“Anyway . . .” Jane prompted. “What did you bring?”
Dee kicked open her backpack and turned it upside down.
“You lugged all that from Brooklyn?” Harris asked in an impressed tone. Dee smiled modestly. Neither of her friends had been thrilled about the idea of bringing the other into Jane’s quest to learn magic, but it seemed they were quickly warming up to each other.
Jane rolled her eyes and rifled through the pile. There were a few dusty, cloth-covered books, an assortment of crystals in muted amber and rose, a vial of lime-green powder, a bronze pendant, and a silver knife so slim it had to be a letter-opener. “I guess we could all just take a book and start reading,” she suggested.
“Don’t be a wuss,” Dee complained. “I’ve been waiting twenty years to meet an actual witch. Now that I’ve got one—well, one-and-a-half,” she amended with an apologetic nod to Harris, “I want to play!”
Jane frowned. They had tried to access her magic for over an hour after the botched Wicca meeting earlier that week, but without success. Jane knew she needed to learn about her magic and she was willing to try, but there was such a thing as too much pressure. Dee seemed to read her look because she playfully poked Harris in the side. He jumped. “We have three people now,” Dee reminded Jane pointedly. “That’s a magic number, a Circle. Like the seven of us back at my place, before you sent them all running for the hills, at least. And one of us is even packing a little extra power this time.”
One of them was back at your place, too, Jane thought, remembering Brooke’s wide-eyed stare when she had realized that Jane’s mind was touching hers. But Jane had kept that theory private, even from Dee. No one deserved to be outed as a witch if they didn’t choose to be.
Jane obediently helped Dee to arrange the letter opener—“the athame,” Dee corrected piously—and a couple of the crystals on the table between them. Dee scattered some of the green powder around it, giving a husky laugh when Harris sneezed.
“Is it okay that we’re doing this here?” Jane asked uncertainly.
“I’m friends with the owner,” Dee replied. “She doesn’t care if I make a mess, as long as I come armed with baked goods.”
Jane sat sharply upright. “You have cookies? Here?”
“They will be your reward, if you cooperate.” Dee looked so smug she was practically purring. “Everybody hold hands,” she ordered serenely. “Jane’s about to knock over that blue crystal in the middle.”
Jane glowered at the blackmail, but she obediently reached out her hands. Dee’s was warm and calloused, Harris’s cool and smooth. She ignored the little spark that skittered down her spine when he pressed his palm to hers. She closed her eyes and tried to quiet her mind. The shop smelled like green tea and patchouli, and a dog was yapping its little head off a few floors above them.
“Every inch of your body holds magic.” Dee’s husky voice was hypnotic. “Begin at your feet, and look for it.”
Maybe when all this is over and I’m tucked away on some private island, I’ll get a dog, Jane thought to the pink darkness behind her eyelids. Maybe a boxer or one of those wiener-looking ones. A dachshund?
“Focus. Feel the power in your feet.”
A spark shot through her left ankle. Soft as cat whiskers, it twanged and purred and tickled her Achilles tendon. Or maybe a Doberman or a rottweiler, in case Lynne ever comes looking for me. Do they make Doberweilers?
“Focus, Jane. Keep your mind on your power.”
Jane sighed, but concentrated on emptying her mind. She tried to put her thoughts on a cloud and let them float away.
“Good. Now, gather it up and let it flow to your knees and spine,” Dee intoned.
Jane’s spinal column shivered with electricity.
“Okay, now lift it gently and concentrate every scrap of power behind your eyes.”
Suddenly the warmth spreading through her body took flight and nestled behind Jane’s eyelids, which vibrated as if her skin had been hit with thousands of tiny shocks.
“Ow!” Jane’s eyes flew open. “That hurt!”
Dee grinned. “Small price to pay for having ‘the power.’ ”
Jane scooped up a book and threatened to throw it at her.
“Hold hands!” Dee reminded her insistently, and Jane was pretty sure that Harris was trying not to laugh. Another jolt ran through her stomach, but this one had nothing to do with magic. Were Dee and Harris . . . flirting?
Dee pushed a strand of dark hair behind her ear. “I want you to gather your power again and focus every prickle of magic on moving the crystal off the pile.”
Jane nodded and fixed the blue stone with a ferocious stare. Her eyes narrowed and she refused to blink, even though the dusty air was making her eyes water.
Nothing happened.
She sighed and slumped forward. Bet Lynne could do it on the first try.
Harris squeezed her hand reassuringly. “You can do it.”
“Copper Top is right. I know you have it in you.” Dee centered the crystal once more.
“Thanks, Elvira,” Harris answered sardonically.
Irritated, Jane stiffened her spine back upright. Focusing intently, she gathered the magic again, clenching her jaw grimly as she fought to hold on to the electricity. It instantly slipped through her fingers. She blew through her lips and stared balefully at Dee. “Okay, I suck at this.”
“You don’t suck at this,” Harris supplied helpfully, stretching his long legs out to the side of his undersized chair. “You just suck at focusing.”
Jane stuck her tongue out at him.
“Try again,” he urged gently, and she felt herself begin to glow under his sparkling green eyes. Stop that, she told herself firmly, but her self didn’t seem to be listening.
“You’ve mentioned that things around you tend to break when you’re upset. Tap into that feeling, if you can,” Dee suggested. “What makes you mad?”
Lynne.
Jane’s fists automatically clenched and her lips curved into a frown. Crossing her legs, Jane took a deep breath and thought about everything she hated about her soon-to-be mother-in-law. Lynne picking that stupid pouf dress. Lynne cutting those annoying egg-white rectangles. Lynne making her son seduce me. Lynne running Maeve down.
Suddenly, all Jane could hear was the pounding of her heart, and all she could see was her targeted crystal. It was blue, but one corner was filmier than the others, so milky as to be almost white. There was a flaw running most of the way through the middle, and a few smaller ones at the poles. Electricity crackled in Jane’s ears and she sent sparking mental feelers out toward the crystal to study it further, to bring it closer to her eyes.
The crystal shuddered.
Then it began to swim and waver, and it seemed as though sparks were inside the crystal and it was glowing as if it were on fire. Then dark spots filled Jane’s eyes. She fell limply out of her chair, her head striking the thin industrial carpet.
When she came to, Harris and Dee were leaning over her, grinning from ear to ear.
“I fainted?” she asked, but her leaden tongue turned it into something more like “Ah fayagh?” She grimaced.
“Not before you moved the thing,” Harris told her proudly, fanning her with one of Dee’s paperbacks.
She glanced at Dee for confirmation. Dee, her mouth so wide it looked as though her smile would split her face, stuffed a cookie into Jane’s mouth, which Jane took as a yes.
In the midst of their gloating, Jane caught sight of the book that Harris was using to fan her face. She tried to grab it out of the air, but her reflexes sucked, and instead she wound up brushing her hand lightly across Harris’s smooth chest. He didn’t seem to mind, and a small part of her liked that fact. Down, girl. She refocused her attention on the title waving back and forth in front of her face: A True History of Witches and Magick, by Rosalie Goddard.
“This,” she whispered, tapping the book lightly with two fingers. She was happy that her mouth seemed to be
a little more obedient now, but there was no need to push her luck with unnecessary words. “We start here.”
Dee snapped into action as crisply as a soldier, all traces of laughter and cookie bribes vanishing instantly. She slid the book into Jane’s bulky purse, leaving Harris clutching empty air in confusion. “Love that one,” she chirped. “Misty—that’s the owner—has Goddard’s diaries in the back, so I’ll take those. And Harris, you need to start talking to your family, any time you don’t need to be with your sister. Jane, get me a list of Goddard’s sources to cross-check as soon as you can, but in the meantime your main responsibility is to practice your little blond head off. Okay. Everybody know their jobs?”
The three of them glanced around at each other, their eyes grave and their jaws set determinedly. If this was a war, they had just become an army.
Chapter Thirty-two
Five days later, Jane rode the uptown 6 near the MoMA to Lenox Hill, clinging to the metal pole for dear life. The train was crowded with after-work commuters, and a teenager with a faux-hawk and a Ricky’s NYC bag was pressed awkwardly against her.
As part of her magical training, she’d worked diligently to read the mind of a grouchy-looking elderly woman in a white fur coat, and an African-American girl who looked to be about seven and kept touching her sparkly headband anxiously. Unfortunately, while Jane could guess at what they might be thinking, she couldn’t seem to focus enough to hear anything actually coming from them. But as the train hurtled out of the 68th Street station and jolted to a stop at 77th, Jane hurtled into the chest of the faux-hawk guy.
. . . hot. I wonder if she did that on purpose? Maybe she likes my hair? Oh man, I hope that guy at Ricky’s didn’t see me take the extra bottle of hair gel . . .
Jane practically skipped off the train and through the turnstile, pushing outside into a light, misting rain. The one moment of mind-reading had been exhausting, and she had a fine sheen of sweat on her forehead, but at least she hadn’t blacked out.
The Hot & Crusty on the corner smelled deliciously of bagels and French vanilla coffee, and Jane had to resist the urge to go inside and devour a pain au chocolat. Or three.
She crossed the street and entered the hospital. The antiseptic smell burned her nostrils and her euphoria vanished. She could only think of Maeve, lying battered on the cold pavement outside the MoMA. The longer she had gone without actually seeing her friend, the more battered her mental picture had gotten, until she was sure that she would find Maeve at death’s door with broken bones jutting through her skin at crazy angles. She won’t look worse than she looked right after she was hit, Jane told herself as firmly as she could, but her heart still sank all the way down to her toes.
She knocked on the door of room 1070, waited a beat, and then let herself in. Harris looked more haggard than he had in the bookstore, and she guessed immediately that he hadn’t been sleeping. Over the course of the last week, an increasingly droopy Harris had insisted that Maeve was “doing well,” and Jane kicked herself mentally for having believed him. Clearly, there had been complications, and, just as clearly, he had been bearing the stress of it all on his own.
Maeve stirred in the bed, traces of yellow puffiness still distinctly visible across her face. Her copper eyes were open, but they looked faded and muddy, missing their usual spark.
“Oh God,” Jane murmured, rushing to the bed.
“I know. I look like I tried to stop a cab with my face, right?” Maeve attempted a smile, and Jane fought the urge to burst into tears.
“She’s in and out,” Harris said softly from behind her. “She’s still on a lot of drugs.”
“I’ve missed you,” Jane whispered. She took Maeve’s limp hand, careful not to disrupt the IV tubes, and slid onto the stool beside the bed. She gave herself exactly one minute to despair over Maeve’s bruised body, then snapped into Cheery Friend mode. Adopting a conspiratorial tone, she said, “I think Archie’s about to lose it. There’s this gala thing the mayor puts on every year, and I guess Archie’s been trying to get it at the MoMA for, like, a decade, but the Met keeps making better offers. And now he finally got a ‘source’—seriously, he called it ‘a source on the inside’—that was supposed to break things our way, but now the Time Warner Center suddenly decided they want in, so he’s tearing out all the hair he’s got left.” She gave every gossipy detail she could think of, and was sure that by the time Maeve’s eyes closed and her breathing settled into a sleep-filled rhythm, the corners of her mouth had lifted in a faint smile.
Jane turned her face up to Harris, who was also sleeping lightly. He shook himself awake a moment later though, and grinned at Jane. “She spends about three hours a day awake, and she’s spent most of them asking about you,” he commented.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner,” Jane told him honestly.
Harris shrugged her apology off casually. “She wouldn’t have remembered until maybe yesterday. She needs a lot of rest.”
He yawned, and Jane raised a Doran-esque eyebrow. “So do you.”
“Hey, I’m not the one who needs energy right now, Ms. Witch Hunter,” Harris pointed out.
Outside the room, a cart clattered past, carrying trays of food, and an overhead intercom paged a Dr. Davis to floor nine. Jane frowned. She had kept a close eye on Lynne for the past week, doing her best to monitor the matriarch’s closed-door meetings with her cousins, her afternoon errands with Yuri, and the many hushed phone calls. It seemed the woman was more focused on the wedding than on killing anyone, but Lynne was also a master plotter capable of the deepest deceptions.
“Lynne hasn’t been here, right?” Jane asked anxiously.
“She hasn’t even tried,” Harris said.
A tableful of flowers stood in the corner, along with several get-well balloons and teddy bears. A thought struck Jane. “Have you told your parents the truth about what happened?”
“No. No good could come of waging a war with the Dorans.”
She saw his eyes momentarily flit to the ostentatious diamond on her left hand. She instinctively turned the stone so it faced her palm.
“So!” He rubbed his hands together and assumed a perky grin, signaling the end of that conversation. “Show me what you can do.”
“Harris,” Jane demurred, “I’m just here to see Maeve. This isn’t a . . . I didn’t come to practice.”
He stood and placed his hands on her shoulders. Heat emanated from his fingers, massaging her stiff muscles. She felt the first spark of her power igniting—along with something else. “I don’t care what you came here for. I want to see your progress.”
The air seemed to crackle around them, and Jane realized just how close Harris was standing. Now that she was alone with Harris, the magic now rising in her blood felt somehow wilder, more dangerous and unpredictable, than it had when they were with Dee in Book and Bell. She felt that same pull she always felt with Malcolm, that same need to erase the few inches that stood between them.
Magic calls to magic, she reminded herself.
“Call the power to you, Jane,” Harris said. “The more you practice, the more you control it, and the stronger you’ll get. Right now it’s radiating off you and dissipating into the air. But when you learn to focus it, you won’t believe what you’ll be able to do.”
After a thickly charged moment, Jane took his hands in hers. She felt the energy flow between them as though a circuit had been closed. “I hope I don’t crash any of Maeve’s machines,” she said, trying to force a light note into her voice to ease the mounting tension.
“You won’t.” Harris’s cool voice washed over her, and suddenly she believed him. His green eyes bored into hers. “I can feel it, you know. I can feel how strong you are.”
Jane felt it too. Under the steadying influence of Harris’s voice, the wild shock of her magic was settling into a steady thrum. It coiled through her body, twisting and turning, even passing momentarily from her hands to Harris’s. It snaked languidly down her lun
gs to her abdomen and then moved . . . lower. Jane felt her breath grow ragged and shallow. Harris’s pupils began to dilate and their chests heaved up and down, up and down, up and down, together.
The pressure built, heat rose, and she felt as though she were on fire. Harris touched his forehead to hers. Then his breath was on her lips and . . . oh God. It was too much. She needed to release the power in her body—somewhere, somehow—now.
Malcolm.
Malcolm is giving up everything for me, something in the back of her mind shouted faintly over the pulse of the magic. Not that he had any right to judge . . . not that he hadn’t lied to her . . . not that this would be a betrayal on anywhere near the same scale . . . not that he didn’t practically have it coming . . .
The lightbulb overhead burst and sparks showered around them.
Jane jerked her hands away from Harris.
Harris just stared at her, his eyes moving from her collarbone to her lips to her eyes. “I’ll let them know about the light on my way out,” Jane whispered. She kissed Maeve’s sleeping forehead, then hitched her purse up onto her shoulder. Harris stood frozen in place. Jane met his eyes for the briefest of moments, then stepped awkwardly around him, shutting the door to 1070 firmly behind her.
Chapter Thirty-three
Jane arrived back at the Dorans’ soaking from the cold rain that had begun as soon as she had stepped out of the hospital. Glancing at the clock as she passed through the (thankfully empty) kitchen, she grabbed a pear from the center island’s fruit bowl and took a large bite. Take that, Lynne, she thought cheerfully, still buzzed from the magic in her system. I’m not just snacking between meals—I’m snacking on carbs!
A furtive movement in the shadows of the hall caught her attention, and she froze mid-swallow. “Sofia?” she asked softly, but she knew that it wasn’t the timid maid. The figure that she was beginning to make out was tall, broad, and the slightest bit stooped. Charles.
He was watching her from the hallway, his dull, dark eyes riveted on her body. Willing him not to move, she circled slowly around the marble-covered island. He was out of her line of sight now, but here she had more access to weapons: there were about twenty copper pots and kettles within easy reach, and the massive butcher-block knife-holder was just a few steps away. She armed herself with one of each for good measure and began circling in the opposite direction toward the kitchen’s other entrance, the one closest to the nondescript wooden door that led to the stairs and the street. It was cold and wet outside, but surely that was better than being cornered by a lunatic.
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