Authors: Gabriella Pierce
“W
here are you?
” J
ane hissed into her phone as the
EMT
s
loaded Maeve into the ambulance.
“Across from the Plaza, in the park,” Malcolm replied. He sounded hollow, almost tinny, and defeated.
“Don’t go anywhere,” Jane ordered. Then she turned to Harris and squeezed his hand as he climbed into the ambulance. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she promised him before striding off into the darkness. His face looked so closed that for a moment Jane was sure he was going to tell her to stay away. No doubt he had connected the same dots Jane had and realized that his sister nearly died because of her friendship with Jane. But he just nodded and let the EMTs close the door behind him.
Jane quickly fetched her coat from upstairs, then, ducking out the fire stairway, made her way to the park. She longed to be in the ambulance with the Montagues, holding Maeve’s hand and whispering that everything would be all right. But first she needed to hear the truth, out loud, from the one person who had owed it to her from the beginning.
Malcolm was waiting by the entrance to Central Park, the streetlamp beside him washing him out to a ghostly pallor. At the sight of him, she felt the now-familiar electric thrum of magic building in her blood. He started to speak when he saw Jane approaching, but she held up a hand to stop him. “Tell me,” she demanded, her voice as hard as steel. She felt the magic curling through her words, and when he drew in a sharp breath, she knew that Malcolm could feel it, too. “I want to know everything.”
He hesitated for the briefest of moments. “Not here,” he said, scanning the street around them. He turned and led her wordlessly along an asphalt path until there was nothing around them but trees and a lonely-looking bench. He signaled for her to sit.
“My mother is a witch,” he said simply, and Jane felt, more than saw, the lamp closest to them blow out in a brilliant shower of sparks.
“Understatement,” she growled. The corners of Malcolm’s full mouth twitched up into the shadow of a smile.
He turned serious again as he studied her face in the semidarkness. “You’re not surprised,” he concluded, and reached for her left hand. His fingers were warm as he traced hers, moving around but not quite touching Celine Boyle’s softly glowing silver legacy.
“No. I’m not.” Her voice was flat and cold. The pieces of the puzzle were falling into place too quickly now, and too neatly. Lynne was a witch. Malcolm knew that Jane was a witch—had immediately recognized the plain silver band on her finger for what it was. She remembered how he had lifted her hand at the farmhouse after her grandmother died. He must have known, but he hadn’t said a thing. Why would he hide his own family history once he saw hers out in the open? Why go to such lengths to keep his identity a secret, once he knew that it was something they could have shared? Unless . . . She lifted her face up toward his with enormous effort. “How long have you known what I can do?”
Two squirrels rustled in the bushes next to them and the barren branches of the oak tree overhead waved in the slight breeze. Malcolm sighed, as quick to read her tone as he always had been. “Her magic—your magic—is genetic. It passes through the female line and pretty much skips the men. So if you have a daughter, she’ll be born with magic, and born able to inherit more.” His dark eyes bored into hers. “But that wouldn’t be true for my own daughter. Unless . . .” He shifted uncomfortably, apparently unsure of how to go on.
Jane thought of Rosalie Goddard, then pictured the Dorans’ family tree branching through centuries of women—of witches—before coming to an inglorious end with Malcolm, his male cousins, and poor six-year-old Annette. No wonder Lynne had been so desperate to replace her dead little girl, racing her own biological clock to keep her family legacy going.
She’d have done anything . . .
Jane was abruptly sure that whatever had gone wrong in Charles’s brain, it had nothing to do with “experimental medication” and everything to do with misguided magic. She struggled to bring her mind back to what Malcolm was trying to tell her.
His children wouldn’t be magical . . . but mine would.
“Unless you had a baby with me,” she finished for him. Her tongue felt thick and heavy in her mouth.
He shrugged evasively, dropping his eyes. “Sometimes the spark can come back after a generation or two, if just the right people match up. Someone like Maeve—”
“Maeve?” Jane asked harshly. She shuddered involuntarily, remembering Harris’s shuttered face as he climbed into the ambulance with his sister. Malcolm, misunderstanding her movement, tore off his cashmere overcoat and wrapped it around her shoulders—playing the perfect gentleman, even now. She decided not to protest: she felt cold and empty from the inside out. Now, in some small measure, Malcolm would, too.
“Her father is like me,” he explained, and she realized he had no idea that Maeve was currently fighting for her life in an emergency room somewhere uptown. He had missed everything that had followed his strange scene with Lynne. “His mother was a witch, but he isn’t and his wife isn’t, so his kids aren’t. Just like my kids wouldn’t be, if I had married—” He bit his lip.
Anyone else,
Jane’s mind supplied numbly.
If you had married anyone but a witch.
“The blood’s still there in all of them, though,” Malcolm went on smoothly, “so you never know for sure.” He blew on his hands. “It might have worked. But—”
“But Lynne didn’t want to take that chance,” Jane finished dully. Lynne wouldn’t leave a thing this important to luck; she wouldn’t settle for a “maybe” from her firstborn son. After all, Lynne had a position to maintain. Jane’s heart began to pound, and electricity crackled to life in her veins. Another lamp flickered and burst.
Her throat was so tight she could barely force out the next question. “Why were you at that auction house in Paris?”
Malcolm dropped his face into his hands. “Because my mom knew you were going to be there.” Emotion muffled his voice. “Madame Godinaux is a family friend.”
Jane rubbed her temples. She could barely hold her hand up—the silver ring felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. So it had all been planned—right down to her first solo client. She remembered how she and Elodie had sat on her miniscule terrace the night Madame Godinaux called to hire her. They had toasted Jane’s career with champagne, Notre Dame looming in the distance.
“Why me, Malcolm? There have to be other witches.”
Witches who don’t require an elaborate farce of a seduction.
He sighed again, looking suddenly thinner in the moonlight as his secrets poured out of him.
“Mom was pretty sure you didn’t know. It would’ve been harder with someone who did; it might have even been a fight. Magic can be passed on, but it can also be stolen, so families that have it usually don’t get along.” He grimaced. “That’s another understatement, actually: they spend most of their time in hiding or at war with each other. But Celine was so careful, so secretive, that Mom figured we could just bring you into the family without you knowing about all that.”
Easy as that.
She thought bleakly about Lynne’s inappropriate interest in her sex life—of course it would be better for the Dorans if she had a daughter as soon as humanly possible.
And then they’d make sure I “accidentally” walked off a cliff or something before I figured out what was going on.
“And I think there was more,” Malcolm admitted. “She said something once about your family . . . there were a lot of names I didn’t know, but I think that she was saying that they’re strong. I think that they had a lot more magic left than most families do these days—maybe even more than ours. Two families have died out completely; an unbroken line of witches like you come from, I guess, is incredibly rare.”
“So I was a great choice, a real purebred,” Jane spit out bitterly. Then a thought occurred to her. “What if I didn’t like you?” Her eyes narrowed. Was there such a thing as a love spell? Had Lynne done something to ensure their chemistry? Her skin crawled just thinking about it, and she scooted to the other end of the bench.
“Magic calls to magic,” he explained in what he clearly thought was a reassuring tone. “I may not be able to use it, but half of my blood carries power, and she said it would appeal to you. But blood’s not everything; it’s just an attraction, just chemistry.” He turned to face her squarely, his eyes imploring. “What we have is real, Jane. You can’t fake true love.”
She felt her mouth set into a harsh line.
“Mom calls it a kind of natural selection,” he went on, floundering a little in the face of her icy glare. “The daughters of two magical parents are more powerful than the daughters of just one. Some families tried to take advantage by throwing cousins together—first cousins, even—to try to breed stronger witches, and then there were a few Romeo-and-Juliet-type stories, and then . . .”
“And then there’s us,” Jane whispered, feeling a chill that had nothing to do with the mist that hung in the trees. “And there’s you just letting this happen—
making
it happen! So I could be some kind of brood mare for your psycho mother. Do you have
any
idea how sick you all are?” Her voice echoed along the empty pathways.
He reached toward her, but she jerked away as if his hand might burn her. “
Don’t
touch me. I think you’ve done more than enough of that already.”
“Jane, I didn’t—”
“Let me guess: you were tricked. Lied to? Manipulated? Magically
compelled
? Good,” she hissed, shaking his coat to the ground and wrenching the engagement ring off her finger. “Now you know how
I
feel.” She threw the ring at him, hoping that the diamond was big enough to leave a mark on his perfect face, and ran blindly down the path.
“Jane!” Malcolm called.
A series of hisses and pops sounded behind her, plunging the park into darkness, but Jane just kept running.
J
ane walked all the way to
L
enox
H
ill
H
ospital on 77th,
focusing intently on the steady rhythm of her heels to keep herself grounded. She kept rubbing at the empty place on her ring finger; only the beveled edge of her grandmother’s ring kept the feelings of loss and betrayal at bay.
She couldn’t afford to think about Malcolm. If she thought too much about the last two months, she was afraid that she would fall completely to pieces over her sham of a relationship. And there were far too many things to consider right now to let that happen.
Like the fact that Lynne was a witch—a very evil one. Unlike Jane, who messed up lights when she was upset, Lynne tried to kill girls who pissed her off. The power disparity was too glaring to ignore. Lynne had probably passed the flickering-lightbulb stage before she’d hit puberty. Whereas Jane had only been aware of her power for a month, and she’d spent the bulk of that time trying to ignore it in the hope that it would go away.
She laughed wryly to herself. She’d played at being normal, hiding her magic away, worrying that it would cost her her new family. And it turned out that her magic was the only thing that had won her that family in the first place. Her fairy-tale romance with a modern-day prince had been just that: a fiction. She’d been nothing more than a puppet, with the wicked witch of the Upper East Side pulling all the strings.
“Magic can be passed on, but it can also be stolen,”
Malcolm had told her. Gran had willingly bequeathed her magic to Jane almost six years before she died, and Jane suspected that the “stealing” option was usually a little more fatal, probably involving that “last breath” Rosalie Goddard had mentioned. And, if the overwhelming and uncontrollable rush of magic in the days that had followed Jane’s acceptance of the ring was any indication, then she had an awful lot of power to steal. She was a walking target for power-hungry witches, and until tonight she had foolishly assumed that no one would notice.
She could never go back to the mansion, obviously, but she didn’t know whom to turn to, whom to trust. Gran hadn’t left any clues about that.
Jane reached the hospital at last and stepped into the brightly lit waiting room of the ER. Her eyes locked on Harris immediately, his lean face drawn and pale. He looked as though he was sorely tempted to hit her. “Get out,” he growled.
Jane stepped forward and placed a tentative hand on his crisp white sleeve. When he tried to shrug her off, she could tell by the set of his shoulders that he was close to crying.
“I only found out tonight,” Jane whispered, feeling him go rigid at the words. “I know what she did, and I’m done. With all of them.”
Harris’s eyes went wide and round, as his sister’s always did, and he started to step around Jane. She followed his gaze over her shoulder, noticing an older man wearing surgical scrubs waving him over.
“Mr. Montague,” the doctor said in a reedy voice. “Your sister’s going to be just fine. We have her resting in the ICU for now, but her vitals are steady, and there’s no reason she can’t be moved out of intensive care in a couple of days.”
Jane’s breath rushed out of her all at once, and there was no time to recover it before Harris pulled her close and crushed her against his ribs in a wild bear-hug.
“You’ll be able to see her in a few hours, but I should warn you that her injuries are extensive. I’m sure you’re excited, but try to keep things calm and let her rest,” the doctor finished.
“We promise,” Harris said solemnly into Jane’s hair. “Thank you.”
“She’s okay,” Jane breathed in disbelief, trying to get the information through to her brain.
“Thank
God
,” Harris said, letting her go and sitting heavily in one of the sturdy waiting-room chairs. Jane followed suit in the seat beside him. They sat silently while the clock overhead clicked away a few hundred seconds.
“You must be freezing,” Harris declared after a while, and Jane jumped a little. She glanced down at her strappy heels, her toes an icy blue beneath her pedicure. Had tonight really started with a party?
“I’m okay.” It was true: she was far too wrapped up in her thoughts to feel any physical discomfort.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” He pulled her to her feet. “You need to warm up.
We
need coffee. And privacy. Now.”
Oh, right. I may have admitted to knowing that magic was real, a few minutes back.
Jane trailed obediently after Harris down the antiseptic hallways. It was her first time in an American hospital, and it was much more sterile and anonymous than the cramped clinic Gran had taken Jane to when she had broken her arm climbing a tree in their backyard.
After a few twists and turns down seemingly identical corridors, Harris led Jane into the cafeteria. The room smelled of instant mashed potatoes and burned gravy. The fluorescent lighting was dimmed to a flat gray, and the only other person in the room was the chubby man behind the cash register, who rang up their tepid coffees.
Harris located a private nook in the cafeteria and kept his voice carefully low as he explained everything that Malcolm just had. “It’s a whole network here, a clique really.” He traced a crack in the plywood table with his thumbnail. “We all attended the same schools, went to the same parties. We know everything about the other families—and sometimes even intermarry to keep our powers viable—but we never, ever trust one another.”
Jane nodded numbly and took a sip of the coffee. It tasted like sludge.
“The number of eligible witchy bachelorettes had sharply declined in the last couple of generations,” Harris went on, “so these awkward alliances have become even more desperately important. Even though Maeve and I are a full generation removed from any kind of magic, Maeve has received six marriage proposals from concerned aunts and grandmothers trying to reignite their line’s magic.”
“How long have you known all this?” Jane asked, thinking about Gran’s letter. She had dedicated her entire life to keeping Jane hidden, and here was a whole society of witches flourishing in New York. After tonight, though, Jane realized that her grandmother probably had the right idea after all.
“Mother explained all this when I was ten,” Harris murmured, casting an eye to the cash register. It looked like the old man had fallen asleep. Sure enough, a light snore carried across the otherwise empty room. “She wanted me to understand why my girlfriends’ mothers would practically be throwing their daughters into my bed. We had to be so, so careful our whole lives; everything was a manipulation.”
“There’s so much I don’t know,” she told Harris, quickly sketching out her background. “I don’t know the full extent of my powers, and I can’t control the ones I do know about. I’m not even in the same hemisphere as Lynne.”
“I can’t do magic myself,” Harris said, running his hands over his coppery curls. “Maeve never even wanted to learn. She thinks the whole idea is lame. But our grandmother could, and she used to tell me about it. I might know something useful—I might be able to help.” He cast his eyes down, looking suddenly shy. “If you want.”
Jane blushed: she wanted. She thought about what Malcolm had told her, how magic called to magic. That definitely explained the pull she felt when she was around Harris, the latent sparks.
Damn
it.
Was she ever going to get to just choose someone without supernatural help?
Malcolm.
She shuddered. Harris’s openness, his clear and honest green eyes, made Malcolm’s ability to deceive her even more frightening. How could someone be so two-faced? How could he have lied to her over and over? And it wasn’t just with his words, but with gestures, smiles, touches . . .
And Malcolm’s deception had led to the horrible events of the night, to Maeve lying broken in a hospital bed somewhere above them, fighting for her life.
“Thank you, but no.”
“Look.” He leaned across the table and grabbed her wrists. “I know what you’re thinking. But you can’t do this alone.”
Tears filled Jane’s eyes. “Maeve is here because of me.”
Harris shook his head stubbornly. “No, she’s here because of Lynne. She’s always had it in for us. You were just an excuse, but she’d throw either one of us under a bus just for sport if she thought it wouldn’t make headlines.”
“Is that supposed to make me worry less?” The corner of her mouth curled up in a bitter half-smile. After a moment, his quirked up in a matching one.
“Seriously.” He leaned in closer, his eyes dancing just a little. “Did Mae ever tell you about the spring break when we ran into Malcolm and Blake in Rio?” He launched into an involved story about a nude beach, three underage models, and a taxi driver who smuggled parakeets on the side.
After a few moments, she relaxed under his grip.
“Jane,” he murmured in a softer tone, stroking her palms with his thumbs. “I’m just saying that there’s history,” he went on gently. “You just walked into this, but we’ve been sparring for generations. My cousin Mary set Blake up to get thrown out of prep school for cheating. Lynne’s aunt—the twins’ mother—tried to poison my grandfather when he was ten years old. We live with danger and distrust all the time; we’re used to it. Mae assumed you were playing her when you first met, but she decided to go along and see where it led. She knew she was getting into something dangerous. It may not have been for the reason she thought, but she knew what could happen.”
Jane bit her lip, hard. The metallic taste of blood seeped onto her tongue.
“I can help you. And trust me, you need help,” he finished earnestly. He stood up, slid around to Jane’s side of the table, and put his arm around her. She rested her head on his shoulder, utterly exhausted.
She had to admit that Harris was making sense. Going it alone would be stoic, to be sure. But was it realistic?
“Stay,” Harris whispered into her ear, sending shivers down her spine.
Magic calls to magic,
she thought grimly. She sat up straight and shrugged off his arm.
“I can’t stay here, it’s not safe for anyone,” she said resolutely. “But I will be in touch.” She rested her hand on Harris’s for the briefest of moments, then stood. Harris looked baffled, and concerned, as she made her way out of the cafeteria. But no matter how appealing Harris’s offer of help was, Jane had brought enough trouble to the Montagues already. She would have to go into hiding and build a brand-new life from the ground up. She would have to start immediately . . . and alone.