The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

for, and she smiled a little to herself.
Everything will be just fine,
her magic whispered, and she sent it through the door as easily as if the hinges had been standing empty.
    The first thing she encountered inside was a smooth, blank wall that her magic couldn’t find any purchase on.
Anne,
she decided immediately. Her mind felt just like Katrin’s had, back when Jane had thought of her as ‘Mystery Witch’. The sameness reassured her, and she slid her mind away from the slick surface of Anne’s. Feeling her way instinctually, she moved back and forth in a slow zigzag through the rest of the room. Although she couldn’t see the inside of the flat, she remembered the basic floor plan from the day before. She suspected that Anne was on the dusty floral couch, and felt pretty sure her mind was sweeping the rest of the seating area in her tiny living room. After a long few moments, she found another person in the room, closer to Anne than she had initially expected to find anyone.
    That person’s mind was a perfectly protected blank, just like Anne’s.
    Jane’s magic recoiled so hard that her head made a dull cracking noise against the wall behind her; her entire body felt bruised.
    There was another witch in the room.
    Had Lynne found Annette first somehow? Was it one of her twin cousins in the living room? Katrin was still in New York, trying to find Caroline Chase. There were surely other witches in the world that Jane didn’t know about yet, but there weren’t supposed to be very many. The odds that one of them would just happen to be in Anne’s flat right as Jane was about to reintroduce her to her family seemed astronomically small.
    With all her senses as alert as she could get them to be over the storm of adrenaline flooding her system, Jane took a couple of hesitant, tiptoeing steps towards the dark green door. A burst of laughter from the other side nearly sent her scurrying around the corner, but in the same moment, she realized who she was hearing. She stalked back to the door, forgetting to be cautious in her shock, and pressed her ear against the cold paint.
    ‘Kathy was so sorry she couldn’t come,’ André rumbled on the other side of the door. ‘She worries about you, you know.’
    Kathy, Kathy, Kathy . . .
Jane’s heart flipped. Kathy was Anne’s so-called best friend.
Small world,
she thought grimly, trying to wedge her body a little more firmly against the door. Anne murmured something in an understanding tone, but her voice was too low for Jane to make out the words.
    Surely André knew who Anne really was – he wasn’t the type to befriend solitary orphans just for fun. And besides, his sister would have been able to tell immediately that Anne was a witch, and Harris had said there was no one in André’s life who hadn’t been vetted by Katrin.
    ‘We’re working on a huge deal in New York,’ André replied to a question Jane couldn’t hear. ‘Kathy has taken over a lot of the family stuff from Mom the last few years, so she’s running the show. But when this trip to Alsace came up, I figured it was a good chance to check up on you.’
    Jane’s heart began to pound so hard she thought it must be audible through the door, and she pulled back a little.
    ‘She’s always been so clever,’ Anne answered sadly. ‘I’m sure they must need her just constantly.’
    ‘Mmhmm.’ André cleared his throat. ‘I’m lucky to have such a dedicated sister, or else I’d never get any time off, myself.’
    ‘You never seem to as it is,’ Anne murmured.
    Jane’s mind spun chaotically.
Katrin
did
vet this ‘friend’ of André’s. Katrin has known her since she showed up at the orphanage in London after going missing across the ocean. With amnesia. And invisible to Lynne’s magic.
    ‘I’m just sorry you can’t stay a little,’ Anne said wistfully. ‘It’s been, what, nearly four years now? Of course, that visit was just Kathy. So I guess you guys trade off seeing me.’ She giggled a little, but it sounded both strangely controlled and a little hysterical.
    ‘You look well,’ André replied absently, and Jane seethed. The Dalcaşcus, she was quite sure, were the ‘friends’ who had taken an interest in little Anne from the beginning, the ones she referred to as ‘like family.’ The ones who had looked high and low for her real parents, and kept tabs on her in the years since her mysterious arrival.
She might see them as family, but to them she’s something else