The Dark Glamour

The Dark Glamour

A 666 Park Avenue
Novel

Gabriella Pierce

Contents

Chapter One

“T
hanks.” Jane Boyle aimed a friendly smile at the tired-looking barista, a sallow-skinned girl with a barbell through her septum. In spite of the fact that the macchiato in Jane’s hands was approximately the eight hundredth she’d bought from the girl in the last three weeks, the barista didn’t show the faintest glimmer of recognition.

Probably for the best,
Jane reminded herself as she settled into the cozy-looking corduroy armchair that had quickly become her favorite. After all, she was in hiding.

Unfortunately, “hiding” was not turning out to be enjoyable or even particularly interesting. Jane could remember vividly the way her heart had pounded as she stood in Grand Central, making the life-or-death choice between leaving New York and staying. Clutching Malcolm’s stock of money and fake passports, she had imagined a wild montage of magical discovery with her fierce and loyal band of friends, culminating in a pitched battle with Lynne Doran and her creepy twin cousins that left their massive stone mansion as a heap of ugly rubble beneath Jane’s victorious feet.

Must. Stop. Thinking. In. Montages.

Jane hadn’t gone more than two blocks when she caught a glimpse of herself on the news. Then the elegant face of her homicidal mother-in-law had filled the screen, and Jane instinctively backed away, afraid that Lynne would somehow see her. Maybe she can, Jane had thought wildly; she really couldn’t fathom the limits of Lynne’s powers. But after a tense few moments of listening to her own shallow breath rasping in the night air, the lure of Lynne’s perfectly peach-lipsticked mouth was too much to resist.

The story the garbled closed-captioned ticker spelled out made it clear that Lynne was as much a mistress of PR as she was of black magic . . . and that Jane wasn’t going to be able to so much as poke her nose out of hiding for a good long time.

Too afraid to contact her friends and with no idea how long the stockpile of cash would have to last her, Jane had to think quickly. A twenty-four-hour Duane Reade and twenty-seven minutes in the bathrooms of Grand Central had turned her from the blond newlywed Jane Boyle into the Ebony Mocha–tressed Caroline Chase, an anonymous New Yorker with a penchant for heavy eyeliner, whose passport Jane just happened to have.
Good thing I didn’t choose Amber Kowalsky,
Jane thought, recalling the heavy Photoshopping of her picture in one of the other pseudonym-ed passports.
All those piercings would have
hurt.

Three weeks later, Caroline Chase was stuck in a depressing single-room-occupancy hotel near Port Authority with a shrinking pile of money and no idea what to do next . . . and Jane Boyle was still above the fold.

“Distraught Mother ‘Won’t Give Up Hope,’ ” the latest headline proclaimed. Jane reached for the newspaper.

Although today marks three weeks since the mysterious disappearance of her son and his new bride, sources close to socialite Lynne Doran say she is as determined as ever to find them. The tenacious Mrs. Doran is currently offering just over $3 million for information leading to the safe return of Malcolm and Jane Doran, who were married on March 3 in what many were calling the wedding of the century. Just hours later, however, their automobile was involved in a bizarre multicar accident on Park Avenue. Although most injuries were minor, Yuri Renard, the Dorans’ family driver, was pronounced dead at the scene. Malcolm and Jane, however, seem to have simply vanished from the car, and the notorious playboy and his new wife have not been seen or heard from since.

“There is nothing on Earth that would stop my son from letting me know if he were all right,” Mrs. Doran insisted on the morning after the accident. Looking more disheveled than we have seen her since the tragic death of her daughter twenty-two years before, the Upper East Side maven went on to speculate that Malcolm and Jane must both be suffering amnesia following the trauma of the crash.

The investigators of the NYPD have been looking into some much more disturbing scenarios, although so far they are reluctant to go on record with them. “Yuri Renard’s head wound was weird,” a source close to the investigation swore on the condition of anonymity. “And they found the Doran couple’s fingerprints in a taxi that was in the accident, too, but no one can find its driver. If Malcolm was high, he could have freaked out and attacked Yuri and then tried to get away—maybe that’s what caused the pileup, even.”

The NYPD officially denies that this possibility is being pursued, but reiterates that Malcolm and Jane Doran are “persons of interest” in the puzzling crash. Anyone with information is asked to call the tip line at the bottom of the page.

Jane sighed and sipped her coffee. It was hard reading that Malcolm was a drugged-out criminal after everything he had given up to help her. Jane was the one who had killed Yuri, the Dorans’ creepy driver and sometime hit man, the day before her wedding, and she had been completely sober when she had done it.

“Not to mention that I never actually changed my last name,” she muttered, stabbing at a printed “Jane Doran” with one rather ragged fingernail. The Goa Sand polish from her wedding day was so chipped it looked more like camo.

How did she get Yuri’s corpse onto the scene so
fast
?
Jane wondered.
Had they stashed the thing in a closet somewhere, just in case?
And what the hell did they do with my tree?
The cause of the pileup wouldn’t have been nearly so “mysterious” if the tree that Jane magically uprooted from the median had still been lying across the downtown-bound lanes of Park Avenue when the police had arrived. Lynne must have gone into overdrive to manufacture her cover-up . . . or maybe witches had some way of altering people’s memories.

Jane set the newspaper down, unable to read one more sentence about Lynne’s “grief.” This was, after all, the same woman who had ordered her son to murder Jane’s grandmother, seduce Jane, and impregnate her with a witch daughter so that Lynne could kill Jane off and raise the baby as her own. Witches’ power could only be passed through the female line, and Lynne’s only daughter, Annette, had died tragically when she was just six years old, swept off to sea one day on the beach. Jane, a full-blooded witch who only recently learned of her powers, had become their very sickening plan B. To read about how Lynne “already considered Jane a daughter” and “hoped the girl’s dear, departed family members” were watching from above so they could see how hard Lynne was working to bring her back “home” made Jane feel nauseated.

Distant thunder rolled overhead, and Jane wondered if her grandmother really was watching from above. Like Jane and all the women in her bloodline, Celine Boyle had been a witch. Jane’s powers disrupted nearby electronics whenever she was upset or emotional; Gran’s excess emotions had boiled over as thunderstorms. If she really was still watching in some way, then clearly she saw eye-to-eye with Jane when it came to Lynne’s crocodile tears.

Jane picked at the cardboard heat guard on her coffee cup. There was still so much she didn’t know about her own power, and it didn’t look as though she’d be learning any more at her present rate.
I’m doing this all wrong,
she fretted miserably,
but what choice do I have?
The whole city—the whole country, probably—was looking for her now, and any tiny mistake could give her away. It felt as though she were suffocating under a giant pillow stuffed with potentially fatal choices. Any movement could mean the end of the line, and so she was stuck sitting still. The fine blond hairs on her arms began to prickle and stand on end.

Jane glanced warily around. The shop’s radio played inoffensive Muzak. Three giggling teenage girls on the center couch were watching Katy Perry on YouTube. The regular in a suit, who clearly had not yet told his wife he’d been laid off, was right where he always was, looking typically miserable. And in the far corner, practically tucked under the counter, a woman sat doing nothing at all.

She was perhaps in her late thirties, with close-cropped black hair and a deep, Mediterranean tan. Her skin was stretched tautly over high cheekbones and a chin like the point of a dagger. And, like Jane’s, her eyes were hidden from view behind a stylish pair of completely unnecessary sunglasses. The hairs on the back of Jane’s neck began to join the ones on her arms. The woman wasn’t looking at Jane, but just moments earlier she had been. Jane was absolutely certain of it.

Anyone in the city, of course, might look at Caroline Chase. And if they had been primed by the media coverage and looked hard enough, they might even eventually recognize Jane Boyle in her features. But the people who might think they had found the desperately searched-for Jane and not approached her—who would hide the fact they’d been looking, even . . . those were the most dangerous of the people on her trail by far.

Jane froze in a painful moment of indecision. Should she try to read the woman’s mind? Maybe the mystery woman really was just there for coffee. Or maybe she was some spy of Lynne’s, and Jane could find out how close behind her mother-in-law really was.

Or, worse still, Jane’s mind would run up against the blank wall that signaled the mind of a fellow witch.

But what if using her magic gave her away somehow? Of all the things she didn’t know about her new powers, that one was by far the most frustrating. If magic left behind some kind of detectable trace, then Jane couldn’t afford to use any at all.

The two possibilities fought in Jane’s mind for seconds that felt like days. The pressure built in her head and she closed her eyes, trying to fight down her panic and think. The gleaming bulk of the espresso machine behind the counter let out an ominous “pop,” and every pair of eyes in the shop turned toward it. The machine spurted scalding jets of espresso in one direction and steam in another. Jane had just enough time to see Mystery Woman ducking beneath the counter for shelter before her body caught up with her brain.

She hurled herself through the door and out into the rainy evening as fast as her feet could carry her.

J
ane arrived at the Rivington Hotel sweating and out of breath.

“Mizz Chase,” the red-faced, permanently greasy day-manager drawled sarcastically as she ran by, but her skin didn’t even have time to crawl as she bounded up the stairs. She took them three at a time, careful to breathe exclusively through her mouth, and didn’t stop until she’d slammed the flimsy door of her room behind her. She flipped the lock, but the temperamental latch refused to slide into place.

“Oh my God,” Jane whispered, feeling the hysteria close around her throat like a hand. The familiar thrum of the magic in her veins could have been a lullaby or a battle cry, and she was sick of fighting it. She pushed away from the door with her fingertips, which left ten faint marks that looked suspiciously like blistered paint. She pushed her magic out like a third, invisible hand until it reached the unfinished chest of drawers in the corner. The dresser shivered, strained against the rusted bolts that tried to hold it to the floor, and then obediently slammed itself against the door. It was quickly followed by a moth-eaten armchair, an end table covered in the etched graffiti of previous residents, and finally by the squeaky twin bed, which tipped up against the rest of the pile with a dusty sigh.

When the entire contents of the tiny room were on her makeshift barricade, Jane’s magic was spent. Her anger, fear, and frustration, on the other hand, didn’t even feel as though they had quite peaked yet.
Enough is enough.

“Who the hell do the Dorans think they are, anyway?” she demanded of the empty room, her voice echoing unfamiliarly off the newly bare floorboards. The new furniture arrangement allowed room to pace, and Jane took advantage of it. Sahara, the emaciated woman downstairs, protested the groaning floorboards by banging on her ceiling. “Seriously?” Jane yelled, prompting another emphatic thud.

Well, if she comes here to tell me off again, it’s not like she could even get in,
Jane realized with somewhat manic glee. But Sahara could decide to get the manager, and then Jane would have to explain her impulsive redecorating spree.
Well, it all started at an antiquities auction in Paris, with this too-perfect-to-be-true guy.

As if by instinct, Jane’s fingers rustled through the cheap straw carryall she had picked up at H&M a day after checking into the Rivington: her red alligator flight bag was a little too conspicuous for her new surroundings. She found the waxy edge of her passport and pulled it out, tracing the gold stamped letters briefly. She separated the thick pages with one fingernail and unfolded the scrap of paper that was taped to the inside cover, deftly catching the tiny plain key that fell out. FIRST TRUST NY, REC. & TRIN., 41811 was written carefully on the paper in Malcolm’s blocky print.

Similar notes—and similar keys—had been attached to the other three passports as well, and Jane had quickly caught on that these were instructions to access four safety-deposit boxes around the world. She would have done so immediately, except that she was in New York, and Malcolm hadn’t been in New York for more than a few hours between the night they had planned their escape and the day it had all gone to hell. In other words, First Trust Bank of New York, on the corner of Rector and Trinity, almost had to be a bank where Malcolm was known, where he had a reputation from even before it came time to plan his and Jane’s escape. And that made it too risky for Jane to walk into.

Or it had, before the incident in the coffee shop.

The air went out of Jane’s lungs in a rush, and she sat heavily on the floor. Malcolm’s arrival had turned her life upside down and inside out and into some sort of diagonal twisting direction that didn’t even have a name. “Too perfect to be true” had been a major understatement: in the space of a few short months, her Prince Charming had turned out to be a murderous mama’s-boy who had been willing to ruin and then, eventually, end Jane’s life to make up for his little sister’s accidental drowning decades before. He had changed sides over time and tried to protect Jane, but in spite of his good intentions, she had had to rescue him from his vindictive mother in the end, which cost her valuable escape time and led to the now-infamous car crash on Park Avenue.