“Strange?” she prompted. “Quelque chose d’étrange, Monsieur?”
“Normal people come one time,” he explained, pressing doggedly on in English in spite of Jane’s native accent. French pride, she thought with a mental eye-roll. Half of them refuse to speak English ever, and you can’t get the other half to cut it out. “They do not again,” the man elaborated. “Saint-Croix is not good for the touring.”
“Do I know you?” she asked, confused. Was he a friend of her grandmother’s? The man didn’t look like he’d remember what he had for breakfast, never mind a face from six years ago. Behind her, Malcolm quietly thanked the shopkeeper for the flowers.
Jane peered a little more closely at the old man’s parchment-skinned face, trying to make out any familiar detail. Malcolm materialized by her elbow, and the man’s watery eyes flicked between their two faces. Malcolm pressed her elbow a little more urgently, and she let him steer her out of the shop.
“Was he bothering you?” Malcolm asked her, an edge of anxiety in his voice. Jane felt a small twinge of satisfaction at his realization that her “quaint French farm village” wasn’t exactly picture-perfect. “What did he say?”
“It was nothing,” she assured him. She turned back once more to look at the old man, but his stool beside the door was empty, and there was no sign of him anywhere.
Chapter Five
The first thing Jane noticed when she pulled the car into the long dirt driveway was the wide-open gate. “That’s not right,” she muttered. Gran was a firm believer in physical barriers as well as social ones, and Jane couldn’t remember ever seeing the gate standing open. As if to compound the strangeness, a loud, hoarse noise came from the stand of trees that separated the little stone house from the road. Jane’s eyes widened as a rangy German shepherd came bounding across the Boyles’ land, barking furiously.
“Honey?” The dog stalked closer more slowly now, mouth twisted into a snarl. Its fur was matted and rough-looking.
“He doesn’t seem to recognize you,” Malcolm pointed out tensely as the dog crouched low to the ground, as if ready to pounce.
“I don’t recognize him either,” Jane explained. “But he might be new. My grandmother always names her dogs Honey. She said she got tired of thinking up names.”
“Maybe it’s a stray?” Malcolm suggested.
Only Gran would never let her own dog get so skinny—or so aggressive. Jane fidgeted with the window, making sure that it was tightly closed. “Let’s just get to the house. I’m sure she’ll have heard the racket by now.” She pulled the little car up the slope of the drive, feeling her jaw relax slightly when the dog bounded off into the trees, away from the house.
Jane parked to the right of the dilapidated porch, whose white paint was peeling off in long strips. The house was dark, and there was no answer to Jane’s timid knock on the weathered wooden door.
Her stomach churned and her toes started to tingle. Lips pressed into a tight line, she pushed the door; it opened easily. The air inside the house felt stale and cold. Jane shivered. “Malcolm, something’s not right.”
“Maybe she’s traveling.” Malcolm’s voice sounded far too loud in the house’s stillness. Goose bumps rose on her forearms.
“She doesn’t travel,” Jane told him flatly, but she felt a spark of hope. Maybe she does now, she thought wildly. Or she’s moved, and we’re trespassing on some stranger.
She drifted down the front hall, taking stock of the familiar reproduction of Matisse’s “Red Studio” on the wall and the worn-out Persian runner. But when she reached the low-ceilinged living room, where four-year-old Jane had built forts from overstuffed pillows and hand-knit afghans, she knew for sure Celine Boyle hadn’t gone on vacation or moved out. Her grandmother was right there, sitting on a floral chintz-covered chair, her hands folded primly on her lap. The skin of her fingers was gray, and her eyes stared through Jane, a white film covering her dark pupils.
“Oh God.” Jane instinctively held her breath, afraid to know how the air around her would smell.
“Jane.” Malcolm appeared at her side and gripped her elbow, trying to pull her from the room. But Jane couldn’t feel her feet, couldn’t move, couldn’t believe this was happening. She tried to speak, but her words couldn’t make it past the lump that had lodged itself in her throat. She felt like a ship whose moorings had come loose; her mind floated free and unattached. Her grandmother, the woman who had raised her, her only anchor in the world, the one constant, was dead.
“Jane, we need to go outside. We have to call someone.”
“No phone,” Jane said automatically. “She never had anyone to call.” Her voice sounded hollow, as though it was someone else’s. “You have to go to the neighbor’s.”
“We’ll use my cell,” he told her, his voice uncharacteristically snappish. “But let’s do it from outside.” She didn’t move, and he was pulling at her arm again. “Jane, I’m not leaving you here.”
Jane wondered why it mattered. She had already seen the body; there were no mysteries left in this room to protect her from. Malcolm could stay, go, talk, be silent . . . she just wanted to be here. Through the fog, she realized she had been away from this house for an unforgivably long time.
Jane heard Malcolm rummaging through his jacket for his cell phone, and closed her eyes, waiting. Her heart counted out the seconds she knew it would take him to give up on getting any kind of signal. And then she heard his curse—a low, soft sound that barely moved the heavy air—confirming that he had realized just how far away they were from the rest of the world. “I’ll be right back with help,” he told her firmly, and she wondered distantly if she was nodding, or acknowledging him at all. Either way, he stepped away from her side, and then the familiar snick of the door told her that she was alone with the dead body of her last family member in the world.
Gran’s vacant eyes stared straight ahead, and Jane suddenly imagined that the woman could see her somehow. If anyone could . . . Gran had always seemed to be watching her, even when she wasn’t there. Jane abruptly turned and walked down the hallway.
She paused in the small doorway to the kitchen. It was as if time had passed the farmhouse by, holding the wood structure constant while the rest of the world spun by. The same rough red curtains lined the leaded windows; the same curling but relentlessly clean linoleum covered the floor; the round breakfast table boasted Gran’s favorite blue-glazed vase exactly in the middle. The flowers in it were brown and shriveled. She guessed that they had been daisies, but it was hard to tell. They had clearly been dead for a while. The thought made Jane wince, and she left the kitchen without another glance.
She climbed the stairs and passed Gran’s room (bed neatly made, hospital corners and all), shutting the door on impulse to indicate its owner would not be back. There was only one place left to go now: the door at the end of the dark, narrow hall.
Her old room felt brutally familiar and painfully small. Dark wooden beams held up the low adobe ceiling, and a water stain shaped like an elephant marred one of the white walls. Teenage Jane had done what she could with the space: mirrors bounced gray light around the room, the furniture was the simplest she’d been able to get her hands on, and the surfaces were entirely free of knickknacks. But the steep gray foothills of the mountain still loomed outside the only window, blocking the sun, and trapping her inside the darkness.
Everything the same . . .
Actually, Jane realized with a start, everything was not the same. On the far wall, right next to the watermark, Gran had hung a small, round mirror set in thick, dark wood. She had to know I’d hate it. Jane approached it curiously. Why would she put it here? Gran may not have shared Jane’s tastes, but she had never interfered with this room. Other than this one anomaly, it didn’t look like the place had been touched in six years, except to rid it of dust. Jane slipped her fingers behind the unfamiliar thick frame before she could even imagine what she was looking for.
“Ow!” Her hand s
truck something sharp, and she jerked it out again.
She watched a drop of blood well up on her finger for a moment before reaching behind the mirror again, more carefully this time. Her fingers hit something hard and crisp, an envelope. It was marked “Jane” in her grandmother’s unmistakable cursive, and bulged oddly in the middle.
The heat in the hallway hissed on and the mournful yowl of a dog floated through the window. “What did you leave me, Gran?” Jane whispered as she opened the envelope. A yellowed piece of stationery fluttered out, along with a silver ring that flashed in the muted light before settling into Jane’s palm. She blinked. For a moment, she could have sworn the ring was engraved with antique carvings, but when she ran her fingers over it, she saw that it was entirely plain: just a smooth silver band with beveled edges. Kind of my style, she registered with vague surprise. She slipped it on her left middle finger and held it up to examine it more closely.
A violent shock tore through her hand, as though she’d stuck it in a live outlet. “What the—” Jane reached to tear the ring from her finger, but the silver object began to vibrate and hum. Jane’s eyes lost focus, and the edges of the room took on a weird, hazy glow. Take it off! her mind ordered frantically. The tingling flood of energy took over her arms, snaking through her veins like a shot of adrenaline, and there was nothing she could do to bring her limbs in line with her mind’s increasingly desperate commands. A burning pain flew down her torso and through her legs, pricking her skin as though she were being set on fire from the inside. She inhaled and tried to scream, but it was too late: the pulsing energy had reached her throat, and her vocal cords were as frozen as the rest of her.
Images from nowhere flickered along the whitewashed room: a horse reared back with an armor-clad knight on its back; a ringletted child in Victorian dress pulled a trapdoor closed behind her; seven stars traced an ellipsis around the earth; a ship cracked and sank below a clear blue sky. A pale woman with sad eyes and a crown of leaves watched from the corner, twisting her long-fingered hands together.
Jane felt herself torn in a hundred directions at once, unable to move or speak or even think. The invisible fire that held her still seemed to also be dragging her apart, and a more specific, familiar burn began in her chest. She had just enough time to wonder how long it had been since her last breath, when suddenly she was ten years old again, deep in the muddy water of Monsieur Pennette’s pond. She kicked for the surface, but the murky gloom and suspended tangle of flora made it impossible to tell which way was up. Gran had warned her almost daily to stay away from the water, but Jane had been desperate to see what lay beneath the lily-padded surface. As her lungs rebelled and her body went limp, she’d wished with all her strength that Gran would dive in and save her. And, just like magic, Gran had appeared. She had dragged Jane out of the dank standing water, and lectured her the whole way home about doing as she was told.
Now Jane was drowning again, this time in heat and darkness, but there was no Gran to pull her to the light. In the very last instant before she passed out on her bedroom floor, Jane’s mind succumbed to the fiery energy, and in that instant, she understood everything.
Chapter Six
Jane pulled her body up into a sitting position and ran an absent hand through the disastrous tangle of her blond hair. Her muscles felt loose and rubbery, as though she’d just run a marathon, and the world looked overly bright, the way it did when she awoke from a deep sleep. She turned her left hand curiously; the silver ring sat perfectly normally on her finger, looking as harmless as a declawed kitten. Her hand was trembling, yet her breathing was steady, her mind detached.
The scrap of stationery that had fallen out with the ring was a few inches from her knee. She unfolded it with care; there was no real hurry now that she knew what was inside. The date was six years old, but the ink was barely faded.
My dearest Jane,
I am so very sorry, but there is no way to say this gently: you are a witch. So am I, so was your mother, and so are many others around the world. Magic is real and powerful and all too ready for the taking. I have spent my lifetime hiding myself, my daughter, and then you from those who would kill to steal this terrible gift from us.
You left for Paris last night, and this morning at dawn I put the most powerful protection spells around you that I could. You are as safe as I can make you without telling you the truth about who you are. I simply cannot bring myself to do that, even now, even if in my bones I feel I should. When you were born, your mother, my darling Angeline, made me promise to never share our secret with you. She wanted to raise you as a normal girl, just as she had always wished to be. I had hoped to someday persuade her of the value of our heritage, but when she died, I had no choice but to honor her wish.
Still, I fear it is a mistake. I feel my age a little deeper in my bones every winter, and when I die, my spells will die with me. I don’t know what you will do then, or how you can possibly be ready, and I do know that people will be looking for you. I have to hope that this last gift of mine will be enough to keep you safe then.
Jane: you are powerful. Extraordinarily so. I have seen what you can do: the words you hear that haven’t been spoken, the things you move that haven’t been touched. The enclosed ring will add to your abilities, enhance them, make you as powerful as your enemies are desperate to be.
If you are reading this, then I am dead, and that means that you are in danger. Please, please find a place to hide and learn how to use your gift so you can keep yourself safe. And under no circumstances tell anyone the truth about who you are; you’ll never know whom you can trust.
I am so proud of you, my Jane, and I only wish that I could have done more to help you.
I love you, and I always will.
Gran
Hot tears pricked at the back of Jane’s eyes. “I have seen what you can do: the words you hear that haven’t been spoken, the things you move that haven’t been touched.” The lights I blow out or the cash registers that I break? She had spent her entire life misinterpreting the world around her: believing that Gran was too strict, that violent weather was a coincidence, that she, Jane, was just “unlucky” with electronics. She had heard thoughts, blown circuits, called Gran to her when she was about to drown in the neighboring farm’s pond. There were no accidents . . . just powers.
A small part of Jane—the part that allotted 10 percent of her paycheck to savings and only allowed herself three cigarettes per week—resisted. Magic was preposterous; witches were old-wives’ tales. But the rest of her, the vast majority of her, couldn’t force itself to question something so obviously true.
She closed her eyes, barely able to process the sound of the wind howling past the leaded windows or the creak of the bed under her weight. She was a witch. And now she was going to be hunted, tracked, sought after, unless she hid away from the world, as her grandmother had . . . or died, like her mother. The pain and betrayal and loss of it all hit her like a brick wall, mingling with her new power, until Jane began to think that she really might explode.
No wonder Gran was always so jumpy. No wonder they had had a bomb shelter, code words, crisis plans. No wonder Gran had seen enemies everywhere. Jane shuddered: could the world really be so dangerous? She had lived on her own for six years with nothing worse than the occasional blown fuse, and she had taken that as proof that Gran was off her rocker. But what if that was because Gran had cast a protective spell around her? What if Gran was right? Was living a “normal” life impossibly reckless?
“It can’t be,” Jane whispered to herself. Dangerous, sure, but crossing the street was dangerous. She couldn’t live in fear now just because she knew the danger’s name. She couldn’t wind up alone with bear-trap nerves on a farm in the middle of nowhere. There had to be another way to handle this gift—this burden.
From what felt like light-years away, she registered the sound of the front door creaking open. Heavy footsteps sounded, and several voices filtered up from the front room. �
��Jane?” Malcolm called, but her throat was too thick with emotion to answer.
“Jane?” Malcolm said again.
Jane’s eyes flew open; Malcolm stooped in the narrow doorway of her bedroom. She surreptitiously shoved the letter into her jeans’ pocket. “You’re so pale,” he murmured, moving to fold her into his arms. For a moment, she was almost surprised that he recognized her; it felt impossible that she could still look the same when so much had changed.
But I need to be the same. She concentrated on that thought as hard as she could, trying to force her mind to work in spite of the battering it had just taken. At first it rebelled, but after a long moment, a decision began to form. She wouldn’t be like her grandmother. She wouldn’t shut herself away, hoping to hide from disaster by closing herself off from the world.
“Jane?” Malcolm’s dark eyes were gentle and worried, a trace of a frown on his full lips. Danger, magic, mysterious enemies . . . it was hard to imagine all those existing in the same world as Malcolm. He’ll never know that they do, she told herself fiercely. I’m not losing anyone else. I’m not giving any more ground.
“You’re all I have now.” She took his hand, a tear slipping down her cheek. “You’re my family.”
He took her left hand and kissed the diamond on her ring finger. If he noticed the smooth silver ring beside it, he didn’t say anything. He just laced his own fingers between hers and led her back toward the door. “Always and forever,” he promised.
Chapter Seven
“We’ll all miss her, dear,” Monsieur Dupuis said. Jane couldn’t help but notice he was holding Madame Foucheaux’s hand. She thought back to Gran’s apparent overreaction to the “fictional” romance in Jane’s diary, and wondered how much—if any—of it had ever been in her imagination. “And I promise to take good care of Honey.” Honey had never warmed up to Jane and Malcolm, but a few good meals and a thorough brushing courtesy of Gran’s neighbors had turned him into a generally pleasant and eminently adoptable dog.
666 Park Avenue Page 3