The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) (26 page)

Chapter Twenty-seven

‘I
T IS A
circle, from your third eye to your head to your heart to the very pit of your stomach down into the earth and back again,’ Penelope lectured, and Jane closed her eyes, trying frantically to figure out just what the hell that meant.

Dee might have been a relentless tutor, but at least I had a vague idea of what she was trying to explain to me,
she remembered with a sharp pang of loss.
And I could tell that she was actually rooting for me
. Penelope, by contrast, had grown increasingly frustrated by their attempts to marshal Jane’s magical focus in preparation for the battle ahead. After nearly two hours of false starts and crossed signals, Jane half wished that it could be night-time already.

Malcolm sent her,
she reminded herself for the hundredth time. And whatever price he had paid, she had a feeling that it hadn’t been cheap. ‘Draw it for me again?’ she asked humbly, pretending not to notice Penelope’s exaggerated eye roll behind the thick distortion of her glasses.

Penelope whipped out her pencil and a piece of paper with ‘Messages’ printed in optimistic blue ink at the top. The paper was already divided into dozens of tiny sections, each of which was crammed with diagrams, words, and, in some cases, mathematical equations. There was at least one that Jane could swear she had learned during her Advanced Physics lessons with Gran, although unfortunately that didn’t make it any easier to remember now. ‘It goes like this,’ Penelope told her in short, staccato tones, her brown hand tracing a design on the paper that didn’t look anything like a circle, or a human body, or anything that Jane could recognize.

She sighed. ‘Maybe I could just, you know, meditate?’
If only Dee were around to hear me ask
that
!
Meditation and the slower, more controlled aspects of magic had never been Jane’s forte, and as a result she found them annoying and usually boring. But even that was better than feeling useless, and she knew from experience that her ability to control her magic grew as she learned to focus her mind.

‘This
is
meditating,’ Penelope insisted, tapping the paper a few times with the point of her pencil for emphasis. Its dulled tip broke sideways with a loud snap, and Penelope stared at it in evident surprise.

‘My brain feels like the pencil.’ Jane raised her eyebrows for emphasis of her own.

‘Fine.’ Her exasperated tutor stuck the pencil into her slick topknot of hair so roughly that Jane was sure that she would stab her scalp with it. ‘We start with the agate again. Tell me what you feel . . . here.’ She slid a thin sliver of stone toward Jane. It was rough and gray on the outside, with a glasslike layer of blue that shaded from midnight to almost white in its centre. Penelope’s thick fingernail pointed firmly to a spot just inside the dusty-looking crust, where the blue reminded Jane of a pair of Baccarat studs that Malcolm had given her for their three-month anniversary. Against Jane’s pale skin and hair, the crystals had glowed almost black.

Jane stared at it, willing it to speak to her somehow. In spite of their best efforts, it hadn’t yet. And just as she had during her first few attempts, she found her mind wandering almost immediately, completely unresponsive to her struggle to keep it on-task.
I wonder what Lynne did with those earrings – with all my things that I had to leave behind
. She had picked up her little red flight bag, pulled a trench coat over her wedding dress, and left every other remnant of her life up until that point in the room that she had shared with Malcolm.
And since then I’ve kept losing possessions at a rather unsettling rate
. ‘It feels lonely,’ she murmured, barely aware that she was speaking out loud.

Penelope’s eyes, which matched one of the agate’s innermost rings, widened appreciatively. ‘And here?’

Of course praise would be out of the question
. But Jane knew she didn’t need to be coddled at the moment; she needed to be prepared. The spot on the outer crust of the stone that Penelope had indicated had the same dusty, light-sucking quality as Leah’s smoke bombs, four of which were tucked neatly into Jane’s satchel. ‘It’s loyal,’ she replied, certain that she was right. ‘An unlikely ally, maybe, but a faithful one.’

A ray of real sunlight pierced the thick clouds overhead, lancing through the glass of the sunroom’s ceiling to strike directly on the stone in between the two witches. Jane felt her heart jump in her chest.

‘It feels happy,’ Penelope told her, glancing slyly up through her thick-lensed glasses. ‘Novices think that crystals focus the witch’s thoughts and power, but they have minds of their own. Like everything else, they have a purpose and an intention. A soul, almost.’

‘Does that mean that you can talk to them, or make them do what you tell them to?’ Jane asked curiously, but it was obviously the wrong thing to say. Penelope’s purple-red lips curled down disapprovingly, and she turned her gaze back to her cluttered piece of paper.

‘You’ll be carrying jasper tonight.’ The bespectacled woman cleared her throat and set a stone on the floor between them. It was a beautiful blood-red colour, marbled with smoky threads of black and a single narrow stream of white near one end. Jane was already wearing earrings set with smaller matching stones, and Emer had found her a bracelet made of unpolished ones on a thin silver chain, like tiny bits of brick.

She stared at the glossy stone that almost glowed on the pale carpet, waiting for it to speak to her.
Blood and bricks,
she thought.
And black smoke, forked with lightning
. But that was just what it looked like, not what it felt. Or was her edginess, her unease when she concentrated on it, a sign of that very thing after all?

‘Its yellow form is more useful for most,’ Penelope told her clinically, ‘but not so many people go to real war anymore.’ Her undefinable accent made each word sound foreign and exotic, and Jane strained to pick each one out correctly. ‘Yellow is for struggle; it is for obstacles. Red is for when you have to build giant pyramids, or cut your way through swaths of enemies with a sword. You will carry this and as many other like it as the boy can dig up in this house before you go.’

Blood and bricks,
Jane thought with satisfaction, though part of her was distracted with wondering how Harris had liked being assigned to jewellery-sorting duty. As hard as it was for her to picture, though, he must be used to doing grunt work for witches by now. He’d probably been accustomed to it all his life, really; the fad of patriarchy had never caught on in magical families. Jane inhaled, then exhaled in a rush. ‘Okay. I feel it. We can try to go back to the circle thing now, if you want.’

Penelope nodded in sharp satisfaction and held up her paper again. ‘The jasper enhances the lower way stations of your magic’s path through your body. Its material is of the earth, and so is its spirit, so there is no balance. You will have to provide the power for the upper way stations only: like a carnival ride with the people all waving their hands up in the air.’

Jane frowned. She had hoped that her little breakthrough with the crystals would somehow make this part suddenly, wonderfully obvious, but apparently that wasn’t how it worked. ‘The circle carnival ride?’ she asked hopelessly, trying to adjust her vocabulary to Penelope’s rather eclectic one. ‘The one like a big wheel?’

The older witch snorted in disgust. ‘You don’t listen,’ she complained. ‘No, not that. Just because I say ‘circle’ doesn’t mean that it happens like a circle in the world. You think this is about shape, with magic?’

‘Of course not,’ Jane assured her, although even in her own mind she couldn’t say for sure how sarcastic she was being. ‘A circle, but not a circle like a circle is.’

‘Better,’ Penelope grunted, peering up through her lenses suspiciously. ‘Are you ready to try it, or just being funny again?’

‘Funny again,’ she had to admit. ‘Tell me about my ancestress. You said her name was Aditi, and something about her having too much conscience.’

‘Did I?’ Penelope asked, her blue eyes maddeningly vague now that the topic was one that interested her pupil. ‘Well. Before courts of law, before police, before the idea of hell or even the threat of damnation by history, because of course there was no such thing as history yet . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Back then, it wasn’t so important to be a good person, especially when no one was watching. Or at least, it wasn’t so important to everyone.’

‘Hasina,’ Jane remarked, although it was probably too obvious to require saying out loud.

But Penelope nodded amiably, her lips pursed and her eyes far away. ‘At first, she wanted to live forever because she thought that the last sister living would inherit their mother’s full power and have it all to herself. They didn’t know back then that magic was a part of the air and the earth and the fire in the human heart. It goes back into those things when a witch’s flesh ceases to hold it, and from those things it is born into every new witch. Fewer witches now, so more in the air. You pull it down like a string into your head, then down past your throat to your mouth, and move it into the earth below where it becomes air again.’

She raised one pencilled black eyebrow hopefully, but even though that had actually made a little bit of sense to Jane, she shook her head stubbornly. ‘Aditi.’

Penelope sighed. ‘When their first children were born, Hasina began to realize that she had misunderstood the nature of their gift. Their daughters were just as strong as they were, but they grew no weaker. Ambika’s power had been too great to be contained even in seven powerful vessels, or perhaps there had been power beyond Ambika’s in the world even after she had claimed hers. Either way, her grandchildren had magic, too, and Hasina realized that she could not simply wait for more to spontaneously come to her. Her inheritance was all that she had a right to, unless she staked a claim to more.’

‘By killing a witch.’ Jane’s own soul recoiled from such a horrible thought – as if killing weren’t bad enough, the only witches in the world back then had been Hasina’s closest relatives.

‘Jyoti.’ Penelope picked up the chunk of jasper, idly passing it from hand to hand. Her gaze followed it closely, but Jane knew that her mind was thousands of years away. She remembered that Emer had guessed Jyoti was Penelope’s and the Dalca
cus’ common ancestress.
Does she take it personally, since the dead are so real for her? Do old crimes feel recent?
But it felt too intrusive to ask, so Jane just waited.

‘She was a troublemaker, and at first the others believed that she had come to some sort of bad end on her own. But there were rumors and whispers and suspicions, and finally Sumitra performed a powerful magic that allowed her to walk in the land of the dead. She found her sister and spoke with her, and then Hasina could no longer hide in plain sight. Amunet joined her happily; she loved any opportunity to have something that the others didn’t. But when she discovered that Hasina still only had what the rest of them had, the two quarreled.’

‘Wait,’ Jane interrupted. ‘What do you mean about not having anything else? She had killed a witch, hadn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ Penelope admitted, ‘but Jyoti was only the second witch ever to die. Her power flowed back into the air, and Hasina gained nothing. It was only after, as she battled with Amunet, that she remembered the way that their mother had breathed her last bequest into seven silver knives, one of which Hasina kept with her always. It was her most prized possession, and when she stabbed her sister with it she quickly pulled the blade back out and pressed it to Amunet’s lips while she died.’

‘And from then on, witches could steal each other’s magic,’ Jane recited dully; how much simpler would life have been if that accidental knowledge had died with Ambika’s daughters.

‘From then on, they have done so. Hasina more than any of them, of course, but do not think of the others as innocent lambs. In fact, their next move was to take Hasina’s daughter as hostage. Most of them wanted to use her as a lure, so that Hasina would meet with them to discuss terms and the four remaining sisters would kill her. But your Aditi refused. She said that magic was too new to the world for everyone to understand how to use it wisely, and she insisted that Hasina should be allowed the chance to mend her ways. She spoke for three days, and at the end they sent a messenger to Hasina saying that they would slit the little girl’s throat if Hasina did not return her stolen power and go into exile.’

Jane sighed; it was an almost depressingly familiar scenario. ‘But it didn’t work.’

Penelope snorted. ‘Of course not. Too much conscience, Blondie, and everyone you love dies screaming.’