666 Park Avenue (17 page)
Authors: Gabriella Pierce
H
attie’s bustling presence in the bakery prevented
J
ane
from having any meaningful type of conversation with Dee. Luckily, a crème-fleurette crisis had given Jane just enough time to secure an invitation to that evening’s meeting of Dee’s coven before she had hastily retreated to fill out her “shopping” cover story. By the time it was late enough to head to Brooklyn for the gathering, Jane had collected an impressive assortment of bags, an activity that had the added advantage of preventing her from thinking too hard about what she was about to do. Two months ago, she hadn’t known witches existed, and now she was joining a
coven
, for God’s sake.
When she exited the subway in Park Slope, she felt as though she’d arrived in an entirely different city. Quaint little shops lined the streets and no building was taller than four floors. One grocery store even had a street-level parking lot, unheard-of in Manhattan—or Paris, for that matter.
Though it was only seven, the sidewalks and streets were nearly empty. A dark town car turned the corner, and an old woman pushed a grocery cart down a side street. Despite the relative calm, Jane couldn’t quite shake the feeling that someone was watching her.
Stop being paranoid,
she told herself sharply, but she hugged her heavy purse close to her chest. She would never again leave the house without her passport, French debit card, and a copy of Malcolm’s AmEx—just in case. With another surreptitious glance around, she hurried down Berkeley Place, past a school playground, until she reached Dee’s stoop.
A cheerful Dee ushered her inside her one-bedroom. The tiny living room had an accent wall in brilliant red, and a threadbare Oriental carpet reached from corner to corner. There was no couch; instead, a pile of cushions in silk and velvet dotted the carpet. A wrought-iron chandelier boasted four fat, lit candles, and seven more candles sat on a rough-hewn wood bench pushed against the red wall. It looked like something out of a CW show about trendy twentysomething witches—albeit a low-budget one—but Jane reminded herself to keep an open mind. This might be her only avenue to learning more about her abilities.
Five other women were crammed into the room. Dee wove among them, trying not to trip over her own furniture, a plate of warm chocolate-chip cookies in hand. Jane, eager for an excuse not to try to make small talk, snatched one up. It tasted, in a word, magical. “Oh my God, you made these? Would you switch my wedding cake for a giant one of these? I’ll take all the blame.”
Dee giggled, her amber eyes glittering. “Glad you like it, but the wedding cookie’s a no-go. Your about-to-be mother-in-law locked the order, so you’re stuck with vanilla-and-orange-blossom sponge cake with cognac buttercream and all the fondant doves we can roll in one kitchen. And, of course, ‘absolutely nothing that looks in any way like a cake-topper,’ ” she added, doing such a flawless impression of Lynne that Jane flinched.
A girl with spiky brown hair and a long batik tunic laughed. “Man, I hope the guy’s worth it.”
“I don’t think they
make
guys worth that,” a tall blonde with a lip-ring teased, slipping an arm around the spiky-haired girl’s shoulders. “But to each her own.” She grinned at Jane. “I’m Kara, and this is Brooke, and feel free to ignore me if it’s true love and all that.”
Jane smiled faintly, but didn’t quite know what to say. “The wedding is just a charade so we can flee the country” was hardly an ice-breaker, but it was difficult to summon a genuine-seeming rush of enthusiasm for her upcoming nuptials.
Fortunately, at that moment Dee called them all over to the circle of cushions, and Jane hovered uncertainly at its edge. “Come on, Jane,” Dee urged. “It’s just a meditation, nothing scary.”
“I don’t want to intrude,” Jane mumbled, perching tentatively on a red silk pillow with faintly Indian-looking embroidery.
Or blow the fuses, or die of boredom, or anything else obnoxiously conspicuous.
But the faces of the other women were uniformly welcoming and pleasant. She smiled back at them shyly.
“We’ve been looking everywhere for a seventh person,” Kara whispered from a cushion beside Jane’s. “It’s a magic number.” She winked, her lip-ring glinting in the candlelight.
“Everyone, please close your eyes,” Dee intoned, and Kara clamped her lips together and shut her eyes in exaggerated compliance.
Jane obeyed as well, and inhaled deeply. The smoky flower-and-ashes scent of the incense scratched her throat and made her feel light-headed.
“The Circle is gathered; the Circle is cleansed.” Dee’s voice was so husky Jane didn’t recognize it at first. “We call on the guardians of the Watchtower of the North, and we bring an offering of Earth to the Circle to remind ourselves of the life that flourishes beneath our feet. We call on the guardians of the Watchtower of the West, and we bring an offering of Water to the Circle to remind ourselves that blessings come to us from every source. We call on the guardians of the Watchtower of the South, and we bring an offering of Fire to the Circle to remind ourselves of the passion that brings warmth and destruction in equal measure. We call on the guardians of the Watchtower of the East, and we bring an offering of Air to the Circle to remind ourselves that we are connected even when we do not touch.”
Jane’s conscious mind registered skepticism at the words, but the rhythm of Dee’s invocation relaxed her muscles and slowed her breathing. At the very least, a relaxing evening’s meditation would do her some good.
“We meet in the presence of the Horned God and the Moon Goddess,” Dee went on. “She who exists as the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. We take her into ourselves as we pass through these stages, and become complete in ourselves. We begin as daughters but carry on as sisters, and we are each the greatest blessing to the others as we move along the paths of our lives. Please join hands as we begin our meditation.”
Jane reached out blindly, but had no trouble finding the outstretched hands on either side of her. A faint current seemed to run through them when they touched, as if a circuit had been closed. The lightheaded feeling intensified, almost as though she was floating above her pillow.
“We begin in a meadow, just as the sun is setting,” Dee crooned, and Jane found that she could see the meadow clearly behind her closed eyes. Waist-high grass rippled in a light breeze, and Queen Anne’s lace and yellow dandelions competed with the green stalks for sunlight. “The stars become clearer and clearer as darkness rolls across the sky. The sliver of the new moon rises above the horizon: tonight is a time of new beginnings, of refreshed spirits, of renewed power. Tonight is the Storm Moon, the sign that light is returning to balance with the darkness, and that the world is reawakening around us. Tonight we begin again, journeying far . . .”
Dee led Jane past a lake covered with waxy lily pads, along a field of wild violets, then through a thick redwood forest where the ground was spongy with moss. The other women were there with her, too, examining mushrooms and oohing at breathtaking waterfalls. The experience was much more affecting than Jane had expected. A more ordinary sort of magic.
“Now I’ll start us off on our evening chant,” Dee announced, “and then we will continue silently together to seal our ritual.”
Jane exhaled softly as Dee slowly chanted a Latin-sounding phrase, then tapered off into silence. The syllables echoed in Jane’s mind, taking root as if the words had been there all along.
After two more cycles of the chant, she realized she was no longer hearing the memory of Dee’s voice. Instead, she was hearing a collection of voices, all chanting more or less together, creating an almost melodic harmony.
Like the wind through the attic at the Dorans’,
Jane thought.
Just then, one of the voices faltered, and Jane’s eyes snapped open. The girl with spiky brown hair—Brooke—was staring at her from across the circle, her eyes wild. Brooke released the hands on either side of her and fumbled to her feet. Jane instinctively did the same. Curious eyes opened as the disturbance spread around the circle. The chanting noise stopped entirely, and then six pairs of terrified eyes were fixed on Jane.
“Did I do something wrong?” she stammered, trying to figure out why they were all staring at her, but no one moved.
Not staring
at
me, exactly,
she realized with a start: it was as if they were looking
through
her. She turned, and then she was staring, too, because all of the candles on the wood bench behind her were
floating
. She jerked at the sight, and the candles tumbled to the ground as if they had suddenly been released. One rolled toward a cushion near Dee, who bent slowly, as if she were under water, to extinguish it.
“Um . . .” A girl whose arms were covered entirely with colorful tattoos grabbed her purse. “I forgot I had this . . . um thing? So I’m just gonna . . .” She jumped up and all but ran to the door, followed closely by two of the other women. As if a spell had quite literally been broken, everyone rose to their feet and pushed toward the exit.
“Sorry,” Kara said, quirking an apologetic smile at Dee. “Too weird for my blood.” She circled an arm around Brooke’s shoulder and guided the shell-shocked girl gently toward the door.
Within seconds, Jane and Dee were alone in the apartment, and Jane couldn’t bring herself to look anywhere but the floor. “I’m so sorry,” she mumbled. “This was a mistake. Please just forget—”
“Are you kidding me?”
Jane glanced up, startled. Dee’s eyes were wide, her smile even wider. Her skin shone and sheaves of tangled dark hair fell around her face. “You’re one of
them
, aren’t you? I was babbling away in the store that day, and this whole time you were one of them?”
Jane’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. She felt trapped. She had unwittingly jumped in with both feet and given herself away in front of six strangers. Now, she realized abruptly, there was nothing to do but ask for the help she had come for. “You’re right,” she forced her voice to say. “It is genetic.”
Dee grinned and shoved a cushion at her. “Nifty. Now would you sit the hell back down already?” Her amber eyes sparkled wickedly. “Let’s find out how it works.”
J
ane’s i
P
hone informed her that
H
arris had called her
seven times in twelve hours. The first time was to make sure that she was still alive, the second to tell her that Maeve had woken up briefly, the third was to remind her that she should probably get rid of her phone if she was on the run, and the last four just said, “Call me. Please.” When the phone rang again for the eighth time, Jane decided to bite the bullet and answered.
Which was how, that Saturday, Harris came to be seated next to her at a triangular table at Book and Bell, Dee’s favorite occult bookstore-slash-reading room on the Lower East Side. The furniture looked like leftovers from a public school, and the worn red carpet had a similar surplus feel. But the walls were covered with books, and the owner (all flowing skirts and frizzy blond hair) had discreetly returned to the front room, leaving them alone.
“Okay,” Dee announced in the tone of someone formally calling a meeting to order. “Now this place is pretty good, but I’ve also brought some resources from home.” She tapped a heavy-looking military-style backpack beside her wooden chair. Then she turned to Jane expectantly, and Harris followed suit.
After a moment’s uncomfortable silence, Jane slammed her unevenly glazed mug of tea on the scarred table. “You two are supposed to help
me
. If I knew where to start I wouldn’t be so pathetically screwed right now.”
Dee smirked. “Well, we could start by voting in a club president, but I’m afraid Jane just shot herself in the foot. It’d be down to the two of us, Harris, and I’d hate to see you get beat by a girl.”
“Touché,” he said with a sly grin of his own.
“Anyway . . .” Jane prompted. “What did you bring?”
Dee kicked open her backpack and turned it upside down.
“You lugged all that from Brooklyn?” Harris asked in an impressed tone. Dee smiled modestly. Neither of her friends had been thrilled about the idea of bringing the other into Jane’s quest to learn magic, but it seemed they were quickly warming up to each other.
Jane rolled her eyes and rifled through the pile. There were a few dusty, cloth-covered books, an assortment of crystals in muted amber and rose, a vial of lime-green powder, a bronze pendant, and a silver knife so slim it had to be a letter-opener. “I guess we could all just take a book and start reading,” she suggested.
“Don’t be a wuss,” Dee complained. “I’ve been waiting twenty years to meet an actual witch. Now that I’ve got one—well, one-and-a-half,” she amended with an apologetic nod to Harris, “I want to play!”
Jane frowned. They had tried to access her magic for over an hour after the botched Wicca meeting earlier that week, but without success. Jane knew she needed to learn about her magic and she was willing to try, but there was such a thing as too much pressure. Dee seemed to read her look because she playfully poked Harris in the side. He jumped. “We have three people now,” Dee reminded Jane pointedly. “That’s a magic number, a Circle. Like the seven of us back at my place, before you sent them all running for the hills, at least. And one of us is even packing a little extra power this time.”
One of them was back at your place, too,
Jane thought, remembering Brooke’s wide-eyed stare when she had realized that Jane’s mind was touching hers. But Jane had kept that theory private, even from Dee. No one deserved to be outed as a witch if they didn’t choose to be.
Jane obediently helped Dee to arrange the letter opener—“the athame,” Dee corrected piously—and a couple of the crystals on the table between them. Dee scattered some of the green powder around it, giving a husky laugh when Harris sneezed.
“Is it okay that we’re doing this here?” Jane asked uncertainly.
“I’m friends with the owner,” Dee replied. “She doesn’t care if I make a mess, as long as I come armed with baked goods.”
Jane sat sharply upright. “You have cookies?
Here?
”
“They will be your reward,
if
you cooperate.” Dee looked so smug she was practically purring. “Everybody hold hands,” she ordered serenely. “Jane’s about to knock over that blue crystal in the middle.”
Jane glowered at the blackmail, but she obediently reached out her hands. Dee’s was warm and calloused, Harris’s cool and smooth. She ignored the little spark that skittered down her spine when he pressed his palm to hers. She closed her eyes and tried to quiet her mind. The shop smelled like green tea and patchouli, and a dog was yapping its little head off a few floors above them.
“Every inch of your body holds magic.” Dee’s husky voice was hypnotic. “Begin at your feet, and look for it.”
Maybe when all this is over and I’m tucked away on some private island, I’ll get a dog,
Jane thought to the pink darkness behind her eyelids.
Maybe a boxer or one of those wiener-looking ones. A dachshund?
“Focus. Feel the power in your feet.”
A spark shot through her left ankle. Soft as cat whiskers, it twanged and purred and tickled her Achilles tendon.
Or maybe a Doberman or a rottweiler, in case Lynne ever comes looking for me. Do they make Doberweilers?
“Focus, Jane. Keep your mind on your power.”
Jane sighed, but concentrated on emptying her mind. She tried to put her thoughts on a cloud and let them float away.
“Good. Now, gather it up and let it flow to your knees and spine,” Dee intoned.
Jane’s spinal column shivered with electricity.
“Okay, now lift it gently and concentrate every scrap of power behind your eyes.”
Suddenly the warmth spreading through her body took flight and nestled behind Jane’s eyelids, which vibrated as if her skin had been hit with thousands of tiny shocks.
“Ow!” Jane’s eyes flew open. “That hurt!”
Dee grinned. “Small price to pay for having ‘the power.’ ”
Jane scooped up a book and threatened to throw it at her.
“Hold hands!” Dee reminded her insistently, and Jane was pretty sure that Harris was trying not to laugh. Another jolt ran through her stomach, but this one had nothing to do with magic. Were Dee and Harris . . . flirting?
Dee pushed a strand of dark hair behind her ear. “I want you to gather your power again and focus every prickle of magic on moving the crystal off the pile.”
Jane nodded and fixed the blue stone with a ferocious stare. Her eyes narrowed and she refused to blink, even though the dusty air was making her eyes water.
Nothing happened.
She sighed and slumped forward.
Bet Lynne could do it on the first try.
Harris squeezed her hand reassuringly. “You can do it.”
“Copper Top is right. I know you have it in you.” Dee centered the crystal once more.
“Thanks, Elvira,” Harris answered sardonically.
Irritated, Jane stiffened her spine back upright. Focusing intently, she gathered the magic again, clenching her jaw grimly as she fought to hold on to the electricity. It instantly slipped through her fingers. She blew through her lips and stared balefully at Dee. “Okay, I suck at this.”
“You don’t suck at
this
,” Harris supplied helpfully, stretching his long legs out to the side of his undersized chair. “You just suck at focusing.”
Jane stuck her tongue out at him.
“Try again,” he urged gently, and she felt herself begin to glow under his sparkling green eyes.
Stop that,
she told herself firmly, but her self didn’t seem to be listening.
“You’ve mentioned that things around you tend to break when you’re upset. Tap into that feeling, if you can,” Dee suggested. “What makes you mad?”
Lynne.
Jane’s fists automatically clenched and her lips curved into a frown. Crossing her legs, Jane took a deep breath and thought about everything she hated about her soon-to-be mother-in-law.
Lynne picking that stupid pouf dress. Lynne cutting those annoying egg-white rectangles. Lynne making her son seduce me. Lynne running Maeve down.
Suddenly, all Jane could hear was the pounding of her heart, and all she could see was her targeted crystal. It was blue, but one corner was filmier than the others, so milky as to be almost white. There was a flaw running most of the way through the middle, and a few smaller ones at the poles. Electricity crackled in Jane’s ears and she sent sparking mental feelers out toward the crystal to study it further, to bring it closer to her eyes.
The crystal shuddered.
Then it began to swim and waver, and it seemed as though sparks were inside the crystal and it was glowing as if it were on fire. Then dark spots filled Jane’s eyes. She fell limply out of her chair, her head striking the thin industrial carpet.
When she came to, Harris and Dee were leaning over her, grinning from ear to ear.
“I fainted?” she asked, but her leaden tongue turned it into something more like “Ah fayagh?” She grimaced.
“Not before you moved the thing,” Harris told her proudly, fanning her with one of Dee’s paperbacks.
She glanced at Dee for confirmation. Dee, her mouth so wide it looked as though her smile would split her face, stuffed a cookie into Jane’s mouth, which Jane took as a yes.
In the midst of their gloating, Jane caught sight of the book that Harris was using to fan her face. She tried to grab it out of the air, but her reflexes sucked, and instead she wound up brushing her hand lightly across Harris’s smooth chest. He didn’t seem to mind, and a small part of her liked that fact.
Down, girl.
She refocused her attention on the title waving back and forth in front of her face:
A True History of Witches and Magick
, by Rosalie Goddard.
“This,” she whispered, tapping the book lightly with two fingers. She was happy that her mouth seemed to be a little more obedient now, but there was no need to push her luck with unnecessary words. “We start here.”
Dee snapped into action as crisply as a soldier, all traces of laughter and cookie bribes vanishing instantly. She slid the book into Jane’s bulky purse, leaving Harris clutching empty air in confusion. “Love that one,” she chirped. “Misty—that’s the owner—has Goddard’s diaries in the back, so I’ll take those. And Harris, you need to start talking to your family, any time you don’t need to be with your sister. Jane, get me a list of Goddard’s sources to cross-check as soon as you can, but in the meantime your main responsibility is to practice your little blond head off. Okay. Everybody know their jobs?”
The three of them glanced around at each other, their eyes grave and their jaws set determinedly. If this was a war, they had just become an army.