The Dark Glamour (9 page)

Chapter Fourteen

J
ane kept her oversize sunglasses on until she reached the door of her Greenwich Village apartment. When her retinas were assaulted by the sun streaming through the living room’s massive wall of windows, she wished that she had kept them on, but she reminded herself that she had earned every stab and throb of her hangover and soldiered on.

“J— Ella!” Dee squealed happily, poking her head out from the kitchen. Jane winced at the noise, but the smells wafting through the doorway made her cautiously optimistic about her ability to keep food down.

“You will not
believe
the day I had yesterday,” she told Dee, keeping her own voice intentionally soft. “But before I go there, is there coffee? Mine’s gone.” She waved her empty Starbucks cup pointedly: the venti Americano had lasted her about two crosstown blocks in traffic. “Next time I’m
so
just taking the subway. But changing trains in these shoes—have you
seen
these shoes? They’re—”

She eventually stopped rambling when she realized that Dee was waving frantic complex signals at her with one hand: the hand, Jane realized, that was hidden from the rest of the kitchen by the doorframe. “Hi, Ella,” Dee supplied in the awkward sudden silence, her throaty voice as cheerful as possible while pointedly emphasizing Jane’s cover name.

“Hi,” Jane began again. “Um . . . coffee?”

“We were just having some. There’s toast, too, which you look like you could use.”

We?
Jane frowned a little, then more as the wrinkling made her headache even worse. “Hi, Harris.” She sighed as she rounded the corner to find him sitting at the spindly kitchen table.
Duh.

He waved a slice of bacon at her cheerfully, his mouth already full of what looked like French toast. He wore jeans and a white V-neck tee that had a couple of pinpoint holes in it from frequent laundering. His usually sparkling green eyes were still a little puffy and bleary.
He slept here,
she realized. He looked like a natural part of the apartment, as if he were completely comfortable there.
Didn’t take him long to make himself at home,
she thought shrewishly, then grimaced at her own meanness.

Dee pressed a mug of black coffee into her hand and Jane finished nearly half of it in one scalding swallow. “Long night?” Harris asked amiably, having finally finished chewing.

“Apparently those are going around,” Jane replied loftily. Under his light dusting of freckles, Harris blushed.
Leave it alone,
Jane told herself, but part of her was quietly gleeful at his embarrassment.

“Harris took me out to celebrate my first day of work,” Dee inserted between them, not looking embarrassed in the slightest, and this time her pointed emphasis was on Harris’s name. “Ella, have you ever been to Masa Bar? It blew my mind. And then, of course, we went and finished the job with tequila.”

“I’m so sorry I had to miss it,” Jane told her, more or less sincerely. Even if it stung a little to watch Dee and Harris together, she knew she should be there for her friend. At the very least, she should
want
to. “My work ran really, really late.”

“Clearly,” Dee agreed, her amber eyes raking over every wrinkle in Jane’s clothes. Jane, who had fished them off a still-sleeping André’s floor just an hour before and was painfully aware that they looked a little too “lived-in” for eight in the morning, scowled at her. Dee’s eyes came to rest on a substantial bruise that was starting to surface under the bare, dark skin of Jane’s left arm. Jane, suddenly and vividly recalling the splintering crash against André’s coffee table that had put it there during Round Three, decided to scowl at her plate instead.

Harris’s green gaze flickered back and forth between the two women, watching them like an approaching storm cloud. He stuffed two more pieces of bacon into his mouth while Jane and Dee both sulked in their opposite corners of the narrow kitchen, chewing and swallowing in record time. “I should go,” he declared abruptly, pushing his chair back and depositing his plate in the dishwasher in one elegant movement. “I just need my . . . um . . .” He flushed again, glancing at Dee but studiously avoiding Jane’s eyes.

“In front of the couch,” Dee told him, as discreetly as she could manage with Jane sitting right there.

Harris kissed her quickly on the cheek and then strode away into the living room, where he scooped a pale-green button-down shirt off the floor. He fastened it as he moved toward the door. He kept his head down, but Jane could still see his blush. When he was halfway through the door, he politely hesitated to call, “Bye, Ella, nicetoseeyou,” before pulling it shut behind him with a solid thud.

“So,” Dee said, turning a black rubber spatula over and over in her tawny, calloused hands.

“So,” Jane echoed, swirling the dregs of her coffee in the thick white mug and wishing for more.

Suddenly Dee was a flurry of tangled hair and long, golden limbs, and within seconds Jane was facing a plate piled with French toast and bacon. “So my new job is
awesome,
” Dee went on, apparently deciding to go first. “Way better than the bakery, because our clients want all kinds of things and I’m completely in charge of the desserts. More variety
and
more responsibility, and Kate—I told you about Kate, right? You never really know with start-up caterers; half of them are just bored home cooks who have no idea what they’re doing. But I can actually
learn
from this woman, and she was showing me some of her past menus and I couldn’t believe it. So then we spent all day prepping for this huge birthday thing on Wednesday, and I was watching her work and it was incredible! I guess the birthday girl has a house in Bali, and so her sister wanted a ‘tropical theme,’ so I’m sitting there doing my little pineapple custards like it’s 2002, and Kate’s like, ‘Okay, now I’m going to brine this suckling pig.’ In Manhattan; seriously.”

There was more—a lot more—but Jane tried to tune it out with her chewing. She was happy that Dee was happy, really. And Kate the Caterer sounded awesome. And, she reminded herself, Dee had had to leave her job, her apartment, and her life thanks to Jane in the first place. She had helped Jane when Jane had needed help, and she had paid a heavy price for it.
But do I have to hear every single detail of how the woman rolls her own noodles at this hour of the morning?

Jane chewed the inside of her bottom lip between bites of breakfast.
I’m jealous again,
she realized with a pang. It was certainly true that Dee had lost a lot because she had helped Jane, but Jane had lost a lot, too. And, unlike Dee, Jane still had a ton of difficult and dangerous work to do before she could hope to return to any kind of normalcy.
Meanwhile she’s got a cute boyfriend and an awesome new boss, and I’m drinking half the day and sleeping with a completely unsuitable guy I’m trying to use for access to my mortal enemy’s fortress.
It wasn’t Dee’s fault, she knew, but it wasn’t fair, either.

“So, um, do you want an ice pack or anything?”

Realizing that Dee had apparently finished the rundown of how great her own life was, Jane glanced up.
My arm,
she realized.
Good thing she can’t see my hip. After we broke that vase . . .
“I’m fine,” she said out loud, grateful for the change of topic, at least. “I met a guy.”

Dee, ignoring her refusal, wrapped a bag of frozen peas in a dishtowel and pressed it against Jane’s arm. It stung, then ached. “An enemy?” Dee guessed sympathetically.

“A means to an end,” Jane replied grimly, and told her everything she had learned about the Dorans and the Dalcascus. She sketched her plan to manipulate both families through André, drawing patterns in her maple syrup with her fork in order to avoid eye contact. She had made real progress, surely, but instead of confident, she mostly felt uncomfortable.

Dee looked concerned, but she refrained from commenting on Jane’s recent redefinition of “unsafe sex.” “Well, you have a plan,” she mused delicately, although her distaste showed in the tension of her full mouth. “Two, actually, because befriending Laura could still totally work.” Jane twisted her own mouth into a noncommittal shape. “Okay, but as long as you’re . . . involved . . . with this André guy, I guess we’d better get the most out of it. I mean, he must be newsworthy in his own right, right?”

Jane frowned. “I’d never heard of him.”

“You’d never heard of the Dorans, either,” Dee pointed out patiently, “but that doesn’t mean that the tabloids hadn’t. And if Lynne is dealing with André and his sister, then they must have something she wants but can’t just throw her weight around and take. So they must be on her level somehow, which means there’s a good chance that Page Six will be interested in what they’re up to, where they’re going, and who they’re . . . dating.”

Jane winced at the euphemism but mostly had to agree. “You think gossip columnists would be interested in me if they think there’s an ‘us’?” She felt a tingling in her biceps that spelled the beginning of numbness, and she set the bag of peas on the edge of the table. A fat brown sparrow settled on the windowsill above the sink, tapped the brick with its beak a few times, and then took off again.

“I think they’d be interested in you anyway,
Baroness,
but they’ve never heard of you before, since you didn’t exist before. And if you had a debutante ball for yourself or whatever and tried to publicize it, they’d probably have a lot of questions about your background that we can’t answer. But if you’re just
with
someone who’s already tabloid-ready on his own, you’re in the story without being the story. And it might even make the Dorans curious to meet you, which I’m sure André will be happy to help them out with.”

Jane steepled her fingers together on the table, examining the pale half-moons that stood out against the dark skin of her nail beds. “Shouldn’t you be off masterminding a coup d’état somewhere in Africa?”

Dee chuckled hoarsely, and Jane felt a slight lessening of the new awkwardness between them. “Their puff pastry leaves something to be desired,” she replied airily, and then sat up straighter. “Although Kate showed me this thing where you just take a spray bottle filled with tap water, and . . . it’s a revelation, seriously. Anyway, I can call a couple of tip lines and say I’m an employee at the hotel or something. I know the kind of rumors they like to print: I’m pretty sure I can get some press about your . . . relationship.”

“Thanks,” Jane told her, sincerely but with renewed stiffness. She wished that she could relax more, but it still felt like there was a short circuit somewhere in their usual, easy rapport.
I’ve got a silly crush on her new boyfriend, and she’s worried I’m in over my head with mine,
she pointed out to herself gently.
We’ll both get over it.

“We should probably be ready for you to get invited to the house anytime; that part could be hard to predict,” Dee went on pragmatically. “And we don’t know how much time you’ll have alone to go looking for Annette’s old room or her things, so I was thinking you might need some magic ready to help you look. I don’t know any spells that would help, but we could go by Misty’s when I’m done with work, and—”

“That’s okay,” Jane told her abruptly. “I’ve got nothing but free time. I’ll go over to Book and Bell myself in a little bit. Misty’ll probably want to inspect her handiwork, anyway,” she added in a not-quite-successful attempt at levity, waving her left hand to indicate her face and body.

Dee’s smile was a fraction too late and too wide, but Jane told herself there would be plenty of time to shore up their friendship later. She had made huge strides in her crazy mission already, but there was still a long and difficult road ahead: getting into the mansion, finding something of Annette’s, finding Annette herself, and then bringing her home.
And then I can focus on
being
as happy as she seems to be lately, instead of being all grouchy about it.

In the meantime, the best thing she could do would be to put some physical distance between herself and Dee. And if she got some research done in the process, so much the better.

She pushed her chair back from the table and slid her syrupy plate beside Harris’s in the dishwasher. She crossed through the living room, studiously not looking at the spot on the pale-gold boards of the floor where Harris’s shirt had been, and moved with relief into the relative darkness of the hallway. Her entire body ached in one way or another. Research would have to wait; her top priorities were a long bath and a short nap.

Chapter Fifteen

T
he uneven
floorboards squeaked underneath the thin red carpet of Book and Bell as Jane
stepped inside. A tiny bell jangled above the door, and Misty turned her cloud
of frizzy blond hair toward the sound. The Wiccan’s face didn’t register any
kind of familiarity, though, and Jane reminded herself that she wasn’t
herself—literally. She had opened her mouth to explain when she noticed a
college-age girl with skinny jeans and punk-short black hair leafing through a
copy of
Tea Leaves and Chicken Bones: A Modern Girl’s Guide
to the Secrets of the Universe
. The girl didn’t look like the type to
be following tabloid drama, but Jane still hesitated to broadcast her real name
within earshot of strange New Yorkers.

She sidled up to the pressboard counter instead. As
she approached, Misty’s right hand disappeared beneath the counter. The older
woman’s eyes remained calm, but fixed unwaveringly on Jane. She realized that
Misty either had a panic button back there, or something more sinister and
supernatural waiting for people who came into her store looking as cagey as
“Ella” probably looked right now.

“Misty,” she blurted out, and the shopkeeper’s blue
eyes narrowed suspiciously. “I’m Dee’s new roommate,” Jane rushed on. “My name
is Ella. We were supposed to meet this weekend, but you had to leave the party
before I got home.” She set her own left hand on the counter for emphasis, and
saw Misty’s eyes dart to the plain silver ring that had held Celine’s magic
until Jane had arrived to inherit it. It looked like a perfectly smooth band
with beveled edges, but she would also once have sworn that it was covered in
ancient carvings. Lynne and Malcolm had both recognized it on sight, and Dee had
noticed something strange about it before she had even known for sure that
witches were real. Jane felt certain the ring would vouch for her among people
who knew magic, even if she couldn’t exactly say why.

Misty nodded curtly, her right hand returning to
rest on the top of the counter, and Jane relaxed a little. “Well, any friend of
Dee’s is more than welcome to come browse anytime, but I get the feeling that
you’re looking for something a little more specific.” She glanced at the
punk-haired girl, who didn’t look up or indicate that she was paying any
attention to them at all.

But then,
Jane thought,
isn’t that exactly how an eavesdropper would
act?
Fortunately, she had spent enough time in the shop to know that
there was a simple solution to the problem. “I think you keep what I’m here for
in the back room,” she announced casually, and Misty smiled in apparent
satisfaction.

“Things are a little disorganized in there right
now,” she answered, swishing toward the curtain divider in a cloud of curling
hair and gypsy skirts. “I’ll show you where to look.”

Jane followed, her mind full of her previous trips
to the shop’s tiny back section. It had the same worn red carpet as the front of
the store, but instead of the attractive displays of crystals, candles, and
silver jewelry that cluttered the main selling floor, every inch of the wall
space in back was devoted to books. There was a small triangular table in one
corner, and a few sturdy wooden chairs that reminded Jane of extra pieces from a
public school. She had come here with Dee and Harris and learned to use her
magic deliberately for the first time, back when it had been a cool new secret
and she hadn’t realized just how scared she should have been. She sighed a
little at the memory, and Misty spun to face her.

“Seven hells, Jane,” she half-whispered. “Dee said
it worked, but this is amazing!” She stepped a little closer, examining Ella’s
face. Her scrutiny bordered on intrusive, but Jane reminded herself that her
curiosity was natural—and she was entitled to it, and more, after all of the
help she had given. “I thought for sure there would be something to recognize,”
Misty murmured. “Something around the eyes, maybe. But even when I know it’s
you, I can’t tell.”

“Neither can anyone else so far,” Jane confirmed.
“You found exactly the spell I needed.”

Misty’s un-glossed lips pressed into a smile.
“Something tells me that my reward for such good work is another try at a
wild-goose chase.”

Jane blushed a little. “Dee and I were talking
about the next few steps of the plan,” she admitted, “and she did suggest that
you might be able to help me plan ahead, spell-wise.”

“Of course I can,” Misty agreed amiably, pouring
tea from a cast-iron pot into a waxed paper cup. She folded out the handles and
passed it to Jane. “But that’s not why you’re here.”

Jane sat heavily in one of the wooden chairs. It
was a little lower than she remembered, and she was a lot taller, so she had to
spend a few seconds wobbling and trying not to spill her tea. “Things are just a
little out of control already,” she admitted, “and while I’ve made all this
progress in just a few days, I feel like I’m getting dragged along. And then I
go home and realize that I’m still so, so far away from getting back to a safe,
normal, happy life. Besides,” she added guiltily, sipping her tea, “on top of
all of it I’ve got a hangover. So.”

“You sound like you could use more than a couple of
‘Blessed be’s,’ ” Misty agreed wryly. “I’d offer to spike your tea, but your
aura’s not exactly calling out for hair of the dog. What you need, my dear, is a
project.”

“I really just came for a spell,” Jane pointed out
hesitantly.

Ignoring her feeble protest, Misty poked her head
around the black curtain divider into the shop’s front room. Apparently
satisfied that no one was stealing or waiting for help, she returned her full
attention to Jane. “In that case, there’ll be a project for each of us. I’ll
look up your spell, and you’ll read these.” She pulled a stack of loosely bound
manuscripts from a high shelf.

When she set them on the table, Jane knew at once
whose cramped, vertical handwriting she was looking at. “Rosalie Goddard’s
diaries,” she gasped. The pages were yellowed and cracked, and looked exactly as
she’d always imagined valuable, old, magic-related documents should look.
Rosalie Goddard had literally written the book on real witchcraft before being
institutionalized by her horrified family. She had lived and died in the 1600s,
but as far as Jane knew, her book still contained the highest fact-to-myth ratio
of any that were available to the general public. Some of it was nonsensical and
plenty had to be just plain wrong, but enough of Goddard’s claims checked out to
make Jane trust the long-lost author instinctively.

“We’d been using it to find some of her source
material,” Misty reminded Jane, “but there are all sorts of interesting things
in there that didn’t make it to the published book. It’s not organized at all,
but you might find something that helps you. And looking for those bits and
pieces will help you to get centered again, which, truthfully, it sounds like
you need.”

Can’t really argue with
that,
Jane agreed silently, pulling the closest manuscript to her and
turning it right-side up. “Thanks,” she remembered to say as the other woman
swirled back through the curtain to watch over the main part of the store,
leaving Jane alone with the diaries.

“And if magick is not a tool
of the devil or a trick of charlatans, but rather a simple talent of some
who walk among us like singing or drawing or shooting?”
she read, her
mind already settling into the familiar stillness that usually came when Dee
talked her into meditating.

We all know that there’s meant to be marks
on witches, to show their evil to the world, but evil is, I believe, usually
better hidden than all of that. They say that a witch will show its power rather
than die, yet while I know of enough executions, I know of no one who has
survived by means of visible magic. I can only conclude, therefore, that we
huddle like children in the dark, convincing each other that we will know the
strange when we see it. There is undoubtedly magic in the world, but why should
those who cannot wield it have the power to detect those who can? Should they
not more reasonably be a higher order among us, in plain sight and yet all
unseen?

Mother dislikes this new project of mine, but
I think Father secretly enjoys my scholarly efforts. He would never say, much
less since it would mean to contradict her, but tonight I found a new sheaf of
paper in my writing desk that I know was not there in the morning. Either he
wishes to help me a little, or perhaps some witch has already learned of my
studies and is guiding me in secret. I hope I have been too discreet in my
inquiries thus far for the latter, but time will tell.

“ ‘Time’ indeed,” Jane huffed under her breath,
sliding the manuscripts out in a fan. The dates on them spanned six years, and
Goddard was already showing signs of being long-winded. But Jane’s huffing
wasn’t entirely sincere: the subject of discovering magic was certainly
important to her, and there was something about Goddard’s voice that she liked.
The second part turned out to be especially useful when it came to maintaining
her new calm, because for most of the first volume of diaries, magic barely came
up again at all.

Rosalie Goddard was still interested in magic, of
course, but she was also a young woman with a lot on her mind.

The preparations are under way for my
wedding feast. I know I am of age, and I know John Goddard is a good man and
pleasant enough, but even with Mother fretting about the dowry every day I
cannot quite believe it is real. My sisters are jealous: Lizzie in particular
dreams of being a wife every night, and often during the day while she wakes as
well. But this is the only life I have known, in which I am a studious child and
John Goddard is the sweet boy down the road who can never quite keep up with us
when we run about and play at adventures. He is not even of a height with me
yet, although Lizzie feels sure he will grow as tall as his own father. Of
course, she also thinks she is a misplaced princess of some faraway kingdom,
so—

Jane flipped a few pages, then moved on to the next
book. Rosalie was still talking about her life, but now her life was getting
more interesting, and Jane read avidly.

“Petru” is not a Nordic name, of course: he
says his real father isn’t Mr. Thorssen at all, but rather someone from his
mother’s homeland. She came from somewhere well east of where my family was from
in the Old World, before she sailed here with Petru and married. She won’t talk
about it, and makes us all call him “Peter,” which Erica Carter says is because
her people are gypsies and she doesn’t want people to know now that she is
married to a respectable man.

Petru loves Mr. Thorssen like a father, but
sometimes I think it must make him sad that his mother never wants to talk about
her life before. He was too little to remember anything, and if his mother
wishes her former life to be forgotten then he may never know even the smallest
details. Sometimes he seems so sad and far away that I wish to take his face in
my hands, and I have to remember that a far more appropriate match has already
been made for me than a fatherless boy from a nameless country.

It goes without saying that John dislikes
Petru intensely, but he is even more baffled by my interest in Sabina Thorssen.
She is so lovely and so mysterious, and sometimes I think that even the way she
distrusts me makes me more curious about her life on the other side of the
ocean. Petru hinted once that her people back there had magic of their own, and
Erica insists that gypsies are all just thick with it. I don’t know about that,
but if I close my eyes and imagine a person who could command unnatural forces,
it would be Mrs. Thorssen. Petru says she prays in a language he cannot
understand, that she never taught him. Anyone might pray in their own language,
of course, Father Rexford says, but Petru says that sometimes he is almost sure
she is saying something else.

John jokes that she is a witch all right, but
I know he doesn’t mean it the way I do. Perhaps I really am as foolish as he
says: perhaps I am using these ideas I have become fascinated with to explain my
fascination with the Thorssens.

“Spoiler alert: she marries lame-ass John anyway,”
Jane muttered, a little disappointed. Petru and his mother sounded far more
interesting and far less likely to allow their relatives to commit Rosalie to a
mental institution down the line when her book tarnished their family’s
reputation. Jane remembered when, shortly after she had started working at
Atelier Antoine, Elodie had discovered just how restrictive Jane’s upbringing
had been and spent three long months catching her up on the pop culture she
should have gotten as a tween. She had the same feeling now as when they had
screened
Titanic
in her cozy studio with the
(sometimes partial) view of Notre Dame: maybe the story would end differently
this time. Maybe Rosalie would live happily ever after; maybe the boat wouldn’t
sink.
But that’s not the way it happened.

She skipped a few more volumes and opened to a page
at random. A familiar name leaped off the page at her instantly.
Ambika.
There must be more than one in the world, but
Jane knew immediately in her bones that Rosalie was writing about the one whose
name was also carved into marble on the Dorans’ wall: the mother of all the
witches in the world. The legend was that she had had seven daughters, and left
her magic to them when she died. One of those seven had become Jane’s ancestor,
another one had been Maeve and Harris’s, and one had begotten Lynne and her
cabal. Jane closed her eyes and pictured the family tree in Lynne’s parlor, but
she didn’t really need to: the first name below Ambika’s had definitely been
“Hasina.”

Jane’s eyes swept across the pages, trying to pick
up the thread in the dense forest of vertical handwriting. Rosalie was married
now, to John, just as Jane knew she would eventually be. And Petru was gone. He
had grown up angry and increasingly reckless until he had fled the colonies
under a cloud of suspicion related to the mysterious death of a trapper. In the
privacy of her diary, Rosalie allowed herself to wonder if some of his newfound
violent temper had anything to do with her reluctant refusal to have an affair
with him, and her guilt tied her firmly and finally to Sabina Thorssen.