Five days later, Jane rode the uptown 6 near the MoMA to Lenox Hill, clinging to the metal pole for dear life. The train was crowded with after-work commuters, and a teenager with a faux-hawk and a Ricky’s NYC bag was pressed awkwardly against her.

As part of her magical training, she’d worked diligently to read the mind of a grouchy-looking elderly woman in a white fur coat, and an African-American girl who looked to be about seven and kept touching her sparkly headband anxiously. Unfortunately, while Jane could guess at what they might be thinking, she couldn’t seem to focus enough to hear anything actually coming from them. But as the train hurtled out of the 68th Street station and jolted to a stop at 77th, Jane hurtled into the chest of the faux-hawk guy.

. . . hot. I wonder if she did that on purpose? Maybe she likes my hair? Oh man, I hope that guy at Ricky’s didn’t see me take the extra bottle of hair gel . . .

Jane practically skipped off the train and through the turnstile, pushing outside into a light, misting rain. The one moment of mind-reading had been exhausting, and she had a fine sheen of sweat on her forehead, but at least she hadn’t blacked out.

The Hot & Crusty on the corner smelled deliciously of bagels and French vanilla coffee, and Jane had to resist the urge to go inside and devour a pain au chocolat. Or three.

She crossed the street and entered the hospital. The antiseptic smell burned her nostrils and her euphoria vanished. She could only think of Maeve, lying battered on the cold pavement outside the MoMA. The longer she had gone without actually seeing her friend, the more battered her mental picture had gotten, until she was sure that she would find Maeve at death’s door with broken bones jutting through her skin at crazy angles. She won’t look worse than she looked right after she was hit, Jane told herself as firmly as she could, but her heart still sank all the way down to her toes.

She knocked on the door of room 1070, waited a beat, and then let herself in. Harris looked more haggard than he had in the bookstore, and she guessed immediately that he hadn’t been sleeping. Over the course of the last week, an increasingly droopy Harris had insisted that Maeve was “doing well,” and Jane kicked herself mentally for having believed him. Clearly, there had been complications, and, just as clearly, he had been bearing the stress of it all on his own.

Maeve stirred in the bed, traces of yellow puffiness still distinctly visible across her face. Her copper eyes were open, but they looked faded and muddy, missing their usual spark.

“Oh God,” Jane murmured, rushing to the bed.

“I know. I look like I tried to stop a cab with my face, right?” Maeve attempted a smile, and Jane fought the urge to burst into tears.

“She’s in and out,” Harris said softly from behind her. “She’s still on a lot of drugs.”

“I’ve missed you,” Jane whispered. She took Maeve’s limp hand, careful not to disrupt the IV tubes, and slid onto the stool beside the bed. She gave herself exactly one minute to despair over Maeve’s bruised body, then snapped into Cheery Friend mode. Adopting a conspiratorial tone, she said, “I think Archie’s about to lose it. There’s this gala thing the mayor puts on every year, and I guess Archie’s been trying to get it at the MoMA for, like, a decade, but the Met keeps making better offers. And now he finally got a ‘source’—seriously, he called it ‘a source on the inside’—that was supposed to break things our way, but now the Time Warner Center suddenly decided they want in, so he’s tearing out all the hair he’s got left.” She gave every gossipy detail she could think of, and was sure that by the time Maeve’s eyes closed and her breathing settled into a sleep-filled rhythm, the corners of her mouth had lifted in a faint smile.

Jane turned her face up to Harris, who was also sleeping lightly. He shook himself awake a moment later though, and grinned at Jane. “She spends about three hours a day awake, and she’s spent most of them asking about you,” he commented.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner,” Jane told him honestly.

Harris shrugged her apology off casually. “She wouldn’t have remembered until maybe yesterday. She needs a lot of rest.”

He yawned, and Jane raised a Doran-esque eyebrow. “So do you.”

“Hey, I’m not the one who needs energy right now, Ms. Witch Hunter,” Harris pointed out.

Outside the room, a cart clattered past, carrying trays of food, and an overhead intercom paged a Dr. Davis to floor nine. Jane frowned. She had kept a close eye on Lynne for the past week, doing her best to monitor the matriarch’s closed-door meetings with her cousins, her afternoon errands with Yuri, and the many hushed phone calls. It seemed the woman was more focused on the wedding than on killing anyone, but Lynne was also a master plotter capable of the deepest deceptions.

“Lynne hasn’t been here, right?” Jane asked anxiously.

“She hasn’t even tried,” Harris said.

A tableful of flowers stood in the corner, along with several get-well balloons and teddy bears. A thought struck Jane. “Have you told your parents the truth about what happened?”

“No. No good could come of waging a war with the Dorans.”

She saw his eyes momentarily flit to the ostentatious diamond on her left hand. She instinctively turned the stone so it faced her palm.

“So!” He rubbed his hands together and assumed a perky grin, signaling the end of that conversation. “Show me what you can do.”

“Harris,” Jane demurred, “I’m just here to see Maeve. This isn’t a . . . I didn’t come to practice.”

He stood and placed his hands on her shoulders. Heat emanated from his fingers, massaging her stiff muscles. She felt the first spark of her power igniting—along with something else. “I don’t care what you came here for. I want to see your progress.”

The air seemed to crackle around them, and Jane realized just how close Harris was standing. Now that she was alone with Harris, the magic now rising in her blood felt somehow wilder, more dangerous and unpredictable, than it had when they were with Dee in Book and Bell. She felt that same pull she always felt with Malcolm, that same need to erase the few inches that stood between them.

Magic calls to magic, she reminded herself.

“Call the power to you, Jane,” Harris said. “The more you practice, the more you control it, and the stronger you’ll get. Right now it’s radiating off you and dissipating into the air. But when you learn to focus it, you won’t believe what you’ll be able to do.”

After a thickly charged moment, Jane took his hands in hers. She felt the energy flow between them as though a circuit had been closed. “I hope I don’t crash any of Maeve’s machines,” she said, trying to force a light note into her voice to ease the mounting tension.

“You won’t.” Harris’s cool voice washed over her, and suddenly she believed him. His green eyes bored into hers. “I can feel it, you know. I can feel how strong you are.”

Jane felt it too. Under the steadying influence of Harris’s voice, the wild shock of her magic was settling into a steady thrum. It coiled through her body, twisting and turning, even passing momentarily from her hands to Harris’s. It snaked languidly down her lungs to her abdomen and then moved . . . lower. Jane felt her breath grow ragged and shallow. Harris’s pupils began to dilate and their chests heaved up and down, up and down, up and down, together.

The pressure built, heat rose, and she felt as though she were on fire. Harris touched his forehead to hers. Then his breath was on her lips and . . . oh God. It was too much. She needed to release the power in her body—somewhere, somehow—now.

Malcolm.

Malcolm is giving up everything for me, something in the back of her mind shouted faintly over the pulse of the magic. Not that he had any right to judge . . . not that he hadn’t lied to her . . . not that this would be a betrayal on anywhere near the same scale . . . not that he didn’t practically have it coming . . .

The lightbulb overhead burst and sparks showered around them.

Jane jerked her hands away from Harris.

Harris just stared at her, his eyes moving from her collarbone to her lips to her eyes. “I’ll let them know about the light on my way out,” Jane whispered. She kissed Maeve’s sleeping forehead, then hitched her purse up onto her shoulder. Harris stood frozen in place. Jane met his eyes for the briefest of moments, then stepped awkwardly around him, shutting the door to 1070 firmly behind her.