The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

windswept beach. In reality, Dee had told Jane, Misty Travers (née Lois Trapinski) had been born on the Lower East Side, just blocks from where her occult bookstore now stood. She had apparently brought about half of the shop’s more private stock with her: crystals of all sizes and colours formed a large circle around the two women, a bundle of sage smouldered acrid smoke in a copper bowl off to one side, and Misty was carefully measuring out tiny vials of something clear and viscous.
    The two of them looked up at Jane simultaneously, and she could see their mouths moving, but the gentle buzz of the magic in her ears muffled their voices. Jane waved as a response, and they seemed to understand, so she joined them inside the crystals and set the glass unicorn in the middle before tucking the dress around her thighs. Misty handed her and Dee a full vial of the clear goo, keeping one for herself. She mimed drinking it, arching a brown eyebrow at the other two to make sure that they understood.
    When Misty and Dee tipped their vials into their mouths, she did the same. It tasted like nothing at all, but as it spread down her throat, she felt her mind detaching even further from her seated body. It felt like she might float away entirely, and she reached blindly for the hands of the women beside her. She found them so easily that they must have been doing the same, and she felt Dee’s warm, calloused hand and Misty’s thin, soft one in hers. She could see, out of the corner of her eye, Misty chanting fervently, and sent the magic she had been holding in her hands flowing through the other two, starting circles in both directions, which began and ended in her heart.
    The crystals around them started to glow, and the buzzing in Jane’s ears grew so loud she almost moved her hands to cover them. But the unicorn was starting to glow, too, and she held on. She kept sending the magic around their Circle until, with a tearing pain, everything around her was gone. She couldn’t see or hear; she couldn’t feel her own body any more. All that she could feel was a nauseating burning in every inch of her, and although she tried to struggle, without her physical form there was nothing for her to move. When the pain finally, mercifully stopped, it was a long moment before she was able to ask herself why. But her vision slowly refocused itself, and she guessed that she must have arrived at her destination.
    Instead of her airy, soothing new apartment, Jane was in a room with one grimy window. She tried to look around, but it was as if her head were stuck in one position, her eyes fixed on a sitcom on a small television with an old-fashioned curved screen. She tried to reach out magically to find Malcolm’s mind, but her magic was as immobile as the rest of her.
Because I’m not really here,
she reminded herself.
I’m just seeing Malcolm—except I’m not. Where is he in this pit?
    Her view lurched and changed, and she was moving through the tiny room at an alarming rate.
I’m seeing
with
Malcolm,
she realized, remembering Dee’s attempt to explain the spell.
I’m seeing what he sees.
    She scanned the room, searching her peripheral vision for any clue to where he might be. The apartment was shabby, with bare walls and an unappealing hodgepodge of furniture. Jane saw a single bed in one corner and guessed that Malcolm’s place was a studio, and a rather small one at that. Clothes were scattered around carelessly: a puddle of geometric black and white lay half on, half off the bed, a pair of slim loafers by the coffee table, something red and shiny draped on the back of a wooden chair.
    I’m missing things,
her brain complained, but it was impossible to really take anything in while Malcolm’s body was sweeping her along. Just before she was certain that she would crash into a dingy, off-white wall, she turned sharply towards an opening that she hadn’t even seen.
    Malcolm was in a tiny bathroom now, pooling slightly reddish water in his hands before splashing it onto his face. His hands looked like she remembered, with the same golden tone under their skin, but they were slimmer and smoother. Jane felt a knot forming in her disembodied stomach. Something about this vision was wrong.
    Jane felt her head being raised, and she found herself looking in a water-spotted mirror. She saw Malcolm’s dark, liquid eyes first, then his square jaw and dark-gold waves of hair. But the similarities ended there, because the face in