The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) (27 page)

Dee didn’t get a chance to scream. Neither did Gran. Did my parents, or Katrin?
But Penelope had made her point all the same. ‘I have to break the cycle. I have to finally reject Aditi’s legacy and be ruthless.’

The words sounded powerful when she said them, but Penelope’s laughter was immediate and sincere. ‘That “cycle” has been broken thousands of times over the years. You think that just because you were related to someone hundreds of generations back, you are the same person? Our families are all full of good and bad witches; Hasina is the only one who never changes. After all, if you take just one more step backward, we all come from the same person. Just as much as you are Aditi’s, you are Ambika’s. And so am I: we are her own flesh and bone.’

‘ Flesh and blood,’ Jane corrected absently, echoing Malcolm’s words from earlier, then flushed as Penelope glowered at her. ‘Your way is fine; it’s just a common expression, is all.’

There was a long, tense silence, and in it Jane’s mind replayed the two phrases over and over, gaining speed until they jumbled together in a cascade of meaningless syllables.
Flesh and blood. Flesh and bone
.

‘We will go back to the circle now,’ Penelope told her stiffly. Her dignity was clearly wounded, but suddenly Jane’s brain was far too full for her to care.

‘We won’t,’ she corrected abruptly, her heart starting to race. Was it possible that magic could flow through loopholes?
Of course it is,
her magic hummed in her ears, pulsing like a second heartbeat.
The spell is just a shape; the power is the power. The only thing that matters is having it
.

Penelope cocked her head, her eyes nothing but frosty blue slits behind her glasses. But she seemed to sense some of the revolution going on inside of Jane, because she said nothing, waiting.

‘Get everyone,’ Jane said finally, when she was sure. ‘Get everyone in the kitchen now, and start getting yourself ready. We’re going to do some magic. All of us.’

Chapter Twenty-eight

J
ANE COUNTED SIX
pairs of eyes riveted on her face and searched herself for any sense of nervousness or stage fright. But there was nothing but a cold, hard certainty. The Montagues stood in the kitchen, ranged like a rather peculiar army on the far side of the countertop, with Penelope hovering between them and Jane. ‘We’re going to raise the dead,’ she told the waiting assembly flatly, not bothering to try to decipher the various expressions that crossed their faces. ‘We’re going to raise Ambika, and she is going to come and take her daughter back to the grave where she belongs.’

There was a murmur of sound at that: a rush of whispers and mumbles that never quite blossomed into outright protests, although their intent was clear enough.

‘We can’t do that, Jane,’ Maeve said finally, so quietly that Jane wondered if her friend feared for her sanity. ‘You know we’d need something of hers, or people who knew her, or—’

‘I know.’ Penelope was looking at her a little too shrewdly now, so Jane kept her focus on the rest of them instead. ‘Emer, I think everything else that we need should already be in the house, right? And we still have a couple of hours. I was thinking you could set up in the sunroom once we’re done here; if you move the furniture, we should be able to make a respectable circle.’ Jane looked pointedly at Harris, who flinched a little under her intensity. ‘You too, please. I’m going to need everyone on this; it’ll take all our power and concentration together. She’s been dead a long time; it wouldn’t be easy no matter what we had of hers.’

‘But we don’t
have
anything of hers,’ Leah half whined. For a moment Jane thought that the girl might actually stomp her foot, but somehow she restrained herself. ‘You can’t just wave away the main ingredient like it doesn’t matter.’

‘Jane,’ Charlotte said in a more conciliatory tone, ‘I’ll be happy to help you try whatever you’d like, but with all the power between us we couldn’t call up so much as a shade of Ambika. Not enough to speak to us, even, or tell us what to do. I’d hate to see you rest your hopes on a séance that won’t even have its guest of honor present. Surely there’s something else we can do to help you better.’

‘This is it,’ Jane insisted, ‘and I’m not talking about a séance. Your mother told me that, with a person’s bones, someone like Penelope – a real adept – could call someone back into this world almost as fully as before they left it. Nothing less than that will help us, so that’s what we’re going to do.’

Harris bit his lip and dropped his eyes toward the floor, but he didn’t have to say anything for Jane to guess that he assumed the worst. He thought that she had cracked under the pressure and lost her mind, or that this was some elaborate plot for her to escape her fatal appointment with Annette. She could certainly imagine how incoherent she must sound at the moment, but the idea of explaining in explicit detail might literally make her sick.

‘With the bones,’ Penelope repeated, her voice like an icy gust rattling the windows. ‘With enough magic you can do anything, but even you don’t have
that
much, Blondie.’

Jane inhaled, then forced all the air out of her lungs. This was the hard part, but she knew it would only get harder if she stalled. She half raised a hand and then lowered it, resting it on the handle of an eight-inch chef’s knife of the type that Dee had especially favoured. Still sheathed in its butcher block, the knife felt awkward and unwieldy, but she knew how sharp it must be.

‘Penelope very kindly reminded me that all of us here are part of the shadow that Ambika cast across the world. We are a part of her, and she is still a part of us. We are’—she drew the knife—‘her flesh and bone.’

Maeve started forward, but her cousin was between her and the end of the counter and there was a confused pileup as she tried to get by. In those few seconds, Jane spread her left hand out on the cool granite countertop, the knife still held loosely in her right.
Pinky, ring, middle, pinky, middle, pinky
– but there was only one option that wouldn’t require her to contort her hand and maybe miss her strike, and if she waited another second she would lose her nerve. With a flash and a chorus of screams that she was only pretty sure weren’t her own, Jane brought the blade of the knife down in a shining arc onto the counter. When she lifted her hands again, the knife and one finger – her own left index finger – remained on the stone.

It felt cold at first, but not quite numb: more of an angry cold, like frozen steel against her bare skin. Then came the heat, searing up her hand and into her arm, and black spots flowered in her vision. She could feel herself beginning to sway a little, blood and red hair swimming in a confusing sea around her, but she couldn’t afford to go under; not now.

One, two, three, four. Four fingers, four corners, four directions. Four, three, two, one
. The black spots receded a little, and Jane counted her breaths, from one to four and back again, and concentrated on not crying. She set her jaw and held her body poker straight, and when some of the shapes around her resolved, she saw that Maeve was pressing a crimson tea towel to her maimed hand.

With her good hand she picked up the finger from the counter, trying not to see it too clearly. It had been sliced cleanly off just above the knuckle, leaving three progressively smaller pieces of priceless finger bone in an unfortunately gruesome sheath of flesh. ‘Harris,’ she called hoarsely, and the commotion around her froze solid.

It was only five pairs of eyes on hers now – Maeve’s head was bent attentively over her injured hand – and the faces they stared out from were definitely paler than they had been before. Even Penelope looked shaken behind her thick glasses: she clutched at a few of the chunky necklaces hanging across her impressive bosom as if they might ward off Jane’s sudden madness.

Careful not to show the slightest sign of her absolute revulsion, Jane casually tossed the severed finger at Harris. He blanched even more and flinched again, but to his credit he caught it out of the air and didn’t let it drop. ‘Boil that,’ she told him in a reasonable approximation of her own normal tone of voice. ‘Boil it until it’s only bones; I don’t want to look at it. Penelope, tell everyone else how to set up whatever we need to call on Ambika. And, everyone else . . . do it. Right the hell now.’

She pressed her own right hand against the tea towel, pulling it gently away from Maeve so that she would know that Jane’s orders applied to her as well. It was warm and a little sticky, and bile rose in Jane’s throat. But there was nothing to do but keep it pressed to her bleeding knuckle and wait, while her six allies scattered in every direction to raise the dead.

Chapter Twenty-nine

J
ANE COULD TELL
as soon as she entered the mansion that Annette had prepared it for battle. There was no one in the gold-and-marble entryway, and the elevator stood open, waiting, as it had never been that she could remember. Since Annette could have tried to kill her on the street or just inside the front door, Jane understood that Hasina’s need for correctness and propriety had forced her hand once again: there would be a real fight.

She stepped into the elevator, and its doors slid silently closed behind her. There was a strange tingling in her limbs, and especially in her wounded hand, where it became confused with the painful throbbing that lingered despite Leah’s best healing efforts.
Ambika,
she thought, bouncing on the balls of her toes, although of course it wasn’t quite. Even with their combined power and Jane’s sacrificed bones, Penelope had warned her that they wouldn’t be able to bind their common ancestress to the mortal plane for long. It would do her no good if Ambika returned to her final rest too soon, so Jane had to risk calling her too late. She slipped her right hand around the bulky silver amulet that Penelope had given her, fingering the strange dark stone at its centre, counting the floors as the elevator rose.

When its doors slid open again, Jane was thoroughly unsurprised to see the blackened floor and soot-stained windows of the eighth-floor atrium. At the far end, where Lynne had lurked before, she could clearly make out Annette’s silhouette against the mingled light from the streetlamps below and the full moon above. Partway along the side wall between them hovered a huge, indecisive shape that could only be her brother Charles. Jane stepped forward, pulling her magic around her like a shroud.

It was only then that she saw the third shape beside Charles, against the windows where Dee had been bound during her last moments of life. Her magic was so primed and ready that as soon as she wished to see it better, light flared through the atrium: cool, steady, and without any apparent source. What it showed her made her heart sink.

Annette stood at the far side of the huge room, immaculately dressed in vintage white Chanel with her hair pulled back so that only a few dark-gold waves framed her face. Charles stood vigilantly about halfway between them, looking much the same as Jane remembered him: unkempt, his slack face wearing a permanent expression of confusion and resentment. And behind him was the third Doran sibling, apparently unconscious and bound by something glowing and greenish to a splintered window frame.

Of course he didn’t just leave
. By refusing Malcolm’s offer of help, Jane realized now, she had practically guaranteed that he would try some kind of doomed attack on his own. In the cool light of her magic it looked as though his attempt on his sister’s life had ended painfully: his mouth and one eye were swollen grotesquely, and she could only guess at the injuries she couldn’t see. She couldn’t bear to think about what he must have been through – and there was more to come. His well-intentioned but hopeless attack had put him in the middle of what was about to be an ugly battle. Her nails bit into her palms at the thought that he could be a casualty of the coming fight.
I’ll fix this,
she thought at him, willing him to hear her somehow.
Just hold on, and I’ll send her where she can never hurt you again
.

‘Perhaps we could keep this between the two of us,’ Jane suggested out loud, projecting her voice as clearly as she could across the burned floor. She gestured toward Annette’s two brothers; Malcolm stirred a little and Charles waved shyly at her. ‘This is no place for either of them.’

‘That’s what
I
said,’ Annette snapped, her hands clenching and unclenching as if she weren’t even aware of the motion. ‘I told you to come alone. I made it very clear.’

Jane bit her lip, feeling the pulse of the amulet against her breastbone. ‘I did,’ she argued, and it was true. Technically, her dead ancestress hadn’t arrived yet.

Annette took a couple of short, angry strides forward, until Jane could clearly make out the rage that twisted her features. ‘Then what,’ she practically shrieked, ‘is
he
doing here?’

She whipped one hand toward Malcolm, her manicured nail pointing straight for his heart. Jane opened her mouth to explain the mistake: she hadn’t known a thing about his plan and would have stopped him if she had. But before she could make a sound, Annette’s nail made a strange back-and-forth slashing motion in the air, and the words died in Jane’s throat as crimson blood began to seep from fresh wounds across Malcolm’s throat and chest.

He woke up then, and for a brief, strange moment their eyes met. ‘Jane,’ he mouthed, and his battered face relaxed into a smile before his eyes closed again.

No
. She wanted to scream, to run to him, to throw her body across his and weep for days. But he was already gone; she could see him leaving. Something in him glowed against the sourceless light that filled the atrium: a white flash that moved through it. It flowed from his limp body to seep through the cracked windowpane and out into the night air beyond. She could actually see the light of his soul as it left, and even through her pain and shock and regret, it filled her with wonder.