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

‘She came up to my suite – my former suite,’ he confirmed, his words coming a little more slowly and carefully than Jane remembered. He winced a little. ‘She was already angry that I had helped you. Katrin was there, but Anne—’ He shuddered, and shook his head.

‘Annette’s much stronger than Katrin,’ she finished.

André’s thick lips twitched. ‘We tried everything to convince her that we were only trying to protect her, to do what was best. . .’

The Dalca
cus were one of the less powerful magical families, and in order to survive, they had always been opportunistic. Many years ago, André and Katrin’s parents had helped Gran whisk Annette away from Lynne and put her in hiding overseas, hoping to end Hasina’s unnaturally long life – and her reign of power – by taking away her last healthy, young female blood relative. Once Annette was safely contained in British foster care, the Dalca
cus sent André and Katrin, then just children themselves, to keep track of her, posing as her closest – and eventually her only – friends. Their attention had meant everything to the lonely young woman, although hers had meant significantly less to them. To the Dalca
cus, Annette was a time bomb, a hostage, and a deep, dark secret all rolled into one. They had only kept her alive to secure Celine Boyle’s continued cooperation. But they hadn’t bothered to make sure Annette was
happy:
as long as she had a pulse and didn’t run into any Dorans on the street, the Dalca
cus had fulfilled their side of the bargain, as far as they were concerned. ‘She didn’t believe you,’ Jane interpreted when he fell silent, and André sighed in agreement.

‘Katrin lifted the block from my mind, so that she could see,’ he began. Witches could read minds, including those of the men in magical families – the males carried magical blood, but wielded no power of their own. Most witches protected their male kin with spells that blocked others from learning their family secrets. ‘I wanted her to know that she was in danger, and that we wanted to help her. But she saw . . . everything.’ His black eyes closed, this time from pain that had nothing to do with his burns.

‘Annette saw that your parents and my grandmother stole her from Lynne when she was little,’ Jane filled in, a bitter note creeping into her voice. ‘She saw that she was only an obligation to you, never a friend. She saw that you knew where her family was all along, and that you could have protected her from all those terrible fires if you had really wanted to. She figured out that she was only ever a chess piece to everyone.’

André nodded. ‘We tried so hard to protect her from Hasina, and now look where she is.’

‘I’m still trying to protect Annette,’ Jane admitted. ‘I want to stop Hasina from taking over her body. The spell takes a month to cast; there’s still time to stop her from completing the transfer. But there’s so much I don’t know about Hasina, and how her magic works. I need all the help I can get. Yours and Katrin’s. Where is she, anyway?’

‘My sister has recently discovered the health club,’ he replied, with a small twinkle in his black eyes. ‘The poor rowing machine may never recover. So that’s what you’re here for, then – recruiting?’

‘Look, no one’s asking you to go in on matching sweatshirts,’ she told him peevishly. The Romanian siblings were lifelong mercenaries. As Ella Medeiros, her interests and Andre’s had lined up for a short while – in more ways than one – but, as she found out, he had been hunting Jane Boyle all the while. ‘But your family has invested a lot – a
lot
– in trying to keep Hasina from inhabiting a new body. And the last time she saw you, Annette did a nasty number on the side of your face and took out a few floors of this hotel as collateral damage. I’m not asking you to be altruistic; I’m
telling
you that we’re on the same side. Whether we like it or not.’

‘You’ve made that claim before,’ he said mischievously, and Jane vividly recalled the feel of his hands on the smooth skin of her thighs.
No,
she reminded herself strictly.
Ella’s thighs
.

She cleared her throat, ducking her head to hide how flustered she suddenly felt, but she was sure André’s keen black eyes didn’t miss a thing. She snapped her head back up. ‘You know, I’m not that great with fire – yet.’ She saw André flinch ever so slightly, and studiously ignored it. ‘But my friends would probably say that I just need some practice. I could go back over you limb by limb – you appreciate that kind of attention to detail, as I recall – and get all that skin Annette missed.’

André stared at her for a long moment, and Jane tried to remember if she had ever seen him speechless before. She had no intention of torturing him for information, of course; the thought alone made her feel light-headed. But she didn’t want to fall into some ‘nice and therefore harmless’ category in his mind, either. He was still looking at her carefully when Katrin stepped into view. Her sharp angles and long, flat planes looked somehow less dangerous in workout gear than they had in cocktail attire, but the look on her face was unmistakably deadly. Something flashed at the edge of Jane’s vision – the glitter of glass, headed in her direction.

‘Stop it,’ Jane snapped as her own magic sprang into immediate action.

In less than a heartbeat, Katrin was pinned down in a free armchair, the jagged edge of a shattered champagne flute pressed to her windpipe. The rest of the glasses fell to the floor, as lifeless as they had been before. Jane glanced around cautiously, but there was no one else in the dimly lit bar to notice what had just transpired.

‘I come in peace,’ she told Katrin more levelly, ‘and your brother and I were managing just fine. You can stay if you want, but you’ll have to behave yourself.’

Katrin nodded carefully, so as not to cut herself on the glass, and Jane let it fall to the floor with a pretty tinkling sound.

André watched her with amusement for a few seconds, then flicked his eyes back to Jane. ‘Lynne didn’t have the full measure of you,’ he said approvingly, and the skin on the back of her neck crawled a little.

Lynne had once told Jane that she reminded her of herself when she had been younger, and Malcolm’s father had echoed the same sentiment.
Is this what being a witch means? Getting pushed and pursued and tricked and trapped until everything really is kill or be killed?
Of course, she reasoned to herself, back when Lynne had been Jane’s age, she had only been Lynne. Doubtless Hasina’s daughters were born with a bit of a mean streak, and being raised by their immortal ancestress couldn’t help. But if Lynne had stayed Lynne, she would have at least had a chance to grow into the sort of woman Jane hoped to be.
Just like Annette deserves,
she thought fervently.
That’s the whole point: to give her the chance to be who she is
.

‘Anne is a mess,’ André told her bluntly, and Jane blinked rapidly at him. She waited, sensing that he was ready to tell her some, if not all, of what he knew. ‘She was always an angry girl. She would latch on to people, build them up in her mind as her saviors, and then they would do something to upset her and she would act as if they had deliberately tricked her into loving them just so that they could let her down. I know you don’t think much of our guardianship of her’ – he twisted a wry smile at his sister, who huffed and looked away – ‘but considering how long we managed to be in her life without setting the little pyromaniac off, I make no apologies.’

‘She had no control over that,’ Jane protested, the heat and fear of her recent dreams pressing in on her again. There was a charred, ashy quality to the air in the lobby that she hadn’t noticed at first, but now it was all she could taste. She brushed a few strands of blond hair off her face. ‘Don’t you understand how magic works, when no one’s taught you to use it?’

As if to punctuate her plaintive question, the lights in the bar area flared to brightness, and the clerks behind the main desk looked up curiously. Jane swallowed against the dryness of her throat, searching out her stray tendrils of power and containing them, and the lighting returned to normal. As a child, secluded in the French countryside with her austere, reclusive grandmother, Jane had always thought she was simply cursed when it came to electronics. It was only when she became aware of her magical abilities that she learned lights and computers responded to the flares in her magic – and the real reason Gran had fought to keep her hidden away from the world all those years.

‘You understand,’ Katrin purred in her clipped English. ‘We know your grandmother told you nothing. But tell me, did the lights go off when you were reading a book, or had a song stuck in your head, or even when you stubbed your toe?’ Jane started to answer, but Katrin cut her off. ‘No. Your magic got loose when you were angry, or frightened . . . when you were out of control. Our Anne was plagued by fires in every home because she was
extremely
out of control.’

‘She was a
child
,’ Jane argued, but Katrin’s words had effectively sown doubt. Jane had caused plenty of electrical trouble growing up, but the damage was minor: radio static, burned-out bulbs, constant computer restarts. The real light shows hadn’t happened until her life had been turned completely upside down.
How angry did Annette have to be for the fire to trap a family of four inside their house?
Jane wondered with a sudden all-over shudder. Her next fire was a month later, and even more fatal. Annette hadn’t been starting small fires in wastebaskets or making the room uncomfortably hot: she had set off major blazes as a child and was still doing it now.

‘She’s all grown up,’ André replied softly. ‘But that makes it easier, doesn’t it? That she’s so unstable?’

Jane frowned, uncertain of what he meant. His olive-skinned fingers caressed the cut crystal of his tumbler in a thoroughly distracting way. ‘Easier – how?’

Katrin clicked her tongue impatiently. ‘Because my brother thinks that you’ll feel bad about killing Anne, no matter how much better it will make things for all of us. Hasina has plagued witches for far too long, as you know from personal experience. But he’ – she jerked a bony thumb toward André – ‘says that
still
wouldn’t be enough for you, if Anne wasn’t a danger in her own right, as well.’ She rolled her eyes in profoundly expressive disgust.