The Dark Glamour (23 page)
Authors: Gabriella Pierce
The girl moved toward her again, a blur of white and gold that Jane couldn’t hope to ward off. Jane watched Anne raise her arms. She could actually see the deadly magic gathered in them. Even without the massive table lying across her leg, there was no way Jane could escape it. She closed her eyes and tried to steel herself for the blow.
A crash came from somewhere across the room, and Anne’s advance stopped abruptly. The girl spun away from Jane, her killing energy fracturing in every direction. The smell of smoke was much stronger, and Jane struggled up onto one elbow and tried to force her eyes to focus. But there was no sense in what she saw: a tall, dark-haired man framed by a strange red light flooding in from the hallway.
André Dalcascu had just saved Jane’s life.
“H
elp me,” Jane whispered, but the air was thick and acrid and she wasn’t sure she could be heard at all.
With a furious scream, Anne launched herself at André, clawing at his face with her fingernails. Her uncontrolled magic raged around the room, seeming to pick up momentum as it went. Pictures flew off the walls, and the green felt of the billiard table in the corner caught fire.
Jane tried to protect her head with her arms, but the storm was only getting more violent. Somewhere near the door, she heard a sickening thud, and André howled in pain.
He didn’t expect her to attack him,
Jane thought, looking up in time to see Anne land a kick that doubled him over. “Run, Ella,” he gasped.
Their eyes met for a moment, and she became sure it was true: he had followed them from the party, overheard the altercation, and had come to try to save her. Knowing as she now did how unlikely he was to ever actually care about anyone outside his own family, she felt deeply moved.
“I’m trapped,” she tried to call to him. Her voice sounded a little louder this time, but only barely.
Something stung the skin of her free leg, and she tore her eyes away from André. The hem of her dress had turned black in places, and glowing sparks worked their way up the silk that covered her leg. She was trapped
and
on fire. She looked up again just in time to see Anne sink her teeth into André’s forearm.
The hell with this.
Jane drew herself up as straight as she could, locked her eyes on one of the marble busts along the walls, and magically launched it at Anne’s back. It was too heavy to throw hard, but it hit her almost squarely in the neck, and the girl crumpled to the floor.
She turned her power to the overturned table that was pinning her down. With a mental heave, she was able to drag her leg free, although when she tried to stand, she realized that it was too painful to put her weight on it. André crossed the room in two long bounds, and she leaned gratefully on his shoulder as they made an awkward, three-legged progress to the stairs. She didn’t look down as they passed Anne’s limp form; she was afraid to be tempted to wish her dead.
As they climbed down as quickly as her already-swelling leg would allow, she realized that the shrill ringing she heard wasn’t just in her ears: it was everywhere. “Smoke alarms,” she told André tersely, and he nodded.
“The elevator won’t work,” he replied, and she was relieved that he seemed to understand her train of thought. “Most of them will take the front stairs, but we still have to hurry.”
“Trying,” Jane grunted, and his arm tightened around her. “ ’S okay. I escape from this place all the time.”
One agonizing step at a time, they made it to the sixth floor, the fourth, the first. Gunther had deserted his post by the time they passed it, but, as far as they could tell, they were the first ones through the heavy stone arch that led to the street.
Park Avenue was eerily empty, but she knew there was no way the stillness could last. Sirens were approaching fast from uptown, and somewhere in the not-too-far distance, a church bell was chiming over and over.
Midnight,
she thought; it had to be, but it felt too early.
Time flies when you’re in mortal peril
. André had gotten her as far as the median of Park Avenue, but even though she could faintly hear a babble of voices approaching the lobby of number 665 below the wail of the first fire truck that had come into view, she needed to stop.
“Just for a minute,” she pleaded. Her leg was throbbing dangerously, and she felt as though she could barely breathe.
“Ella,” André began, bending down to bring his face close to hers . . . and then he stopped. She stared at him in confusion, and he stared back at her in what she slowly began to recognize as horror.
“Midnight,” she whispered, and he let her go and stepped back so quickly that she nearly lost her balance.
“You,” he growled, and the air around them took on the thick charge of danger.
Jane held up her hands between them, and even in the flat light of the street lamps she could tell they were her own. The breeze lifted her hair, and a long, blond lock of it swayed back and forth tauntingly in front of them. She looked up at him; farther up than she had ever had to the entire time she had known him.
“It was you all along.” The moment of something like tenderness between them was over, she knew: over and never coming back.
She felt frozen, rooted to the spot as he raised his hand to strike her, but for the second time that night she braced herself for a blow that never came. Instead, André turned to face a new threat that Jane hadn’t even seen coming: a bright red Dodge Challenger with a racing stripe down the hood screeched to a halt just inches from them.
“Get in,” Dee called to her, shoving the passenger door open from the backseat. Harris grinned at her from the driver’s seat. André grabbed for her, but his hands found only empty air as Jane tumbled herself through the door and slammed it shut behind her.
Jane could feel the purr of the engine through her seat as the car accelerated. Harris piloted it expertly around a fire engine that was pulling to a stop in front of the Dorans’ mansion. Jane flinched and nearly covered her eyes as they rocketed straight for two more, but Harris didn’t hesitate. He took them through a space between the trucks so narrow that Jane could feel the pressure change in her ears. A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk, and she could see flames beginning to lick out of the windows of the seventh floor. Harris downshifted, and the engine growled, and the entire scene disappeared from view almost as soon as Jane had registered it.
“You’re not even going to say hi?” a chirpy voice quipped from the backseat, and Jane whipped around.
“Mae?” There was no doubt; the elfin features, penny-colored eyes, and wild red curls belonged to Maeve Montague, Jane’s very first friend in New York.
The friend Lynne nearly killed because of me,
she thought guiltily, but it was impossible to regret Maeve’s presence no matter how much danger they might be in now.
“Back from physical therapy and better than ever,” Maeve smiled, and Jane, too far away to hug her the way she wished she could, reached back and squeezed the girl’s tiny hand instead.
“How did you guys know?” she asked finally, when they had crossed over to FDR Drive and were safely off the city streets.
“Our grandmother and aunt had been saying all kinds of dire things,” Harris answered, his green eyes constantly flickering back and forth between the road and his mirrors. “Doom, gloom, all-out war. My cousins and I have all been trying to keep an ear to the ground, but they couldn’t even tell us what we were listening for. So I went to the party tonight, and guess who I saw there?”
Jane blushed, and then blushed harder when she realized that she was back in her own pale skin that showed every change of shade. At least it was dark in the car, she decided. “I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you—and please don’t blame Dee. She wanted to, but I wouldn’t let her.”
“What the hell is she talking about?” Maeve piped up from the backseat.
“He didn’t mean you, Jane.” Dee chuckled hoarsely.
“No,” Harris explained, frowning a little. “I saw Dee’s boss.”
Jane spun her torso around in her seat as far as it would go. “Come again?”
“Kate,” Dee confirmed, and from her tone of voice Jane suspected that she was blushing now.
Freaking Kate again
. “She was doing the catering?” Jane turned back to Harris, waiting for some kind of further explanation. “The canapés didn’t suck,” she admitted belatedly.
“She wasn’t a caterer,” Harris said grimly, and Jane finally caught up.
“Katrin. Kathy, Kate . . . Katrin Dalcascu.”
How many nearly-the-same aliases can one woman have?
Harris nodded, but it was Dee who spoke next. “Jane, she must have seen us together, before you went undercover. She was working me the whole time.”
“She was already stretched pretty thin, protecting her awful brother’s mind from being read,” Maeve went on, “and she doesn’t really have much magic of her own to start with. She’s got two daughters, and the rumor is they’re total duds. Plus she had to use some to make it seem like she actually knew how to cook. And then Dee had been working on blocking out mind-readers, anyway, so between all of it Katrin had to come at you some other way.”
Jane turned around again, deeply impressed. No matter how many other ways Katrin’s magic was being used, for Dee to have kept a determined witch out of her head when she hadn’t even realized that she needed to was extraordinary. “Seriously?”
“So when I saw this ‘Kate’ schmoozing with Belinda Helding, I went straight to pick up Dee, and Mae, and get the hell out of the city,” Harris continued, his eyes still ever-alert. “Grandma and Aunt Charlotte still couldn’t decide what to do, or whose side we were on, or if anything was even really going on, but enough was enough.”
“And he was headed upstate when I told him he didn’t quite have everybody,” Dee finished softly, and a warm feeling spread through Jane’s belly.
“You came back for me,” Jane whispered, leaning back against the headrest. Even the ache in her leg was beginning to feel just like another kind of heat, and she thought she could almost fall asleep.
“Of course,” Maeve confirmed, sounding indignant. Jane smiled; she was sure Maeve would have a few things to say about being kept out of the loop for the last couple of months.
The thought sobered her, and she felt a stab of doubt. How long could their enthusiasm really last in the face of the stark reality ahead of them? “I really appreciate it,” she told them sincerely. “But as soon as we’re clear of the city, I’m going to need you to—”
“Split up?” Maeve asked sarcastically.
“Go somewhere safe,” Dee drawled.
“Leave you to face the danger on your own,” Harris finished, rolling his eyes and shifting lanes.
Jane bit her lip. “One witch,” she sighed, “and a Wiccan, and two people who know more than most about magic. But one witch. War really is coming, and doom and gloom and everything you’ve heard. I can’t keep you safe on my own, and I will
not
—”
“We’re sticking together from now on,” Harris interrupted grimly, sparing Jane an emerald glance that cut her to the bone. “End of discussion.”
He smiled mysteriously, and Maeve cleared her throat significantly. Jane turned to her, and as she did, she felt a strange pressure building in the car, like the charge before a thunderstorm. Maeve was staring at a space in the air between them, and just when Jane opened her mouth to ask what she was doing, something floated up into that space. The headlights of the cars traveling in the opposite direction caught it over and over like a strobe light; it was a silver tube of Givenchy Tempting Coral.
The lipstick hovered in the air, trembling slightly, and with an effort Jane could feel almost physically, Maeve tore her eyes away from it to lock them with Jane’s. She looked exhausted but fierce, like a warrior. The lipstick stayed in place even after Maeve had stopped looking at it. “Want to freshen up?” Maeve asked through a tensed jaw, and the silver tube moved even closer to Jane.
As she reached up and pulled the lipstick out of the air, her battered muscles aching from the effort, Jane ignored the pain and focused on only one thing: the feeling of hope rising in every inch of her.
Gabriella Pierce is an American living in
Paris with her two dogs. This is her second novel.
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666 Park Avenue
This book is a work of fiction. The
characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and
are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE DARK
GLAMOUR
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EPub Edition © September 2011 ISBN:
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