The Dark Glamour (19 page)

Chapter Thirty-One

S
o they’re just playing every game that exists,
Jane
thought somberly once she was finally back in her hotel room. She had to almost
admire the Dalcascus. In spite of being less overtly powerful than Lynne
and her clan, they had a kind of enterprising spirit that would have been
impressive if it werent so terrifying. After all, they had brought down Lynne’s
dynasty with one stroke, and now were looking to cash in on that, twenty-two
years later, by allying with her. That was the kind of strategy best handled by
experts.

Jane wriggled out of the Karen Millen cape she had
picked up to keep away the drizzle and flung it unceremoniously onto a
tapestry-covered love seat. A damp puddle spread slowly from its black-and-tan
folds, but Jane ignored it and stomped down the hall.

I can’t believe I nearly told
her.

Anne might have believed her about the Dorans—she
might have even been willing to come to New York with her. But there was no way
she would have taken such a major step in her life without alerting the people
she obviously felt closest to in the world . . . André and Katrin. And
considering that the Dalcascus had been keeping Anne away from Lynne for
quite some time, there was no way they would let mother and daughter be reunited
. . . especially not now, when they were so close to the “merger” they
had been working on for months. They needed Lynne to stay just weak enough to
need them. Their hunt for Jane herself was further proof of that.

She stopped at her little kitchenette and turned on
the flame below a sleek silver kettle. The water seemed to take forever to boil,
but Jane watched the kettle without moving a single muscle until clear steam
began to curl out of its spout. She reached into the cupboard for a leaf-green
mug, but nearly knocked it to the ground with her still-trembling hands. She
finally got it upright on the granite counter, set a teabag inside, and filled
it halfway with hot water. After a moment’s careful staring at her hands, she
dug a flight-size bottle of bourbon out of the minibar and emptied it into the
mug. She continued down the hall to her bedroom, holding her drink in both hands
and feeling the warmth of it seep into her flesh.

What would happen, she wondered, if the
Dalcascus did find Jane Boyle? If they thought they could use her
somehow—or that they might be able to sometime in the future—they might just
erase her memory the way she knew now they had done with Annette’s, and then
stash her somewhere “just in case.”
Or they might just kill
me outright.

Time was running out for her. There were only nine
days left of the Forvrangdan orb’s power at the most, and she wasn’t sure that
it would even last that long. She had narrowly avoided an open war with the
Romanian clan by not confronting André, but that reprieve would expire as soon
as her disguise did. There wasn’t a manhunt on for Ella . . . but the
one for Jane was already well under way.

She stopped in front of the full-length mirror that
covered the closet door. Standing an arm’s-length away at first, then with her
nose just inches from the glass, she inspected her face.
Broad cheekbones. Pink bow of a mouth. Long black eyelashes.
She
stared and stared, until she had to admit that she wasn’t entirely sure anymore
what she was looking for. Her new face and her old one felt equally unfamiliar,
and at the same time equally normal. It was impossible to tell if her looks were
changing, and she turned away from the mirror in disgust.

Her almond-shaped eyes filled with tears. She took
a long drink of her amber-colored tea, but didn’t taste it. Her plan had seemed
like a wild-goose chase at first, but as more and more pieces had clicked into
place, she had gotten more and more confident.
I thought I
was making the impossible happen,
she sighed miserably,
but I was just getting lucky.
She sank down onto her
bed, wishing that the squishy mattress would swallow her whole, and curled up
into a little ball.

There was no way in with Anne, she knew: nothing
foolproof to convince her to trust a stranger over the people she had trusted
her entire life. No one would agree to that without at least
talking
to their surrogate family about the
accusations, and certainly no one as emotionally dependent on them as Anne had
seemed to be.

I wish I hadn’t found
her,
she thought, burying her face in her starched pillowcase. She
would have been better off taking the head start that Malcolm had tried to give
her, resigning herself to a life on the run. After everything she had done, she
was right back where she’d started. And it felt even worse than it had a month
ago.

She propelled herself upward with her palms and
rolled off the bed and onto her feet, taking another generous sip of her spiked
tea for good measure. There was no point in staying in London anymore; there was
nothing she could possibly accomplish there. She hauled her navy suitcase out of
the closet and began throwing in clothes by the armload. “Even a fake baroness
really doesn’t need
this
many shoes,” she muttered
angrily as she tried unsuccessfully to stuff a knee-length black boot in next to
its mate. Everything had fit just fine on the way from New York, but she had
also been a lot less upset when she had packed the first time around. With a
hiccupping sob of a sigh, she dumped everything out onto the carpet and began
again, rolling and folding and angling each item as carefully as she could
manage through the tears that were finally starting to fall.

So I go back. And then
. . . and then . . .
And then nothing that she
could think of, she admitted with a regret that bordered on nausea. She had nine
days left as Ella, and she would have to keep being Ella for all of them. And
after that she would have to go back to being Jane—or, more realistically, Amber
Kowalsky or one of the other names on the passports Malcolm had given her, until
she could get some fresh ones of her own.

She felt even sicker when she thought of her daring
plan of staying in New York—right under Lynne’s nose, she had gleefully thought
at the time. It was certainly true, but now there was nothing gleeful about the
idea. It was just plain reckless; it had been from the beginning. She had been
reveling in risking her neck because of some far-fetched theory that she might
somehow take down the formidable witch who held all the cards. Jane, an orphan
just barely scratching the surface of her own power, wasn’t some scrappy
underdog who was about to shock the world by turning the tables. She was just an
underdog. Sooner or later, Lynne would find her and put her down.

She surveyed the room; there was nothing left to do
at all except book herself on the next flight back to New York. She was sure,
though, that that wouldn’t be until morning . . . and in the meantime
she would just have to begin her useless waiting right where she was. She sat
down heavily on the bed again, then reached over and dialed the front desk. She
told the crisp British accent on the other end that she would be checking out in
the morning. He assured her briskly that he understood and then clicked off,
leaving her with a buzzing dial tone.

Chapter Thirty-Two

J
ane stared around Ella’s now-familiar suite at the Lowell Hotel. Everything was just where she had left it, although the sharp corners of the linens and total absence of dust confirmed that housekeeping had been busy while she was gone. A blank-faced bellhop arranged her navy suitcase on a stand in the bedroom, then ducked out again before Jane had the time to remember that Americans usually tipped for things like that.

She sighed and flipped her gold Vertu open, pressing the ceramic power button lightly. To her surprise, when the screen glowed to life, it informed her that she had three messages waiting, the first one more than two days old. After staring at the date for a moment, Jane realized that she must not have bothered to get any kind of international plan with her fancy new phone. She rolled her eyes and tapped the keys to play back the messages, hoping she hadn’t missed anything urgent. The middle one was from Elodie (who obviously did have international roaming), but the other two were from Dee.

I should just go back to the apartment,
Jane thought fretfully as she listened to the first one. In it, Dee wondered where Jane was, told a funny-but-you-had-to-be-there story involving Kate and a piping bag, wondered where Jane was, again, and hung up.
I can’t believe we’ve gotten so far apart . . . I didn’t even think to tell her I was leaving town.

It was true: she had been so worn out after the second spell she had done to find Anne, then so preoccupied with André the next morning, that it hadn’t occurred to her to check in with her friend. She almost hung up immediately and called Dee back, but then she remembered the third message on her phone, and decided to finish them all first.

“Hey, Ella,” Dee’s throaty voice began, as careful as it always was now that Jane was in disguise. “I’m not sure where you are—hopefully somewhere good—but I wanted to let you know I won’t be around this weekend. Harris’s folks invited us out to their place in the Hamptons. Can you believe I’ve lived in New York so long and never been? Anyway, back on Tuesday, and if I don’t hear from you by then I’m breaking into your hotel to look for clues. So call me, okay?”

Jane ended the call and sat looking at her phone for a few silent minutes. In the hours since her frantic packing in London, her misery had faded into a sort of fragile numbness, and she found that she had no particular desire to call Dee, or not call Dee, or do anything at all, really. She had accepted that her instincts were only as good as her luck, and it felt like there was really no point in even making decisions anymore.

I’m not going to call,
she concluded eventually, closing her phone. It sounded like Dee was having a great time, and Jane didn’t think she could bear to bring her friend down . . . or, if she was being honest with herself, to hear about how wonderfully everything was going for her.

“So now what?” she asked the empty room. Her voice sounded strange and hollow. Jane had never been one to just calmly accept her fate, and somewhere deep inside her something was screaming at the useless fatigue that had taken her over. She couldn’t do anything to fix her messed-up situation; that much was clear. But in her heart, she also knew she couldn’t sit in her room waiting to gather dust, either. If her original plan hadn’t worked out and she couldn’t think of another one, she would just have to push herself to do something—anything.

As she reached to push her phone into her purse, something about her hand caught her attention.
Didn’t I notice Ella’s nail beds at first?
she wondered. She had, she decided: she could vividly picture the white half-moons glowing against the tawny skin that was just two shades lighter than the walnut of the rest of her hand. Now, though, the white semicircles were floating against a background that looked much more like the unremarkable pink Jane had known her entire life.

I’ll go see Misty,
she decided.
She’ll be able to tell if it’s wearing off, or if I’m just getting too used to this body to tell it apart.

She held her breath for a moment, waiting to feel a renewed sense of purpose once her decision was made. It didn’t come, but she made her legs move toward the bathroom anyway. After her long, dull flight, the needling hot water of the shower felt like heaven, and Jane let it run over her hair and body for considerably longer than she really needed to. Finally, though, she reached for the restocked Bulgari shampoo and conditioner and got serious about starting her day.

She made it out of the hotel and into a cab without bursting into tears at the thought of her recent failure, and decided that pushing herself into action—any action—had been a very good idea. She paid and hopped out of the car when she saw the familiar black awning of Book and Bell, and almost smiled when she spotted Misty’s wild, bleached curls through the window.

Five minutes later, Jane was installed in the back room with a paper cup of (bourbon-less) jasmine tea and Misty making sympathetic noises as she poured out everything that had happened in the week and a half since Jane had last been in the store.
It felt more like a year.

By the time she finished, Misty’s repertoire of noises had expanded to shocked, angry, and frightened, in addition to the sympathetic ones. She plucked Jane’s empty cup out of her hand and crossed the room to refill it while Jane sat, feeling inexplicably as if she were waiting for a judge’s verdict.

“Well,” Misty said finally, and Jane straightened a little in her uncomfortable wooden chair. “I have a few things to say.” She folded her permanently tanned hands in her lap and looked expectantly at Jane, who took a gulp of her tea and nodded. “First—and I know you didn’t ask—but I think you’re jumping to conclusions about Dee.”

Jane raised an eyebrow; whatever she had expected to hear, this wasn’t it. Then she remembered that it was Lynne Doran’s favorite facial expression, and forced the second eyebrow up to match it. Then she felt silly, relaxed her face, and said, “Please go on.”

“Things are going well for her—amazingly well, under the circumstances,” Misty began, and Jane frowned a little; this, she knew. “But it’s the ‘under the circumstances’ part that she’s trying to get you to ignore when she tells you how great everything is. She knows you feel responsible for what happened back in March, and she’s afraid you’ll feel guilty, or get distracted by worrying about her. She’s not trying to throw anything in your face, Jane; she’s trying to show you there’s no reason for you to cut her out of your life . . . again.”

“I didn’t—” Jane began, but that wasn’t true: she had. For three weeks after her disastrous wedding day, she had avoided Dee completely, and in the back of her mind, she had been gearing up to do it again now that her master plan had fallen through. “I put her in danger. I keep doing it,” she mumbled, and Misty shrugged.

“She’s a big girl, my dear. She’s not going to run headfirst into a war zone, but she’s also not going to give you a reason to get all protective and drop her. Like you did with Maeve, and then with Harris.”

Jane shook her head, but those were even more impossible accusations to deny. “Dee hasn’t told him about me, has she?”

“Of course not.” Misty looked so shocked that Jane immediately felt guilty for even thinking it. “She’s doing the best she can—he’s still completely broken up over your disappearing act, you know. They came together because they didn’t know what to do after you left, and now one of them knows you’re back but has to pretend; can you imagine?”

Jane couldn’t, and thousands of questions flooded her brain, but she bit them back. This was hardly the time for high-school-style crush drama, and Misty had already given her plenty to think about along those lines as it was. “Okay.”

“Good. Now, thing two: you mentioned an e-mail about your wedding bouquet at some point during all that mess you just told me. Can you back up to that, please?”

Jane shrugged. “I get a lot of junk,” she explained; she hadn’t even realized that she had mentioned that completely extraneous detail. She wondered how long she had babbled on for, altogether. But Misty waved her hand in a circle, encouraging her to go on, so she sighed. “It’s all just part of having the wedding of the century, apparently. Theknot.com has been sending me e-mails—one a week at least—with all these discounts and copies of the stuff Lynne had at mine and Malcolm’s. You know: ‘where to find the hottest dresses’ and all of them look just like mine, or half-off on the same kind of bouquet I had. I can’t decide whether Lynne would be proud she’s set all these trends, or irritated that people are stealing her ‘exquisite’ taste. Probably both.”

“That’s a membership site,” Misty said, as if it were somehow significant, and Jane frowned as she shrugged again. “They make you put in your wedding date when you sign up,” the older woman added, still staring searchingly at Jane. “And yours has passed.”

“You’re just going to have to tell me what you’re getting at,” Jane told her helplessly.

“They should be sending you ads for thank-you notes, not dresses. Are you sure those e-mails are really coming from that site?”

“Who else—” Jane’s jaw dropped open, and she sprang out of her chair.

“Back here,” Misty told her tersely, pointing to an alcove beside the curtain that divided the two parts of the store.

Jane didn’t remember if she had ever noticed the older-model Dell sitting on a shelf inside it, but she certainly noticed it now. Her fingers flew over the keyboard, even tapping frantically on the sides of it while the slow machine strained to obey all her commands at once. After what felt like much longer than it probably was, she had rescued the last four e-mails from her trash and had them side by side in narrowed windows on the screen. “They look legit,” she murmured doubtfully, clicking on first one, then another, and scrolling around to see every part of them.

“Sure, except that no major Web site just gives out customer service info like that anymore,” Misty scoffed, pointing to two numbers at the bottom of one of the messages.

Jane smiled and started to agree, but then she actually looked at the numbers. The first one was a normal American toll-free number. The second one, labeled “International Callers,” had an international country code in front of it. “I’ve shopped on U.S. sites from France,” she told Misty slowly. “That’s not how they do it. International callers can’t always use toll-free numbers, so they just give a different local one. They don’t just pick a random country and tell the whole world to call that.” She clicked on the next window, and then yelped in triumph: the toll-free number was the same, but the “International Callers” number was completely different. She opened a fifth window, making it tiny so as not to cover the others, and searched for a directory of country codes. “Brazil,” she declared, closing the first e-mail with a flourish. “Then Chile.” She clicked the second one off the screen. “Ecuador.” Click. “And then . . . um . . . Laos.” Her face was flushed as she stared at Misty. “Malcolm is in Laos.”

Misty grinned, and Jane felt her own smile widening. The muscles of her face felt a little creaky after the drama of the last twenty-four hours, but there was no mistaking it: she was coming back to herself. “Not South America anymore,” Misty pointed out helpfully, and Jane practically giggled; Lynne may actually have been on Malcolm’s trail, but then he had jumped clear to the other side of the globe. He was still safe, as far as she knew, and now she might even be able to get in touch with him.
In an emergency,
she told herself steadily,
or when I have good news.

“And I’ve got one last piece of good news,” Misty told her seriously, and Jane’s attention snapped to her tanned face. “Jane, Anne’s still in London.”

Jane recoiled physically. “Is that supposed to be a joke?” she asked, genuinely stung. If it was, it seemed uncharacteristically unkind.

“You know where she is, you twit,” Misty clarified, rolling her eyes. “You didn’t brawl with André and scare her away, or tell her the truth and freak her out. She’s exactly where you left her, and no one knows you know but
you
.”

Jane frowned. “But I can’t get anywhere near her.”

“You don’t need to,” Misty nearly exploded. “You think Lynne can’t afford a ticket to Heathrow?”

“She’d give me anything for that information,” Jane realized slowly. Fragments of thoughts began to coalesce in her mind: the deal she had been thinking of striking with Lynne back before everything had gone to hell. “Okay. Now I need to run some ideas by you.”

It’s not perfect,
she warned herself, but she could feel the telltale energy returning to her limbs. She felt hopeful, almost giddy, and she knew what it meant. Jane was, once again, on the verge of a daring, dangerous, and brilliant plan.