The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) (22 page)

‘Not enough firepower,’ Emer murmured. ‘Last time we took her on, we failed the mission and lost a sister.’ Jane nodded, touched by the choice of wording. Even though she didn’t share their genetics, Dee had been one of them.

‘Well, Blondie’s friend bought the full package,’ Penelope informed them, seemingly unconcerned. ‘I’ll help plan, help train, or help fight. Just point where you need me.’ She turned to Jane. ‘He loves you madly, you know. Or at least, he certainly acted like someone in love, like a knight on some quest to redeem his lady’s honour. So few people love the way they used to anymore; it’s really quite a shame.’

Jane’s heart suddenly felt as though it would burst out of her chest.
It doesn’t matter,
she tried to remind herself.
I can’t let him win me over with shallow grand gestures; I have to focus on the big picture
. But if Malcolm hadn’t returned to claim his credit, what kind of shallow gesture was that?

Penelope was watching her with shrewd blue eyes. ‘It’s not easy to find me, you know, much less to find me twice. I was in Caracas this time,’ she continued idly, and as she said it her accent grew somehow thicker. ‘We had met already in Ecuador last month. Your knight had crossed the path of a self-proclaimed “witch hunter,” and very thoughtfully warned me. That bought him your trinket – an excellent bargain for him – and then we were done. Apparently, though, the coven I crossed the border with wasn’t quite as discreet as I would have preferred. I wouldn’t have stayed in the area nearly so long if I had known what gossips they were, and not enough power to turn on a lightbulb between the four of them.’

‘Well, four,’ Emer scoffed, and Charlotte and Penelope chuckled appreciatively. Jane, who didn’t get the joke, folded her arms across her chest and waited.

‘It’s much harder to do magic in even numbers,’ Charlotte explained unhelpfully. ‘Three, five, seven are the best . . . twelve works because it’s divisible by three . . . eleven is unlucky and will cause your spell to rebound . . . there are a lot more rules to magic once you’re in a group.’

She shrugged in a sort of apology, and Jane felt a sudden pang of missing Dee. She had always been Jane’s magical translator.
Besides, we were an odd number when we went into the mansion, and I don’t think it helped a bit
.

‘It’s complicated,’ Emer chimed in gently, covering Jane’s hand with her own, ‘but only if you need to complicate it. Your power is your power, and its only limit is itself. But combine it with a coven, or a specific spell, and the structure can hinder just as much as it can help.’

‘But what does that even
mean
?’ Jane complained, unable to keep quiet any longer. Jane half expected them to giggle at her confusion again, but Penelope just fixed her eyes on Jane’s, and Jane felt her entire body still. Even her pulse seemed to slow. ‘It’s like building an engine around the raw power that is combustion,’ she explained. ‘With that clear, can we begin now? I see the dead all over you, Blondie, and I’ll need to know everything you’ve learned from them.’

Chapter Twenty-three

B
Y THE TIME
Jane finished telling Penelope about her last vision of Dee, her conversation with Gran’s diary, and everything André had told her, the kitchen’s population had changed several times. First Maeve had come down, yawning and wearing fuzzy slippers. She had managed to sit at the little wooden table quietly enough, but Leah’s entrance had caused more of a disturbance. Her mother had quickly taken her out, then returned through the great-room door just as Harris had descended by the stairs on the other side. Then Leah had returned, only to be herded sternly away again by her mother, and in the end Jane was alone with Penelope, repeating every detail she could remember from the last week.

‘Hasina,’ Penelope breathed when she had finally finished. ‘It may surprise you, but until your knight came to find me I wasn’t sure that her unlikely life was anything more than a myth.’

Jane’s mouth twisted into a frown; that was hardly encouraging news.

‘You know, of course, about Ambika and her seven daughters,’ Penelope went on.

‘I know the basics,’ Jane agreed. ‘But something tells me that you know a lot more than that.’

Penelope’s smile revealed an even row of tiny white teeth. ‘Ambika was the first witch,’ she began agreeably. ‘She inherited her kingdom from her warlord father, but his followers wanted nothing to do with a woman ruler. Their head priests took Ambika into a hut and filled it with perfumed smoke, trying to make their gods show them who her father’s true heir should be. But when the smoke cleared, there stood Ambika. And she had changed.’

‘The priests made her a witch?’ Could witches be ‘made,’ somehow? It didn’t fit with anything that Jane knew.

‘Of course not,’ Penelope scoffed. ‘It was their gods who made her, who appointed her their ruler, and the people knew that it was good for them and knelt in the mud and worshipped her from that day forward.’

‘Oh. Well, that sounds a little better, then. And from what I hear, in addition to being touched by those gods she was incredibly fertile.’

‘Seven sons, seven daughters,’ Penelope confirmed. ‘She remembered the lessons of her own ascension to the throne and, in an attempt to prevent the same from happening to her children, divided up her lands among her sons, for all the good it did them. History doesn’t even remember their names. Those of us who still carry her magic know the names of her daughters, though. It was to them that she left her true inheritance, split into seven equal parts.’

‘Jyoti,’ Jane remembered, the common ancestress of both Penelope and the Dalca
cus. ‘Hasina, and Anila – she was the one whose descendants Hasina wiped out after Salem.’ She frowned, trying to remember any of the other four names she had read in Rosalie Goddard’s journals. ‘Anulet?’

‘Amunet,’ Penelope corrected. ‘A nasty piece of work, that one. Maya, of course, but hers are all gone now. There was Sumitra, who is oh-so-indirectly responsible for this lovely kitchen we’re sitting in now. And the youngest was Aditi. She’s the one your people came from, Blondie. A little slip of a thing; all eyes, really. And conscience, more’s the pity.’

Jane pitched forward on her stool. ‘You know them?’ she whispered. ‘You’ve spoken with them?’

Penelope smiled and leaned back a little in her small wooden chair. Jane was, she realized belatedly, looming over the other woman, but she didn’t seem to care or even especially notice. ‘I speak with the dead,’ she explained. ‘Nearly all the day long, in fact. I live with them. I breathe their air, walk in their footsteps, wear their fates like jewels. I know them all by reputation at the very least. Even those who lived at the dawn of humanity itself.’

A million questions popped into Jane’s head at once, but Penelope was there for a specific reason and she felt honour bound to try to focus on that. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she began slowly. ‘No one in generations has been able to stop Hasina, even when they’ve known who she is and what she’s doing to stay alive. But her sisters were just as strong as she is, and her mother would have been even stronger. I bet if they’d known what she was going to do, they would have been able to keep her from ever moving into her first new body.’

Penelope’s mouth twisted thoughtfully. ‘Probably,’ she agreed. ‘They might even be able to give you some pointers – or they could, anyway, if we could talk to them.’

Jane’s mouth opened and then closed again. When she managed to make it form words, she heard a faint pleading tone in her voice. ‘Isn’t that what you do, though?’

Penelope didn’t seem ruffled in the slightest by Jane’s skepticism. She pushed her thick glasses a little higher on her nose and sighed. ‘Even experts in their fields have limits. Or were you going to tell me that you know where Ambika and her daughters are buried? And that you have some previously unknown spell to reconstitute their skeletons, since I doubt any of them was in a hermetically sealed tomb. They have truly returned to the dust by now, and no one even knows which dust.’

‘Having the body, though
–
the bones, really
–
makes up for just about any other lack,’
Emer had said once. And what was the rest?
‘If you’re truly adept and you have someone’s bones, you can call them back for real.’
But they didn’t have any bones, and they didn’t have anything else, either. The first witches’ belongings were long gone, and everyone who had known them was long dead. Even if Penelope was every bit as good as her remarkable reputation, she couldn’t be expected to work miracles out of thin air.

‘Even an heirloom would be a long shot anyway, wouldn’t it?’ Jane asked, finishing her train of thought out loud. ‘Anything but a skeleton would, when the person has been dead so incredibly long. Even if we found something that one of them owned, it wouldn’t be enough.’

‘It wouldn’t.’ Penelope’s accented voice was crisp and calm.

It’s not an urgent problem to her,
Jane realized darkly.
It’s just a job. If we all die in some futile attempt to take out Hasina, she’ll take her payment and just disappear
.

Before she could voice her annoyance, however, Penelope spoke again. ‘You may well be correct that one of those original witches could help us. But without their bones we could never raise them, not even a fleeting shadow of what they left on the world. So we will have to pursue other avenues.’

‘I don’t suppose you have any in mind.’

‘Of course I do,’ Penelope replied, unperturbed. ‘Hasina transfers bodies using a spell. It’s a difficult one that requires tremendous power focused through impossibly convoluted conduits, but still, a spell. Something like that doesn’t just end once the body switch is complete – it takes effort to maintain her presence there for the rest of that body’s life. It’s performed the one time, but it continues indefinitely.’

Jane took a moment to process that information. The orb she had used to become Ella Medeiros had sort of worked that way, she realized. It had functioned on a strict time limit, fueling her disguise for exactly twenty-eight days. After that it had vanished – burned up or collapsed on itself or just winked out of existence, perhaps. Jane wasn’t sure. She had been on the street when the spell ended, far from the orb, watching André’s handsome face grow increasingly murderous as he realized who she was. But Hasina’s spell would not self-destruct that way; it must provide a different sort of energy, so that casting it once would continue releasing that energy until the spell was cast again. ‘Okay,’ she agreed. ‘But we tried to stop her from finishing the spell, and we got beaten. Now it’ll keep her in Annette’s body until the next time she needs to perform it, and once she has new heirs she can do that whenever she wants. We won’t be able to predict it, and we know from experience that we won’t be able to interrupt it, so—’

‘Do you need me here for this?’ Penelope interrupted. When she seemed convinced that Jane would be quiet, she continued. ‘The spell is cast, but it’s still working,’ she explained slowly. ‘If we learn enough about the spell, then we may be able to disrupt its effects, to change the way it works on Hasina’s soul.’

‘We could break the connection,’ Jane said, realizing what Penelope meant.

Penelope held up a warning hand. ‘Maybe. But it would be best if we knew every last detail of the spell in question, and only Hasina knows all that. You’ll have to tell me everything you know about it, and then Emer and her family need to do the same. Don’t leave anything out. If you can’t remember the exact words that your grandmother’s diary used on the subject, then I’ll need to interview it, as well.’

‘I remember.’ She knew Gran’s words by heart, and of course she had seen the spell under way, hadn’t she? Abruptly, the smell of smoke filled Jane’s nostrils, and she felt an angry heat licking at her skin. She closed her eyes against the remembered flames.
Snap out of it,
her brain urged frantically, but she couldn’t.
Then at least use it,
she told herself.
See what you saw
. There were shapes in the darkness, and she needed to know what they were. Lynne’s tall, trim form was outlined against the atrium’s windows, and next to her something glowed with an unearthly light.

But I didn’t see; I didn’t see
. Annette’s dark, predatory eyes kept getting in her way, and attacks had come from every side. Jane was confused and disoriented, her lungs on fire.

Then a door banged open and Dee was there, her face as fierce as any Amazon’s. Dee saw, Jane thought with relief, and her world jolted and shifted and realigned until she reached the moments when she had looked out through Dee’s amber eyes. Something bubbled in between Annette and her twin crones, giving off the same unearthly glow that Jane had seen earlier. Somewhere far away, as though in a different world, she felt her lips trying to form words to describe the odd substance. But her real self was trapped here with Dee, hearing the terrible rising rushing noise, watching as Belinda and Cora withered and collapsed, and turning away as the light began to pour from Annette’s suspended body.