The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) (6 page)

‘A twenty-eight-day spell,’ Emer mused, as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘That’s what “a month” would mean to any witch. A precise time frame like that usually means a ritual of some kind on each day. She’ll be using blood, and there might be some darker things. Sacrifices?’

‘Wouldn’t there have to be?’ Maeve asked. ‘To balance the scales, or whatever? You can’t make new life out of nothing, not even with magic.’

‘But she isn’t, really,’ Jane countered thoughtfully. ‘There’s no new life; if anything, there’s less of it. And maybe the body she leaves
is
a sort of a sacrifice. What happens to those bodies, anyway?’ she asked suddenly, turning to Malcolm, who looked taken aback.

‘I don’t . . . know,’ he mused. ‘I tried to learn more about my family during my time away, but I guess I haven’t wanted to think about that part too much. Hasina doesn’t completely push the person out, from what I understand; she shares the body, two souls crammed into one. She’s driving, but the other person is still there somewhere, not controlling, but maybe sometimes influencing. Or maybe not even that.’

Emer frowned. ‘A soul with no body of its own, but stuck inside of one anyway.’ She shuddered and clasped her hands together tightly. ‘It’s an abomination, not meant to be. That soul would be badly damaged from the start, then fade over time to almost nothing.’

Malcolm swallowed, and Jane felt a wave of pity for him. They were, after all, talking about his mother – and his sister, if they didn’t find a way to stop it. ‘A tarot reader in Cuenca told me that the host is just a collection of habits, a ghost in the back of her own head. I’m not sure there would even be enough of her left to take her own body back even if Hasina left it voluntarily. Dementia runs pretty thick in my family – among the women, anyway. I never thought to question that before, but it makes sense that it would be the former vessels, left by Hasina and with too little life in them to really come back.’

Jane slid her hand across the smooth fabric of the couch to squeeze his. ‘Maybe we could inoculate Annette somehow,’ she suggested, ‘and make it impossible for Hasina to get in. Or if we could just convince her to
leave
. . . but so far Lynne hasn’t left her alone for a second that I’ve been able to see.’

‘It might not matter,’ Dee told her. Her husky voice was reassuring. ‘Hasina will have to cross some distance no matter what, to get into her new body. Surely she’s marked her target by now, so I don’t think the actual amount of distance would be much of an obstacle when the time comes.’

‘Not
much
of one,’ Emer murmured, glancing meaningfully at her granddaughter. Maeve looked as confused as Jane felt, though, and so the older woman pressed on. ‘But physical distance is still relevant, because she’ll have to go airborne. There’s no other way.’

‘She’s saying it’s not a body switch,’ Maeve explained to the others. ‘Everything in the world takes up some kind of space, even Hasina’s soul. She has to move from one body to the other in order to take it over, which means she has to be out of both bodies for, like, half a second.’ She paused, looking pensive. ‘It’s a point of vulnerability, maybe.’

‘A vulnerable half second?’ Harris scoffed. ‘So we could kidnap Lynne and tie her up in our kitchen, and she could still jump bodies when we inevitably blink?’

‘No, she couldn’t,’ Maeve replied, glancing at her grandmother for approval. Emer nodded for her to go on, her own green eyes glowing with pride. ‘It’s a difficult and dangerous spell with an exact time limit. The precise moment of the body-switch has already been determined; it was set in stone the moment she started the spell. Which she probably did as soon as she heard that Annette was still alive, so we can narrow it down to one specific evening.’

Jane flashed back to the moment she had told Lynne, during their tête-à-tête in Central Park, that she had found Annette. Lynne had breathed all her magic into her silver athame and handed it over to Jane in exchange for Annette’s whereabouts, vowing to never come after her again. But Lynne had probably rushed straight back home to set the spell in motion, while Jane went off in the other direction thinking that all her problems were over.

‘André wanted me to kill Annette,’ she said quietly. ‘He thinks it’s the only way to make us all safe.’ She glanced up, looking at each face for a long moment before moving on to the next. ‘I want you all to be safe. I don’t know if I’ll be able to fight Hasina once she’s in Annette’s body, with all her magic and a whole new life ahead of her. But there’s a week and a half left to prevent that from ever even happening, so now is the time to stop her. I dragged that poor girl into this mess, and if we can give her a way out, I want – I
need
– to try.’

‘Of course you do,’ Dee assured her quickly. ‘And we’ll all help.’ She shot a meaningful glare at Harris, who looked like he was biting his tongue.

‘Thank you all,’ Malcolm told them sincerely. ‘I know that my family has done nothing to earn your goodwill, so it means a lot to me that you’d even consider helping my sister. I hope that once Hasina is banished from our lives, we can be friends – or at least, not such enemies.’ He shot Emer a smile that would have melted marble, and even Harris looked moved.

Jane glanced between them approvingly.
It’s a start
.

Chapter Six

J
ANE PAUSED FOR
a moment on the front steps of the brownstone to gather herself. The emotion and energy bottled up during the meeting had practically shoved her out the door. It was only once she was outside, breathing the fresh spring air, that she was able to slow down and make sure that Malcolm had kept up with her. But of course he was right on her heels, the sunlight picking up golden glints in the thick waves of his hair.

Jane’s smile was both automatic and sincere. After more than a week of her near-desperate need for solitude, she felt strange spending so much time with Malcolm. It was, after all, the first time they had really been alone together since they said goodbye just after their wedding barely a month ago. But as confusing as it was to have him so near, it also felt inexplicably normal. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked him curiously; her own plans for the rest of the day weren’t even half formed, and she wondered what he might have in mind.

‘We’re going where you’ve gone every day so far,’ he told her, sliding his elbow deftly under her hand, which seemed to have been waiting for it. ‘As soon as you got off the couch you were on your way to check up on my sister.’

I am,
Jane realized. ‘I feel so responsible for her,’ she admitted, then noticed that Malcolm had begun gently steering her down the street. ‘Wait,’ she urged, pulling him instead toward a diner on the corner. ‘It’s a bad idea for either of us to lurk around looking for her; it’s a terrible idea for
both
of us to do it. I’ve got it on good authority that your family doesn’t exactly appreciate my interest in Annette.’

He resisted for a brief moment, then nodded and stepped ahead of her to politely open the door of the diner. ‘Excellent point,’ he conceded as she passed him. ‘Let’s take a break and strategize. Besides, I’ve been in the mood for blueberry pancakes ever since I got back.’

‘Dee makes pretty good ones,’ Jane remembered fondly, sliding into a green-vinyl-covered booth.

‘Dee makes pretty good everything,’ Malcolm agreed easily, ‘but I have a feeling her version of “blueberry pancakes” would be crêpes with blueberry compote. I respect the artistry, but sometimes you just want the kind made from a mix.’

Jane opened her mouth in surprise. ‘This is an American thing,’ she guessed, and was rewarded with an embarrassed grin.

‘You’re trying some,’ he countered, and proceeded to order what sounded like enough food for six people.

When the waiter had gone, Jane set her elbows on the table and twisted her hands together. ‘The last time I saw her, your sister tried to kill me,’ she pointed out, deciding to be blunt. ‘I’m not exactly sure what she might do if we run into each other on the street.’

‘I want to say “I’m sure she would hear you out,” ’ Malcolm told her carefully, ‘but I guess I don’t know her that well anymore.’

Jane felt suddenly guilty. She hadn’t really considered how complicated Malcolm’s feelings must be until now. Annette was back, was in mortal danger, and had nearly killed the woman he loved. It was a lot to take in, especially since he hadn’t even been able to see her yet.

The waiter set down a stack of syrup-drenched pancakes between them, and their mutual reverie was broken.

‘I read something on the plane that I thought was interesting,’ Malcolm said, once a third of the pancakes were gone and three more plates of deliciously fried and greasy food had arrived.

Jane tried to look as encouraging and curious as possible with her mouth full of bacon. Reading her expression, Malcolm pulled a few pieces of magazine print from his back pocket, unfolding them and sliding them across the table toward her. Leaning closer, Jane realized that she was looking at a six-page
National Enquirer
spread about the fire at 665 Park Avenue.

‘All the other coverage I’d seen said “no serious injuries,” which is great,’ Malcolm explained, ‘but they all also said that the most damage was to the top two floors . . . and the attic.’

In a flash, Jane understood. Malcolm’s younger brother, Charles, had lived his entire life hidden in the mansion’s attic. He was the result of a very late pregnancy that Lynne had risked in a desperate attempt to replace her lost daughter. She had held it together – barely – with so much magic that the child suffered severe, and permanent, mental damage. But even more disappointing was the fact that after all that, the child was a boy. Having spent most of her pregnancy on bed rest, supposedly grieving her lost daughter, Lynne was able to easily keep Charles’s existence secret from the world.

While Jane had been living at 665 Park during her engagement to Malcolm, Charles had snuck out of his attic apartment a few times and come looking for her, responding to the same magical attraction that had caused so many problems for Jane. It scared her half to death. But when Lynne locked them in the attic together, trying to make Charles rape and impregnate her, Jane managed to break through the confusion of his mind and communicate with the lonely boy underneath. She had felt a certain affection for Charles since then, although it was, naturally, a wary one. He had helped her again when she went looking for some of Annette’s things to use in a spell, and was the only one to see through her Ella disguise, which had perversely made her like him a little more.

And it didn’t even occur to me until now to wonder what happened to him in the fire
. Jane bit her lip and followed Malcolm’s pointing index finger to a large sidebar on the last page of the article. ‘ “Rumors of Homeless-Squatter Discovery Persist in Spite of Denials,” ’ Jane read aloud, then frowned in confusion. ‘Huh?’

‘Just read,’ Malcolm encouraged, and she did.

Although there was no proof and no confirmation from the authorities and not even any nameable sources, the paper asserted that a homeless man had been secretly living in the mansion, unnoticed by even its inhabitants until the fire had forced him to leave. ‘It’s a big house,’ one person had been quoted as saying – anonymously, though Jane couldn’t see much harm in such an obvious observation.
But of course you can’t be too careful, when risking Lynne’s wrath
. The ‘mystery man’ had allegedly been confronted by one of the mansion’s staff members, and no one could account for his movements after that, so Jane concluded that he must have been led back inside and confined again before (almost) anyone had a chance to wonder what he was doing there. At least he hadn’t been harmed in the fire.

‘That’s a relief,’ she said out loud, and Malcolm cocked a skeptical dark-gold eyebrow her way. ‘I mean it,’ she assured him. ‘He’s as much a victim of your mother as you and Annette.’

A long pause settled between them, and Jane knew that they couldn’t avoid coming back to the heart of the matter for long. ‘I need to see her either way,’ Malcolm began in a decent impression of idle conversation.
Of course he does,
Jane knew. After twenty years, seeing Annette’s photo in the tabloids would hardly satisfy him.

‘And I need to try to warn her again,’ Jane mused. ‘She was so angry that night; Lynne saw me coming and told her half truths to wind her up. But she will have had some time to cool down now. Maybe she even heard a little of what I was trying to tell her. Maybe she’ll be curious.’

Malcolm pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘Or else she’s in a very tense and vulnerable place right now and she’ll kill us both on sight.’

‘Yes, or else that,’ Jane agreed miserably. She was prepared to take some risks to help undo the mess she’d made by bringing Annette here. But how was she supposed to decide what to do when there was no way of knowing how risky any given action even was?

‘Maybe . . .’ Malcolm pushed some hash browns around his mostly empty plate with his fork. ‘Maybe we should do a little surveillance before jumping right in. I’d like to give her the benefit of the doubt,’ he added quickly, ‘but it’s more important right now to tread carefully than to prove I’m a loyal brother. I promised I would do anything to keep you safe, for one thing, and I’m not eager to be burned to a crisp, myself.’

‘Surveillance, then,’ Jane agreed with a wry smile, thinking of her own surveillance outside the church just days before. ‘Do you happen to have a pair of binoculars with you? Or maybe a high-powered telescope, so we can keep a really safe distance?’