The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

that had originally arrived from Gran’s farmhouse. It didn’t stay intact for long, though: she began by trying to pull off the paper and then, in her eagerness, wound up ripping straight through the cardboard beneath. Crisscrosses of tape held it together in unexpected and sometimes inconvenient ways, but she was determined, and in a few seconds she was looking directly at the last remnants of her inheritance.
    It didn’t look like much, she had to admit, but it didn’t really matter: everything in the box had belonged to Gran, and that made it special to her. There were a few books in English, more in French, and a floral fabric-covered one that she set aside, noting that it looked like a diary of some kind. There was a pair of reading glasses with grey plastic frames in a soft leather pouch, two glass paperweights with flowers suspended inside, an ancient-looking Polaroid camera with no film in it, a little box that held a few seashells, and a collection of broken and dried-out pens. Jane lifted each item carefully out of the wreckage of the cardboard box, lining them up on the floor in front of her. The resulting display made her feel as though Gran were in the room with her, and she closed her eyes in a moment of pain. She reached out blindly until her hand encountered the cold surface of one of the paperweights, and let her mind slide back to the old farmhouse at the foot of the mountain.
    She remembered the way that the dusty sunlight had fallen sideways through the small windows, illuminating the pink anemone in one glass bubble, the yellow rose in the other. She had held them up, turning them to catch the light, transfixed by the way they seemed to glow from within. Gran would be in the kitchen, filling the entire house with the smell of cabbage and boiled ham, or she would be in the living room, nestled in one of her overstuffed armchairs, the grey reading glasses perched on her nose. Jane’s hands balled into fists as she opened her eyes. No matter how well things had turned out, she had already lost so much to this conflict. She was free to start over now, but with no family to return to, starting over was her only real choice.
    She picked up the diary and flipped it over in her hands. The fabric was faded, but still cheerful, with white, red, and pink flowers overlapping one another on a periwinkle-blue background. Jane felt a little more apprehensive than she had expected: Gran had always presented such an intimidating, closed-off façade that Jane was almost afraid to find out what had been underneath. Even now that she knew what Gran had been hiding, and what she had been hiding Jane from, it was still hard to shake the feeling that she might regret invading her guardian’s privacy. She took a deep breath and opened the front cover.
    An empty white page stared back at her.
    She flipped slowly through the blank pages, deflated. She felt sure, just as she opened each, that there was writing on it, but there wasn’t. She closed her eyes, feeling a little foolish for getting her hopes up. But once she wasn’t looking at it, the book seemed to thrum and almost tremble in her hands.
Something is here,
she insisted to herself.
    She wondered wildly what would happen if she tried the same location spell with this book that she had performed on Annette’s glass unicorn and then with her stuffed rabbit. Would she see through the eyes of Gran’s body, buried in the little cemetery of Saint-Croix, or would she see something different, something about what had become of her grandmother’s soul? She felt a chill at the thought, but she felt her magic begin to form a circuit, passing faster and faster between her heart and the book.
    I don’t want to see the present, though,
she thought almost pleadingly.
I just want to understand the past a little better.
    It came to her in a flash: she had done exactly that once, without even meaning to. The force of her magic had shattered Annette’s unicorn into countless shards, but before it had exploded, she had seen the girl the object had once belonged to. Without giving herself time to think, Jane gripped the diary, making sure to press Gran’s silver ring against it as hard as she could. Then she poured herself into the diary, shoving her mind into the grain of the paper, flattening herself into its lengthwise plane.
    Images rushed past too fast for her to see them, although she craned to look. But she was being pulled deeper, somewhere more still, and when