The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) (25 page)

Emer was clipping some purplish leaves; Jane noticed that she was wearing gloves and being unusually careful not to let them touch her bare skin. Although she was the only person whom Jane could see, she could somehow sense a sort of magical shadow of Penelope’s activity from inside the house.
I’m here to make plans,
Jane reminded herself, tilting her chin up and trying to look confident.
I’m here because everyone in this house is trying to help me live past tomorrow night
.

Chapter Twenty-six

J
ANE STOOD IN
front of her bedroom’s closet, one hand on her hip, feeling hopelessly indecisive.
What do you wear on the day you’re supposed to die?
The first time, it had been a one-of-a-kind haute-couture wedding gown. Then a flimsy cocktail dress with crystal-studded sandals, and then a soft black sweater and a knit cap. The difference, of course, was that on those occasions, the prospect of an untimely death had come on her unexpectedly. This time, she was determined to dress the part.

She had spent the morning in an old violet-and-lime silk robe of Charlotte’s, delaying this decision for as long as she could. But there had come a point when the sun was inching higher, Leah was starting to dig through the kitchen looking for something to heat up for lunch, and Jane had no choice but to try to get dressed.

Maki curled around her ankles – or, rather, just below her knees. His long gray bottle-brush of a tail reached nearly to her waist, and Jane swayed a little from the force of his affection.

‘What do you think, kitty?’ she mused. ‘It’s a serious occasion, so probably nothing too bright. And sequins are just plain out. But if I’m going to give myself any chance at fighting, I’ll need to feel confident.’ She pulled a pair of shea-butter-soft leather pants out of the closet full of hand-me-downs and held it up against her hips, turning this way and that thoughtfully. ‘Then again, if I go in looking all combat-ready, I’ll lose the element of surprise.’

Maki hopped heavily onto her bed and blinked at her with unfathomable green eyes. ‘You’re right,’ she agreed. ‘I won’t have the element of surprise anyway, no matter what I wear. Still, leather pants just don’t feel right. I’m still me, not Ella.’ The oversized cat turned his back on her very deliberately and curled himself into a ball. ‘You’re no help,’ she complained, but his only response was to twitch his tail a little more closely around his body. She sighed. ‘It’s okay. I think I know.’

She reached to the far right of the front rack, where a blue-and-white Carolina Herrera dress had caught her eye over and over again. The V-neckline plunged a little farther – okay, a lot farther – than seemed appropriate, and the overlapping iris pattern was more ‘garden party’ than ‘battle to the death.’ But she felt perversely delighted at the prospect of irritating Hasina with a slightly out-of-season dress, and anyway, it felt perfect. She pulled it over her head, the soft fabric sliding across her face, arms, breasts, stomach, thighs. It looked even more flirtatious on her curvy body than it had been on the hanger. There was no doubt about it: this was the dress.

‘Can I zip that for you?’

Jane jumped nearly a foot in the air, twisting as she did and banging her wrist sharply against the mirrored door. It shuddered and swung, showing a blue-and-white blur of her dress and her bedroom before filling with a million perfect shades of gold.
Malcolm
.

She blinked a few times, focusing one by one on his familiar, perfect features. ‘What are you doing here?’ she gasped.

He held up his phone almost sheepishly, switching on its glowing screen as he did. It was too small for her to read it at that distance, but she already knew what was there anyway. ‘I got your email,’ he explained, confirming her guess.

And here I was thinking I’d been so clever and vague
. Of course he had seen right through her message; he knew her better than she gave him credit for. ‘You sure do hop around the globe with lightning speed,’ she muttered darkly. She’d never met anyone with such a penchant for dropping everything and skipping halfway across the world at a moment’s notice. ‘First down to Venezuela to send reinforcements, then right back here.’

‘I know I said I wouldn’t,’ he apologized. ‘And I’ll leave as soon as we talk this out. But I want to know why you apparently think you’re going to die, and what I can do to help.’

‘You’ve helped,’ she started earnestly. ‘I put that in the email, because I needed you to know. You’ve already helped. A lot.’

‘But?’

But. There always has to be one of those, doesn’t there?
She reluctantly told him about Annette’s phone call the morning before, and the decision that she had reached, glossing over the part about how Harris, for one, seemed to prefer things that way.
Maybe more of them do,
she had to acknowledge to herself.
Maybe the others are just better at hiding their relief
. Emer, Charlotte, Maeve, and Leah had been working more or less nonstop on ways to help Jane survive her meeting with Annette, but even Maeve had stopped trying to talk her out of it. Penelope, who had never bothered with that to begin with, had spent all night outside on the lawn, dangling prisms from her fingers and occasionally moving them in unfathomable arcs. Jane didn’t ask questions.

‘But we ran out of time sooner than I’d expected,’ she admitted. She tried to ignore the way his face darkened as she explained why she had accepted the meeting, but by the time she finished it felt as though his anger had pulled nearly all the light out of the room. ‘We’re putting together some spells – some weapons,’ she finished appeasingly, ‘and Penelope is making me some kind of . . . well, I don’t actually know. But she’s helping as much as she can, and it might make all the difference.’

‘ “The difference,” ’ he repeated flatly, and she flinched from his cold, fatalistic tone. ‘You mean there’s an outside chance that you might not die in a few hours.’

‘I can’t argue about this anymore,’ she told him honestly, hearing her own fatigue in the way her voice had worn thin. ‘I’ve already had to work it out with myself, then I had to convince Maeve and the rest of them.’

‘Did they put up much of a fight?’ Malcolm asked sarcastically. But she knew he was just afraid for her, and she smiled wearily.

‘Maeve has been a trouper,’ she assured him. ‘And I don’t think that any of them is actually
happy
about the way things have turned out.’

‘I know I’m not,’ he said simply.

His hands clenched and unclenched by his sides, and she instinctively covered one with one of hers. ‘But you get it,’ she prompted. ‘You don’t like it, but you understand why I’m choosing this. And you’re going to give me your blessing to go, instead of sending me off into this thing that is, by the way, actually pretty scary, with more arguing rattling around in my brain.’

He pulled away and turned abruptly toward the door, only to pause there, a half step away. Jane could see the muscles of his back working against one another through the fine woven cotton of his shirt. ‘I could go with you,’ he said quietly, his voice tight with emotion. ‘I could sneak into the house while she’s focused on waiting for you. I could come in right behind you with a gun, or I could –’

‘Isn’t it enough for one of us to be stupidly brave?’ she interrupted. ‘You really want me to risk my life
and
feel the same way about you that you’re feeling right now about me?’

His shoulders flinched, but he still didn’t turn around. ‘I want you to have the best chance that I can give you.’

She crossed to him and reached out a hand tentatively toward his back. It was warm, almost radiating heat. ‘We’re past all this now,’ she told him, knowing that it was true. ‘Hasina wants my power, and somewhere deep inside of her your sister hates me. If I can’t drive Hasina out, then I’ll either have to kill her or die. But I’m done trying to strategize the perfect battle plan where we all come out alive and happy and skip off into the sunset together. Dee was enough collateral damage; I won’t let Hasina have any more of you. She just gets me – whatever I am, whatever I can do, whatever force I can call up to fight her.’

Malcolm turned suddenly and gripped her arm. There was a desperate light in his eyes, so she wasn’t surprised by his next attempt to change her mind. ‘If you lose,’ he warned, ‘she’ll still be at large. She could come after any one of us next, and I’m sure she’ll get to all of us eventually.’

Jane smiled sadly. ‘You’re her brother,’ she reminded him, ‘and even though you meant exactly the opposite, you did her a favour the last time we tried to attack. If you don’t cross her again, she’ll probably forgive you, or at least make a show of getting along with you. And the rest of them get one hundred years: that’s more than enough.’ She poked him playfully in the ribs, smiling more broadly when he jumped a little. ‘Not to mention the fact that none of you ever bothers to mention:
I might win
.’

He opened his mouth, closed it sharply, then opened it again. ‘You might,’ he agreed finally. ‘When we were trying to find you, my mother talked all the time about how powerful you would be. You came from two magical lines – which is rare enough, considering how much the magical families distrust each other now – but there’s more to it even than that. It’s something about being a direct descendant of Ambika, through an unbroken line of practicing witches. Being a true heiress of her legacy, however distant, makes you stronger.’

Jane pictured the marble wall of Lynne’s parlour, with its thousands of years of tiny branching names. They hadn’t bothered to keep track of the male lines; sons were a dead end as far as the family tree went. But there was a steady line down the middle, one woman’s name followed by another, and at its end was Annette Doran. ‘Annette is Ambika’s direct descendant, too,’ Jane mused, ‘and probably through about as many generations as I am. Hasina’s stolen and hoarded magic along the way, of course, but she also bleeds it out over the years. There’s every chance that we’re evenly matched.’
Except for how Hasina has had thousands of years to learn the intricacies of magic and ways to use it, while I’ve had just a few months,
she thought but didn’t say.

Jane could all too vividly remember the sensation of the air burning out of her lungs, smothering her from the inside out. Her magic hadn’t stood up to Annette’s assault: How much worse would it be now that Hasina was occupying her body? From Malcolm’s worried eyebrows, she could tell that he was thinking the same thing. ‘At least let Penelope help you prepare,’ he offered, as a compromise. ‘She knows a thing or twelve about survival.’

‘Of course I will,’ Jane agreed, though being the object of Penelope’s creepy gaze wasn’t her first choice of how to spend what were probably her last few hours of life. It made her feel like a dead thing that the woman planned to dissect.
She might help,
Jane reminded herself dutifully.
I said I’d try
.

‘And take this,’ Malcolm continued relentlessly, as if she hadn’t spoken. He shoved a silk-wrapped bundle into her hands, and she recognized the long, cold shape beneath the fabric immediately. ‘You’ve seen nothing your whole life but proof that hiding doesn’t work. Not for witches, and not for power. Magic was meant to be used, and there’s no one I’d rather see use it than you.’

Before Jane could say anything else, Malcolm bent down and kissed her softly, gently, on the lips. His mouth lingered on hers, and she felt the fine hairs on her arms stand up from her suddenly charged skin. The magic in her blood hummed and sang, racing its way to her heart and then returning, full again, to carry the news of Malcolm’s nearness through every inch of her body. She felt her skin flush from head to toe, and leaned a little closer, letting his arms wrap around her. His kiss became deeper then, a little more passionate. But before she could tell where it might go, he let go of her and stepped back. ‘Fight,’ he told her roughly. ‘I can’t stand the thought of a world without at least the possibility of you in it. That’s my north star; that’s what keeps me on the path to be a better man than I was raised to be.’

You are better,
she thought, but she couldn’t say it out loud. If she told him, he might insist on coming with her no matter what she did to stop him, and she couldn’t bear the thought of it.
He was right about killing Annette, but even when I threw him out anyway, he acted with such nobility
. The thought reminded her of another lingering question, and she knew that she had to ask. She tilted her chin up at him, taking in the square jaw, the warm skin, the dark, shining eyes. ‘What did you do?’ she whispered. ‘Emer made it sound like hardly anyone can afford Penelope, like she only takes awful things in payment. How did you manage to convince her to come here?’

She held her breath as she waited for his reply, hoping that she had misunderstood and that Penelope in fact accepted MasterCard. A tiny, awful part of her, though, somehow hoped for the worst.
Tell me that you threw a baby down a well or gave some poor soul bad directions to Emer’s Summerlands. Tell me that you’re not really everything that I hope you have become. It would make it so much easier to leave you behind
.

But he just smiled, one corner of his mouth curling up in the way that she knew and loved so well. ‘Silly Jane,’ he said lightly. ‘Don’t you understand? There’s not one single thing I wouldn’t give to help you. Absolutely all of it is yours.’

Then, before she could demand that he answer her more fully, he kissed her once on the forehead, turned, and left the room. From the bed, Maki lifted his tufted grey head to watch him go, and his flat green eyes looked almost wistful. Jane turned over the bundle that Malcolm had thrust into her hands, not sure whether she should unwrap it yet or not.
He went to Venezuela to send me Penelope, then to the Financial District to bring me Lynne’s athame
. His tireless devotion to arming her for her battles touched her beyond anything that she could express in words. When Jane finally stepped forward into the place that Malcolm had been standing a moment before, the air around her still felt warm.