666 Park Avenue (26 page)

Chapter Forty-eight

T
he streetlights had come on along
P
ark
A
venue, and
Jane strained to see the familiar glow of a free taxi. She pushed Malcolm, bloodied and limping, down the avenue. The light changed and a fleet of taxis rushed toward them. One screeched to a halt several feet in front of them, the red taillights flashing. Jane slid across the seat and Malcolm slammed the door behind them.

“Grand Central,” he announced.

The driver put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. Jane breathed a sigh of relief, relaxing into the seat as the car lurched forward. But just two blocks later, the wheels locked with a sharp thud and the cab jolted to a stop in the middle of the road. “What the—” the driver muttered darkly. A black BMW zoomed past, and a minivan taxi leaned on its horn, coming within inches of their stalled cab.

“What are you doing?” Jane cried to the driver. Malcolm breathed heavily through his mouth; his nose had begun to bleed again.

“I’m not doing anything! It’s the damn car.” The driver threw the car in and out of gear a few times to no avail, and even shut off the engine before restarting it. The car hummed to life, making all of the right noises, but wouldn’t budge so much as an inch along the pavement.

“Forget it,” Malcolm ordered, grimacing as he reached for the door. “Let’s just take a different cab.”

Jane clutched Malcolm’s wrist urgently, every hair on her arm standing on end. The air had changed. It was thicker somehow, foggy almost, and the world outside looked as if it were unfolding in slow motion. Each drop of moisture in the air sparkled like crystal.

“Malcolm,” she whispered, her gaze transfixed on the rear window. “Don’t get out of this car.”

“What?” he asked, baffled, but she turned in her seat and he swiveled to follow her gaze. “Oh shit.”

A wind had picked up, blowing brown leaves across the wide, tree-lined avenue, and the trees in the median and along the sidewalk bent in the sudden gust. But all Jane could see was Lynne, her peach wedding jacket billowing around her as she strode purposefully toward their beached taxi. Her hands were at her sides, and her eyes looked as dark as the night sky. She was walking in the middle of the street, but cars swerved harmlessly past, as if the entire world had bent itself around her. From what Jane could tell, it more or less had.

“She’s doing it,” Jane whispered.

“I know,” Malcolm said. In the front seat, the driver swore and tried the ignition again. “Can you do anything?” Malcolm whispered to Jane.

As if I hadn’t thought of that,
Jane thought darkly, probing for any hole in Lynne’s defenses. “She’s too powerful.” Jane turned her attention toward the taxi, but the wall of energy holding them in place was even more intense than the protective cocoon around Lynne. Jane felt like a child who had picked a fight with a grown-up, and she spun the rings on her left hand in frustration. Celine Boyle’s silver band sparked, sending a bolt of electricity down her finger.

Jane’s heart pounded and her eyes narrowed.
That bitch killed my grandmother.

Lynne was less than a block away now. Jane knelt on the bench seat, calling her magic and feeling it spark to life in her veins.
She stalked me, murdered Gran, attacked my friends, destroyed Malcolm, and tried to have me raped.
The power in her grew with every offense Jane recounted, and she suddenly felt very sure that her eyes were as black as her raging mother-in-law’s. The magic thrummed in her veins almost painfully, but she held on, knowing she couldn’t afford to release it carelessly.

An SUV swerved blindly around Lynne’s tall form, and Jane sent out feelers to the protective bubble around her mother-in-law. It was solid and seamless, but it was taking a lot of energy, too: between maintaining her shield and holding the taxi in place, Lynne had nothing left over.
We just need one good distraction,
Jane thought urgently.
One thing to make her forget about us, even just for a second.
The trees in the median continued to thrash wildly in the wind that was coming down the avenue along with Lynne. A plan formed in Jane’s head, and she could only hope it would be enough.

She focused hard on the large maple just behind the car. Reaching out with her mind, she felt the rough edges of the dark, splintering bark, and probed the frozen ground that was packed in around the thick roots. She wrapped her mental fingers around those roots, and then yanked back as hard as she could. The blood drained from her face, but she kept pulling, knuckles white on the back of the seat. A tearing noise reached them over the whipping of the wind. Jane’s muscles burned and screamed in agony, each one clenched and focused on the massive trunk.

With a final creak, the tree crashed down lengthwise across the road between Lynne and her prey. Surprise flickered across Lynne’s face for just a moment before it was hidden by the dense branches, and then came the squealing of brakes and the crumpling of metal on metal. Lynne let out a howl of rage as she found herself in the center of a five-car accident that would, Jane hoped, take every ounce of her magic to avoid being crushed under.
Or she could just be crushed. That works too.

Jane spun around to face the front of the car. “Drive!” she shouted to the cabbie.
“Now!”

Using the last strains of her magic, she shoved the surprised driver’s foot down on the pedal for good measure, and the taxi jolted forward, speeding recklessly down the avenue until the fallen tree was out of sight. To his credit, the cabbie kept the car steady. “Grand Central?” he asked in an almost normal voice, although he was glaring suspiciously at the couple in his rearview mirror.

Malcolm just nodded at him in the mirror, and Jane sank down into the seat, feeling her eyelids force themselves closed.

Twenty blocks of napping,
she promised herself,
and then back to the daring escape.

Chapter Forty-nine

F
ive minutes later, they were dashing through the
bustle of Grand Central Station.

“White Plains,” Malcolm told her, pointing to the electronic screen over the ticket window; there was a train in nine minutes. “They’ve got an airport, and I’ve got cash. Mom will have people looking for us at LaGuardia and JFK, but there’s a good chance she won’t think to—what?”

Jane was shaking her head. “You’ve been around your mom all day. She has to know what you have planned.”

“She doesn’t!” Malcolm said forcefully. “I promise. I would have known if she’d seen it. And we can still change our plans—get on a different plane, go to a different airport.” His voice was verging on hysterical, and Jane put her hand on his arm to calm him.

A man with a Prada roller-duffle ducked around her, clipping her toe with one of the wheels. Jane barely registered the pain. Malcolm was looking at her, pleading with his amazing, hypnotic eyes.

“Too risky,” she explained gently. “Airports have rules and security; you could get cornered. You need to stick to trains: pay in cash and get off early, change to a different one, backtrack. Keep moving, and keep her guessing.”

“We,”
he corrected cautiously, and then rushed on before she could say more. “Hundreds of trains pass through here. We’ll go wherever you want, however you like. We just have to go, now!”

He tried to pull her toward the gates, but she resisted. “We’re getting on different trains, Malcolm.” His face fell, but he didn’t seem nearly as surprised by her news as she had feared. “I’ll never be able to look at you without seeing her,” she added in a whisper, and bit her lip fiercely. Now that she knew how Lynne had manipulated Malcolm, using his guilt over Annette, she couldn’t hate him for what he had done to her life. He was just a tool of his family, not some evil arch-villain. But he also was not the person she had once imagined that she’d loved. She couldn’t in good conscience leave him to be tortured in some dungeon, and she might be able to use his help someday, if they could both survive Lynne’s current rampage. But that was as much as she owed him, and it was all she could feel for him anymore.

He nodded, his dark eyes closing in pain. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered roughly.

“I know,” she said, touching his temple lightly. “I saw.”

“You will need money,” he said, pulling out his wallet and tucking a thick wad of cash into her purse. After a moment’s hesitation, he added three blue passports and one dark red one to the money. “Can you at least tell me where you’re going?”

“It’s safer if you don’t know,” she told him gently. “But I’ll need to be able to reach you. Set up an e-mail account. I’ll find you.”

He gripped her arm suddenly.

“It won’t help,” he warned desperately. “It doesn’t matter how far you go: you’ll only buy time, not safety. They’ll never stop looking, and they
will
find you. I need to be there to protect you. I have to do
something
to make up for what I’ve done.”

“You’re right,” she said carefully, ignoring his fleeting hopeful look. “They’ll keep on coming until they reach me, but that’ll happen no matter where you go. And I’m not going to let you die playing bodyguard just so you can feel better about what you did.” He flinched, and she felt a stab of guilt, but she couldn’t really regret telling him the truth.

After a moment, he nodded slowly, and she exhaled a breath that she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding. “But I mean it,” he went on fiercely, eyes blazing with a new, darker kind of determination. “Jane, if there’s ever
anything . . .”
He waved his hand, dismissing the rest of the sentence. She knew that he meant it: there were no limits or qualifications on his offer to help her hide from his family. “Whenever you need me, Jane, I’m on your side.”

“You better be,” she told him seriously, and then winked. “After all, I am your wife now.”

The corners of his lips quirked up in his familiar smile, and she felt a twinge of regret when she realized that this might be the last time she saw it. She stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek, and then turned before she could change her mind, plunging into the shifting crowd. A cluster of giggling teenage girls in way-too-short miniskirts filled the space where she had been almost as soon as she left it, and by the time they cleared, Malcolm was gone.
It’s for the best,
she told herself firmly.
I need to learn more. I need to move forward, not just crouch down and wait for them to get me. And I can’t afford to be protected anymore. I have to figure out how to do it myself.

She glanced up at the sign that pointed toward the trains, but as she did, something else caught her eye.

SUBWAY
, an adjacent archway read, complete with a helpful arrow pointing in the opposite direction. 4, 5, 6, 7,
S
.

Jane stopped in the middle of the giant marble-vaulted hall, the beginning of an idea swimming idly around her mind.

“It doesn’t matter how far you go,” Malcolm had said.

So why go far?

The orange constellations painted into the blue ceiling twinkled, and the crowd flowed around her as though she was simply part of the scenery—no more conspicuous than a tree or potted plant. She’d run to Paris when she was eighteen, and then to New York when she met Malcolm, but she’d never been able to shake off her fate.

Now Lynne and her cousins would be stalking her the same way her own magic always had, and she realized that she had absolutely no desire to run again. She had put down roots, had made a family. There was Dee, with her useful knowledge and boundless curiosity. There were Maeve and Harris—though Jane hesitated to ask any more of them. Plus, New York was the last place anyone would think to look for her: no sane person would stick around in the same town where they’d just crashed a bunch of cars around Lynne Doran.

She gave the arches one last look: Metro-North trains to the left, the subway to the right.
Guess I’m not all that sane,
she thought with a grin, smoothing her jacket over her torn wedding dress.

Heart pounding, she turned to the right and headed for the maze of tunnels and trains that would hide her in plain sight . . . right below the Dorans’ feet.

About the Author

GABRIELLA PIERCE
is an American living in Paris with her two dogs. This is her first novel.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

Copyright