The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

shortest route to the stairs that time, which hadn’t led through Charles’s living space, but there was only so much attic left between where they were now and the other side of the staircase.
We’ll take the long way back,
Jane promised herself absently. Then she noticed that Charles had stopped. At the sight of the room he had led her to, Jane stopped in her tracks as well and stared.
    The walls were lined with shelves, which were filled with orderly rows of boxes. The boxes on the floor formed considerably less orderly stacks; there was probably room for a person to walk between them, but it didn’t look entirely safe to try. Most of them didn’t have lids, so the corners that weren’t perfectly aligned sank into the boxes below, creating Tower of Pisa-esque stacks of cardboard that wound first one way, then another. Each one was labelled with initials, and Jane could see papers, ribbons, trophies, clay sculptures, and stuffed animals peeking out of the gaps between them.
Evil psycho witches keep crayon drawings?
    Apparently, they did: at least some of the boxes were marked ‘MWD’.
Malcolm Walter Doran.
She held her breath as she dug one of them out of its stack, but although there was some dangerous wobbling, she managed to get to it without knocking anything over. A model of the solar system, a bunch of notebooks, and a single shin guard were inside; Jane spun Saturn thoughtfully. ‘They never throw anything away, do they?’
    ‘Sister.’ Charles shrugged, digging with a yellow fingernail deep scratches into a corner of one of Blake Helding’s boxes.
    Jane smiled in spite of herself: in his own strange way, Charles kept coming through for her.
Plus it was kind of nice to be recognized, especially by someone who isn’t currently trying to kill me.
She knew how important it was, and that it was quite temporary, but after two weeks of seeing a stranger in every mirror, her disguise was starting to get to her. If it weren’t for Jane’s face periodically popping up next to Malcolm’s in various tabloids, she felt she might start to forget what she looked like: it was already hard to remember the contours of her real eyes.
    ‘Do you know her middle name?’ she asked hopefully, but she had already begun to search through the stacks. Charles was too busy widening the hole in his box to acknowledge her question, but it didn’t really matter: Jane knew she would recognize two out of the three initials. She wandered haphazardly through the piles of boxes, trying to make sure she saw all their labels. They were all so similar that they blurred together, and she suspected that she was covering the same territory multiple times. One of the boxes even seemed to glow a little, and Jane blinked a few times. But her vision didn’t clear: the box was brighter than the ones around it, as if lit from within. Jane craned her neck until she found the marking on it: ‘ALD’. Jane spun around, trying to take in as many of the boxes as she could at once. Two others were glowing faintly as well, and she felt a silly grin break across her face.
Three boxes of Annette’s things – things that she didn’t intentionally give up – way more than I even need.
    She pulled one out and began rooting through it, but it was mostly clothes: practisal shirts and shorts, stylish tunics and leggings, and a blue velvet dress with lacework that took Jane’s breath away. ‘The world’s best-dressed six-year-old,’ she muttered, replacing the box in its stack. Clothes probably weren’t personal enough, she guessed: whatever she used had to be something that Annette would still have considered ‘hers’ no matter how much time had passed. She pulled the next box off one of the shelves along the wall, and it was a gold mine: a leather jewellery box full of silver chains and stick-on earrings, two pairs of jelly shoes, a doll that looked homemade, five dusty, velvet-lined boxes with glass figurines in the same style as the unicorn that Jane’s first spell had broken, and a stuffed rabbit so worn that it must have been laundered thirty times. There was even more underneath, but she didn’t bother to dig through it.
    ‘Thank you, Charles,’ she whispered sincerely. He stayed half hidden behind a stack of boxes and still wouldn’t look at her, and his shyness made her feel extra-brave. She tugged a pretty knot-work ring off her left pinky, held her breath, and tiptoed over to him. She thought she saw a faint smile on his