The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) (31 page)

‘That’s not what happens if I break the glass.’ Penelope fell silent again, but this time Jane was determined to wait her out. After a few moments, the strange witch went on. ‘He died, and he left his body. A place was waiting in the Summerlands, a path laid out for him, but he signed a contract and so he turned a different way. That path is only offered once in a lifetime, so to see it again he’ll have to die again.’

Jane couldn’t contain her impatience anymore. ‘To die again he’d have to live again, and souls are born into new bodies from the Summerlands, Emer says. So what, exactly, are you offering me?’

‘The most that I can, Blondie. I open this, and your man finds a body. Not a new one, mind you: one that’s on the verge of losing its own soul. One that fits him, more or less; one that suits his soul. But I can’t guarantee that he’ll be half as handsome as he was the first time around. I don’t know if that makes a difference to you.’

‘Of course it doesn’t,’ Jane snapped. ‘But he’ll be . . . him?’

‘I doubt he’ll remember much – at least at first.’ Penelope shrugged. ‘Bits of his last mortal self may still be attached to the soul, though. Some things might come back with time, or you could tell him if you want. I don’t do this often enough to say for sure.’

‘I could tell him,’ Jane whispered, her gaze drifting to some point far away as her hand lifted to her stomach of its own accord. Annette had gotten yet another chance to turn her life around; didn’t Malcolm deserve at least as much? If he could be the person he might have been all along, without his mother’s malevolent influence . . . and if Jane could be there to see it . . . ‘But how would I know who he was, then? If he’s in some different body?’

Penelope smiled and twisted the glass bubble in an odd motion that Jane couldn’t quite follow. As it came loose from the chain, Jane saw that it was set into an octagon of the same kind of dark metal that the chain was made of. It almost looked like a miniature crystal ball. Before she could ask anything else, Penelope’s brown fingers closed over the glass, and it shattered between them.

In spite of herself, Jane cried out, drawing some curious looks from the nearest cluster of mourners. She quickly pulled a tissue out of her purse and held it over her face, trying to look funeral appropriate, and they turned back to their hushed conversation. When she peered out from behind her tissue again, Penelope was holding the little octagon out to her around the tree trunk.

‘This will help,’ the witch told her, dropping it into the hand that Jane numbly extended. ‘It will miss its former occupant, and it will pull toward him like a magnet. If you want to find him, then hold it in your hand and let it lead you. Good luck, Blondie.’

Penelope stalked away across the grass, hitching her black skirts up a little to keep them from the dew. Jane stared after the peculiar woman for a moment, then let her eyes return to the metal octagon in her hand.

A lively debate raged in her head, but her heart knew that it was all just noise. Her free hand hovered protectively over her stomach again, telling her everything that she needed to know about what had to happen next. The trinket was pulling ever so slightly west, and so west she would go. She would find Malcolm and tell him about their past, and then they would tell each other about their future.