The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) (13 page)

‘She’s ready,’ Dee’s husky voice murmured from the passenger seat, and Jane heard the leather protest a little as she twisted. ‘Jane, they’ve got one.’

Jane heard some more rustling, and then something soft landed beside her in the backseat. She opened her eyes slowly, carefully, but the house looked the same.
It doesn’t have to feel like anything to work,
she reminded herself dutifully.

The Montague witches stood on either side of one of the trees planted in the median. Its branches were starting to sway drunkenly. The women’s bare arms glowed white-gold in the light from the streetlamps, and Jane realized that they, like Dee, had half instinctively removed jackets and sweaters before going to work. The night was cool, but she could already see sweat glistening on Maeve’s smooth forehead.

Jane absently folded the red hoodie that Dee had tossed into the back, then slid out of the car. ‘Stand back,’ she warned Dee and Harris, who had quickly stood up as well, but she didn’t have to watch them to know that they wouldn’t go far, despite her warning. The other two melted back from the tree a bit, which started to sway even more dangerously until Jane’s magic reached out to prop it up.

Her friends formed a loose half circle around the door to 665 Park. From her position in the centre, Jane looked around at them: they stood too far apart to hold hands, but she could almost see the lines of magic stretched taut between them, pulsing with energy. Then four pairs of eyes locked on her in unison, and with it came all the power they had been working to pull into their Circle. Her knees buckled under the sheer force of it, and her head swam. She felt momentarily drunk, but the sharp boundaries of the Circle around her held her in place until she could bring the street back into focus. She could sense her own intentions reflected back at her from every side, herding her toward her target: the tree.

The others had loosened it for her, she could tell: its sprawl of roots was partly visible, still covered in rich black dirt. Its branches, full of perfect miniature leaves, continued to wave softly. The other trees on the median strip swayed as well, but when she looked closely it was obvious to Jane that her tree was responding to something other than the brisk wind. When she reached her magic out toward it again, she could feel its wrongness like a loose tooth in the back of her own mouth.

Then the tide of magic from the people around her swept her mind onward again, and she solidified the grip of the magic on the tree’s rough trunk. She could almost feel its sap sliding beneath her skin. The wind moving through the leaves stirred her hair with the same touch. The power channeling through her was changing, and Jane changed with it: lifting and turning a burden that would have been far too heavy for one person alone. Five, though, could hold the tree suspended in thin air, and Jane marveled at the relative ease of it. Uprooting her first tree had taken nearly all her energy; this time she still had more than enough left to throw it.

An intangible change ran through the Circle, jumping from nerve ending to nerve ending, tingling up through Jane’s arms and into her brain.
Ready
. The thought was hers, but she heard Dee’s voice in it as well, and Harris’s more faintly, and a sort of rich vibration below that she knew must belong to the other two witches.

The tree held steady for a moment, shaking slightly from the pressure of magic on every side of it, and then it shot forward like an arrow. Jane felt her hair and sweater whip around her in its wake as she watched it crash resoundingly into the carved front door. The door splintered with a satisfying crunch, but the tree rebounded back into the empty air. Jane could see that the door was badly damaged, but she didn’t dare look closer: even shared between them the tree was beginning to feel heavy. She focused all her attention on the tree and felt the answering magics of her Circle backing her up.

Again,
she thought, or maybe they all thought it at once, and the tree surged forward a second time. It was almost imperceptibly slower, but still landed solidly enough to do the trick: the thick brass hinges let go with a high-pitched wail, and the door sagged brokenly inward.

Inward into the lions’ den
. Jane shivered at how hollow and thin her own thoughts suddenly sounded in her mind.
I’m alone again in here,
she realized with a feeling much like grief. She shook her head to clear it and tried to make herself step forward, to where Dee and the Montagues were approaching the gaping ruins of the carved wooden door. Their linked Circle had served its purpose, Jane knew, and there was a lot to do in the next few minutes, but she couldn’t quite shake her lingering feeling of loneliness.

She moved up toward the doorway, and they moved instinctively to let her peer inside. The familiar gold-and-marble entryway was littered with dark splinters. Jane immediately saw the uniformed figure at the security desk to her left, and her magic flared up protectively – but it was only Gunther, and he was slumped over, unconscious.
Knocked out by the blast,
she thought charitably, although she knew the ancient doorman had probably been asleep before they even arrived at the mansion. Either way, he seemed to be breathing but not moving, so she decided to ignore him, stepping gingerly over the remains of the door and across the threshold.

Her flats clicked on the grey-veined white marble, and she heard more footfalls behind her as her friends filed in. ‘You know what to do,’ she whispered without turning around, and a quick flurry of activity followed. Harris and Dee swept past her together, bypassing the waiting elevator and the wide-mouthed marble staircase in favour of the humble wooden door that housed the back stairs. Without the benefit of Jane’s magical eye shadow, they would do a cursory search of the lower floors. Jane felt sure, though, that the spell would be on one of the higher ones, so she had elected to start from the top and work her way down.

Maeve hurried into the gold-panelled elevator, her brown eyes round and bright with excitement. Her grandmother followed her halfway in, frowning and running her papery-skinned hands along the edge of its retracted door. Jane stepped carefully around Emer to join Maeve inside but kept her eyes anxiously trained on the older woman.

‘I have it,’ Emer declared proudly, and Jane let out a breath she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding. Emer stood squarely in front of the open door and pulled a silky amulet bag out to rest on top of her blouse. She closed one hand around it, then pulled a small blue crystal out of her shoulder bag with the other. She kissed the crystal, or maybe whispered something to it, squeezed the amulet a little harder, and pressed the crystal to the elevator’s control panel. The elevator whirred to life almost immediately.

‘Go, Grandma, go,’ Maeve whispered, and Jane could see a small smile on the old woman’s lips as she began to whisper an incantation. Jane strained to make it out, but she couldn’t hear any of the words.
Trade secrets,
she thought with a shrug; as long as they got where they were going, Emer could be as stealthy as she wanted.

Jane had never really doubted that Maeve’s grandmother could get the elevator going without the usual electronic codes, but she still felt giddy relief at her success. If anything, the machine seemed to be rising even faster than usual.
Five . . . six . . . seven ..
. The elevator’s last stop would be the atrium, one level below the hollow square of an attic that had once been Charles’s home.
I wonder if they’ve repaired it enough to send him back there,
Jane thought, bouncing nervously from the ball of one foot to the other.
Or maybe he’s wandering the halls full-time now
. It was a sobering thought, even in the midst of their successes so far. If the attic was still damaged badly enough by the fire, Charles might be anywhere – including right in the way of the couple moving up the stairs.

They’ll be fine,
she assured herself, gripping the edge of her wide belt so tightly that the soft leather left angry marks on her skin. Charles had no magic; even his unpredictable, sometimes-violent self would be no match for a resourceful Wiccan and an athletic young man.

She closed her eyes and drew her magic together. It was ready, waiting, eager to leap out from the tension-filled cage of her body. She soothed and corralled it, trying to remember all the possible attacks that the twins might use first. Then the floor lurched beneath her feet, and her eyes flew open. The delicate ‘8’ above the door had lit up.
Already?
she thought, just as another part of her sighed
Finally
.

The doors slid effortlessly open, and Jane stepped past Emer into the atrium. It was a sooty, broken shadow of its former elegance, and for a moment André’s scarred face swam in her vision. Not for long, however, because the atrium, for all its devastation, wasn’t empty.
Of course they’re in the first place we looked
. For a wild moment she wondered why she had even bothered with the pretence of searching the mansion: part of her had known all along that the spell would only take place right here.

Belinda Helding and Cora McCarroll stood in the shadows to either side of the elevator – Jane couldn’t tell which was which, but it didn’t matter. Both wore lots of long, grey layers that melted almost seamlessly into their long grey hair, and their twin pairs of pewter eyes shone flatly in the low light. The other two figures were nothing but silhouettes against the floor-to-ceiling windows, but Jane knew them all the same. The tallest and thinnest, her sleek chestnut hair pulled back into a perfect twist, could only be Lynne. But it was the slightly fuller one with the curling tendrils of shoulder-length hair that held Jane’s full attention.

‘Hello, Jane,’ Annette Doran purred, her voice as smooth and sharp as glass. ‘Welcome home.’

Chapter Fourteen

T
HE INSIDE OF
the elevator seemed to catch fire, and when Jane opened her mouth, it seared the air out of her lungs. She lunged forward and down, to where the air was cool and dark – a hand clutched at the back of her sweater, and she jerked instinctively farther forward away from its grasp. In just a few seconds she had become completely disoriented.

‘Jane!’ Maeve called desperately, and Jane realized too late that it was her hand she had pulled away from.

I went the wrong way,
she realized.
I should have gone back into the elevator
. Instead, she was crouched on the floor, thoroughly disoriented and vulnerable.

‘Jane!’ a different voice called, its sound warped by another wave of strangely unreal heat. She couldn’t even say for sure which direction the blast came from, but she did know that she couldn’t stay where she was for long.
I’m right where Annette wanted me
. The shock of the girl’s betrayal shook Jane every bit as much as the first blistering assault of her magic had.
Why didn’t Malcolm tell us that she never met up with him this afternoon? When did this all go wrong?

The room around her thickened unnaturally and the smell of smoke filled her nostrils, but this time Jane was ready to act. She clenched the magic in her blood like an invisible muscle and pushed, forcing it out through her skin and into the surrounding space. A bubble of air cleared, though she could see waves of distortion just outside it. Out there, she realized, the battle was already joined.

Maeve and her grandmother had retreated into opposite sides of the elevator, only visible in bits and flashes as they lobbed spells and amulet bags half blindly into the atrium. Lynne’s twin cousins seemed to have their hands full blocking those attacks while trying to advance on the open door, and Jane could tell that they were still making steady progress. But she couldn’t help the trapped witches just yet: Annette was heading across the soot-blackened floor toward Jane, and the buzz of magic around her was so strong that Jane could almost see it. An unfamiliar, metallic taste filled her mouth when she inhaled, and she tried to breathe mostly through her nose to avoid it.

The Dalca
cus had been right all along: Annette was no innocent victim in need of rescue. She was an unstable, untrustworthy, vengeance-minded killer.

‘You must have thought I’m hopelessly stupid,’ Annette remarked. Her mother hadn’t even bothered to step into the fray, Jane noticed.
And why should she? No magic of her own, and plenty of puppets to do her bidding
. ‘Did you really think Mom wouldn’t tell me all about my inheritance? Or that I’d let that jealous waste of a brother try to trick me out of it?’

‘Malcolm,’ Jane croaked, trying to force her parched and cracked throat to turn the word into a question.

‘He’s been jealous of me ever since that day he “lost” me on the beach,’ Annette snarled, launching another wave of vicious heat into the air. ‘And now he’s trying to separate me from my family all over again. But this time I’m strong enough to fight back.’