The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

apparently wasn’t favourable enough to warrant Anne slowing down to chat.
    Jane made herself stop staring at the busy waitress, instead turning to the dusty window below its neon Guinness sign. She had been examining her reflection almost compulsively since she had left André at Hibiscus the night before, but she hadn’t come to any definite conclusions. Her hair was still dark and shoulder-skimming, her cheekbones still wide, her breasts and hips still narrow.
There’s something around the eyes, though,
she fretted, leaning closer to the window. She touched a couple of walnut fingertips to her eyebrows, pulling the skin gently first one way, then another.
    A second face appeared behind Jane’s in the murky reflection, and she whipped around. Anne refilled Jane’s empty coffee cup, and then swept on before Jane could catch her eye.
If I hadn’t been so busy staring at myself . . .
She bit her lip; Anne’s wavy golden hair had been close enough to touch.
    Jane sipped her coffee, and immediately regretted it. It was bitter and watery and oddly acidic, and the more refills she got the worse they tasted.
I should just tell her,
she thought as Anne passed by her again with a tray of empty pint glasses, so close that Jane could have grabbed her free hand. The small lunch crowd had thinned out to almost nothing; it was as good a time as any.
I could just . . .
    The neon sign in the pub’s window flickered warningly, and Jane tried to suppress the magic she realized was starting to build up in her system. The difficulty was sobering: it made Jane remember her one very good reason for not startling Anne. Before Jane had known about her own powers, she had thought she simply had atrocious luck with electronics – especially when she was upset. Once she had found out her real family history, she had guessed that Gran’s magic had manifested her uncontrolled emotions as weather. She had no idea what Annette’s magic might do when the girl was agitated, but it would be safest for all concerned to keep the drama to a minimum. She pressed her hands flat on the scarred wood of the table, working to calm her power.
    Or
, she decided suddenly,
I just get two birds with one, you know, whatever.
    As Anne rushed by again, this time with a stack of dirty plates balanced on one arm and two glasses pinched in her other hand, Jane lashed her magic out like a lasso. It caught Anne just above the ankle, and Jane watched in horrified happiness as the girl, the glasses, and the stack of plates wavered for a long moment and then crashed to the ground.
    Jane bounced off her stool as Anne struggled to her feet, wiping broken glass from her clothes. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked, trying to hide both the guilt and the glee in her voice. It had been a mean trick, but it had also been kind of spectacular.
    ‘Fine,’ Anne snapped, flinching away. Then she glanced up at Jane, and another flicker of recognition crossed her face. Her whole posture relaxed, and Jane smiled automatically at the friendlier body language. ‘Sorry about this mess,’ Anne went on, swerving around the bar and then returning with a broom.
    ‘It’s so not your fault,’ Jane insisted as supportively as she could. ‘I think you caught a chair leg; the guys at that table shouldn’t have left them pushed out like that.’
    Anne shook her head ruefully as she pushed the largest pieces of glass and china into the dustpan first. ‘No one has to leave chairs anywhere.’ She smiled to herself, as if she were enjoying some private joke. ‘I’m cursed.’
    ‘Me, too,’ Jane blurted out impulsively.
I thought I was cursed for most of my life, anyway.
She wondered frantically how Anne’s magic manifested. If she didn’t know what was happening, unintentional magic could easily seem like a string of insanely bad luck.
    Anne looked at her curiously before returning to her dustpan. ‘I suppose plenty of people think so,’ she offered noncommittally, her waves of hair hiding most of her face.
    ‘No, really,’ Jane insisted, inching forward on her bench. ‘Electronics hate me. One time I swear I blew up a whole espresso machine.’
    Anne glanced nervously at the little drip coffee maker behind the bar, then back at Jane. ‘Just the once, though,’ Jane checked herself, her full mouth set in a straight, serious line.
    ‘Just once that was coffee-related,’ Jane assured her. ‘But I
am
cursed with electronics in general. We should start a support group – or at