The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

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 centre 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