The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) (30 page)

‘Is this where the persona-non-grata picnic is being held?’ a voice chirped from behind her, and Jane jumped a little. ‘I brought the caviar.’ Maeve’s elfin features and black Issa dress were appropriately somber, but she really was holding a wicker picnic basket. In spite of her own sadness at the occasion, Jane smiled warmly at the sight of her.

‘Harris is parking the car,’ Leah added, picking her way around another maple tree on perilously high heels. The rest of her family was straggling behind her.

‘You guys didn’t have to come,’ Jane told them, her throat swelling with gratitude.

‘That’s what makes it a gesture, love,’ Charlotte reproved mildly, but with a twinkle in her brown eyes. ‘That basket of my niece’s contains a bottle or two of rather nice champagne, and we thought that it would be appropriate to toast Malcolm’s memory with you, if you’re willing.’

Jane glanced back toward the crowded gravesite; the parade of eulogies showed no sign of slowing down. ‘We should have plenty of time before anyone comes back this way,’ she guessed, and Maeve slid a green bottle of Salon 1997 from her basket to pop its cork in one fluid, practised motion.

Harris arrived with a large, plaid blanket in hand and shook it out across the grass. ‘I had a dream last night,’ he told Jane softly when the champagne was poured and they were all settled on the blanket in a companionable little group. Jane startled a little, but waited for him to go on. ‘Dee was in it. I hadn’t – she hadn’t – since—’ He stumbled over the words, and Jane reflexively placed a soothing hand on his shoulder. He covered it with his own after a moment and squeezed it lightly. ‘I’m trying to apologize,’ he explained eventually. ‘I don’t remember most of what she said, but she set me straight and then some. Maybe I should have been more open-minded when you wanted to talk to her the first time – it would have saved me a lot of needless grudge holding.’

Jane smiled fondly. ‘No, I think you were right about that. It’s better that she got to choose her own time to stop in.’ She raised her champagne flute to her lips, then hesitated self-consciously, the bubbles tingling her skin. After a moment she set the full glass back down again on the blanket.

There was a small silence, and then Harris spoke again, more hesitantly this time. ‘It might not have
actually
been her,’ he admitted. ‘It looked like her, but I’ve been pissed off at you and Malcolm and the world in general for a while now, and maybe I’ve been thinking it was about time to stop.’

Jane considered that. ‘I think Dee would be really happy to be a part of that moment. Whether it was her own idea or yours.’

‘I think so, too,’ Harris agreed mildly, a sad smile brightening his freckle-dusted face. There were some faint new lines around his brilliant green eyes – stress, Jane thought, and pain as well – but when he smiled he looked like his old, optimistic self. ‘I’m sorry you lost him,’ he finished.

‘I’m sorry you lost her,’ Jane answered, and she leaned her upper body over to fold him into a half hug. There was the faintest hint of an electrical tingle, a tiny throb of her magic that would, she knew, always respond to the magic in his blood. But it felt different now, more like recognition than need. He was, in a way, a part of her family, and it was only right that family should get along.

‘I was worried that it was too early for peaches, but try this,’ Maeve ordered, pulling herself across the blanket to sit on Jane’s other side and thrusting a little bowl of fruit salad into her hands.

Jane obediently scooped some into her mouth, though she was too overwhelmed by the day to taste much of anything. ‘They’re great,’ she agreed absently, and Maeve’s eyes narrowed.

‘There aren’t any peaches in it,’ she said, sighing, and rested her curly head on Jane’s shoulder affectionately. ‘How are you holding up?’

Jane craned her neck for a minute, trying to get a sense of how the funeral was progressing. Although the gravesite was thronged with people, Annette looked alone and somehow frail. Hasina hadn’t occupied her body for very long, but Jane wondered if her presence hadn’t done some lasting damage to her hostess all the same.
It would serve her right
. ‘I’m okay,’ she replied honestly. ‘The hardest part is the regret. I know you never get a chance to correct mistakes, but usually you at least get a chance to make amends.’

Harris glanced up at her as if he had heard his name spoken, then returned quickly to bickering good-naturedly with his cousin about the proper size of a scoop of caviar. Maeve picked a grape from Jane’s fruit salad and popped it into her mouth with her fingers. ‘I can see how that would be hard,’ she agreed. ‘And Malcolm was absolutely, madly, head over heels in love with you. But, Jane. Do you really think he would have done half of what he did for you if he didn’t also know how you felt about him?’

Jane opened her mouth to reply, but found herself needing more time to really think about Maeve’s question. Her friend took the opportunity to shove a strawberry into it and gently pressed Jane’s chin to close her mouth around the fruit. It had a little more flavour than the first bites she had taken.

‘Thank you,’ she said when she had swallowed. ‘I guess I know he
knew,
’ she conceded. ‘But he still deserved to hear it from me. More often, and without all the drama and qualifications and reversals. He kept fighting on my side until it killed him, and I never got to . . .’ She shrugged helplessly.

‘The specific events, the details, won’t matter to him wherever he is now,’ Emer assured her, and Jane blushed to realize that she had been speaking loudly enough to be overheard.

‘Souls don’t keep score,’ Charlotte agreed, patting her loose bun absentmindedly. ‘That’s a part of what made Hasina such an abomination – she never had to lay down her arms between lives and let her grudges go.’

‘But Malcolm will have by now,’ Emer finished for her, sipping delicately at her champagne. ‘So there’s no need to fret. He’ll remember the love, and he’ll feel it, even now.’

‘A
lot
of love, apparently,’ Leah added, her voice dripping with irony as she gestured toward the mass of mourners across the cemetery. ‘We should all find out we’re so popular after we’re dead.’ Her mother clucked her tongue reprovingly, but Jane had to chuckle a little.

‘I’m thinking of not going back to MoMA,’ Maeve whispered to Jane when the conversation had moved on around them. ‘I don’t think it’s fair to stretch out my “medical leave” any longer; Archie’s going crazy. And all the other witches in this city have gotten back to work – Harris and I noticed the other day that Dee’s friend’s bookstore was open for business again. So I definitely should be doing something, but it seems like I should be doing something a little . . . witchier. Now that I am one.’

‘Well,
this
witch is thinking of becoming an architect again,’ Jane suggested, ‘but you’d need a whole new degree for that.’ Maeve pulled a face.

‘I was thinking more like a wedding planner,’ she countered. ‘Aren’t most of them witches? Wouldn’t you almost have to be?’

‘It would probably help,’ Jane agreed, recalling the hundreds of angry phone calls that Lynne Doran had managed to cram into each day of planning Jane’s own wedding.

‘Or maybe I’ll travel for a while, first,’ Maeve mused on. ‘I could come stay with you in Paris for a while, or I could rent a place in Florence and make you come hang out with me.’

‘That sounds nice.’ It was true, Jane realized: Paris sounded nice, and so did Florence, and so did New York. They all sounded perfectly fine . . . even if none of them sounded like home.
I guess I’ll have to start from scratch,
she thought.

After a while, the funeral began to break up, and the Montagues took that as their cue to do the same with their picnic. ‘I’ll stay for a bit,’ Jane insisted, kissing each of them on the cheek and resisting the multitude of invitations that they seemed to be inventing on the spot to keep her occupied. ‘I’d like a little time to say goodbye once the crowd is gone.’

But her friends were much more efficient about their departure than the more ‘official’ mourners seemed inclined to be. A good ten minutes after Emer had blown one last kiss over her shoulder, Jane was still standing under the tree, watching Annette accept condolences from a seemingly endless line of well-dressed strangers. It must have felt so strange, Jane reflected, to someone who had grown up believing that she didn’t belong to anyone’s family.

‘And now she has all of Manhattan clamouring to be part of hers,’ she muttered to herself. It was only to be expected, of course: one of the city’s richest and most powerful families had been decimated almost overnight, and its heiress was a virtual unknown. Nothing in Annette’s childhood had prepared her for the coming onslaught, and Jane wondered how she would fare.
Malcolm would have stepped in to help her, even after everything,
Jane thought wistfully.
He would have cared more about what she needed than about what she had earned
.

‘Part of her what?’ a strangely accented voice asked curiously from the other side of her maple tree, and Jane jumped for the second time that afternoon.

She crooked her head around the grey-brown bark to see Penelope Lotuma, dressed all in black, with chunky jewellery dripping from every part of her body in honour of the occasion. ‘I was just thinking out loud,’ Jane told her, reluctant to share the specifics of her thoughts. Although Penelope had more than come through, Jane would never feel as comfortable and open with her as she did with the Montagues. Something about Penelope’s appraising, ice-chip eyes kept her instinctively at a distance. ‘I thought you’d be gone by now.’

Penelope gave her a sidelong glance from around the tree, her light blue eyes unfathomable. ‘I find myself in a very unusual position, Blondie. I’ve got a flight in a few hours, but I did want to come talk to you, first.’

‘I really appreciate the help you gave us,’ Jane temporized. ‘It made all the difference, having you here. I know Malcolm didn’t get a chance to see that before he . . . well. I hope that he knows, anyway.’ Something caught in her throat, and she swallowed hard.

Penelope’s fingers moved absently to the necklace of hers that had always piqued Jane’s curiosity: a thin, dark chain studded with clear glass bubbles. Her hands travelled to it at times that Jane felt fairly sure were significant, but she hadn’t been able to sort out a pattern yet. ‘You could ask him,’ the little witch pointed out archly. ‘I think you know how, by now.’

‘Power makes a lot of things easier,’ Jane agreed, but she knew she didn’t need to add that she wouldn’t be raising Malcolm from the dead. He deserved peace, and she would be strong enough to give it to him.

Penelope, however, clicked her tongue disapprovingly. ‘I did expect you to try, especially once that pretty toy he gave you failed to pick up his scent. I never do get used to the moral ones. So I suppose I must tell you, then: if you had gone looking for your dead man, you would never have found him. He’s one of mine now.’ She spun one of the little glass bubbles around on its chain, and Jane felt her eyes go wide in horror.

‘Malcolm,’ she gasped. ‘He’s . . . in there? That’s what he offered you?’

‘They keep me safe,’ Penelope said lovingly, stroking the dark chain. ‘They come to no harm here, although they can’t move on, of course, either. They keep unfriendly eyes from me and can fuel my power far beyond what I was born with, if I need it. Your man was willing to make that trade just to gamble on you having a better chance.’

Jane’s breath caught in her throat.
His life really is over, then – he doesn’t even get to start again in the next one
. Emer and Charlotte had been wrong: Malcolm wasn’t a free soul, basking in the memory of Jane’s love. He had traded that future away. Her eyes flickered to the massive polished-wood coffin, barely visible beneath a mountain of roses in all colours.
They’ll lower it and he’ll be ..
. She shuddered violently, suddenly freezing even in the early-summer warmth.

‘I’m getting to the nicer part,’ Penelope said dryly. ‘I have all these souls, you see, because for my entire lifetime it has been rather dangerous to be a witch. In addition to all the normal squabbling and backstabbing that you might expect, there was something, someone out there killing us off one by one, decade after decade. And now there isn’t.’

‘Now there isn’t,’ Jane agreed mindlessly. Penelope shot her an exasperated look.

‘So I find myself feeling something that I have never felt before, not once. I think you might call it “indebted.” ’

‘Or “grateful”?’ Jane guessed, raising an inquisitive eyebrow. Whatever she had been expecting from Penelope, that wasn’t it.

The strange woman laughed. ‘Gratitude is foolishness. However, the fact remains that I obtained your lover’s soul to protect myself from the very thing you used my services to go out and kill. Maybe it turns out now that I don’t need
quite
so many souls to stay safe.’

Belatedly, Jane remembered the strange glowing thing that had left Malcolm’s body after Annette had cut him down. She hadn’t thought about it until now, but it was clear: she had watched his soul fly toward Penelope’s bauble. ‘Not
quite
?’

Penelope smiled, twisting the glass between her short, dark fingers. ‘I could spare one. If you want it.’

‘If I—’ Was she supposed to start a necklace of her own? Keep Malcolm’s soul on a shelf somewhere? The thought made her stomach churn sickly; a soul was no ornament. And even Penelope – who wore them herself – must know that. ‘You mean, if I want him to move on, into the afterlife. If I want you to let him go.’