The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) (14 page)

For a fleeting moment, Jane wondered what Annette would be like if her grandmother and the Dalca
cus had never interfered that day in the Hamptons. Would she have turned into a miniature Lynne – or would having Malcolm as a brother have helped make her a warmer, more caring person? Jane wanted to think the latter, but she had a feeling Annette would be . . . problematic, no matter how she’d grown up.

A faint glow near Lynne became visible against the dim light filtering through the windows. Jane squinted at it as she upheld her magical shield, trying to see clearly. It was definitely inside the room with them. But Annette was still inching closer, and her nearness was searing the air and sucking it dry of moisture.
She’s been learning,
Jane thought, coughing sickly.

She reached down through her veins again, trying to separate some magic from what was keeping the shield around her in place. It was confusing at first, like she was looking through two pairs of eyes at once. But she managed to grip some into a ball and hold it for a moment, ready to strike—

‘I do wish you had told me what you had in mind, Annette,’ Lynne said suddenly, and Jane held her magic back, momentarily distracted. ‘Soon you’ll be far too powerful to bother with these little revenge scenarios; you have nothing to prove to these insects. Be a dear and kill them so that we can get back to it.’

A bolt of energy darker than the half darkness around it glanced off the side of Jane’s protective bubble, grazing her shoulder rather than hitting her squarely in the back.
Belinda,
she thought through gritted teeth. Her whole shoulder felt numb and heavy, and Annette had almost reached the edge of her shield. The heat was already intense, and Jane knew that she absolutely couldn’t allow Annette to get inside her magical barrier. She felt for the edges of her shield and retracted it toward her body, pulling it into a dense sort of second skin.

‘I would have thought that you had had enough of party-crashing, Jane,’ Lynne went on in her deadly purr. ‘Have you missed us so much that you simply couldn’t stay away?’

‘Shut up,’ Jane grunted, forcing her magic out and forward in a solid wall. Annette stumbled backward, and Jane gulped a quick lungful of the relatively clear air.

Her vision seemed clearer as well, but the odd glowing near Lynne was as indistinct as it had been earlier. There was a large shadow moving in front of it, which Jane slowly realized was the lank hair and large, bowed shoulders of Charles Doran. He was pacing back and forth, agitated and nervous, in front of . . .
in front of what?
she wondered again. Nothing behind him seemed to provide a source of the unnatural light, which was vague and shimmering. Something about it nagged at the edges of Jane’s mind, but by then Annette had regained her balance, and Jane turned back to her, fumbling for what remained of her magic.

‘Mother’s right, you know,’ Annette hissed. ‘In a few minutes I’ll be too powerful to care whether Malcolm dies, or you live. You just had the bad luck – or bad planning – to show up while I still
do
care.’

A heavy crash sounded from somewhere behind her, and one of the twins screamed shrilly.
Pain? Fury? Triumph?
It was impossible to tell without taking her eyes off Annette and Lynne, and Jane was sure that if she did, it would be the end of her. She pressed the tattered remains of her magical shield together into an intense new knot just below her heart. Her skin felt naked and exposed, but there was no way around it: she couldn’t attack
and
defend
and
keep an eye on whatever Charles and Lynne were hovering around by the far windows.

She jabbed outward with her power, thinking of snow and icicles and the wind off the mountain slopes in Saint-Croix-sur-Amaury as she did. She didn’t have any particular reason to think that it would help, especially not enough to offset Annette’s unnatural pyrotechnics, but the atrium chilled perceptibly and the tall girl seemed to almost shrink in on herself. A bright-green flare shot past from the elevator, and Jane saw a moment of intense pain on Annette’s square-jawed face. She pressed her focus forward harder, feeling her flagging energy surge as Annette cringed back another step.

A shadow flickered behind Annette, and Jane barely ducked down in time as a heavy silver platter flew past the place where her head had been moments before. She was less quick with the stoneware pitcher that followed: it caught her squarely in the rib cage and knocked the breath out of her lungs in a single painful rush. The room whirled sickeningly, and she fell forward, managing to catch herself painfully on one knee. It took her a full, panicked second to figure out that she was facing entirely the wrong way, back toward the pitched battle for control of the elevator. Emer held the door almost closed, she and Maeve ducking out from behind its cover to fire spells at Belinda and Cora. The twins’ swirling grey forms were closing in, and they didn’t look tired at all.

Flames ripped across Jane’s still-numbed shoulder, setting her sweater ablaze and blackening the long ends of her hair. She tried to turn toward the assault, but then the pain came, cutting downward across her body and doubling her over. For a long moment she had no idea where Annette was, or Maeve, or even her own magic; she was alone in the middle of the floor with the fire and the pain. Then there was a stabbing in her lower back – not magic this time, but the point of a boot. Annette kicked her again, viciously, and Jane fell forward to curl in the fetal position as she tried to think of something, anything, to buy herself some time. Her magic was reduced to tattered shadows at the corner of her consciousness; she could barely feel it, much less control it.

Then in a strange, frozen moment of clarity she realized what was glowing at the far end of the room: Hasina’s spell must be there, setting off the powder on Jane’s eyelids.
And Lynne started lobbing spare parts at me when it looked like I might have an edge on her daughter
. Her mind flashed inexplicably to the moment twenty-eight days earlier, in Central Park, when Lynne’s face had been filled with wonder at the knowledge that Annette was still alive. It was followed quickly by Annette’s broken expression five days earlier, when she seemed to realize that her mother was her enemy. And then she saw Malcolm: the molten pools of his eyes, the thick waves of hair that glinted with gold lights, the way that one corner of his mouth tended to quirk upward in amusement – and she felt somehow stronger.

Jane rolled instinctively, feeling the air stir alongside her ribs as Annette tried to kick her again, but missed. Her vision felt blurred as she struggled to her feet, and it took her a moment to make sense of what she was seeing. The door to the back stairs was hanging open as two dark shapes darted inside one after the other.
The cavalry
. The hall lights glittered briefly off Dee’s long black hair; Harris had already come through. Cora McCarroll fell to the burned floor, twitching and spasming – and Jane tore her attention back toward Annette, who was advancing warily, her dark eyes flickering from Jane’s face to her hands and back again.

‘I can’t believe you ever thought we had anything in common,’ she rasped, her low voice a strange, feminine echo of Malcolm’s. ‘You’re nothing. I’m a part of
this
.’

Out of the corner of her eye, Jane saw Dee moving stealthily along the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows, circling them. Her hair danced wildly as she passed two panels that had been shattered in the fire. She wasn’t sure what Dee was up to, but she did know that she didn’t want the Dorans to notice her. ‘ “This” will be the last thing you ever do,’ Jane retorted. ‘But if you’re feeling suicidal, go ahead. I can take out Hasina just as easily after she’s wearing your skin. My mistake was thinking that you’d want someone to try to save it.’

Annette lunged at her in response, raking her arm with four sharp fingernails that left a fiery trail of magic behind them. Jane spun away just as a hoarse scream filled their end of the atrium, and something like fireworks erupted near the elevator in a shower of sparks and light. Jane whipped around to see Dee, her hands clutching that strange glowing light, bent precariously backward by the grip of Lynne’s slim hand in her hair.
She went for the spell,
Jane realized with a surge of hope. They’d lost any hope of securing the house waiting for the perfect moment to destroy Hasina, but they could still destroy the spell components.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Annette moving and spun back to meet her attack, but Annette seemed not to even see her anymore and was instead charging toward the struggling figures of her mother and Dee. Jane reached both hands out toward the running girl, forcing a focused jet of power through them with every molecule of her will. Annette stumbled and fell heavily to the floor, her ankles tangled in Jane’s magic. Jane caught up to her quickly, placing her body squarely between Dee and Annette before the girl could regain her feet. She flexed her magical shield open again.

She was much more tired than she had been the first time, though, and she could feel thin spots and even gaps all over its wall. Behind it, Annette rose to her feet, a thin trail of blood sliding down her chin. Jane risked a quick glance back at Dee, who had broken away from Lynne.

When her eyes came back to Annette’s face, though, there was something truly horrible about the girl’s smile. Her mouth seemed to move, but Jane couldn’t hear any words – she couldn’t hear anything at all, she realized, though the thought seemed to come to her from a great distance. Annette’s hands spread out wide, each one holding something that Jane couldn’t see but somehow knew was sinister, and then she clapped them together and Jane’s world spun sickly.

Everything went black.

Chapter Fifteen

S
OUND FILTERED IN
, and light – far too much light. Jane knew that some of the sounds were voices, but it seemed like an unreasonable amount of effort just now to remember what words were. Her head lolled back against something firm but pliant, and she hoped that she could stay there. She closed her eyes more tightly against the light and drifted.

Hours or seconds or no time at all later, Harris set her down on her feet, holding her firmly upright by the shoulders while shouting something at her.
We’ve done this before,
she managed to think, but something was different this time, and it was starting to bother her a little. Figures moved out of the ruined doorway; her eyes wouldn’t focus that far away, but she could locate them by their hair.
Red, white. One, two
.

That was wrong, and something else was, too. She tried to ask Harris about it, but her mouth wouldn’t make the right shapes. He wasn’t paying attention, anyway: he fumbled with something out of her line of sight and then half lifted, half pushed her onto a cool leather seat.
A car,
she thought confidently, but her pride at remembering the right word was swallowed by her realization that she was in the wrong place.

‘I . . . go there,’ she managed as Harris slid into the driver’s seat next to her. Her speech was getting more distinct, but she couldn’t pull her muscles together to point exactly where she meant. She sort of waved, turning her body a little, just enough to catch a glimpse of Maeve moving the limp red hoodie out of the corner of her vision.

His jaw clenched violently as he started the car. The jaw worked back and forth for a moment, and Jane watched it, fascinated. ‘We have to go,’ he snapped. ‘We couldn’t – we had to get out.’

The car jumped forward, pressing Jane back against her seat.
No, not mine
. ‘Dee,’ she gasped. The hoodie; the hair; the tall figure bent backward in the atrium.

‘She was pinned down all the way across the room, and we had to go,’ Harris repeated, and now she could hear the brokenness in his voice. ‘I got you, though,’ he added. There was no relief to the statement, no real emotion; nothing but the practical satisfaction of checking an item off a grocery list.

‘Turn around,’ Jane grunted, dragging herself upright with more effort than she thought it could possibly take. ‘They’ll think we’ve gone.’ She reached gingerly inward, checking for magical damage to match the total collapse of her nervous system. The hum of her magic was faint, but to her relief it was there, and the pulse grew a little stronger as she followed it. Her power would come back, she knew, along with her coordination and the mental organization that was getting sharper by the minute. ‘Turn
around,
’ she insisted again, but he just kept driving.

‘They know she’s with us,’ he said hollowly. ‘They know we – they’ll want to trade. Ransom her. We just had to get away, and they’ll tell us what they want, and send her back.’