The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) (16 page)

She heard running footsteps on the staircase somewhere overhead; no doubt more Montagues. Gritting her teeth, Jane pulled her aching body slowly upright, trying to ignore the way the room pitched and swayed as she moved.

‘Back to your corners,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘Harris, back off.’

She took a careful step forward and saw Malcolm’s head lift to look at her as she did. But then Harris’s hand swung up from somewhere below the couch and clipped him on the ear, and the two of them were off again. Jane tried halfheartedly to dig around for any magic left to her, but she knew it was futile. She had nothing left.

A light touch on the shoulder made her jump, and she turned to find a pair of worried brown eyes peering into hers. A regal woman with a cloud of red hair piled on top of her head was standing in front of her, partially blocking her view of a sullen-looking teenaged girl who practically vibrated in her eagerness to get closer to the action.

Jane inhaled, letting the air fill her lungs and expand her rib cage, and feeling the pain in her shoulder flare as the muscles in her torso moved. ‘Hasina killed Dee,’ she told the two newcomers shortly, guessing that they must be Emer’s daughter and granddaughter, Charlotte and Leah. Dee had mentioned them once or twice. She would have preferred to break the news a little more gently, but assorted freckles and red hair kept swimming in front of her, and she had to communicate the key points quickly in case she was going to pass out again. ‘Harris is trying to kill Malcolm, over there.’ Her shoulder refused to respond to her instruction to gesture toward the floor of the great room, and she remembered belatedly that it had been injured somehow during the battle in the atrium.

‘Well, that won’t do,’ Charlotte replied crisply and moved out of Jane’s line of sight. After a few more thumps and a couple of barked orders, Harris stood, panting raggedly, beside his watchful sister. Malcolm, a few new scrapes and bruises decorating his handsome face, had moved to a corner near the fireplace, and finally the rest of the Montagues filtered into the centre of the room to join the pair of siblings there.

‘I
just
got him patched up,’ Leah exclaimed, stepping toward Malcolm to run a finger across the beginnings of a black eye. ‘Harris, look what you’ve done!’

‘What
I’ve
done?’ Harris exploded, so viciously that even Maeve shrank away from him. ‘He got her killed!’

‘He nearly died, too,’ Charlotte told him quietly, slipping over to rest a calming hand on his sleeve. ‘That horrible sister never met him today; she sent some thugs to do it instead. It was only luck that we found him in time.’ She frowned, deeply worried lines forming on her pale skin. ‘I thought it best to get him out of the city immediately.’

Jane stepped forward tentatively to peer closer at Malcolm’s wounds.
‘In a few minutes I’ll be too powerful to care whether Malcolm dies, or you live.’
Annette had wanted to punish him; Hasina would have just killed him. ‘Found him?’ she repeated absently, running a finger along a tear in Malcolm’s sleeve.

‘At your apartment,’ he told her softly, and Leah heaved a dramatic sigh.

‘When you didn’t come back, we thought you might be regrouping at the apartment downtown,’ she explained, her tone faintly accusatory. ‘But the only one there was him. Looking much, much worse than now,’ she added as an afterthought.

‘They took my phone first thing,’ Malcolm apologized, spreading his empty hands as if to demonstrate.

‘Of course they did,’ Harris snarled. ‘You had a great excuse for staying out of the firefight tonight, and then these mysterious strangers conveniently prevented you from warning us that your own dear sister was there, waiting for us. Because you told her we were coming!’

Charlotte and Leah were adamant that Malcolm had been too gravely wounded for it to have been a smokescreen, which Harris insisted was exactly what Malcolm wanted them to think. It didn’t help matters that their impressive healing skills had made it difficult for Harris or even Jane to see the extensive injuries that the women described.
And at the end of the day, it’s the Montagues and the Dorans
. Even Emer seemed reluctant to stem Harris’s vitriol, and Maeve was still too shaken by Dee’s death to say much of anything at all.

‘Enough of this,’ Jane finally forced herself to say, and was pleased to note that her voice sounded almost strong. Every head in the room swiveled her way, and the arguing stopped.

‘Jane, I didn’t know anything about this,’ Malcolm rumbled softly. She wanted to go to him, lean her head against his chest, and let him tell her that everything would be all right, but she couldn’t.
It won’t, anyway, no matter what he says
. ‘Please let me make it up—’

‘How?’ Harris spat, the word twisting his handsome mouth into an ugly shape. ‘You mean you want to buy your way out of this, just like everything else? How much is she worth to you?’ Jane noticed that he hadn’t said Dee’s name since they’d left the mansion, and she understood. She was terrified, too, of the fresh pain that had come with the sound of it.

‘He didn’t mean it like that,’ Leah insisted, trying to step toward her cousin, but Charlotte pulled her daughter back and held her close.

Didn’t he?
Jane wondered. The faces before her wavered a little in her vision, as if she were looking at them through uneven glass. She wished that she were still leaning against something solid. Harris’s angry words of warning before they had gone to the Dorans’ mansion came back to her vividly.
Can my judgment really be trusted where he’s concerned?
She would never believe the worst of Malcolm, but was it possible that she’d been too eager to always believe the best?

‘I’ll do whatever you need, whatever you ask,’ Malcolm answered simply, lifting his hands and then dropping them back helplessly to his sides. ‘I know I can’t undo what’s happened, but my last offer cost one of you her life. If it’ll help you, you can have mine.’ Harris looked grimly interested in that offer, but Emer turned away in obvious disgust.

‘No one is dying,’ Jane corrected him tiredly. ‘Enough people have died.’

‘Not quite enough,’ Maeve muttered, softly but not so low that she couldn’t be heard by everyone in the room.

‘Hasina is alive,’ Malcolm agreed. Jane thought that that was a rather generous interpretation of Maeve’s remark under the circumstances, but she wasn’t about to correct him, and Maeve didn’t either. ‘She’s wearing my sister’s face and she killed your friend. So let me kill her.’

An uneasy silence settled over the room, and glances flicked nervously between Malcolm and Jane.
André warned me to kill Annette from the beginning,
she remembered, and her stomach churned.
And even Emer had endorsed it as a last resort. If I had listened ..
. She had ignored every reason not to trust Annette. She had committed them to a dangerous plan that hinged on the reliability of an unstable stranger, and it had cost them so much more than she would ever have willingly paid. But even if killing Annette were the only answer now, could she really let Malcolm do it?

‘I can get close to her in public,’ Malcolm insisted urgently, and Jane saw interest on a few of the assembled faces. ‘Some event, some party. To everyone there I would just be her brother; even if she saw me coming, she would have to try to stick it out. She cares about what people think more than anything,’ he went on, picking up speed in his enthusiasm. He was right about that, Jane knew: Hasina’s desire for a huge society wedding between Jane and Malcolm had been the reason Jane was able to escape her the first time.

‘You make it sound so easy,’ she murmured, her mind spinning.

‘I don’t expect to get away with it.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s not that hard to kill someone if you don’t mind getting killed, yourself.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ she countered, stepping back, away from him. She swayed a little, but her legs held her. ‘I thought you had changed.’

Malcolm opened his mouth to argue, but then closed it again. Confusion pulled his dark-gold eyebrows together tightly. He seemed completely at a loss.

‘
You
think he was in on this with Annette?’ Leah demanded, hands on her skinny hips and head cocked angrily. She tossed her perfectly straight strawberry-blond hair over her shoulder in a gleaming cascade.

‘I don’t,’ Jane clarified quickly, glancing around the room to make eye contact with everyone. She didn’t want them to have any doubts about her certainty that Malcolm was not on Annette’s side. ‘Can we have a minute?’

Emer, Charlotte, Leah, Maeve, and finally a very reluctant Harris filed slowly from the room. Jane waited until they were completely gone before she spoke again. ‘You can’t make everyone’s problems go away by killing them,’ she began, and Malcolm’s dark eyes widened in surprise.

‘This isn’t – I don’t know what you—’

Her heart broke for the pain written across his face, but she couldn’t give in to it: her bad judgment where Malcolm was concerned had already cost Dee her life. ‘You make a mistake, you think you can fix it just like that,’ she went on when he sputtered to confused silence. ‘You don’t think about the consequences; you just want the mess to disappear so you can go back to your happy life and never feel bad again. I thought you had grown past that, but you haven’t.’

‘I have.’ Malcolm’s voice was low and throbbing with sincerity.

Jane closed her eyes, wanting to believe him but knowing that she couldn’t trust anything she wanted so badly. When she opened them, he had crossed the room to stand just inches from her and was holding his arms out as if to gather her in. ‘You can’t stay here with them – with us,’ she told him. His arms fell to his sides in defeat. ‘I need you to leave. I know you want to be a part of this, and I thought you could, but you can’t. And I can’t let you try anymore. I can’t lose any more people I love to your need for redemption. You’ll have to find that somewhere else.’

She expected an argument, or at least a protest. But Malcolm simply stared into her eyes for a long minute, until he seemed to find something there that satisfied him. Then he leaned down and kissed her forehead gently, his warm lips lingering only a little longer than the gesture required, and turned to step out of the door of the farmhouse.

Jane swayed a little and rested her palm against the ivory wall for support.
He didn’t even argue,
she thought dully. Did that mean that he knew she was right? Or that he thought she was too far wrong to even reason with?

She heard a soft rustling noise from the kitchen, and the muffled sound of a voice. She couldn’t stand to go there, though; she knew she would never be able to walk into a kitchen again without feeling Dee’s absence like a physical wound. She circled around the ground floor in the other direction instead: past a darkened sunroom, through an even darker formal dining room, to a staircase, where she removed her flats so as to make as little noise as possible.

Tomorrow, she knew, she would have to face the Montagues. She would have to talk with them about what had gone wrong and tell them what she had seen of Dee’s last moments. She would have to decide what she wanted to do next. And she would have to do all of it while Harris’s grief surrounded her like water that rose over her head. There would be no way to breathe without feeling it, just as there was already no way to breathe without feeling her own loss. She was in no hurry to see it mirrored on the faces of her friends.

Jane chose an empty bedroom at random, tugged her jeans off, and slipped underneath the white bedspread in just her sweater, realizing long after the fact that she must have lost her knit cap sometime during the evening’s struggle.
Not mine to begin with, and not mine anymore,
she thought superstitiously. Objects that still belonged to a person could be used to locate them, as Jane had done with Dee’s hoodie. In the magical world, it didn’t pay to be sentimental about possessions.

One of them did still matter to her, though, now more than ever; and she sat up to dig around in her knapsack for the small wooden box that Malcolm had brought back from his travels. Gran’s strong, work-roughened hands flashed briefly before her eyes, so quickly that she wasn’t sure if it was magic or her own tired and confused brain.
How long before this begins to remind me of Dee?
she wondered bleakly, lying back down and curling her arms around the box’s edges as though cradling a lover.
Would she even choose to hang around me, after all this?

Her arm snaked out until it struck something warm and furry among the high piles of pillows, eliciting a soft meow of protest. A pair of green eyes gleamed out at her.
That’s got to be the biggest cat I’ve ever seen,
Jane thought curiously, retreating politely to her own side of the bed while the cat’s eyes closed sleepily again. It seemed willing enough to peacefully coexist, so she stayed put, allowing herself to feel just the tiniest bit warmed and soothed by its presence. It was a relief to have company that couldn’t talk, especially considering how much talking she would have to do in the morning.

They’ll be relieved that Malcolm is gone, at least
. The thought caused the dull ache in her heart to harden into an angry knot; and she shoved her face into the pillowcase, trying to block out her own miserable thoughts.

She’s dead
. Dee’s wide smile flashed before her eyes with such clarity that Jane almost thought she was in the room. Her eyes began to sting and burn. She heard the cat’s heavy body shift restlessly beside her, but any sense of companionship had vanished. She was all alone in this, alone with her illusions and her tears.
It wasn’t her fight, but I brought her in anyway. And now I can’t even tell her I’m sorry
.