‘It would probably help,’ Jane agreed, recalling the hundreds of angry phone calls that Lynne Doran had managed to cram into each day of planning Jane’s own wedding.
‘Or maybe I’ll travel for a while, first,’ Maeve mused on. ‘I could come stay with you in Paris for a while, or I could rent a place in Florence and make you come hang out with me.’
‘That sounds nice.’ It was true, Jane realized: Paris sounded nice, and so did Florence, and so did New York. They all sounded perfectly fine . . . even if none of them sounded like home. I guess I’ll have to start from scratch, she thought.
After a while, the funeral began to break up, and the Montagues took that as their cue to do the same with their picnic. ‘I’ll stay for a bit,’ Jane insisted, kissing each of them on the cheek and resisting the multitude of invitations that they seemed to be inventing on the spot to keep her occupied. ‘I’d like a little time to say goodbye once the crowd is gone.’
But her friends were much more efficient about their departure than the more ‘official’ mourners seemed inclined to be. A good ten minutes after Emer had blown one last kiss over her shoulder, Jane was still standing under the tree, watching Annette accept condolences from a seemingly endless line of well-dressed strangers. It must have felt so strange, Jane reflected, to someone who had grown up believing that she didn’t belong to anyone’s family.
‘And now she has all of Manhattan clamouring to be part of hers,’ she muttered to herself. It was only to be expected, of course: one of the city’s richest and most powerful families had been decimated almost overnight, and its heiress was a virtual unknown. Nothing in Annette’s childhood had prepared her for the coming onslaught, and Jane wondered how she would fare. Malcolm would have stepped in to help her, even after everything, Jane thought wistfully. He would have cared more about what she needed than about what she had earned.
‘Part of her what?’ a strangely accented voice asked curiously from the other side of her maple tree, and Jane jumped for the second time that afternoon.
She crooked her head around the grey-brown bark to see Penelope Lotuma, dressed all in black, with chunky jewellery dripping from every part of her body in honour of the occasion. ‘I was just thinking out loud,’ Jane told her, reluctant to share the specifics of her thoughts. Although Penelope had more than come through, Jane would never feel as comfortable and open with her as she did with the Montagues. Something about Penelope’s appraising, ice-chip eyes kept her instinctively at a distance. ‘I thought you’d be gone by now.’
Penelope gave her a sidelong glance from around the tree, her light blue eyes unfathomable. ‘I find myself in a very unusual position, Blondie. I’ve got a flight in a few hours, but I did want to come talk to you, first.’
‘I really appreciate the help you gave us,’ Jane temporized. ‘It made all the difference, having you here. I know Malcolm didn’t get a chance to see that before he . . . well. I hope that he knows, anyway.’ Something caught in her throat, and she swallowed hard.
Penelope’s fingers moved absently to the necklace of hers that had always piqued Jane’s curiosity: a thin, dark chain studded with clear glass bubbles. Her hands travelled to it at times that Jane felt fairly sure were significant, but she hadn’t been able to sort out a pattern yet. ‘You could ask him,’ the little witch pointed out archly. ‘I think you know how, by now.’
‘Power makes a lot of things easier,’ Jane agreed, but she knew she didn’t need to add that she wouldn’t be raising Malcolm from the dead. He deserved peace, and she would be strong enough to give it to him.
Penelope, however, clicked her tongue disapprovingly. ‘I did expect you to try, especially once that pretty toy he gave you failed to pick up his scent. I never do get used to the moral ones. So I suppose I must tell you, then: if you had gone looking for your dead man, you would never have found him. He’s one of mine now.’ She spun one of the little glass bubbles around on its chain, and Jane felt her eyes go wide in horror.
‘Malcolm,’ she gasped. ‘He’s . . . in there? That’s what he offered you?’
‘They keep me safe,’ Penelope said lovingly, stroking the dark chain. ‘They come to no harm here, although they can’t move on, of course, either. They keep unfriendly eyes from me and can fuel my power far beyond what I was born with, if I need it. Your man was willing to make that trade just to gamble on you having a better chance.’
Jane’s breath caught in her throat. His life really is over, then – he doesn’t even get to start again in the next one. Emer and Charlotte had been wrong: Malcolm wasn’t a free soul, basking in the memory of Jane’s love. He had traded that future away. Her eyes flickered to the massive polished-wood coffin, barely visible beneath a mountain of roses in all colours. They’ll lower it and he’ll be ... She shuddered violently, suddenly freezing even in the early-summer warmth.
‘I’m getting to the nicer part,’ Penelope said dryly. ‘I have all these souls, you see, because for my entire lifetime it has been rather dangerous to be a witch. In addition to all the normal squabbling and backstabbing that you might expect, there was something, someone out there killing us off one by one, decade after decade. And now there isn’t.’
‘Now there isn’t,’ Jane agreed mindlessly. Penelope shot her an exasperated look.
‘So I find myself feeling something that I have never felt before, not once. I think you might call it “indebted.” ’
‘Or “grateful”?’ Jane guessed, raising an inquisitive eyebrow. Whatever she had been expecting from Penelope, that wasn’t it.
The strange woman laughed. ‘Gratitude is foolishness. However, the fact remains that I obtained your lover’s soul to protect myself from the very thing you used my services to go out and kill. Maybe it turns out now that I don’t need quite so many souls to stay safe.’
Belatedly, Jane remembered the strange glowing thing that had left Malcolm’s body after Annette had cut him down. She hadn’t thought about it until now, but it was clear: she had watched his soul fly toward Penelope’s bauble. ‘Not quite?’
Penelope smiled, twisting the glass between her short, dark fingers. ‘I could spare one. If you want it.’
‘If I—’ Was she supposed to start a necklace of her own? Keep Malcolm’s soul on a shelf somewhere? The thought made her stomach churn sickly; a soul was no ornament. And even Penelope – who wore them herself – must know that. ‘You mean, if I want him to move on, into the afterlife. If I want you to let him go.’
‘That’s not what happens if I break the glass.’ Penelope fell silent again, but this time Jane was determined to wait her out. After a few moments, the strange witch went on. ‘He died, and he left his body. A place was waiting in the Summerlands, a path laid out for him, but he signed a contract and so he turned a different way. That path is only offered once in a lifetime, so to see it again he’ll have to die again.’
Jane couldn’t contain her impatience anymore. ‘To die again he’d have to live again, and souls are born into new bodies from the Summerlands, Emer says. So what, exactly, are you offering me?’
‘The most that I can, Blondie. I open this, and your man finds a body. Not a new one, mind you: one that’s on the verge of losing its own soul. One that fits him, more or less; one that suits his soul. But I can’t guarantee that he’ll be half as handsome as he was the first time around. I don’t know if that makes a difference to you.’
‘Of course it doesn’t,’ Jane snapped. ‘But he’ll be . . . him?’
‘I doubt he’ll remember much – at least at first.’ Penelope shrugged. ‘Bits of his last mortal self may still be attached to the soul, though. Some things might come back with time, or you could tell him if you want. I don’t do this often enough to say for sure.’
‘I could tell him,’ Jane whispered, her gaze drifting to some point far away as her hand lifted to her stomach of its own accord. Annette had gotten yet another chance to turn her life around; didn’t Malcolm deserve at least as much? If
he could be the person he might have been all along, without his mother’s malevolent influence . . . and if Jane could be there to see it . . . ‘But how would I know who he was, then? If he’s in some different body?’
Penelope smiled and twisted the glass bubble in an odd motion that Jane couldn’t quite follow. As it came loose from the chain, Jane saw that it was set into an octagon of the same kind of dark metal that the chain was made of. It almost looked like a miniature crystal ball. Before she could ask anything else, Penelope’s brown fingers closed over the glass, and it shattered between them.
In spite of herself, Jane cried out, drawing some curious looks from the nearest cluster of mourners. She quickly pulled a tissue out of her purse and held it over her face, trying to look funeral appropriate, and they turned back to their hushed conversation. When she peered out from behind her tissue again, Penelope was holding the little octagon out to her around the tree trunk.
‘This will help,’ the witch told her, dropping it into the hand that Jane numbly extended. ‘It will miss its former occupant, and it will pull toward him like a magnet. If you want to find him, then hold it in your hand and let it lead you. Good luck, Blondie.’
Penelope stalked away across the grass, hitching her black skirts up a little to keep them from the dew. Jane stared after the peculiar woman for a moment, then let her eyes return to the metal octagon in her hand.
A lively debate raged in her head, but her heart knew that it was all just noise. Her free hand hovered protectively over her stomach again, telling her everything that she needed to know about what had to happen next. The trinket was pulling ever so slightly west, and so west she would go. She would find Malcolm and tell him about their past, and then they would tell each other about their future.
The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) Page 22
