The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) (19 page)

Deep down, Jane knew that Harris was right about her motives for wanting to communicate with Dee. The sense of peace that had settled into the Circle after Emer’s funeral ritual should be honoured, not disturbed. Jane still felt a pressing need to pour her heart out to her friend, but Dee had more than earned her rest. It wouldn’t be fair to inflict the problems of the living on her afterlife.

But the thing that lives in this book was never alive, and it isn’t dead
. It was a shadow of her gran, a memory that Celine Boyle’s magic had turned into a sort of reference guide to the story of her life. It didn’t have a peace to disturb, and as a bonus, Jane had never done anything to hurt it. The burden of her constant guilt seemed to get heavier with every wrong choice she made. Even just speaking with someone whom she hadn’t harmed would be a very welcome relief.

Jane opened the book, flipping through the apparently blank pages while invisible writing played at the edges of her sight. Her magic prickled, responding to the journal’s curious spell, and Jane sent it searching deep into the secrets of the paper.
Show me,
she thought at it, hearing the words both inside her mind and, somehow, inside the book.
Let me see who your owner was. Let me see the mark she left on you
.

Then she was falling, her own body somewhere far above and behind her. Images rushed by, too quickly to be anything but a blur of colour and light and movement. She knew to expect them this time and tried to watch, looking for familiar faces, but before she could recognize so much as a single frame of the slide show it was over. Jane was motionless in the dark, standing on nothing, face-to-face with the memory that looked identical to Gran.

‘You again,’ it observed in a tone so Gran-like that Jane didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

‘Me again,’ she agreed instead. The diary version of Gran had been the one who told Jane about Hasina in the first place. She had showed her the real Gran’s pursuit of the witch she suspected of killing Jane’s mother – Lynne Doran – and her discovery that Lynne was the latest in a long line of hosts for her ancestress. When André and Katrin Dalca
cu’s parents had kidnapped Annette from under her mother’s nose, Gran had agreed to help them hide the girl until Hasina finally died. Unfortunately, Jane hadn’t received the diary until after she had already undone all her grandmother’s careful work.

‘I couldn’t stop her,’ she blurted out. ‘Hasina switched into Annette’s body.’

The Gran-like figure blinked rapidly a couple of times. To Jane it looked like a robot assimilating new information, not a human being reacting in surprise; which oddly enough made her feel more comfortable opening up about the events of the last few weeks. She explained about Malcolm’s return, their meetings with Annette, the plan to intercept Hasina during her spell, and the disaster that had unfolded in the atrium. ‘Annette’s young – twenty-seven, I think,’ she finished, an edge of frustration creeping into her voice. ‘She can have a whole pack of children of her own.’

‘That’s true,’ not-Gran confirmed sternly, but somehow serenely. ‘And even if she never finds a new body, this transfer has provided her with many more years of life. Witches will die as long as she lives; I fear that you are in even more danger than you were before.’

‘Maybe she’ll have to stop, now that more of us know about her,’ Jane suggested halfheartedly, knowing before the words were fully out how ridiculous that hope was.

‘She won’t,’ un-Gran replied, and Jane wondered if she were imagining the hint of surprise in her familiar voice. ‘It is necessary in order to maintain her power.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Jane said as she frowned. ‘Are other witches some kind of threat to her?’ It was hard to imagine, given how Hasina had grown over the millennia.

‘It’s far more than that.’ Gran’s image went on to explain that Hasina’s magic had stopped behaving normally after her first body’s life had ended. Magic replenished itself on life, she reminded Jane: it needed organic energy for fuel. No matter how drained of magic Jane might feel – and she had felt pretty empty after the battle in the atrium – her power always rose back to its natural levels with a little rest (
and a lot of food,
Jane amended silently). When magic was sent to inhabit something that wasn’t alive, however – as when it was stored in silver, for example – it wouldn’t just remain inert and waiting. It slowly leeched back into the world, dissipating year by year until it was gone.

While Hasina wasn’t an inanimate object, of course, she wasn’t quite alive, either. The thing that animated her, the life force, didn’t belong to the body it inhabited. The spirit that did belong there had no control over its own body, and quickly grew weaker and more confused until it couldn’t really be called a ‘person’ at all. So the body had a harder and harder time maintaining its magic the longer Hasina was in control . . . and Hasina wasn’t partial to being short on power.

‘So she
has
to kill other witches, to take their magic,’ Jane finished slowly, and the Gran-like image nodded gravely. Something clicked in Jane’s brain: she had been so focused on the present that she had almost forgotten the reason why Gran had investigated Lynne Doran’s secrets in the first place. ‘Is that why – do you think that’s what happened to my parents? She killed them for my mother’s magic?’

The image hesitated ever so slightly, then nodded. ‘I believe that Hasina killed your mother in order to steal her magic.’

There was something odd and stilted about her speech, and Jane frowned. ‘ “My mother,” ’ she repeated pointedly. She had pictured the car accident hundreds of times growing up, piecing it together from the scraps of information that Gran had occasionally let fall. The specific details shifted and changed in her mind, but she knew that there had been a narrow, winding mountain road in North Carolina, a flash flood, and a brutal crash. She knew that a kindly neighbour had insisted on babysitting for the young couple, or else ten-month-old Jane would have died as well. And she knew that both of her parents had been in the car.

‘Hasina could have killed her alone,’ un-Gran admitted finally. ‘But she had an old, old grudge against your father as well, and I imagine that the opportunity to avenge herself on him while also gaining magic from your mother was especially appealing to her. In fact, a theory that Lynne Doran might have acted on her family’s bad blood with his was what led me to discover Hasina’s existence in the first place.’

Jane felt her breathing speed up and grow shallow. The real Gran had never been willing to tell Jane much of anything about her father. He had evidently changed his last name to ‘Boyle’ after marrying Angeline, making it impossible for Jane to learn even basic information about his life. Gran’s stubborn silence on that topic had been one of the many things that had sent teenaged Jane into helpless fits of rage, but no matter whether she shouted or reasoned or went on a hunger strike, Gran refused to budge.
But her memory is answering all my questions,
she realized. It must have been created without Gran’s own stubborn reservations. Jane sucked in a deep breath and forged ahead. ‘Tell me about the grudge. Who was my father to Hasina?’

‘It goes back to long before his birth,’ the memory cautioned. ‘Hasina’s memory is as long as her life, and she can carry a vendetta through many generations. It began with the famous witch trials in Salem – you’ll remember them, of course.’ Jane didn’t bother to answer. Gran herself had homeschooled her, so she knew perfectly well that Jane knew all about them. ‘What you most likely do
not
know is that the accusers and judges were merely the tools of actual witches. For some time the New World had been home to the last surviving descendants of Anila, one of Ambika’s daughters. They had lived in relative peace and obscurity for some time, but to their dismay Hasina’s daughters crossed over, invading the territory that had been theirs alone. They managed to discover her secret and realized that she was an even greater threat than they had realized: it was imperative to their continued survival that she be killed.’

‘So they tried to use regular nonwitches to do the job?’ Jane was appalled; it was like trying to smother a forest fire by throwing fluffy bunnies at it. Then again, she thought, maybe it was clever. Hasina was deeply dedicated to fitting in with the rest of society and would go to extraordinary lengths to seem socially ‘correct’ – maybe even far enough to get ensnared in a well-laid trap.

‘They used the locals as camouflage,’ the diary confirmed, ‘or at least they tried. Some of Hasina’s more minor relatives were actually caught up in the executions, but of course Hasina herself wasn’t touched. When she discovered that Anila’s family was behind the hunt, she killed every last witch in their line.’

Jane exhaled slowly. ‘Malcolm said that a couple of the witch families were extinct.’

Gran’s memory nodded, but Jane knew her well enough to understand that her agreement was qualified. ‘The witches in them, at least. Hasina continued to seek out Anila’s children for several generations, until there was no real hope that magic would ever resurface in their line. But there were a few children – distant relatives, mostly males – whom she was willing to ignore.’

‘Until one of them married a witch,’ Jane finished for her. Even if her father had been generations removed from any of his family’s actual magic, the attraction of one magical being to another might have been there; faint, but there. Gran would have known who her daughter’s suitor really was – even if he had no idea himself – and knowing that the marriage would draw unwelcome attention, she had opposed it. But Angeline had married Jane’s father anyway, leaving Gran with no choice but to hide the couple with all her fierce strength, including convincing him to change his name. As a daughter of not one but two magical lines, the infant Jane inherited more power than any other infant in her generation – maybe even more than Annette. Hasina would never stop until she had found the child and taken her magic . . . and her life.

But Angeline had insisted on raising her daughter as a ‘normal’ girl, free of the magical world and the danger that came with it. She moved her family to North Carolina, hoping to leave her past behind, and Gran had tried to respect her wishes.
And that’s how my parents died,
Jane realized. ‘Tell me everything,’ she told the image. ‘Please. Start from the beginning.’

The image exhaled with a touch of loving exasperation. Jane longed to throw her arms around her, but she knew she would have to settle for listening. Around them, the darkness spun, shimmered, and resolved. Jane saw a sandy-haired young man in a well-tailored but well-worn suit. He sat in a one-piece plastic chair in front of a massive window, and Jane saw a line of bullet-nosed airplanes waiting on the other side. The young man held a boarding pass in his hand, and he kept flexing open its paper sheath to read the numbers on it again and again. ‘Your father’s name was Matthew Vincent,’ Gran’s voice began, and Jane listened raptly.

Chapter Twenty

T
HE SUN WAS
low on the horizon by the time Jane emerged from Gran’s diary. She was exhausted, and her mind was reeling from the massive volume of new information she had taken in during the afternoon. She felt like there was too much in her now to be contained in her one bedroom, or even in the entire sprawling house. She needed the open sky around her rather than walls pressing in, so she pulled a soft wool wrap around her shoulders and slipped outside.

She crossed the lawn quickly, and without even thinking found herself face-to-face with Dee’s little stone marker, nestled carefully into a flat space between the dunes. She had no idea where Emer had gotten it on such short notice, but then she supposed that the Montagues specialized in putting troubled souls to rest, so of course they must have some rather macabre supplies on hand. The narrow stone stood just under a foot high, and although it was brand-new, its edges already looked a little weathered and worn. A pentacle was carved into its smooth front surface; its other sides had been left rough and unfinished. Dee would have said that it was perfect, Jane knew, and her eyes filled with tears.

‘I miss you,’ she whispered, dropping down to kneel on the grass before the marker. It was springy and damp, and she felt moisture seeping into the ballerina-like chiffon layers of her skirt. But it wasn’t really hers, and she didn’t care, anyway. Her entire heart was swollen with longing, so full it felt like it might burst.

Dee, Gran, Maman, Papa . . . even Malcolm, or who I thought Malcolm could be. Harris, whom I used to think might become more than a friend, and now he’s even less
. ‘I miss you,’ she said again, brushing Dee’s marker with her fingertips but speaking at least a little bit to all of them. The stone was still warm from the heat of the day, although the sun had disappeared behind the house and a few stars were peeking out of the sky over the water.
It has life,
Jane thought irrationally;
it has some of her fierce kinetic energy in it
.