The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

salt shaker from Jane’s reach. After a brief hesitation, she moved the pepper, as well, and then the sad, still-smoking cell phone. Jane, left with nothing handy to fidget with, rested her hands awkwardly on her thighs. Dee cleared her throat, and Jane looked up expectantly. ‘So. We need someone who Ly— Who no one in the house will recognize. We need someone who either doesn’t know why they’re really there, or whose mind is protected. It would also be nice if they’d been in the house before, so they don’t waste all their time on places that obviously aren’t the room they’re looking for. Or, if not, then they should be someone that the people in the house expect to see there, so they don’t have to hurry back out again.’
    ‘Umm . . . are you guys, like, done?’
    Jane jumped, clutching her plastic fork like a weapon. She turned to see a tween in a green vinyl raincoat, with expertly moussed hair, holding an overflowing paper plate and tapping her Mary Jane-shod foot impatiently. Dee bristled, but they’d finished eating a while ago, and the restaurant was packed.
    ‘We’re going,’ Jane assured the girl, who turned to wave over a cluster of similarly trendy friends. Jane and Dee tossed away their plates and napkins and stepped out into the cool night air. When they were safely away from the small crowd on the restaurant’s steps, Jane lit a cigarette – one of three she allowed herself each week – and returned to their previous conversation. ‘We don’t know anyone who meets all of those criteria, but we can’t just toss out the whole idea because of that.’
    Dee nodded. ‘Technically your Mystery Witch is the closest person we know who fits the bill, but you probably shouldn’t ask her.’
    ‘Agreed.’ Jane tried to imagine recruiting Mystery Witch. It was the sort of thing Lynne might do, she decided, and maybe even the kind of thing she herself might do after a few more decades of being the most powerful person she knew. Right now, though, it felt like suicide.
    ‘Jane,’ Dee said hesitantly, and Jane turned towards her. ‘I’ve been practising some stuff on my own while I was at the bookstore. Not magic,’ she rushed on when Jane cocked a bewildered eyebrow, ‘but not just research, either. I’ve been trying to learn that thing you said Malcolm could do, to hide his thoughts from his mother. Locking secrets in his mind somewhere that she couldn’t see them. I thought I might need it someday, so I’ve been practising for three weeks. I think I’m getting the hang of it.’
    ‘Malcolm had been practising that, too, for more than thirty years,’ Jane reminded her, ‘and he still had the good sense to stay the hell away from Lynne during the month when he really had something to hide.’ Dee looked disappointed, and Jane felt a pang of guilt for her flippant dismissal. ‘I’ll practise it with you if you want,’ she added more gently. ‘It would be a really good thing for you to be able to do – it was smart of you to think of it. I wish that I had suggested it myself. But it won’t be enough to keep all three of those bitches out of your head indefinitely, and that’s what you’d have to do if they caught you. Not to mention the fact that I can’t cope with the possibility that they might catch you running this kind of risk for me, period.’
    Dee sighed. ‘I know. It was worth a shot, but I knew you’d say that. What we really need is your insides with someone else’s outsides. Like one of the staff’s, or some high-society friend of the Dorans’ that they’d
invite
into their house.’
    ‘Could I be royalty?’ Jane asked cheerfully, hopping agilely out of the way of a fortysomething man with a mohawk. Although it was fully dark, she could still feel the damp springiness from her morning in the park, and she inhaled the night air deeply. ‘I always used to pretend that I was really some missing princess, like Anastasia, being raised by my grandmother the exiled queen. Except in some versions she was the crazy maid who’d kidnapped me, but that was just when she was being extra-overprotective, which makes a lot more sense to me these days than it did when I was a kid.’
    Dee stopped walking, and for a moment Jane was afraid she had tripped. But her friend was just standing stock-still on the concrete, her amber eyes far away. The neon sign of a nearby bar changed her black hair into a collage of red, blue, and gold. ‘Like a glamour,’ she