The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) (15 page)

Jane stared at him. ‘Harris,’ she began softly, but stopped when she saw his knuckles go white around the steering wheel.

‘We’re too strong to attack as long as you’re with us,’ he explained. His manner was so patient and rational that she could almost taste the screaming panic underneath. ‘They’ll have to keep her, to trade.’

Jane’s mind was clear, she realized finally: it was Harris who was still in the fog. ‘We don’t have anything they want,’ she explained tiredly. His jaw kept working back and forth, but other than that she saw no sign that he had even heard her.
Is that actually true?
she wondered suddenly in the painful silence that followed. She did still have one last thing of Lynne’s: the ancient-looking silver athame into which she had poured all her power. A few generations’ worth of accumulated magic wouldn’t mean much to a witch as long-lived as Hasina, but it might be enough of a reason for her to keep Dee alive.

Jane reached across her body to hold the edge of the back of her seat and struggled to turn herself partway around. The red hoodie lay between the two women behind Harris like a pool of blood. Still holding on carefully with her right hand, Jane reached for the sweatshirt with her left. She knew that they all must be aware of her actions, but they made no move to help her, and Harris’s eyes stayed riveted on the road.

Her phone tumbled out of the folds of the hoodie as she lifted it, and the screen flared briefly to life from the movement. Its screen was cheerfully devoid of any alerts, and she shuddered: Where was Malcolm now? Annette had implied that he was still alive, but Jane’s silent phone suggested otherwise. She let it fall carelessly onto the seat.

‘I’m going to try to see where she is,’ she told the side of Harris’s immobile face, pulling the red hoodie onto her lap.

She had done this magic twice before: once with a great deal of preparation, and once with a great deal of energy. She had neither this time, but it was some help that the sort of detached trance-state she needed her mind to slip into was familiar to her now. It helped even more that her grip on consciousness was already a little shaky. She clutched at the hoodie for a moment, then felt her grip relax as her inner self drifted loose from her body.
Show her to me,
she pleaded desperately, coaxing and cajoling any of her magic that would still respond to her, and aiming it toward the sweatshirt on her lap.
Let me see what she’s seeing right now
. Dee’s amber eyes filled her mind, then her long, calloused fingers, her hoarse, husky laugh. Her own body tugged back at her, tired and burned and needing her, but Dee couldn’t afford to wait, so Jane yanked herself away harder.

With a final, sickening wrench she was free, and then she was trapped.

I’m not,
she realized a second later.
She is
. Dee was seated on the blackened floor of the atrium, bound hand and foot, with her back pressed against one of its windows. The huge room seemed unnaturally quiet after the chaos that had raged there just minutes before. Charles was nowhere to be seen; Jane guessed that he had only been allowed in the atrium at all to lend his brute strength to the Dorans’ fight. Now that it was over, only the most vital core of the family remained.

Annette, Cora, and Belinda were huddled in a close circle around something that bubbled and hissed, while Lynne paced behind them, glancing over their shoulders impatiently.
The spell,
Jane realized.
It must be almost ready
. The four of them had probably spent all the previous twenty-seven nights just like this, she realized; how foolish of her to imagine that Annette might ever believe the worst of the mother who had saved her from a life she hated.
Nothing like evil to really bond a family together
.

‘Do you still like magic?’ Lynne asked her suddenly. Jane tried to jump, but of course she couldn’t: Lynne was speaking to Dee, not her. ‘You’re hardly the first witch-groupie to get stuck in the middle of this sort of thing, you know, but most have better sense than to go
looking
for death.’ Her dark eyes were intent as they flicked back and forth from Dee to the sitting witches. ‘A little slower,’ she instructed, and across the half-dark room Jane saw Annette’s dark-gold bob nod in acknowledgment. ‘It should feel like your heartbeat controls it.’

Dee said nothing, and Jane wondered if she were restrained somehow from speaking, or simply afraid.
She has to be gagged,
Jane decided after a long pause; Dee would never have let a comment like that go without some kind of snappy response.

‘It’s a tremendous privilege for you to see this, of course.’ Lynne turned back to Dee, apparently satisfied with whatever Annette was doing for the moment. ‘It’s normally quite the . . . family matter. But Jane is family, I suppose, and I expect she’ll be along shortly.’ She leaned down toward Dee’s face, scanning it closely. ‘Or are you there already, dear?’

I’m here,
Jane thought fiercely, although she meant it more as a comfort to her friend than an answer to Lynne. Neither of them could hear her, anyway, but it was the only thing she could do, so she thought it again.
Dee, I’m here with you
.

‘It often happens this way.’ Lynne sighed. ‘I get quite attached to a body – they’ll tell you I’ve outgrown caring about that sort of thing anymore, but it’s not true. Family is a different matter: after the first seventy children or so, they stop being such a big deal. Most of them live such
short
lives, and the new ones don’t even look like me anymore. It’s been so long since I could recognize my features – my own, I mean – in any of them. But the skin I wear, the mind I live inside . . . I can actually become quite sentimental about that. I’ll be sorry to see Lynne Doran go, but I’d be sorrier to see her live on after I’ve left her behind.’ Jane shivered in her own mind, though Dee remained still and silent.

‘It’s the sort of thing that hangers-on like you can’t even imagine.’ The tall, chestnut-haired woman resumed her restless pacing. Jane saw Dee’s legs shift suddenly, and guessed that she was trying to kick or maybe trip her as she passed by, but if Lynne even noticed the attempt, she didn’t bother to respond. The bubbling thing between the seated witches gave off a pale, sickly gleam that illuminated the faces around it, which were glassy-eyed and drawn with exhaustion. Annette was frowning, her brow coated in a fine layer of sweat that glistened in the unnatural light.

I was trying to
help
you, you psychotic bitch,
Jane thought furiously.
Dee’s worth twenty of you, and she wanted to help you, too. If it meant getting her back now, I’d set you on fire and walk away without a second glance
.

A shudder ran through Lynne’s thin body, and an answering one shook Annette so hard that Jane thought it must be rattling the girl’s teeth. Lynne slipped a little glass vial from the pocket of her Chanel jacket and smiled wanly in the general direction of Dee. But her eyes seemed so far away that Jane doubted she really saw anything in the room anymore, except for the bubbling substance and her daughter’s vacant face.

‘Usually I let the spell be the judge,’ she murmured, watching the small coven fixedly. ‘It’s deadly more often than it’s not, thankfully; I never do enjoy watching my last shell wander around without a true owner. But you and your meddlesome friends have made it so that I can’t participate in the ritual this time. Without it, there’s no risk to this body at all, so I have to decide its fate all on my own.’ Her eyes flicked toward Dee with a quick flash of irritation before locking back on Annette and her cousins. ‘I hold you entirely responsible for how positively vile this will taste.’ She unstoppered the vial and tipped its purplish contents into her mouth, grimacing as she swallowed. Another tremor ran along the length of her body, and the vial dropped, forgotten, to smash on the floor.

The sound it made was almost completely drowned out by a strange roaring, rushing noise that Jane realized must have been in her ears all along, steadily growing louder until it was impossible to ignore. She watched as one of Lynne’s perfectly manicured hands reached up to clutch briefly at her chest before she fell to the ground in front of Dee. Her body twitched a little every couple of seconds, her chest rising and falling in the shallowest of breaths, but her eyes rolled grotesquely and her lips had a tinge of blue underneath their customary peach lipstick.

Dee looked away from her, though, so Jane had to do the same. Annette was rising. Not standing: rising into the air as if in the grip of some huge, invisible hand. The twins remained on the ground, but whatever was holding Annette seemed to be affecting them, too: the small grey women looked even smaller and greyer, as if they were drying out somehow from the inside. Jane could see their skeletons beneath their skin, and then right through it. The bubbling thing between them grew bigger and brighter as they seemed to shrink in on themselves, and Jane realized that they were feeding themselves to it in some way that Dee’s eyes couldn’t perceive. One of them slumped forward as a ghostly green light began to radiate from Annette’s eyes, mouth, nose, fingertips, from every bit of exposed skin that Jane could see. In another moment it was blinding, and the atrium lurched and spun into darkness as Dee turned away and shielded her eyes as best she could with her thick curtain of hair.
This was when we needed to be there,
Jane thought, and she would have clenched her fists if she could feel them.
We just needed ten minutes more, and Annette took them from us
.

When Dee turned back to the Circle, the unnatural light and the bubbling substance were gone, and Annette’s feet were planted firmly on the charred floorboards. Dee barely had time to take in the three still, lifeless corpses around her before Annette turned her way, and Jane quailed inside her body: Annette’s eyes had changed. They were still their same dark color, but even in the dimness of the ruined atrium, Jane could see that there was something different about them.
It’s as if she’s wearing contacts,
she thought, remembering where she had seen this before. Whatever used to make Lynne Doran’s eyes so strange was looking at her now through Annette’s.

‘That’s better,’ Hasina purred through Annette’s full-lipped mouth. Then she pressed it closed tightly, rolled her shoulders in their sockets, rose onto her tiptoes and settled back down again, with a contented smile that Jane had never seen her wear before. ‘Now, I think Jane’s seen enough, don’t you? She can stop trying to interfere and “rescue” poor, helpless Annette. And I certainly don’t want her to trouble herself with breaking in again to rescue
you
.’ Her lips curved up cruelly. ‘Believing in magic gets you nothing, you idiot wannabe witch. The only thing that matters is
having
it.’

She raised one hand and pointed, aiming a blood-red fingernail carefully at Dee’s throat. Before she could scream or Jane could react at all, Annette slashed her hand sideways, the nail cutting through the air with a soft, dangerous hiss. There was pain, and there was something warm and thick spilling down the front of her shirt, and then the room spun and Jane was gone.

For a few heartbeats she was bodiless, frozen in absolute blackness with nowhere to go and nothing to move in order to get there. No mouth to scream through; no legs to kick; no heart to break into a million pieces.

Then she was back in the leather seat of Harris’s electric-blue Mustang, Dee’s red hoodie resting limply on her lap. Her hands tightened reflexively around the soft material, but it was cold and lifeless and no consolation at all. She bent down and buried her face in it, feeling hot tears begin to flow. Her body shook, then doubled over as she was racked with sobs.

In some dim corner of her brain she registered the feeling of the car slowing down, then drifting to the right. It came to a stop, and somewhere beside her she heard Harris begin to cry as well.

Chapter Sixteen

T
HE CAR
’
S HEADLIGHTS
flashed over flat, well-fitted stones as Harris turned the car off the main road and onto a driveway. Jane blinked, trying to make sense of the indistinct shapes rising around them: a grouping of buildings silhouetted against the starry sky. Jane caught a quick glimpse of iron-bound wooden doors before they were replaced by a long row of wooden boxes on either side of a wide aisle.
A barn,
Jane thought hazily.
He drove us into a barn
.

‘This is the family farm,’ Maeve’s voice said softly in the darkness, and Jane nodded, her foggy brain putting together that they had driven to the Montagues’ compound in the Hamptons.

The stalls on the left were closed, but the doors of the ones on the right were all wide open. Jane could make out the darkened headlights of a car in each one, and so was unsurprised when Harris spun the wheel and turned into an empty stall about two-thirds of the way along the centre corridor. When she stepped gingerly out onto the concrete floor, Jane heard soft whinnies from one of the closed stalls on the other side of the aisle, and the sound of something heavy shifting around inside.
Half cars, half horses,
she thought.
How modern
.

They crossed the stone courtyard in silence, Maeve carrying Dee’s hoodie like a fallen banner. Lights were on in the main house, and when she stepped inside, Jane stopped short. Pacing back and forth across the great room, looking for all the world like a caged lion with his tanned skin and dark-gold mane of hair, was Malcolm. She hadn’t fully processed the fact of his presence when Harris stepped around her to rush at him.

She wanted to interfere, or at least protest, but the short walk from the car had already made her feel a little woozy, and all her body wanted to do was sag against the doorframe. Harris’s attack caught Malcolm completely off guard and the two rolled off, out of her line of sight.