The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

watched Celine as avidly as they both watched Lynne. Sometimes Gran brought Jane along as she followed the Dorans, although more often she left her with a string of interchangeable-looking babysitters. Sometimes she would sit in their minuscule studio apartment, reading obsessively and making notes in the margins of old books that Jane couldn’t quite see.
    Finally, during one of those evenings at home, Gran’s face turned ashen as she looked up from a page. ‘I didn’t find the information I was looking for,’ her voice told Jane almost sadly. ‘I found something worse.’
    The images began to speed up again, and Jane was glad she had Gran’s voice to make some sense of them. Gran had begun investigating the Dorans at the real beginning: she had researched Hasina. Jane didn’t understand what Lynne’s ancestress could possibly have to do with her own parents’ deaths, but her guide to the diary seemed intent on showing Jane everything her grandmother had learned, so Jane paid attention.
    Hasina had been one of the seven daughters of Ambika, the very first witch, who had split her magic among her daughters after her death. All seven had gained notoriety among their suspicious contemporaries, who had often tacked their reputations onto their names. Hasina, as Jane remembered from her own reading, had been called ‘the Undying’. Jane had wondered why . . . but Gran had found out. As Hasina had felt her body begin to fail, she had dug deeper into dark magic than any of her six sisters ever had, and had found a way to live on well past her body’s natural time: she had taken her daughter’s.
    ‘Wait,’ Jane whispered, but there was no stopping the narrated flood of images now. Hasina possessed generation after generation of her descendants, leaving each body when one of her daughters was grown and strong enough to hold her. It had taken her years to learn the spell, which took a full month to cast, but once it was done, the soul couldn’t be shaken loose from its new home by anything but the next repetition of the spell.
    Of course, that meant that Hasina could never be without a prospective host – or hostess, rather. A daughter was ideal, but not always possible. In a pinch, she eventually learned, a niece would do: as long as the new body was a witch’s, and as long as there was a blood link between her and the last host, Hasina could make the switch. The witch she left, Jane noticed, tended not to live long afterward, and her horror at Hasina’s atrocious betrayal of her own family – over and over – was tinged with profound sadness for them.
    In the diary’s memory, Gran followed the ancient witch’s trail from book to book, from portrait to photo, and then, finally, inescapably, to Lynne Doran. Jane saw Lynne, protected from the summer sun by a long-sleeved shirt and floppy straw hat, sitting on a beach. In spite of her large sunglasses, she shaded her eyes with one hand, watching a small group of children run towards, then away from, the waves. Celine watched her from behind some tall dunes, her hands and jaw clenched. ‘It was her,’ the diary’s voice hissed. ‘I’m sure of it.’
    ‘Lynne,’ Jane whispered.
    ‘Not any more,’ the diary replied clinically.
    The images spun again, and Celine argued with the dark-haired couple on a deserted stretch of windswept beach. Something lay on the sand between them, and Jane recoiled when she recognized unconscious six-year-old Annette Doran. A nasty-looking bruise was already beginning to form on her right temple. ‘We can stop the chain,’ the woman was telling Celine in an urgent voice. ‘She’ll never be able to have another one, not at her age.’
    ‘I won’t kill a child,’ Gran insisted in the steely voice Jane remembered so well.
    The man looked downright murderous at that, but the woman placed a cautioning hand on his chest and he remained still. ‘Then we share the work,’ she declared, and Celine nodded.
    The scenes spun and shifted again, but this time Jane could follow them on her own. Gran lit candles around a hastily taken Polaroid of Annette, whispering and working magic, and then she turned to the frightened-looking girl herself with regret in her eyes. She led a blank-looking Annette and a happy, sturdy four-year-old Jane through Heathrow.
    ‘She and my André are close enough in age to be playmates,’ the dark-haired woman’s voice said from somewhere, ‘and Katrin is old enough now to take some