The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) (24 page)

She turned her attention away from the ocean, bringing it in closer to her own body until she could feel her pulse thump steadily against her eardrums. She wondered whether she would notice the last beat, or if there would be so many distractions that she would miss it entirely. That possibility seemed unbearably sad.
I’ll make myself notice,
she decided dreamily.
I’m sure that I will remember to do that
. Her heart beat a tiny bit faster for a moment, as if in acknowledgment, then returned to its normal, slow march.

Finally, she slipped her old iPhone out of her pocket, unlocked it, and opened up her email.
‘Malcolm,’
she typed when a blank email screen winked open.

I have no idea what you did to get Penelope to come here, but she’s been a godsend. We’ve been working really hard together, and I think that we might have a breakthrough soon. So thank you, for doing whatever it was. I’m sorry about the way that things happened that night at the farm; I wish that we had talked a little more so that I could have explained better. I hope you know that I still care deeply about you, and I hope that wherever you are you are continuing to become the man I know that you’ve always wanted to be. Most of all I hope I get to meet him someday
.

Jane stopped typing for a moment and frowned at the screen. It looked okay, she decided: almost upbeat. But the next part of what she had to say would be harder to disguise.

I want to thank you for always trying. I should have known when you left so quietly that you would immediately turn around and make something good come of it. It means a lot to me that your first instinct was to help. It’s enough to make me wonder if I had been too quick to judge the things you said that night, and I hope that I was. Whatever you do, please keep proving me wrong
.

Jane

After a moment she erased the last line, and replaced it with ‘
Love, Jane
.’ She almost typed ‘
Love always,
’ but it was too risky. No matter what she wished she could say to Malcolm now, the most important thing was that he not realize she was saying goodbye.

Chapter Twenty-five

‘T
HEY
’
RE A BUNCH
of cowards,’ Maeve snarled, storming into the gazebo and throwing herself onto one of the stone benches.

Suddenly Jane thought that she looked almost exactly like her cousin Leah, but she politely refrained from saying so. For a moment she was disoriented, watching the play of dappled light through Maeve’s wild mop of red curls. Then the explanation came to her: it looked wrong because the sun had shifted. ‘How long have I been out here?’ she asked, stretching her arms out to the sides experimentally. There were a bunch of angry new knots in the muscles of her back and neck, and she thought that she could guess at the answer before her friend said it out loud.

‘It’s just past three,’ Maeve answered nonchalantly, then frowned. ‘You’ve been here since you walked out? Like, right there in the middle of nowhere just
sitting
?’

‘Lying down, mostly,’ Jane pointed out, although it did nothing to relieve her self-consciousness. ‘I’ve been napping. Or meditating. Or something like that.’ The truth was that she might have slept for a while, but she was pretty sure that she hadn’t. And there had been nothing as intentional as meditation on her mind, either: she had just lain there, drifting on the slate stones, not moving or particularly wanting to move.
It isn’t time to go yet. And when it is, I will
.

‘I figured you’d skipped town,’ Maeve said with a grimace, crossing her delicate ankles and swinging them gently back and forth. ‘I hoped, anyway, that you would have had the good sense not to stick around a bunch of losers who would turn you over to some evil arch-bitch just to save their own skins for a few years.’

‘A hundred,’ Jane corrected primly. The gazebo’s floor suddenly felt cold and unyielding beneath her, and she moved awkwardly to a bench one away from Maeve’s. It was made of stone as well, but something about being able to stretch her legs downward actually did help her to feel a tiny bit more comfortable, so she stayed put. ‘And I can’t help but notice that you came looking for me here, anyway.’

‘I said I hoped you would show some basic sense, not that I completely gave up my own. Whatever the most bullheadedly stupid thing is that could possibly, remotely be construed as ‘noble,’ there you are. Doing it.’

Jane grinned, and Maeve’s bow mouth tugged up a little at the corners as if by reflex. Her brown eyes, though, stayed hard and angry. ‘They’re not “turning me over,” Mae,’ Jane reminded her gently. ‘I know you’d rather pretend Annette’s call never came. But it did, so I had to know about it, so I have to meet her. That’s not your family’s fault at all.’

Maeve snorted delicately, but shifted the topic. ‘Jane,’ she pleaded earnestly, ‘just let us help you hide. We could smuggle you through our place in Chamonix to anywhere you wanted to go.’

‘Tell me more about this phone call,’ Jane asked, ignoring Maeve’s suggestion even though it tugged at her heart.
I’ll never get to go to Chamonix. I always meant to
. But something about Maeve’s anger was beginning to sound evasive, and Jane had too much to deal with in the present to let her mind dwell on some nonexistent future. ‘What was the exact wording?’

‘You can’t read my mind,’ Maeve argued defensively. ‘Not anymore, anyway.’ She frowned suddenly, then cocked her head to the side in a curious gesture so familiar that Jane wanted to cry. ‘Did you ever read my mind before?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Did you see any of the stuff I thought about that assistant curator in Drawings, for example?’

Jane smiled at her and shook her head definitively. ‘No, but you’re going to have to tell me all about him sometime soon. Just make it after tomorrow night. I think I’ll have a little trouble focusing on things between now and then, but it would be nice to have something to look forward to when it’s all done.’

Maeve stuck her tongue out childishly. ‘Skip town,’ she urged, growing serious again. ‘Did you see how many extra cars Harris keeps just sitting in the barn here? He’s a total freak about lending them out, but between the two of us we could totally swipe his keys.’

‘You know I won’t do that. And it’s just as well, I think, since Hasina threatened you all if I don’t show up. Right?’

Maeve jumped up off the bench and stormed out of the gazebo, her face a furious scowl. After a moment she returned and sat again, as Jane had guessed she would. ‘Her
existence
is a threat to us,’ she pointed out angrily. ‘It has been for pretty much forever; knowing about it doesn’t suddenly make it true.’

‘There’s a difference,’ Jane told her gently. ‘There’s a difference between her picking off witches at random to rebuild her magic, and targeting your family specifically because she’s pissed off.’

‘No, there isn’t,’ Maeve countered, but Jane could see that she didn’t really have an argument beyond that.

‘There really is,’ she said firmly. ‘But it’s a moot point, because I’d decided to go before I even knew about that little bit of blackmail.’

Maeve bit at her lip, twisting it. ‘I figured you’d say something like that,’ she admitted. ‘But I don’t really get it. This whole time you’ve been all gung-ho to take on Lynne. You stayed in New York way, way longer than you had to, and then you rallied Grandma and even Harris and convinced them to go face off against someone they’ve been afraid of their entire lives. We got so used to being Manhattan’s
weaker
witch family – scrappy second place – and you came in and treated us like—’ She hesitated, weaving her fingers together: one over, one under. ‘Equals,’ she said finally, her voice barely louder than the breeze off the dunes.

Jane said nothing. Everything she could think of would only come across as patronizing, and she had no intention of sounding like that. From the moment she learned about her power, she had seen herself as an underdog. All the other witches she knew had gotten a massive head start in terms of training. But deep down, Jane knew she had always thought of that as a temporary status, something that she would grow out of once she understood more. She couldn’t imagine how it must feel to face an entire lifetime of always having less power, of always depending on the goodwill of stronger witches.

Maeve finally finished her thought, breaking the silence between them. ‘I just don’t get why you’re suddenly so willing to walk right into that horrible house. Straight to your own death.’

‘I don’t think that that’s what I’m doing,’ Jane argued.
Not necessarily; not exactly
. It felt reckless somehow, to say it out loud, but in a way it was true.

Maeve tossed her hair back, her eyes suddenly fierce. ‘You’re going to fight, then.’

Jane heard a ringing note of satisfaction in her friend’s voice, and she smiled. ‘Well, I certainly don’t plan to just walk in and shout up the stairs for someone to come down and kill me.’

Maeve’s coppery-brown eyes searched her face more closely than she would have liked, especially since the girl didn’t seem satisfied with whatever she saw there. ‘You know that Hasina doesn’t feel all that bound by her word,’ she pointed out. ‘You think that if you somehow manage to get out of this meeting alive, she’ll stick to the hundred years’ offer? Trust me, she won’t. No matter how she phrased the deal, she won’t agree that she got her end of it unless she kills you.’

Jane frowned; was that true? She had hoped that a time-limited deal would be binding somehow, but maybe that was hoping for too much from an offer of Hasina’s. Not to mention that the unstable mind she had taken over was a wild card in itself. How much of her reaction would be ruled by Annette’s impulsive fury? ‘On the bright side,’ Jane offered carefully, ‘I probably
won’t
make it out alive. So.’

Maeve heaved an exasperated sigh and reached into an inside pocket of her shrunken Polo blazer. She pulled out something lumpy and grey and tossed it to Jane, who didn’t know whether she would be better off trying to catch it or dodge it, and ended up splitting the difference. The object bounced off her stiff-fingered hands and fell onto her knees. ‘Don’t drop that!’ Maeve cautioned, a bit too late, but at least it hadn’t hit the slate floor. Jane peered at it; it seemed unharmed, but how was she supposed to tell? ‘It’s a smoke bomb,’ Maeve explained once she seemed satisfied that it wouldn’t roll away. ‘Leah made a few of them. Actually, she said she was trying to make an invisibility charm, but I’m pretty sure that if you swallowed that, it would kill you.’

Jane ran a finger across the fabric surface of the smoke bomb, surprised at how touched she was by the gift. ‘Thank you. And thank Leah.’

‘Come back inside and thank her yourself,’ Maeve snapped impatiently. ‘Jane, she’s been sitting in the sunroom building an arsenal all morning long. Do you have any idea how badly that’s cut into her usual texting schedule?’

Jane chuckled and shook her head. She leaned back to slip the little grey pouch into the pocket of her jeans, but its roundness was too unyielding to fit. For lack of other options, she ended up holding the bomb loosely in her hand, its dusty surface scratching against her skin.

‘I’m serious,’ Maeve pressed, standing up pointedly. ‘If you plan to fight, at least plan. To fight. And let us help. Penelope’s been working frantically on figuring out Hasina’s body-snatching spell, but she doesn’t think there’s any way she’ll be ready to interrupt it by tomorrow night. I’d bet that Annette knows that, and doesn’t want to give us the time to figure it out, so let’s use our resources more wisely. Go into the house, pull Penelope off her fool’s errand, and tell her you need weapons instead. She’s got some scary-good ones,’ she added in an almost confessional tone. ‘Aunt Charlotte says she makes this powder out of human skulls, then distills it into a liqueur with a little orange flower, and it doubles the range of her spells. More than doubles, maybe; if you drink enough of it you could probably knock Annette on her ass without ever leaving the farm. They’re all in there working on
something,
even if it’s a stupid something, while you’ve just been sitting out here “meditating.” ’

Finally, Jane nodded. Although she highly doubted that these last thirty hours would matter too much in the battle to come, she stood and linked her arm through Maeve’s. She held the small gray pouch carefully away on the other side of her body, wrinkling her nose as a strange odor wafted up from it as she moved.

‘Really don’t drop it,’ Maeve cautioned, her eyes wide and round with sincerity. ‘They all make smoke, but some of them double as stink bombs.’

Jane smiled in spite of herself, turning the pouch over a few times between her fingers as she let Maeve steer her back toward the house. ‘Leah seems to have a real gift for driving you crazy,’ she observed almost cheerfully. ‘If she can get under Annette’s skin half as well, I may actually have a shot.’

Maeve kicked at her ankle. It wasn’t much of a kick; more of a tap, really, but it still snagged Jane’s foot and made her stumble a little. ‘You’ll have more than “a shot” if you start cooperating,’ she pointed out tartly. ‘We’re all in there making sure you go to the mansion as prepared as you can be, and you’re lying out here like you’re practising being dead.’

Is that what I’ve been doing?
Jane wondered, even as she made the appropriate denials out loud. She had certainly said goodbye to Malcolm, and it had felt at times like she was doing the same with the rest of the world. But she had felt very much alive the entire time – or, at least, for as much of the time as she could remember. She put on her most resolute face as they approached the herb garden.