The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

she finally landed on what felt like solid ground, there was only one other image in front of her. ‘Gran,’ she whispered, nearly choking on the word. Celine Boyle nodded back at her.
    Jane risked a glance downward, but whatever was beneath her feet was invisible. There was nothing but darkness on all sides of her, except that Gran stood in the same darkness, looking back at Jane expectantly.
    ‘I’m not real,’ Gran cautioned her when Jane started forward, holding up a warning hand. Jane stopped obediently; she could tell now that there was something insubstantial about her grandmother, and also somehow ageless. She didn’t look real.
    ‘But you’re here,’ Jane told her stubbornly, and then felt exasperated with herself; even in the magical non-presence of her deceased grandmother her instinct was to act like a child.
    ‘I’m a memory,’ Gran replied simply. ‘I’m Celine Boyle’s diary. You are Jane Boyle, and you have the power to read this, but I have no recollection of you gaining the knowledge.’
    Jane thought about that for a moment. She had no idea when Gran had made this remarkable spell, but Gran had died before Jane had learned about magic. So, of course, the version of her in the book wouldn’t expect to encounter Jane, although she didn’t seem especially upset about it. Jane’s initial impulse to throw her arms around Gran had faded down to nothing almost immediately; whatever was standing in front of her, it wasn’t the difficult, overprotective woman she had loved.
But she could show her to me,
Jane realized,
or . . .
    ‘Can you tell me about my mother’s death?’ she asked plaintively, and Celine Boyle nodded curtly.
    With a sickening spin, Jane felt herself disappear into one of the strains of memory around her, which immediately became sharper, slower, more visible. ‘I wasn’t there, of course,’ Gran’s voice came from somewhere around her, although the image of her hadn’t joined Jane wherever she was now. A younger Gran was picking up a phone, and Jane realized that they were in the kitchen of their old farmhouse in Alsace. Gran listened to the voice on the other end of the line, which was nothing but a faint buzz to Jane, and then her face began to crumble. Her grief was so raw that Jane couldn’t help herself: she looked away, and the walls began to shift around her.
    ‘I was told it was a car accident,’ the voice of Gran from the diary went on clinically, and a shifting collage of images showed Celine on a plane, talking to police, talking to neighbours, staring through an empty window, clutching ten-month-old Jane to her chest. ‘But I didn’t believe it.’
    Jane frowned; she had wondered once if her mother’s magical heritage might not have played a part in the flash flood that had swept her parents off the road one night. After all, Anne had accidentally killed her entire foster family because she didn’t understand her magic and couldn’t control it; might not Angeline Boyle have done something similar? It was the question she had wanted to ask in the first place, but hadn’t quite been able to say out loud. She held her breath, simultaneously hoping Gran would go on – and that she wouldn’t.
    ‘I suspected a witch named Lynne Doran,’ Gran continued, and Jane’s breath flew out of her.
    ‘Lynne?’
    ‘So I stayed in America to investigate.’
    Jane shook her head. ‘You brought me back to France the next day,’ she told the disembodied voice, but the images around her were telling a different story. Gran had stayed, and if the changes in little Jane were any indication, she had stayed for quite some time. ‘I don’t remember this,’ Jane whispered. She knew she must have been too young to register where she was at first, but as her younger self passed three and headed towards four, she felt completely disoriented. At some point, they had obviously travelled to France; how could she have no memory of an international flight by then?
    Meanwhile, the younger Gran was stalking a younger Lynne Doran, first in Manhattan, then in the Hamptons, then back again. Jane had the bizarre experience of watching Annette grow from a toddler to a young child, while Malcolm slid inevitably into his still-gorgeous version of an awkward preteen. Gran had allies in her hunt, Jane realized: a good-looking, dark-haired couple who were probably just over forty at the time. Something about the woman’s eyes made Jane certain that she was a witch, and she