Authors: Gabriella Pierce
F
ive days later,
J
ane rode the uptown 6 near the
M
o
MA
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 lungs 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.
J
ane arrived back at the
D
orans’ 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.
Her position by the door afforded a view of the hallway again. She lifted the kettle at the ready, then blinked. The corridor was empty. Charles was gone.
Before Jane could register what this might mean, a footstep sounded loud and clear . . . and right behind her. She let out a short shriek and spun around.
“Goodness, dear,” Cora McCarroll tsked. “Are you
cooking
something? Did you forget where the staff call button was?” She gestured vaguely toward the electronic panel in the wall and stared hard at Jane, sucking in her lower lip speculatively.
“I . . . I thought I saw Charles,” Jane admitted, and mentally kicked herself for her uncertain tone. She didn’t “think” anything. “He was in the hallway just now,” she declared a little more firmly.
Cora blinked her gray eyes and ran her fingers along her pink pearl necklace. “He certainly wasn’t. Poor thing just can’t stand being downstairs; he’s happiest where he is. Now. Perhaps you would join me for a soothing cup of tea?” She nodded pointedly at the kettle in Jane’s hand; Jane set it down gently on the back of the range.
“Thank you,” she recited automatically, slipping the knife back into its slot, “but I think I had better get changed.”
“Yes,” Cora mused, her eyes raking Jane up and down. “You’re positively dripping.”
Jane gave a forced smile and beat a hasty retreat, tapping the code to bolt her bedroom door as soon as she was safely inside. She let out a loud sigh and kicked off her sopping suede boots. They were probably ruined—she couldn’t remember if Vivienne, her shoe shopper at Barneys, had said that they were waterproofed or “needed to be” waterproofed. Either way, they looked distressingly soggy.
She was about to go to her en-suite bathroom for a towel to pat them dry when a spark of leftover magic tingled in her fingers, giving her a better idea.
“If you have a free minute, you might as well be practicing,”
Dee had been reminding her about three times a day.
Jane set her dripping left boot in the center of the dark wood floor and sat down cross-legged in front of it. She worked to still her mind the way Dee had taught her, trying to gather her thoughts like fireflies in a jar. It was difficult: the loose, unconstrained power she had felt in the room with Harris kept trying to fight its way free. And as much as she knew that she couldn’t just go off like a grenade every time she got worked up, that wild magic felt . . . good.
Eventually, after many yoga fire breaths, her mind calmed. Her thoughts flowed out, and magic took their place. Electricity vibrated in her blood, unusually clear and strong. She tried to pack it all together, like a snowball, but over and over it slipped from her control.
Perhaps I should keep my distance from Harris,
she considered.
I clearly can’t be trusted around him, and he has enough on his plate with Maeve. Besides . . .
The magic began to settle low in her body, and she shook herself all over.
Snap out of it. Just focus.
Sweat dampened her temples and the nape of her neck, and Jane finally managed to concentrate a small bundle of energy behind her eyes. Snapping her eyes open, she sent the magic skittering toward the boot in a warm burst.
The boot shivered noticeably in place, like a dog shaking off after a dip in the ocean. A few droplets of water scattered onto the dark floorboards.
Jane’s muscles throbbed in exhaustion.
Magic: the new core-blasting workout.
That raised an interesting point: anything this tiring had to burn calories. Maybe if she practiced enough, she would lose an inch or two off her hips, and Lynne would quit harping on every little thing she ate.
Maybe I’ll even be allowed to finish a complete meal sometime in the next month without something being removed, substituted, altered, or just plain snatched out from under my nose.
Newly motivated, she straightened her back once again and fixed the boot with her witchiest stare.
Ten minutes later, the boot was mostly dry and lying on its side, and Jane was prepared to call that a victory. She collapsed heavily on a particularly ugly but very cushy Oriental rug, the magic still singing in her veins. Her muscles might be tired, but the power was still there, and that was somehow comforting.
Worn out though she was, the humming drone of the magic made her mind feel awake and alert, as if every sense was heightened. Her breathing sped up, and her thoughts scattered, shifting from Malcolm to Maeve and finally landing on Harris. In the steady quiet of her new focus, she could recognize that her attraction to him stemmed directly from the magic in both their bloodstreams. She also knew that there would be no happy ending for their friendship, or whatever it was they had, so long as Lynne was watching them like a well-dressed vulture.
Jane stretched her arms above her head, the magic beginning to flow out of her. That was where all of the trouble had started, anyway: those magical impulses that had drawn her so strongly to Malcolm and then to Harris.
She thought of her first encounter with Malcolm: the spark of his touch at the auction, just from his hand brushing hers when he’d given her his card. The flame had shot through her entire body when he had lifted her, broken shoe and all, off the sidewalk and into his waiting limo. No reasonable woman could be expected to resist that kind of overwhelming assault on her defenses. She pictured the dark blond waves of his hair, the deeper color of his eyebrows, and then his deep, liquid dark eyes. When her mental eye conjured the full curve of his lips, she sighed, recalling the fiery shudders those lips had sent racing across her skin.
Just like magic.
Jane’s hands moved down across her body as if they had a life of their own, following the same path that Malcolm’s large, strong hands had that very first night. The magic thrummed in response, and it felt as if every nerve ending in her body was poised and ready to fire. She undid the tiny shell buttons running down the front of her sweater and let it fall open, thinking wryly that if Malcolm really were there, a few of those buttons would be gone for good. Her fingertips brushed against her bare skin, raising goose bumps on the pale flesh.
In her mind’s eye, Malcolm’s warm mouth moved up her thighs, bare under her fluttery layered skirt, and her fingers followed after it, stroking and caressing in the best approximation of his tongue that she could manage. The pulse of the magic in her blood more than made up the difference; it was as if Malcolm were actually in the room, his breath hot against her body. The delicious tension built, her fingers moving faster, until she reached the most powerful climax of her life. She opened her eyes, breathing hard, and honestly expected to see Malcolm’s dark gaze peering down on her. But of course the room was still empty.
A tear slipped down her cheek, salty with exhaustion, release, and longing. Then her eyes fluttered shut, and she fell asleep where she lay, half-naked on the wooden floor.