“Thank you,” Jane said, her eyes downcast. A black thread was unraveling from the sleeve of the cheap black dress she had chosen randomly from Saint-Croix’s sole, dingy department store. One more thing coming apart at the seams.
For the past few days, she and Malcolm had feverishly prepared for Gran’s funeral. The coroner had discreetly (but a little too eagerly, as if he had a penchant for gossip) informed them that between Gran’s age and the cold, it was impossible to establish exactly when her heart had stopped. It didn’t matter, though. She was gone, and knowing exactly when it happened wouldn’t do a thing to change that.
The macabre story of the dead widow in the farmhouse had piqued plenty of interest around the area, and everyone in town had turned up for the funeral mass. Every last villager was now standing in the receiving line at the small stone church, offering Jane condolences in one breath while waiting hopefully in the next for a crumb about Gran’s tragic demise. Jane wished that at least one of the so-called “mourners” would have bothered to check on her grandmother in the last month, if they were going to act all caring now. Then again, Jane herself hadn’t stopped by in six years.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Madame Martine, a local artist who fancied herself eccentric, murmured. Jane gave her and her tie-dyed headscarf a wan smile. A headache was blooming behind her eyes, growing stronger with every “sorry.” The ancient church, damp and musky, echoed with words—both said and unsaid.
Perhaps if she’d come back sooner . . .
Such an odd lady . . .
Jane rubbed her temples, longing to block the voices that seemed to wander through her head at random.
. . . wonder how much the house will go for . . .
. . . girl was gone for so long . . .
. . . killed her . . .
If my child ever leaves like that . . .
The idea of mind-reading, as it turned out, was much more appealing than the actual experience of it. The magic from the ring still pulsed through Jane’s body, throbbing uncomfortably at unexpected moments. She didn’t know how to control her powers, and disembodied thoughts came in unpredictable, vivid flashes. She couldn’t even pinpoint whom they belonged to, and could rarely hear more than a snippet before her mind skipped away to eavesdrop on someone new. She felt perversely glad to be in mourning: no one would expect her to behave completely normally at a time like this. Her confusion, distraction, and startled responses to unsaid words didn’t seem too terribly out of place, even if they felt cringe-inducingly noticeable to her.
“You poor dear.” Madame Sandineau grasped her fingers, and Jane nearly gasped aloud at the influx of unwanted information that flashed in her mind: namely, that the sinewy fromagière hadn’t showered since Tuesday in order to conserve hot water. Jane felt a rush of vertigo as she watched herself through Madame Sandineau’s thoughts.
She carefully disengaged herself from the woman’s strong grip. That grasp confirmed Jane’s suspicion that her powers were amplified when she touched people. She couldn’t see a way to get out of that completely, what with the receiving line. She sighed. Her feet hurt, and the cheap dress was making her legs itch. I’m supposed to be able to move things without touching them, she thought glumly, longing to scratch them red. That would be a little more useful right now than the stupid mind-chatter.
“Are you doing okay?” Malcolm whispered in her ear. “Do you need to take a break?”
Jane shook her head, grateful for his comforting presence by her side. “It’ll be over soon enough.” Malcolm had been unbelievably attentive since their horrible discovery in the little old farmhouse, and if such a thing were possible, she’d grown to love and need him even more in the last eight days. Each morning he’d brought her breakfast and held her when she cried, and each night he’d stroked her hair until she fell asleep. He’d hired a team of movers to ship all her belongings to his parents’ house in New York, where they’d be staying until they found their own apartment, and he’d insisted on paying for the entire funeral. She hadn’t had a thing to worry about except for her grief . . . and her stupid, willful, uncontrollable magic.
Malcolm’s attentiveness had made her even more resolved to hide her new secret from him, and so she had flushed Gran’s note down the toilet as soon as she was alone. She ached when she watched the familiar handwriting disappear, but she already knew the contents by heart—and besides, Gran herself had warned Jane to hide the truth. Destroying the physical evidence was an unavoidable first step.
Unfortunately, the flickering lights and finicky heater in the squat little church strongly suggested that Jane wasn’t hiding nearly as well as Gran would have liked.
Suddenly, goose bumps rose on her arms and she got the chilling feeling of being watched. Looking up, she saw an old man with papery skin and wiry eyebrows in the back of the church. He was glaring at her, and she realized with a start that he was the strange man who was at the flower shop the morning they arrived in the village. She stiffened.
Malcolm lightly touched her back, but Jane couldn’t look away from the old man’s dark, unwavering eyes. A stab of rage pierced her mind, and a violent jumble of images that she couldn’t quite make out—a letter-opener maybe? a barking dog?—flooded her mind. She winced, and felt Malcolm squeeze her hand in concern. The magic subsided as quickly as it had come, and when she regained her bearings, she saw that the old man had left.
It doesn’t matter, she told herself firmly. He doesn’t matter. Soon she and Malcolm would be thousands of miles away. She didn’t have to worry about deciphering the secret feelings of some stranger from her hometown; she had to worry about protecting her fiancé from finding out that he was in love with a mind-reading freak.
“Please talk to me if there were a thing I can do. I loved your grandmother greatly,” the local constable said, resting his hand on Jane’s shoulder. He’d known her since she was a baby, and had always insisted on practicing his English with her—even, apparently, at her grandmother’s funeral. Jane fought the urge to snort, but it was quickly overshadowed when another voice, male this time, filled her head.
. . . killed that nice old woman herself for the inheritance. Those city girls are all the same—wouldn’t lift a finger for . . .
Jane winced and snatched her shoulder from the tight grip of the beefy, iron-haired constable. Suddenly she couldn’t stand being in Saint-Croix for another moment, couldn’t stand to hear another thought about what a horrid person she was or about her grandmother’s gossip-worthy reclusiveness. Most of all, she couldn’t stand to be so near the place that had filled her with this loathsome power.
She tugged Malcolm’s impeccable black cashmere sleeve. “We have to leave,” she told him. “Now.”
She wanted out of the village, out of Alsace, and out of France entirely. She was done being Jane Boyle, mysterious, ungrateful American orphan; that chapter of her life couldn’t be over soon enough.
Malcolm nodded, considerate as always, and she felt a tiny pang. Even though he would never know that she was deceiving him, she would work as hard as she possibly could to make it up to him. “I’ll take care of it. Meet me at the car.”
She turned and began to push through the crowd, muttering “Excuse me” in defiant English, and ignoring the shocked—and angry—looks from the congregation.
She emerged outside into the gray daylight, a little breathless. The old man from the flower shop was waiting across the narrow cobblestone street, and he didn’t look any less furious than he had before. A matching fury began to stir in her. How dare he? How dare he insult her grief and intrude on her mourning? Couldn’t he spare an hour or two to respect the dead rather than glare at the bereaved? Jane was seized with a sudden impulse to cross the street and make him explain himself. Just as she was about to step off of the curb, Malcolm came up behind her and looped his arm through hers. “This way,” he reminded her, kissing the top of her head, and the hard knot of her anger began to melt away.
She walked
arm-in-arm with him to the car, leaving the angry old man—and everyone else in Alsace—behind her for good.
Chapter Eight
Eighteen hours later, Jane was a continent away from the funeral, Saint-Croix-sur-Amaury, and her past, and staring straight at her future. From the view in the airplane, the New York City nightscape had been all glass skyscrapers and neon lights. But now, on the Upper East Side and firmly on the ground, the city looked like something else entirely.
A sharp January breeze played around her ankles, and Park Avenue was deserted as far as the eye could see. Jane clutched her canvas bag closer to her chest. Wasn’t this supposed to be the city that never slept?
Malcolm thanked Yuri, the family driver, and the silent hulk of a man nodded curtly before pulling away from the curb, leaving them alone. Jane studied the heavy stone archway of the Dorans’ house. It struck her that, squatting gloomily between 664 and 668, the building shouldn’t really have been numbered 665 at all. She had never been superstitious, but she felt a sudden rush of gratitude for whomever had decided that the carved stone façade was just too forbidding to tack on a sinister number; it would have been creepiness overkill.
The greenish-gray building easily rose eight stories from the street, but there was nothing graceful or sleek about its height. Instead, it seemed to almost be looming over the sidewalk, even though her inner architect, which tended to see things in blueprint form, insisted that it was vertical. The windows, although moderately sized, were set deep back into the thick stone. She wondered how much daylight could penetrate the fortress. House, she corrected herself sternly. Home. But it didn’t look especially like either.
Malcolm typed a short code into a discreet keypad to the right of the entryway, and a massive wooden door swung open on silent hinges. Of course, despite the house’s archaic appearance, it would have an electronic key system. Perfect. Jane hadn’t had an uncontrolled surge of magic since she’d left Alsace—she’d drugged herself into oblivion on the plane so as to keep it in the sky where it belonged—but it was just a matter of time.
They stepped through the enormous arched entryway into the foyer.
“Mr. Doran,” wheezed a tiny, white-haired man in a black uniform with gold trim. His eyes looked bleary with sleep, and Jane guessed that her own probably looked about the same. “Welcome home.”
“Thanks, Gunther,” Malcolm replied. “This is Jane, my fiancée.” Gunther nodded deferentially before retreating silently into the shadows behind them. The lobby was ostentatiously large; Malcolm’s extended family could clearly afford to waste as much prime Manhattan square footage as they liked. The marble floor gleamed and the gilded moldings along the ceiling had been expertly restored—assuming they had ever even fallen into disrepair. It was clear the Dorans were not interested in understatement.
Jane stifled a yawn as she stepped into the mahogany-paneled elevator. According to her silver-and-turquoise watch—a gift from Gran on her twenty-first birthday—it was eleven p.m., which would make it five in the morning to her jet-lagged body.
“Are you sure your family is still up?”
Malcolm had seemed sure that his family would be wide-awake and waiting for them, but she was really beginning to hope he was mistaken. She was anticipating a chilly reception at best: the farm-country orphan, to whom New York’s most eligible bachelor had proposed after one short month, was bound to come under scrutiny. She was fully prepared to win them over, but it would be easier after a full night’s sleep had cleared the jet lag and the drugs from her system.
He tapped another code into the elevator keypad and closed the gold metal gate behind them. The button for the sixth floor lit up immediately. “Don’t worry, they’ll love you,” Malcolm reassured her, as if reading her mind. She smiled wryly at the thought of them having his-and-hers superpowers. We could fight crime.
The elevator smoothly rose, an arrow clicking off floors two and three. Malcolm’s Upper East Side manse, he had explained during their layover in Paris, had been in the family since the end of the nineteenth century. Over the years, it had been divided and subdivided, and it currently housed three branches of Malcolm’s family. The Dorans occupied floors six through eight, while Mrs. Doran’s cousins and their adult children lived on the floors below.
“Do a lot of families live together like this in New York?” Jane had always heard that Americans moved out of their homes the moment they could. She had imagined that she would fit right in here, but perhaps rushing off to live on one’s own wasn’t such a chic thing to do when it came to UES brownstones.
Malcolm shrugged. “We’re a tight-knit bunch. We just renovate when we need to change the divisions.” He grinned. “Plenty of work for an architect with the right connections, now that I think about it.”
Jane smiled. Sure—think they’d let me tear it down and start over?
The elevator bumped to a gentle stop on floor six, and the doors hissed open.
“Jane! I’m so glad to meet you!”
Jane nearly jumped out of her skin. Waiting on the other side was the tallest woman she had ever seen. Jane knew that Mrs. Doran had to be at least sixty, but she could have passed for forty. Glossy, gray-streaked brown hair fell softly to her shoulders. Her crisp charcoal-gray cashmere sweater made her eyes look positively smoky and showed off her trim figure.
She pulled a dazed Jane into a hug, then shot a sharp look at her son. “It’s about time you brought her home.” She clapped brightly. “Now come say hi to everyone. We’ve been dying for you to get here.”
Mrs. Doran spun on one high-heeled boot and made her way down a low-lit hallway covered with a plush Oriental runner. Jane was too shocked by the woman’s warmth to do anything but follow. “Random Nobody Snags Heir to Billions; Matriarch Is Glad”? They turned a corner, and Mrs. Doran threw open two heavy doors to the parlor, revealing a sea of eager faces. “Guess who’s finally here!”
Three, six, eight, eleven . . . Jane’s head spun as she tried to count the grinning faces and raised glasses; there were just too many to take in at once.
“So nice to meet you, dear,” a woman Mrs. Doran’s age cooed. Her silver hair was pulled back in a pinched bun and she was dressed in a powder-blue boatneck dress. Like Mrs. Doran’s, her eyes were dark as pewter. “I’m Cora McCarroll and this is my sister, Belinda Helding.” She gestured to a woman completely identical to her, dressed in severe black. Belinda’s eyes flicked dismissively over Jane, decidedly less interested than her sister’s.
“Nice to meet you,” Jane nodded. Malcolm had mentioned that Mrs. Doran’s cousins were twins—both widowed—but she hadn’t been prepared for them to be so thoroughly indistinguishable.
In her fuzzily jet-lagged state, the whole family, in fact, was beginning to blur together. Cora and Belinda seemed to have about a dozen sons apiece, some with families of their own, and only a few people made any impression on her tired mind at all. (“Will you friend me on Facebook?” pleaded awkward young Ian McCarroll, and Jane hoped that her indulgent laughter was all the discouragement he would need.) Malcolm’s father was a stately old gentleman with steel-colored hair and a vaguely distant air, who all but blended in with his armchair; Jane got the impression that his main role in family events was to nod along while sipping his scotch.
An investment banker she eventually placed as Blake Helding sidled up and grasped her hand lecherously. “If I’d known they built ’em that way in France I’d have traveled more,” he slurred, earning himself a cold glare from wife Laura-with-the-implausible-Bergdorf-highlights.
“Oh,” Jane replied awkwardly, hoping he didn’t spend much time in the Dorans’ apartment. She wanted Malcolm’s family to like her, but there were limits. “Ha. Um, if you’ll excuse me a minute, I just have to . . .”
Hardly seeming to hear her words, Blake dropped her hand and drifted over to the bar to refill his whiskey on the rocks. Malcolm was now chatting with his mom, and everyone seemed engrossed in their own conversations. Jane used
the brief break in introductions to take a long look around the parlor. The room was pentagonal and high-ceilinged. Four of the walls were covered with ivory paper so thick and textured she suspected that it was actually fabric. The fifth, though, was a massive sheet of unpolished white marble, covered in carvings too small to make out from across the room. She approached it and realized that the etchings were names, connected by a complicated web of lines.
A family tree, she guessed, and checked the lowest branches for familiar names. She found Mrs. Doran almost immediately in the dead center of her generation’s row, and impulsively reached out to touch with her fingers the line that led to Malcolm’s name. Just before it reached him, though, it branched. She frowned. Malcolm had called himself an only child, but Jane’s fingers traced across the record of a sister. Annette, she read silently. She had been born six years after Malcolm, and next to that date was another one, six years later. She had died when Malcolm was only twelve. Her heart ached at his loss, and then a little pinprick of hurt vibrated through her. Why had he never mentioned something so important? But you’re keeping secrets from him too, a little voice in the back of her head pointed out. And Jane realized that she couldn’t imagine how much it must have pained him to lose his little sister. Swallowing some of the dwindling champagne in her glass, she decided to not mention her discovery until Malcolm was ready to tell her about Annette on his own.
She was about to step away when an unusually smooth, rectangular patch to the right of Annette’s name caught her eye. It was too polished to be a natural flaw, and it was the only one on the entire wall. Had it been a mistake?
“We take a great deal of pride in our heritage and tradition.” Lynne Doran appeared suddenly at her shoulder, and Jane jerked her hand away from the wall.
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