado slammed Annette back against the windows behind her, shattering one of them into a huge spiderweb of crystalline cracks. Ambika’s magic flowed through the jasper stone in one of the hidden pockets of Jane’s full skirt, and then with a pulse that threatened to tear her apart, every last one of the floor-to-ceiling windows around the room exploded outward. Annette’s body was thrown to the floor by the blast, but as she turned to stand back up Jane saw Hasina’s arm curl out, stretching impossibly far out into the empty night air. Jane ducked instinctively as the arm whipped back toward her, realizing only after she had that the air where her head had just been was now filled with hundreds of flying shards of broken window glass.
‘My mother’s been in the ground a long time,’ Hasina hissed as the glass sliced through the air. ‘I’ve used that time to learn a few tricks.’
A few of the razor-sharp edges caught the back of Jane’s arm and shoulder, and for the second time that day she felt her own warm blood flowing freely across her skin. I should soak the dress right away, she thought absurdly, her head spinning for a moment even after the motion of her body had stopped. In the silence that followed, she heard Ambika’s voice murmuring in her ear. She
couldn’t understand the words – the language Ambika spoke had been dead for thousands of years. But the message seemed to be flowing into Jane’s own mind, and she pressed her palms flat against the charred floor, blocking her missing finger out of her vision as she pooled her magic into the remaining nine.
Ripples ran away across the floor as if it had suddenly been made into water. Above Jane’s head, Ambika countered some attack of Hasina’s; whatever it was scorched the hairs on the back of Jane’s neck. Then the ripples reached Annette, and she sank up – or down – to her rib cage in the liquefied floorboards before Ambika signaled to Jane to lift her hands away and stop the magic.
The floor resolidified instantly, trapping Annette with her arms at her sides and nothing below her chest visible at all. Gotcha, Jane thought wildly, struggling to her feet and pressing her hand experimentally against the sliced skin behind her shoulder. Both responses came simultaneously: along with Ambika’s warning whisper, the entire house began to shake beneath her.
Annette’s eyes had gone wide and round, two deep pools of panic. Jane tried to focus her magic into the shape of a net, or chains like the glowing ones that had held Malcolm against the window. But she wasn’t entirely sure how that was supposed to work, and Ambika’s will was pulling her spell in a different direction that she didn’t understand at all, and then the floor around Annette was breaking apart like a frozen pond at the end of winter. Jane’s magic went wide and wild, careening through the atrium like the wind that had begun to twist through the blown-out windows and stirring Annette’s limp tendrils of hair. A wickedly proud smile turned the trapped witch’s full lips upward, and in an instant she was no longer trapped.
Jane screamed out in frustration, but it did nothing to change the gaping, empty hole in the floor where Annette had worked her way free to the level below. Ambika knew of something that might, though, and Jane obediently lifted her arms to the sky, calling on the guardian of the Watchtower of the West, just as Dee had once taught her, to summon their element to find her enemy. Water flowed from nowhere into the hole in the floor, first a lively stream and then a raging river of it. It funnelled through the floorboards, spinning into a whirlpool before vanishing downward to flood the room below.
As Jane watched, a prickling in the back of her neck informed her that her half-present ancestress expected to see the water returning back up through the splintered hole, but more and more of it just kept pouring in. It’s not working, she realized. Hasina is getting rid of it somehow.
The strip of sky outside the broken windows tipped and swayed sickeningly, and Jane struggled to remain standing. Aside from the attic, she was at the highest point of the looming mansion, with a possessed and furious witch somewhere out of sight below her – not an ideal position. With the house shuddering all the way down to its foundation, the elevator was out; so she turned toward the door to the back staircase. But the floor pitched and rolled like the deck of a ship, and Jane fell hard to her knees. The broken place where Annette had dropped to the floor below widened, and a crack ran across the boards, pointing toward Jane with a rapidly growing finger of blackness. She froze for a moment, stuck between her instinct to roll away and Ambika’s transmitted instruction to stand and run. In that moment of hesitation, the floor opened up the rest of the way and swallowed her.
Darkness tumbled end over end with faint, distant lights, and then there was a shower of stars as Jane landed, back-first, on a pile of burnt wood on top of an embroidered bedspread. A cloud of dust and soot exploded up into the air around her, making it impossible to see if Annette was nearby. No water, though. She had no earthly idea where it had all gone, and her back ached.
The four-poster bed caught fire all at once, the splinters around her wicking it closer like kindling. Through the mounting flames Jane could see Hasina’s face, but not Annette’s. Was that even possible? She threw a bolt of crackling energy at Hasina, but it passed through her without causing her to even blink. Then something heavy and hard struck Jane across her back, and she fell forward, her hair tumbling down on either side of her face to get singed at its ends.
Hasina was in front of her, she realized slowly, but Annette was behind her.
Jane twisted herself backward off the bed, pushing her magic out before her to form a shield. Like a wrenching in a phantom limb, she felt Ambika spin the other way, toward her wayward daughter. Annette was waiting for Jane, a board in her hands and a strange, broken vacancy in her eyes.
‘You took her.’ Her voice was a shocked rasp, and her chest heaved massively under her stained white jacket. ‘My family, my inheritance – Hasina was all of it. How could you make her leave me now?’
Jane reached instinctively into the plunging neckline of her dress and felt for the rune-covered handle of Lynne’s athame. She tugged at it and it slid free immediately, springing into the dusty, dry air with a life of its own. The mirrorlike surface of its slim blade reflected the strange light of the ghosts and flames with an enthusiasm all its own.
Then the floor shook beneath them again, and both women turned instinctively toward the ghosts on the far side of the burning bed. Any semblance of humanity was gone from the two unearthly figures, who had somehow wrapped themselves around and even through each other, twisting and distorting their features until they were thoroughly unrecognizable.
Jane heard a clatter from Annette’s direction and spun back just in time. The girl had finally noticed Lynne’s athame. She had dropped her splintered board and was advancing warily, her dark eyes fixed on the humming blade.
‘That’s mine,’ she warned, her voice rough.
‘It’s mine,’ Jane corrected sharply. She felt nearly as battered as Annette sounded, but there was no way she would show it now. ‘I won it fair and square.’
At that, Annette lunged at Jane, raking the arm that held the athame with her sharp fingernails and the four fiery trails of magic that followed them. Jane spun away, pressing her other hand to her stinging arm.
When she turned back, Jane felt a fury she had never experienced in her entire life. It consumed her like Annette’s flames. She had tried so hard to save Annette, to see past her damaged exterior to some kind of salvageable core, but it wasn’t there. She was empty inside. She wanted to be possessed by some immortal lunatic – and she had killed Malcolm. No more. Not another second more. Jane whispered a word that she had heard in Ambika’s mind, focusing her power through it. It felt something like a verbal prism, breaking her magic into pieces that were each still whole, living lines. Some of them arced up, and some shot down through the floor that was shaking and rocking more than ever now. But most of them surrounded Annette, binding her arms to her sides and cramming her magic back below the surface of her skin.
With her magic otherwise occupied and the walls starting to crumble around her ears, Jane did the first thing that came to mind: she dropped the athame to the floor, clenched her five right fingers into a tight fist, and smashed it into Annette’s nose. The witch’s dark-blond head snapped back, blood spurted over her once-white suit, and there was a wrenching scream that seemed to come from all around Jane at once. Then Hasina and Ambika disappeared, and then the entire house did the same.
Chapter Thirty
WHEN JANE’S EYELIDS fluttered open, she was confused to find herself staring at the sky. There were no stars – there was far too much glare from the city’s billions of lights for that – but the slim icicle of the moon hung in the dark-blue haze almost directly above her. The otherwise-empty blue was bounded on three sides by the tall outlines of buildings, looming a little too far above her head to match her last memories. I think I fell, she thought cautiously. How far did I fall?
She tentatively felt the dusty, broken surface around her, noticing the absence of her left forefinger with an unpleasant flicker of surprise. For a moment she remembered the way she had pushed her tongue into the spaces left by her baby teeth, when she was a child. There was another gaping loss that she would need to face,
she knew, but the pain from that would hurt far worse than her finger, so she forced it aside.
Walls rose on three sides of her: two stone and one brick with marble trim at its edges. On the fourth side, inexplicably, was a wide city street, divided down the centre by a line of green-clad trees. A yellow cab glided silently by, flanked by a couple of nondescript black sedans and followed a moment later by a dingy white van. It was Park Avenue; she was sure of it. But then where was the house she had just been standing in?
She heaved herself up to a sitting position with her hands, breathing shallowly and trying to take in each new piece of information at once. The air around her was swimming with particles of dust and soot; eddies of them caught the orange light from the streetlamps and glowed like schools of tiny tropical fish. The street and the smooth white sidewalk were at least a story below her – ten feet, she estimated, or maybe a little more. But the uneven and shifting surface below her was the most indecipherable thing of all.
Then her head began to clear a little, and all those little details spun like one of the dust currents until it made an entire picture. We knocked the house down. I’m still in it; it’s just not here. The strange new surface around her looked like all the photos she had ever seen of demolished buildings. It had just been hard to recognize it at first from her unusual perspective: she was sitting right on top of a pile of rubble, which was all that remained of 665 Park Avenue.
The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) Page 20
