The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

. .’ She trailed off uncertainly.
    Jane unfolded her legs from the nubby white couch and spread her toes over the cool, glossy finish of the bleached hardwood floor. ‘Now’s good,’ she insisted gently, drifting over to the spot in front of the windows where hundreds of candles marked out a strange symbol on the floor. The view through the windows shifted slightly as she moved, and Jane felt an almost seasick light-headedness.
What’s some archaic Swedish mark doing on the eleventh floor of a building in Manhattan?
Or was it even Swedish to start with? Ambika and her daughters had lived and died before there were maps.
    Misty appeared beside her with the orb wrapped carefully back up in its shroud.
Magic-proof,
Jane realized.
The cloth saved my coffee table from whatever happened to that pigeon feather.
    Dee approached on her other side, the growing starlight washing her eyes and face out to the same dark silver. ‘It starts with blood,’ she told Jane softly, and there was something even more silver in her hands. She handed it to Jane, who recognized the two-edged blade that Dee had called an ‘athame’. They had used it to help focus Jane’s mind when she had first learned to use her power, but never used the edges for what Jane realized was probably their actual purpose.
Lynne did, though.
Jane suddenly saw her mother-in-law as vividly as if she were on the deck of the harbour-cruise boat with her again, watching the older witch slide something half-seen into her purse; watching her blood drip in the near darkness. Lynne did things with her power that Jane hadn’t been able to even imagine, but now she was beginning to. Whatever they were about to do was major magic, and Jane could feel the Earth turning ever so slowly ten storeys beneath her bare feet.
    Of course it starts with blood.
    She held out her hand to Dee, who held up the athame and began to whisper. The starlight flashed wildly as she spun the blade downward, and the spell began.

Nine
    J ANE WOKE UP in her bed. She stared at the white ceiling for a while, feeling powerless to even shift her eyes to the skylight a few feet away. Every muscle was sore and even her lungs felt ragged, as if she had been running. Or screaming.
Maybe I was doing both,
she thought curiously.
There was a spell . . . wasn’t there?
    It had lasted for hours, or maybe she had dreamed the whole thing. Her muscles and joints protested loudly as she turned her entire body towards her window; the stars she remembered were still out there, although the sky behind them was fully, finally dark now. She slid carefully off the bed, wobbling a little on her bare feet. Her fingertips brushed the soft, powdery paint of the wall, and she followed it, coaxing her body to stay upright with each step. By the time she reached her little bathroom, she felt fairly confident that her legs would cooperate, and she risked letting her fingers leave the wall in order to flick a light switch. Clumsily, she hit both at once, and the overhead bulb came on at the same time as the softer ones embedded around the mirror above the sink.
    Damn.
She shrank back instinctively, shielding her sensitive eyes with her other hand until they adjusted to the fierce glow.
Those nut-jobs turned me into a vampire, probably.
She peeked out from behind her hand and found that she could see without squinting now, but she still hesitated, afraid to face the mirror.
    ‘I can’t just stand in the doorway all night,’ she announced reasonably, and then shuddered: her voice wasn’t noticeably higher or lower, but it was absolutely different: the same note produced by a new instrument. More curious than afraid now, she pulled herself forward into the bathroom, lurching to a graceless stop in front of the lit mirror.
    She’s so tall,
she thought, half hysterically.
I am, I mean.
Her new body had at least eight or nine inches more in its legs and torso than her old one had, but not noticeably more weight to go around. Her new, model-esque height came with pointed shoulders, small ripples of breasts, a long, flat stomach, and stretched-teardrop hips. Above her sharp collarbones, her face was unexpectedly girlish. Her jaw was wide, her cheeks short and round. She had a plump bow of a mouth and sparkling black eyes, which matched her straight, shoulder-skimming black hair perfectly. Most striking, though, was her skin. Jane, who had spent her life with the kind of hopelessly unfashionable peaches-and-cream skin that