The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

tapestry-covered love seat. A damp puddle spread slowly from its black-and-tan folds, but Jane ignored it and stomped down the hall.
    I can’t believe I nearly told her
.
    Anne might have believed her about the Dorans – she might have even been willing to come to New York with her. But there was no way she would have taken such a major step in her life without alerting the people she obviously felt closest to in the world . . . André and Katrin. And considering that the Dalcaşcus had been keeping Anne away from Lynne for quite some time, there was no way they would let mother and daughter be reunited . . . especially not now, when they were so close to the ‘merger’ they had been working on for months. They needed Lynne to stay just weak enough to need them. Their hunt for Jane herself was further proof of that.
    She stopped at her little kitchenette and turned on the flame below a sleek silver kettle. The water seemed to take for ever to boil, but Jane watched the kettle without moving a single muscle until clear steam began to curl out of its spout. She reached into the cupboard for a leaf-green mug, but nearly knocked it to the ground with her still-trembling hands. She finally got it upright on the granite counter, set a teabag inside, and filled it halfway with hot water. After a moment’s careful staring at her hands, she dug a flight-size bottle of bourbon out of the minibar and emptied it into the mug. She continued down the hall to her bedroom, holding her drink in both hands and feeling the warmth of it seep into her flesh.
    What would happen, she wondered, if the Dalcaşcus did find Jane Boyle? If they thought they could use her somehow – or that they might be able to sometime in the future – they might just erase her memory the way she knew now they had done with Annette’s, and then stash her somewhere ‘just in case’.
Or they might just kill me outright.
    Time was running out for her. There were only nine days left of the Forvrangdan orb’s power at the most, and she wasn’t sure that it would even last that long. She had narrowly avoided an open war with the Romanian clan by not confronting André, but that reprieve would expire as soon as her disguise did. There wasn’t a manhunt on for Ella . . . but the one for Jane was already well under way.
    She stopped in front of the full-length mirror that covered the closet door. Standing an arm’s-length away at first, then with her nose just inches from the glass, she inspected her face.
Broad cheekbones. Pink bow of a mouth. Long black eyelashes.
She stared and stared, until she had to admit that she wasn’t entirely sure any more what she was looking for. Her new face and her old one felt equally unfamiliar, and at the same time equally normal. It was impossible to tell if her looks were changing, and she turned away from the mirror in disgust.
    Her almond-shaped eyes filled with tears. She took a long drink of her amber-coloured tea, but didn’t taste it. Her plan had seemed like a wild-goose chase at first, but as more and more pieces had clicked into place, she had got more and more confident.
I thought I was making the impossible happen,
she sighed miserably,
but I was just getting lucky.
She sank down onto her bed, wishing that the squishy mattress would swallow her whole, and curled up into a little ball.
    There was no way in with Anne, she knew: nothing foolproof to convince her to trust a stranger over the people she had trusted her entire life. No one would agree to that without at least
talking
to their surrogate family about the accusations, and certainly no one as emotionally dependent on them as Anne had seemed to be.
    I wish I hadn’t found her,
she thought, burying her face in her starched pillowcase. She would have been better off taking the head start that Malcolm had tried to give her, resigning herself to a life on the run. After everything she had done, she was right back where she’d started. And it felt even worse than it had a month ago.
    She propelled herself upward with her palms and rolled off the bed and onto her feet, taking another generous sip of her spiked tea for good measure. There was no point in staying in London any more; there was nothing she could possibly accomplish there. She hauled her navy suitcase out of the closet and began throwing in clothes by the armload. ‘Even a fake baroness really doesn’t need
this
many shoes,’ she muttered angrily as she tried unsuccessfully to stuff a