Authors: Gabriella Pierce
W
hen
J
ane woke up, she had no idea where she was.
T
he
ceiling above her was supported by wood rafters that sloped at a steep angle. Light filtered in through two dusty windows, and the walls were bare save for a small, gold-framed photo near the door.
She tried to sit up and get a better look around. The satin of her dress rustled, but her limbs wouldn’t move.
I was getting married,
she thought foggily.
I’m almost sure of it.
But that wasn’t right, not exactly.
I
did
get married. And now I’m in a bed . . . in an attic?
She tried harder to move, and this time the source of the resistance was clearer.
I’m
tied
to a bed in an attic.
Had the honeymoon started already?
You’d think I’d remember that . . .
But that wasn’t right, either. Hot tears began to spill from her eyes as her mind recalled the image of her husband leaning over her dying grandmother.
No wonder the dog barked at him,
she thought, but that reminded her that the dog hadn’t been the only one to recognize him. The old man in the flower shop—what had he said?
“Normal people come one time. They do not again.”
His dark tangle of anger at the funeral suddenly made a lot more sense: he knew that Malcolm had been in Saint-Croix once already. He must have seen something that had made him suspicious, especially once Celine had turned up dead.
Why the hell didn’t he say something?
she fumed impotently, but it was hard to really blame the stranger. Either he had been afraid to get involved or he had thought that Jane was a party to the murder; either one was more forgivable than Jane’s marrying the man who had killed her grandmother.
And the more Jane thought about it the more she realized the full magnitude of her mistake. She had been so foolish. All the clues pointing the way to the truth had been laid out in front of her, like dainty little breadcrumbs, but she’d been so blinded by love, by her need for Malcolm, that she had put the picture together all wrong. She’d questioned the timing of Malcolm’s arrival in her life, sure, but she’d overlooked the most obvious problem with the “coincidence.” Malcolm was a son of a witch with bad intentions: he could never have gotten anywhere near her so long as the ever-paranoid Celine Boyle was alive.
And apparently the Dorans weren’t willing to sit around waiting.
Bile rose in her throat. Malcolm was a liar and a murderer, and she had put all of her trust in him. She had
married
him, for God’s sake. There was no light at the end of the tunnel anymore. She had no one to love, no one to trust. But she did have someone to blame.
“Lynne Doran!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “Lynne, you lunatic psycho-bitch, get your bony ass in here!”
There was a brief silence, and then the aging wood door swung open. “Really, dear. Do you
have
to be so crude?” Lynne sniffed. The twin cousins filed into the room behind her like bodyguards. “At least you won’t be around to pass on your appalling lack of manners to my granddaughter. I shudder to think how she’d turn out under your tutelage.”
Rage boiled through Jane, followed by the familiar prick of magic, but it was weak and faint, impossible to grasp, as if all her weeks of practice had been undone—or had never occurred at all.
Lynne laughed unpleasantly. “That’s a useful little spell we hit you with, Jane. I’d offer to teach you sometime, but I doubt it’d be worth my trouble.”
“Don’t worry, it’ll wear off . . . eventually,” Cora tittered.
“I’ll kill all three of you,” Jane sputtered, although behind the hollow threat her mind was racing. So the cousins had done something to dampen her magic. But they hadn’t taken it away. She just had to figure out how to access it.
Belinda smirked. “It’s three against one, Jane, and let’s be honest: you’re not really much of a witch even when you
haven’t
just been knocked out.”
Jane swallowed hard. Maybe she wasn’t much of a witch, but that was because these women had killed her grandmother before she’d had time to teach her anything.
“Killing your thug wasn’t all that hard,” she spat at Lynne, whose eyes narrowed in response.
“Yes,” Lynne mused. “I suppose I’ll have to punish you for that. Will taking your baby and slitting your throat do it?”
Jane rolled her eyes. “Your golden boy never did manage to knock me up, so you might as well get to the throat-slitting and spare me having to listen to your obnoxious voice for another moment.” Anger rattled through her, igniting tiny sparks of her magic. She focused hard on them. If she could summon just enough, perhaps she could get the photo frame beside the door to fly off the wall and lodge in Lynne’s brain.
“As tempting as that is, dear, your throat will remain intact for another nine months. I do need you to have that baby for me one way or another. Although, unfortunately, Malcolm is
unavailable
at the moment.” A shadow flickered across her face and was gone before Jane could interpret it. “How very lucky that I have two sons.”
Charles.
Jane swallowed a gasp. This woman was truly sick.
“From what I heard, ‘luck’ had nothing to do with little Charlie’s birth,” Jane retorted, trying to mask her terror. Lynne flinched. “Malcolm sold you out,” Jane went on softly, forcing Lynne to step a little closer to the bed to hear her. She gave the framed photo a hopeful try; it rattled so faintly that it could have passed for a loud exhale.
Come closer. Get distracted. Give me something to work with, here.
“He made up some nonsense about ‘experimental drugs,’ made it sound like a mistake of a desperately hopeful woman. But you and I know better, don’t we? You weren’t hopeful. You didn’t wait to see how the pregnancy would go, and you sure as hell didn’t bother with anything the FDA will ever see. The moment you knew you were pregnant, you locked it down. You just kept forcing and forcing more of your witchcraft on his fragile little brain until you broke it.” Jane chuckled grimly. “Shame you couldn’t figure out how to move chromosomes around. It would’ve all been worth it to have a broken
daughter
, right?”
Lynne’s eyes blazed with rage and she took a menacing step forward.
“Lynne,” Cora cautioned.
After a violently still moment, Lynne straightened up and smoothed the peach gown she’d worn to the wedding. It matched her lipstick perfectly. “Well,” she snapped very precisely. “I guess you’ll find out soon enough.” Then she strode out of the room, her cousins on her heel.
No,
Jane thought desperately.
I need more time.
She thrashed against her ropes, but there wasn’t the slightest bit of give in the complicated knots. And then she saw the hulking figure lurking in the hallway.
Charles.
Her stomach turned and for a moment she thought she might pass out again.
“This is seriously your sickest idea yet,” she called to Lynne, hearing a note of desperation creep into her voice.
“Be a good boy, Charles.” Lynne appeared in the doorway. She kissed her younger son on the cheek and smiled aloofly at Jane. A moment later, she slammed the door shut behind her. Charles padded toward Jane, a horrifying gleam in his eye. A key turned in the lock, and then they were alone.
Magic calls to magic,
J
ane thought wildly as
C
harles moved
closer to the bed. “Wait a minute,” she pleaded urgently. “Charles, wait. Is it ‘Charles’? ‘Charlie’?” He stared at her, momentarily confused.
Whichever.
“Just wait a second.”
He shook his head and grabbed her ankle; she instinctively shot her focus out toward the painting again. This time, free from the other witches’ stifling presence, it flew off the wall, but it drooped low before it reached Charles’s meaty shoulder, and ended up bouncing harmlessly off of his leg. In spite of herself, she caught herself admiring the older witches’ skill.
How the hell long before their knockout wears off?
Charles wrinkled his nose, then touched her other ankle and squeezed. Hard.
“Stop!” she demanded, cringing from the feel of his meaty fingers on her skin.
What now? What now?
A wave of panic threatened to overcome her. How could she stop him—and how could she do so quietly enough that Lynne and her drones wouldn’t hear the slam of his body against the wall? If they rushed back into the attic, she’d never get another chance to get away.
And even if she did manage to hit him hard enough to do real damage, she’d still be tied to the bed, with her power coming back in slow dribbles.
Charles’s clammy hand grabbed her big toe and wiggled it back and forth, almost as though he was playing “This Little Piggy.” Jane thrashed her legs, trying to sit up and free herself from the bed. Charles’s smile drooped and he shook his head. He wrapped his fleshy hand around her throat and pinned her back to the bed.
She shuddered violently, and a flash of confused images invaded her mind—a tattered doll with the smiling face half wrenched off, a shattered mirror, a threadbare blanket.
Charles’s thoughts.
But his thoughts didn’t feel lustful, as Lynne clearly wanted them to be. They just felt . . . lonely. Jane set her jaw, struggling to take a breath.
I’ll have to work with him,
she decided.
There has to be something in there.
Summoning all her energy, she dove into Charles’s mind. Like Malcolm’s, it offered just a thin skin of passing resistance—but unlike Malcolm’s, it was a jumbled mess.
Charles howled and increased the pressure around Jane’s neck.
No, no, no!
Jane thought frantically, gasping for air. With her mind’s eye, she grabbed onto one of the memories spinning in Charles’s brain. Miraculously, the movement stopped and a scene blossomed in her mind.
“You’ll be getting a new friend in the house,”
Lynne told Charles lovingly, in a distant memory. But before Jane could see more, colors blurred and suddenly a slightly younger Charles was in the attic, pounding on the door and ripping apart the bed as footsteps retreated down the hallway, leaving him all by himself. In the memory, Charles took a tarnished silver object out of his pocket and clutched it in his palm.
Jane fought desperately to take a breath. Still locked inside of Charles’s disordered and confused mind, she pushed as hard as she could.
The thought moved.
“You’ll be getting a new friend in the house,”
Lynne repeated, more clearly this time.
“Do you understand what I mean by ‘friend’?”
Charles’s eyes widened. For a moment, he loosened his grip on Jane’s neck and stared at her. Jane took a greedy gulp of air.
Charles tried to brush the memory away, but Jane held on for dear life. After a few moments, Charles returned obediently to the memory she held in front of him.
“I’m your brother,” a bored-looking eighteen-year-old Malcolm told Charles, who was still in diapers in spite of looking too old for them. Charles gaped at him, and Malcolm rolled his eyes in annoyance. “Whatever—it’s like having a friend. Except you’re never going to have one of those, so . . . Mom, do I have to? The kid’s a turnip.” Lynne’s response was too soft for Charles to hear, but Malcolm was apparently chastened because he turned back to his little brother. “Look, we’re friends, okay? It means I’ll always be nice to you, and that I’ll look out for you, and that you do the same when you can. I’m leaving tomorrow for school, so it’s not like—” Malcolm glanced to the side where Lynne was presumably standing before going on. “So I’ll be away for a while, but I’ll visit. I’ll be back at Thanks—” Another glance. “Christmas.” He began to turn toward the door, and sadness welled up in Charles. Abruptly, Malcolm turned back, holding out something in his hand. “You could hold on to this for me, until I get back.”
Charles held out his hands eagerly, and Malcolm dropped a silver Yale key chain into them. Charles stared up at him with adoration before leaning forward and sinking his teeth into Malcolm’s leg.
“Ow! Damn it! Mom, would you—” He shook Charles off violently, and the child collapsed on the ground, sobbing. “Oh, for the love of . . . Never mind. I got it.” He bent down to look Charles in the eye, holding him firmly by the shoulders just in case. “We’re friends, remember? That means you never, ever hurt me, and I don’t hurt you, either.”
“You’re hurting me, Charles,” Jane told him firmly, forcing her voice not to tremble. “This hurts.”
Charles backed away, confused, and Jane dug through his mind for what she needed, to drive the point home.
“You’ll be getting a new friend in the house,”
Lynne said, showing Charles a snapshot of Jane that Malcolm had taken on one of the narrow back streets of the Marais. She was laughing happily, pale blond hair whipping around in the wind like a flag. They had gone to a museum and then sat for hours in her favorite café with the orange walls, sipping hot chocolate.
“We’re friends, remember?”
Malcolm said.
“That means you never, ever hurt me, and I don’t hurt you, either.”
The key chain spun between them, the silver gleaming.
Charles inhaled deeply, and Jane almost cried with relief when Charles reached into his pocket and pulled out a tarnished Yale key chain. He turned it over and over in his hands.
“We’re friends, Charles, so you won’t hurt me, and that’s good! Because I need you to help me right now. And then we’ll go to my room and you can pick out anything you want, like that key chain, to remember that we’re friends, just like you and Malcolm. Okay?”
He stared at her balefully, and then turned and shuffled toward the door.
“Wait—Charles! Wait!” she squeaked. Charles flinched at the sound of her voice, but he didn’t open the door. “I can’t go anywhere right now; that’s why I need your help. Can you untie these ropes? Otherwise I can’t . . . help you find your present.” She almost said, “Otherwise I can’t leave,” but realized just in time that Charles might not consider that to be as much of a problem as she did. She showed him Malcolm’s key chain again, pushing the memory discreetly away before he bit Malcolm.
Fortunately, Charles seemed to like the present idea because he returned purposefully to the bed. The knots were complicated and extremely tight, but she merged her thoughts with his. Her mind helped direct his, and within minutes, she was rubbing her sore wrists and legs.
“Good,” she breathed, casting her mind toward the locked door. The tumblers felt simple and blissfully loose to her tired magic, turning almost of their own accord, and then she was free. For now, at least.