The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) (8 page)

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of mink on the spiral staircase. In a near panic, Jane reached out with her hoarded power and pulled, tugging on Malcolm’s arm as urgently as if she were standing there beside him. He swung around, surprise registering on his face, but when he saw Jane’s expression he seemed to understand. He pulled a pen from his pocket, scribbled something hurriedly on a business card, and pressed it into Annette’s hand before ducking his head and exiting back into the main part of the floor.

Jane swirled her magic around him as he did, darkening his hair and slimming his broad shoulders a little so that he would be harder to recognize from behind. She was nearly done before she realized that, as the one who was facing in Lynne’s direction, she probably should have touched up her own disguise first. But by the time she had enough attention free to do so, Annette had crossed the floor to meet her mother, steering her back toward the staircase. The two women began to climb again, chattering naturally, and then Malcolm wrapped his arms around Jane, enveloping her in his own spiced-champagne scent.

‘Thank you,’ he breathed into her hair. ‘It’s too soon to tell if she listened, but thank you for helping me try.’

Chapter Eight

A
FEW HOURS LATER
, after waking up from a much-needed nap, Jane wandered halfheartedly toward the kitchen. Without Dee’s cheerful influence, though, nothing in it seemed especially palatable. She wandered out again, wondering where Malcolm had disappeared to. She didn’t know if he was considerately trying to give her space, or if he felt like having a little space of his own, but the sudden tugging in her chest made her not care.

Slipping off her shoes, she padded down the hardwood hallway, encouraged to see that the bedroom door was open – but Malcolm wasn’t in there, either. She half started toward the bathroom door, listening for the sound of a running shower, but then realized where he must be and stepped into the hallway instead. The door to the bedroom that she still thought of as Dee’s was closed. But now Jane could sense the warmth of a live presence from the other side of it, as though she could hear Malcolm’s heartbeat.

She entered before she thought to knock, and promptly blushed: Malcolm was extended along the floor’s wide open space, stripped to the waist and glistening with sweat. She had caught him mid-push-up, and from the looks of things it wasn’t his first or even his fifteenth. Never a small man to begin with, Malcolm had put on easily ten new pounds of muscle during his travels around the world.
Lots of calisthenics alone in his room,
she guessed, and then he saw her standing in the doorframe and she blushed harder.

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ she mumbled, stepping inside and closing the door behind her. Her palms suddenly felt slick with sweat, and it took her two tries to turn the enameled knob, but finally it clicked closed. When she turned around again, Malcolm was pulling a thin gray T-shirt over his head, and she felt a quick stab of disappointment.

‘You seemed exhausted,’ he told her, brushing a damp curl of dark-gold hair back from his forehead. ‘And I didn’t want to crowd you in your own home.’

‘It’s been a long couple of weeks,’ she agreed noncommittally, catching herself searching for the flat curve of pectoral muscle beneath his thin shirt. ‘We’re hurtling toward a deadline, and I can’t make Annette contact you in time, or even figure out how to actually help her if she does.’

He smiled wanly and settled himself into a low white armchair. Jane, feeling uncomfortable about sitting on the bed without some sort of invitation, folded into a cross-legged position on the crocheted rug in the middle of the floor.

‘We’re underpowered.’

Malcolm didn’t try to contradict or reassure her; he just nodded. ‘How can I help?’

He leaned his upper body forward. His attention felt like radiating sunlight, and she closed her eyes for a second, basking in it. ‘Help me think,’ she requested, and he nodded.

They began with the nearest source of additional power: Lynne Doran’s athame, which Jane had kept locked safely away in a bank vault ever since it had been handed over to her. Malcolm started out surprisingly neutral about it – technically it could be considered a part of his sister’s inheritance, but under the circumstances that was a trivial concern. Annette had plenty of magic of her own, and Jane had bartered it from Lynne fair and square. Besides, to hear Malcolm tell it, magic was stolen fairly regularly, or mistakenly allowed to die with its owner; obtaining such a massive store of it was a rare gift that no witch could really expect. Still, he seemed reluctant to actually tell her to go remove it from the bank for their use, and Jane wondered if he shared her worries about the real nature of its power.
He certainly has reasons to distrust his mother’s magic. Maybe his hesitation should mean even more than my own
.

‘If nothing else, we could melt it down,’ Malcolm suggested, as in sync with the direction of her thoughts as he frequently seemed to be. ‘There’s a spell – Emer would know. You melt it and then transform the silver into something else – mercury, usually, or zinc. Something that can’t hold magic, and it dissipates.’

Jane considered this, but as troubling as the thought of having the athame around was, destroying it didn’t seem much more appealing. ‘I worry that we might need it someday,’ she explained, spinning her plain silver ring idly around her finger. ‘That it could be the key to saving Annette, or that we might need it . . . later.’

Worry lingered around Malcolm’s eyes, but he didn’t bother to ask what ‘later’ might mean – he had grown so much more serious in the last few months. When they had first met, his relaxed manner and easy charm had attracted her: she had wanted to share whatever life had made him so open and confident.
Of course, he didn’t really have it so good even back then,
she reflected, but regardless, the change now was palpable.
He’s grown up,
she decided finally.
Once he broke with his mother, he could start to become his own man
. And there was no denying that that new man was plenty attractive in his own right, albeit in a very different way from his former, lighthearted self.

‘More witches would help,’ Jane continued thoughtfully. ‘Everyone keeps talking about how there aren’t so many of them anymore, but obviously there are some, and plenty more than I’ve met.’ Her mind’s eye filled briefly with a button nose, spiky brown hair, and wide brown eyes, but that was a no-go. Dee’s Wiccan group had all gone underground since Annette’s party, and anyway Jane was pretty sure that her friend Brooke hadn’t even known she was a witch before Jane’s power had touched her own.
We need experienced witches, not a pack of untrained recruits
.

‘I did meet a couple of them in my travels,’ Malcolm mused, ‘but none who I think would come all the way to New York just for the privilege of pissing off my mother. Most of them didn’t have enough power to be much help, anyway, and the ones who do are the least likely to get involved.’

‘André and Katrin are here, and they’re already involved,’ Jane reminded him nervously.

‘You and André,’ he said quietly. ‘I wondered when you first mentioned him, if . . . while I was gone . . .’ He lifted his hands, then let them fall helplessly in his lap.

Jane swallowed hard. ‘We had a . . . relationship,’ she confirmed, although she wasn’t entirely sure that
relationship
was the correct word. They’d had a healthy amount of sex and an unhealthy amount of mutual deception. The fact that it ultimately added up to a sort of comfortable affection was serendipity – certainly it wasn’t any kind of clever planning on Jane’s part. ‘It’s over now; it ended when my disguise did.’

‘They’re power for hire – both of them,’ Malcolm warned her, his voice thick with emotion. ‘If my mother’s bought them, they’re hers. And even if their contract with her is up, they’ll kill you the second it suits them, no matter what
relationship
you thought you had. The best thing you can do is just stay the hell away from hi – them.’

Way too late for that,
Jane thought ruefully. ‘Look,’ she began in what she hoped was a soothing tone, ‘I get that this must be upsetting for you. Especially knowing that they want us to kill your sister—’

Malcolm brushed that aside with an angry wave. ‘Jane, I know damn well that Annie might not live through this mess – that none of us may live through it. I think I understand that better than you do, and it’s sure as hell not why I’m angry.’ He drew a shuddering breath deep into his broad rib cage, and let it out smoothly. ‘The thought of that absolute creep so much as touching you . . .’

‘You’re
jealous
?’ Jane blurted out.

Malcolm slid forward to kneel on the floor in front of her, his chair rebounding gently in response to his sudden absence. ‘Yes,’ he told her, so fervently that the force of the words made her shiver. ‘I’m jealous that he kissed you, touched you, saw you sleeping. I’m jealous that he got to stand beside you and breathe the same air as you. I am in love with you, Jane, whether I have any right to be or not, and I will forever be jealous of anyone lucky enough to be in your life when I had to stay away.’

For a moment the world was perfectly still, and it was filled entirely by Malcolm. The warm lamplight glinted off a million curves of dark-gold hair, and his face seemed to almost radiate it. There was no thought, no weighing of the pros and cons, no decision to make: there was nothing for her to do but kiss him, and so she did. Everything between them had changed, and so in a way it felt like a first kiss, but of course it wasn’t that, really, and his lips fit to hers with the ease of long practice.

He hesitated for a moment after the kiss could have been complete, giving her the opportunity to gracefully break away, but that was the furthest thing from her mind, and she pursued him with her mouth, then her hands, then her body.

Her fingers found the hem of his thin T-shirt and sent it flying away from them. It landed with a whisper on an arm of the chair, dangling limply like a grey ghost. Apparently feeling that he had put enough of a good-faith effort into being restrained, Malcolm sent her own clothes sailing after his shirt piece by piece, pausing only to kiss the newly exposed bits of her flesh like a drowning man straining toward air.

Everywhere his mouth or hands went, Jane could feel tiny sparks of pleasure bursting in her bloodstream, as if some sort of electromagnetism were drawing them together.
Magic,
she thought wryly,
the best kind of chemistry there is
. But it felt different, somehow, from her dark, desperate connection with André or the shivery current that used to draw her toward Harris.
It’s not all the same,
she realized. There had always been something between the two of them, but after everything that had happened, she had cynically assumed it was just good looks and the whisper of magic. And it was true that her blood knew Malcolm’s – she could feel it whenever he was near – but now her body and her heart did as well, and the three combined into an attraction that couldn’t be reduced to any kind of simple explanation.

The bed seemed impossibly complicated to reach, so instead she just hitched herself forward, using the waistband of his pants as leverage and conveniently pulling them off in the process. Malcolm wrapped strong arms around her waist, pulling her closer, and she wrapped her legs around his and slid herself onto him. For a moment they sat that way: locked together with their faces just millimeters apart, touching in nearly every possible way. Then Jane began to move, propelled by her thighs with eager support from Malcolm’s arms, rocking along the length of him and back again until they both gasped together, stifling their cries with more kisses.

Finally, spent, Jane let her head fall onto his shoulder. Her hair spilled down over his muscular back, shining like molten silver in the lamplight. Disentangling carefully so as to stay as close together as possible, they rearranged their limbs just enough to fall asleep on the rug where they lay.

Chapter Nine

S
UNLIGHT STREAMED THROUGH
the damask curtains, but Jane knew immediately that that was not what had woken her up. A soft buzzing sounded somewhere off to her left. She jerked her body up to sitting and rocked onto her toes, trying to ignore the distraction of Malcolm’s naked sleeping form as she attempted to take stock of where her clothes had landed the night before. The buzzing noise came again and she followed it across the room to where her bag lay underneath her crumpled Paige jeans and oversized Theory sweater. She fumbled inside with one hand and pulled on her sweater with the other, and somehow managed to flip open the rose-gold phone on the fourth ring while stepping out of Malcolm’s room fully – if not at all neatly – dressed.

The Vertu phone – Ella’s phone,
she realized belatedly, wincing at her oversight. She hadn’t been sure what to do with it once Ella didn’t exist anymore. It was far too beautiful to just discard, but she had been letting all its calls go to voicemail and had intended to keep doing so indefinitely. The number on its screen was an unfamiliar one from the Manhattan area code; Jane guessed that she would hear André’s voice on the other end of the line, growling with bad news. She took a last, longing glance toward Malcolm, but only one outstretched hand was visible from the hallway. ‘Hello?’ she said quietly, moving toward her own room for good measure. The rising sun hadn’t reached the skylights yet, and the floorboards were chilly, but Jane consoled herself that at least they weren’t creaking and giving her retreat away.