The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2) by Gabriella Pierce Read Free Book Online Page B

was, unmistakably, a woman’s.
    Jane shoved herself backward out of the mind she was in, scrambling on her absent knees and hands for her own body. Her hands came back first, nearly glowing with the spell’s unspent magic. She wrenched them free of her two friends’ startled grips and reached violently for the unicorn. At first, she wasn’t even sure why she was holding it, and then she had no idea what to do next, but the magic in her veins was feeding on her fear and whispering secrets to her. She closed her eyes and opened her mind, forcing it into the curves and twists of the glass in her hands.
    She saw things then: little fingers tearing at wrapping paper to reveal a blue box, a little girl with dark-gold hair dancing around a lavish parlour with the unicorn held up to her eyes, a chestnut-haired mother almost vanished down the hall while a nanny held the girl’s hand, a sun-swept bedroom with a view of the ocean, and Malcolm, barely twelve but already growing tall, watching older boys playing soccer on the beach.
He tried to get her to stay and watch, but Annette wanted to play in the sand.
    The images swirled sickeningly and resolved, reordered themselves. There was a distant explosion, and someone must have screamed; it might have been her. Jane saw the face in the mirror again, and then she was completely back in her living room with Dee and Misty. They had backed outside of the crystal circle, and were brushing shards of glass from their clothes. Jane felt a stinging on her face and her now-empty hands, and realized slowly that the energy she had poured into the little unicorn must have shattered it.
    ‘Annette,’ she whispered hoarsely, and Dee’s head snapped towards her. She stepped closer, trying to help Jane wipe off the glass and blood. Jane held up her hands to ward her off. ‘Malcolm’s little sister. I saw her. Annette Doran is alive.’

Six
    J ANE SIPPED A banana-guava smoothie and watched a pair of Taylor Momsen-wannabes struggle through Washington Square Park on perilously high, studded stilettos.
‘Healthy’ my ass,
she thought cheerfully as she swallowed the sugary drink.
Just crushing up a vitamin in it doesn’t change the fact that it has as many calories as a three-course meal.
Dee had gone out to lunch, and Jane had burned farfalle in a halfhearted attempt to prove that she still kind of remembered how to cook. She didn’t intend to try again. Dee was just too good at it for Jane to struggle through measuring and chopping and washing and all that just to be left with a weird, blackened mess in a dirty kitchen.
    Besides, it was nice enough weather for sitting outside, and Jane had been driving herself almost stir-crazy since her misfired spell the morning before. She had paced and muttered and tried to put her thoughts down on paper, but instead had wound up drawing scrolls and vines and theatrical masks that had eventually spilled out of the margins and covered the entire page. Finally, Dee had snapped. ‘I’m going out,’ she’d announced, ‘with or without you.’
    Probably
with
Harris, from the way she was checking her phone every two minutes,
Jane had realized after the fact, but she reminded herself that that was even more reason for her to stay away. Dee had promised to keep Jane’s real situation to herself unless she decided to do something reckless, and Jane had been far too shell-shocked by the results of their spell to plan anything. But some dedicated shopping, a tuna sandwich, and now an intense session of people-watching felt like exactly what she needed to get to the bottom of what she had seen.
    How is Annette Doran alive?
To the best of Jane’s knowledge, Annette had drowned at the age of six while her family was vacationing in the Hamptons. While Lynne and the other grown-ups had got an early cocktail hour under way on the veranda, Malcolm had been left in charge of his little sister. But preteen Malcolm’s attention had wandered, and then Annette was just .