With a wrenching gasp, the next thing Eve knew was that she was tangled in an embrace with Jacob, on a cot in a clean, white room, a gurney rolling away to the side, likely whatever she’d been laid out on, and it was as if Eve had fallen on top of him yet again, souls crashing into bodies once more. Nurses and doctors shouted.
“A miracle!” one nurse cried to the woman next to her. “I thought they both were passing!”
Her father came rushing in. “Eve, oh my goodness, what—” He carefully extricated her from Jacob and began to examine her wound. Only then did Eve realize how much pain she was in. Her legs gave way, and her father guided her into a chair beside Jacob’s bed.
“Hello, Father, I’m very sorry—”
“I’m sorry for nothing now that you’re safe. Let me just see how deep this is,” he said, peeling back the shredded layer of her dress, over her arm and the rip along her bodice. “What happened; were you stabbed?” he asked.
“I don’t know what happened. I think someone was manipulated in trying to strike us.”
Jacob was delirious, but coming to, murmuring.
“I’m here, I’m here, Jacob,” Eve said, trying to pull away from the examination. “I’m fine, Father. I’m sure it looks worse than it is.”
“It needs stitches,” her father countered. “You did well with stanching blood flow but it needs to be sewn up.” He looked between Eve and Jacob and seemed to understand something. “Talk to him a moment then we’ll have you both patched up. I’ll get everything ready.”
Her father motioned to the nurses, and they exited to prepare, giving the two a moment amid the white cloth screens. Eve was grateful for the scrap of privacy.
Eve sat at Jacob’s bedside, taking his hand. “I’m right here, Jacob; it’s me, it’s Eve. You’ll be all right.”
He stared at her in wonder and hope. “You said…you told me…”
She leaned close to his ear, the act of which was agony, but her murmured words lessened the pain. “I said that I love you. And I do love you.”
Jacob released a happy sigh. “My love,” he whispered, and seemed to drift off into a light sleep as one of the young nurses returned. Rushing to the bedside, the nurse tried to keep him awake and lucid, for fear of aftereffects of a concussion, and he maintained a sleepy, limited responsiveness.
Eve wanted Jacob to declare his heart back to her in turn. She didn’t like having been so vulnerable, having given her truth away with nothing sure in return, but that was perhaps too much to ask considering the circumstances. “Will he be all right?” Eve asked the nurse.
“From what your father said, loss of blood caused his weakness, and he has a concussion that needs to be monitored. But he should recover after rest, aches and pains notwithstanding. His parents have been notified,” the nurse said. “We took his card since he’s an officer of the law. It was easy to reach them; they’re on their way.”
Eve couldn’t be sure if anyone else heard their exclamations of love or not, but she knew her heart, finally, and couldn’t fight it anymore, and didn’t want to. Seeing his ghost was clarion focus enough. They’d all be ghosts eventually, but not until she’d had a life holding on to his warm, living body.…
But the danger, this terrible turn, his near death… It was all her fault.
The sinking certainty of just how much he was in danger because of her hit her like a repeat blow. Her loved ones were going to continue to get hurt if she didn’t change the dynamic.
If Prenze wanted her dead, he’d likely have found a way to shoot her, though a bullet was a far clearer charge of murder than these roundabout ways he was spectrally trying to maim them and threaten them off his tail. She was likely a part of the great experiment that Dupont had warned them of. People like Jacob were in the way.
Gritting her teeth against searing pain, she stood and listed between the screens, shuffling toward the first door of the wing she could see, desperate to be somewhere alone, away from this place of pain, death and hopeful recovery, needing to think about her next move. Truth be told, she wanted to run again to Sanctuary, to be let in and to never to come out, to do all her helping of the mortal and spirit world from within, keeping everyone around her safe by removing herself physically, not psychically.
As she was about to wander into the next hospital corridor, her father called out.
“Just where do you think you’re going?” Dr. Whitby said in his most fatherly tone, full of British indignance masking a distinct fear.
“I’m…fine.” The lie came out as a mumble. The pain was escalating; the tricks of the body that made one feel invincible in the heat of danger were subsiding to a wave of incapacitating agony. She swayed on her feet.
Her father put steadying hands on her shoulders. “I said we were getting you stitched up, and that’s what we’re doing.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. In part to keep back tears, in part to keep from the room spinning.
“You’re still in shock. Please, just let me take care of you,” her father pleaded, as if that’s all he’d ever wanted to do and the dangers of their lives just kept getting in the way of it. A neutral man of kindness and diplomacy, her father didn’t often take either a firm or pleading tone. It was especially important to note when he used both.
Folding against his side, she let her father collect her, her head falling on his shoulder, allowing herself a vulnerability she’d tried to block out and steel herself against since childhood. When the paranormal aspects of her life strained her relationship with her parents, she’d tried to brick a wall around her heart. But there was no need of that here. Her father had always silently understood. He couldn’t pretend to know how she was haunted any more than she could know the ways in which he had been. Haunting, like spirituality, faith, and one’s connection with the divine, was entirely personal, and no one’s experience trumped another.
Never minding fresh drops of her blood on his crisp white coat, Dr. Whitby led Eve back toward the room she’d wandered from. She let pain overwhelm her into motionlessness as he guided Eve to a bed near where Jacob lay, the nurses washing his wounds and preparing him for stitching too. Administered a sedative by a calm nurse, she drifted off into an unsettled half rest as the sting of the stitches sent her into a pain-induced dream state.
* * * *
Eve awoke to familiar, nearby voices. Four hushed, concerned tones. Before she opened her eyes, she thought to herself how to appear composed to these people. Her mother, Gran, and Mr. and Mrs. Horowitz. They’d all met, in the most unfortunate way, but they were making pleasant small talk, discussing their mutually loved Rachel Horowitz.
Commonalities, making inroads, making connections: all of this was so important, but Eve needed to retreat from it all. Loved ones, especially in the case of Jacob, meant potential casualties.
The agony of nearly losing him, of the truth of her heart—it was all too much, and she didn’t want any of them to see her awake, so she squeezed her eyes closed, but not before tears flooded out.
She wanted to stay sleeping until everyone went away. Given great talents, she was hardly powerful enough. She was only good enough to get noticed and targeted, not talented enough to have solved anything; yet anyone near her was in a radius of danger.
“I confess, I’m not sure what to think about all this,” she heard Mrs. Horowitz say quietly.
“He’ll make a full recovery,” Dr. Whitby assured her.
“And I thank you for that, Doctor,” Mrs. Horowitz said.
“Indeed,” Mr. Horowitz agreed. “We are in your debt for quick work. I simply would like to know what happened here.”
Jacob sat up with a groan, and his outburst made Eve’s eyes shoot open, reflexive to the sound of him. He looked at her first, smiling; the physical pain on his face washed away, replaced by a certain wonder, as the dawning of what had passed between them seemed to illuminate him and if Eve wasn’t mistaken, he whispered, “My love…”
It drove Eve’s pain even deeper, and she subtly shook her head, mentally asking for him not to make this harder on her.
Jacob looked at his family, who had jumped to either side of his bed. “Hello Mother, Father,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what happened—it was all so sudden—but Eve moved me aside, from a man swinging something toward us. She put herself in the way, getting injured in the process, but if she hadn’t, the pike may have gone right through me.…”
Jacob looked over at Eve, and it was then they all noticed she was awake.
“Thank you, Miss Whitby,” Mr. Horowitz exclaimed. “Thank you for helping him.”
“We are so very grateful,” his mother added. Eve could sense their genuine gratitude in equal amount as their horror at his being a target. Eve understood; she felt the same way.
Eve’s mother and father came to her bedside in turn, her mother leaning down and kissing Eve’s brow. “Your father promised me it’s not as bad as it looks…and I believe him,” she said, keeping her calm, looking between her husband and her daughter. Gran stood at the edge of the partition, between the beds, a consummate diplomat and soothing presence.
“Did you… I’m sorry, Miss Whitby,” Mrs. Horowitz began carefully, “but I have to ask, was it your case that put him so in danger?”
She managed to ask without accusation, simply wanting to know the facts. Mr. Horowitz winced, as if he wished there were some other way to have asked the truth of it. But there wasn’t, and the slow crack threatening to cleave Eve’s heart entirely in two widened. She wouldn’t lie.
“It was. I’m…I’m so sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Horowitz.”
“No, no,” Mr. Horowitz tried to interject, but he trailed off.
“If you ask me, when they got here, it seemed she saved his life,” a young nurse said as she came by with a decanter of water. “It’s like she went somewhere after him and dragged him back here. It’s like he fell back into himself. I’ve never seen anything else like it.”
This rattled Mr. and Mrs. Horowitz as much as anything. Eve grimaced. This wasn’t the way she wanted her spectral dealings to be revealed, in this kind of tense circumstance. She changed the subject abruptly.
“Gran, can I come have a nightcap with you and stay?” Eve asked. “Will you tell the girls not to worry? I need your advice on matters.” Wanting desperately to be out of this place, Eve slowly rose to a sitting position, her mother helping her, her father checking the bandages.
If she separated herself from Jacob and the girls, for their safety, Eve was sure she could do so with Gran’s help and not be reckless about it. They could plan how to extricate her and still solve the case. Gran would know how to hole oneself away to fight a spectral battle and that wouldn’t be as dramatic as her irresponsibly just disappearing.
Gran looked to her father, who nodded. He handed Gran a glass bottle of small white pills, likely aspirin for the pain. “Come by our side for dinner?” he asked hopefully.
She looked at them and said plainly, “I shouldn’t. It isn’t safe. I’m not safe.”
The stricken look that this created on both her parents’ faces was a palpable hit. Eve despaired; she was causing such pain all around her, and in her.
“Let me take her, please,” Gran murmured.
“Yes, the two of you, again,” her mother muttered. “As if the rest of us never faced danger before in our lives.”
Eve sighed irritably and replied in a tense whisper, “You can’t be distressed by my work and then angry when I distance you! I don’t want this man to be the reason your condition comes back, Mother! This is a personal vendetta for Gran and me to fight—”
“We won’t be alone; we’ve an arsenal,” Gran interjected with implacable diplomacy before Eve could drive any wedge further. “This will be over soon. I feel it.”
Natalie Whitby turned to the Horowitz family, contrite. “I’m sorry to involve you in our family drama,” she said. “I’ve always had a hard time reconciling my daughter’s work.”
“As have we, with our son,” Mrs. Horowitz confessed quietly. “It is difficult, sometimes unbearable, to accept a job with constant risk and not feel like you’re abandoning your child to the wolves just by allowing them to do it.”
“Exactly,” Natalie said, as if Jacob’s mother had put the perfect words to her emotions.
“But they are their own people,” Mr. Horowitz added. “We cannot live their lives for them.”
“Indeed. It is wise of you to remind me.” Natalie stepped toward the couple, clasping her hands together and bowing her head slightly in deference. “It was a pleasure to meet you both, Mr. and Mrs. Horowitz. Your son is a treasure.”
“Thank you,” they responded warmly.
Coming back to Eve’s bed, her mother sighed. “You should stay here and rest, on doctor’s—your father’s—orders. But I’ve a feeling you won’t heed them.”
“Correct. But you can help me up,” Eve said, offering her parents her hands. With a tired chuckle, her father took one side as her mother pursed her lips and took the other.
Once she was standing, Gran handed her a wool cape she could throw over her mauled dress once outside. She folded it over her arm.
“I’ll see you downstairs, but give me a moment,” Eve said to her family, looking first at her parents and then at Gran, who gathered them gently and led them out with soft pleasantries, leaving just Eve and the Horowitz family.
Eve turned to Jacob’s parents. She looked down at what they were looking at. They stared at the bloodstains on her dress as if they couldn’t look away.
With a deep, shaking breath, Eve let tumble a rush of difficult words. “I…I can’t decide for your son how he continues to pursue his own aspect of the case. But considering his safety above all else, I’ve made the resolution to separate myself. I am clearly a risk. So, if my presence means a greater threat, it’s for the best.… Please tell him, insist, he keep his distance. I know he has open cases he’d be best to resolve with other colleagues,” Eve said, and turned, fighting tears. Biting her lip to force composure, she turned back. “Please tell your son he’s… the very best. And that the most important thing in all the world to me is that he be safe and happy. Thank you. Take care.”
Both parents opened their mouths as if they thought perhaps they were meant to protest, or say something else, but the silence was strained and Eve smiled at them, bowed her head, and left. She tried to speed out with her usual brisk pace, but the pain slowed her. Throwing the cloak over her shoulders, she buried her face in the corner of it for a moment to dry the sudden stream of tears she could no longer hold back. She breathed in the sharp surgery smell of solvents: alcohol and iodine, like a smelling salt bringing her back around.
With no clue as to what the future held, she had to walk away from Jacob for as long as it would take. For safety’s sake.
The moment she exited the white doors of the surgery wing, breathing in less sharply scented air, she noticed Gran waiting for her, calm and statuesque, her brocade burgundy tea gown a rich contrast to the stark white hall.
“The girls are in the reception area,” Gran said. “I knew you’d have wanted me to send them away, but I couldn’t. It isn’t fair to them. Their lots are all cast in, with this precinct, and with you. If you just tear yourself away without clearance…”
Eve’s sudden rush of exhaustion, concern, and perhaps even panic must have been evident on her face, for Gran continued with a stern tone.
“They’re psychically tied to you, Eve, and to this work. You can’t expect them not to be. None of your gifts can just be turned off when it scares or isn’t convenient for you. They knew something was wrong just as I did, and came. The staff wouldn’t allow them in as they said it was too crowded. I told them to wait outside. I know you want to retreat. Tell them why; give them something to do. You can be involved in separate missions, but don’t you dare let one man break apart your precinct.”
Gran’s command hit Eve squarely, and she didn’t know what else to do but nod.
As they walked down the long hallway toward an exit, Eve’s side was awash in cold. “Oh, mi corazón,” Vera said, appearing on Eve’s left as Gran guarded her right. The spirit’s luminous hand was laid over her heart.
“Don’t,” Eve snapped, hastening her stride. Her Sensitivities in a hospital—a place of pain, struggle, and unexpected loss strained her ability to reason. “Nothing of the heart. Help numb me. I must be steeled.” Each step jarred her wounds, but she wanted to be anywhere but here.
“I had to walk away from someone I didn’t dare be with.” The ghost circled her as she walked. “Your circumstance was not mine, but pain is pain.” She opened her arms, and Eve’s breath turned to frost. “I give you my cold. You are the lady of the dead. Let the chill of us comfort you until you can make things well again.”
Eve let temperature overtake her like stepping into an icebox. Steel and cold. She had work to do, no time for sentiment. She had to inure herself against psychic and emotional turmoil, harden herself against the danger of love. Of letting down her guard. No matter how much joy she’d just shared. This depth of despair was as deep as her mountain of bliss had been high.
In a white, sterile reception hall that was pleasant only in how much light came in through the windows facing the river, Eve stepped over to a bench in the main reception area where Cora, Antonia, and Jenny sat huddled. When they saw her, they jumped up, and before Cora or Antonia could hug her, Jenny peeled back the layers of her cape, revealing the blood, so that everyone would know to be gentle, as if the little girl sensed the damage before seeing it.
“Hello, dears,” Eve began before any of them could offer sympathies. A harsh tone was all she could muster just to get the words out. “Because everything is being weaponized to hurt those around me, you must keep your distance. I may have to be vulnerable, on my own, to see how Prenze moves. Join the surveillance operation if you must do something. But stop if you or your environments are manipulated. Send spirits only to give me information, because anyone next to me”—tears flowed again, and Eve cursed under her breath—“gets hurt. Keep yourselves safe above all else. And keep Jacob off the case. Far away. It’s my fault, what happened.”
“Will he be all right?” Antonia asked.
“If he keeps his distance. Make sure,” Eve demanded. “Promise you’ll force him back.”
“We can try,” Cora murmured gently. It was she who had been the most resistant to his presence at first. But she seemed very aware of the pain Eve was in. Reaching out, Cora gently took Eve’s hands, and Eve was grateful the gloves Cora wore kept her psychometry from seeing all that had just taken place. “But he’s his own man, as we are our own women.”
Eve bit back the urge to snap orders at them. She didn’t want contention, just distance.
“I’m going to Gran’s, not home,” Eve explained. “Be careful. Have people who Prenze doesn’t have a read on research any clues or paper trails. I can’t have more blood on my hands because we got too close to a wayward monster. I’ll come home to the Fort when I feel it’s safe.”
At this, the girls all protested at once. But Eve walked away as if she didn’t hear it, drawing her cloak closer over her ruined dress. She could tell she was hurting them, excluding them, and she wasn’t proud of any of it: that she’d needed them in the first place, that she’d let them get close, and now she wasn’t even able to fully reject or fire them, send them irrevocably away. She felt impotent and useless, like she couldn’t win and neither could they, living a half life between calling and protection.
Antonia ran after her. “Eve, please. A moment of advice.” Eve stopped and turned back to her colleague. “Those flashes of what I thought might be premonitions? I’m going to follow them if I see them again. I think they correlate to things in motion.”
“All right, dear, as long as you steer clear of my direct path.”
“I saw a forest again,” Antonia said. “And I realized it was familiar. Likely Sanctuary.”
“Sanctuary may indeed need protection too. It is wise to consider. Go nowhere alone.”
Antonia cocked her head. “You presume to act alone and tell us we cannot do the same?”
Eve sighed and turned away. “Do not attend Sanctuary alone, that’s all I have to say.”
Despite significant bodily pain, Eve moved quickly to the front doors to avoid any other emotional exchange. All she could see was Jacob’s handsome face after their kisses, and that same gorgeous visage bloodied after the attack, two images in horrific contrast that made her sick to her stomach.
Downstairs at the patient exit of the grand brick building along the busy East River, she embraced her parents. Her father helped her mother into a carriage before returning with Eve to Gran’s vehicle.
“Thank you, Father, for everything.”
Both he and Gran helped her, grimacing and wincing, into the carriage.
“Take care of her, will you?” Dr. Whitby begged Gran. “Maybe she’ll listen to you if you tell her to find some other case to solve that doesn’t have it so out for her?”
“We’ll get through this,” Gran promised.
Eve wasn’t feeling so hopeful for herself, but she would draw danger away from her loved ones.
“Shield,” Gran commanded as the carriage rolled away. Both women did so, and Eve felt the energy of the carriage become a fortification. Staring out along the river, she wondered how to draw Prenze just to her. Gran circumvented her. “Don’t you dare do anything drastic.”
Eve turned to her, exasperated. “I’m letting myself go with you, stay with you so that I don’t! Help me live apart from everything until this passes and the case breaks for the better. I’ll commune with spirits remotely, and you can collect the evidence and bring it to the girls. They won’t drop the case, but I need them away. And keep Jacob entirely clear. I’m too dangerous. Will someone promise me that?”
“What happened to the detective today is not your fault.”
This time, Eve leaned against her fortress, her dearest confidante, and let loose a sob.
“He nearly died, Gran; it was so close! He was being leaned on, psychically, by Prenze, to let his spirit go. To give up. I had to go into the Corridors after him. . . .”
Gran embraced Eve as she wept. The passion of the day was her secret to keep, but she had to tell someone her heart. The idea that just hours ago they were entwined in the park… Tears pooled on her hands.
“I told him I loved him.” Eve choked on the words. The searing, overwhelming truth of how much she loved him, realized in this stark turn, caused as much terror as it had joy. “With that confession, I won his spirit back; I think the truth of my heart was what did it. But I do…love him, to the point where I’m terrified. It makes me sick. I can’t be the reason.… I can’t bear what might happen to him.”
“We’ll stop Prenze,” Gran reassured her.
“But how?” Eve wailed. “We’re trying with finances, surveillance, paperwork that doesn’t yet add up, anything we can yet use in court proceedings, and every day anything could strike us. He’s not letting us get closer.…” An idea struck her. She sat up, dried her eyes, and stared at Gran. “I’ll host a séance. Just me. Invite him to my mind. His bait. To see what’s next.”
Gran sighed. “Just like your mother.”
“What?”
“Not precisely, but your mother played this game, to entrap the creature that attacked your father. I never thought it would play out again. She likely senses it, fears a parallel.”
“The family legacy,” Eve said grimly. “But this time, I’m no longer your student. This is now between me and the ghosts, and I have the ghosts to help. Whatever the ‘great experiment’ is, I’m a part of it.”
“I was a part of the experiment too, Eve,” Gran insisted sharply. “I’m wrapped up in this just as you are. And your team, they are their own people, Eve, and they care about you.”
“If I have to fire them and evict them from my home, I will! I won’t have any harm come to them when I am the one he wants. The ghosts and I, we’re the ones to confront him.”
“Whatever he thinks about spirits, he’s not giving them much credit,” Gran scoffed. “He doesn’t know how they can fight. For now, you must rest. Thank you, at least, for being willing to come with me. Your grandfather is away on business; he’s been traveling more these days, and during this bout with Prenze, I’ve encouraged it.”
When they arrived at the house, Gran left Eve in the parlor with some peppermint tea so she could attend to telling the very small household staff, save for the security staff Gran kept on retainer, that they were getting a few days off; limiting collateral damage.
The tea mirrored the taste of Jacob’s kisses. Eve had to bite her tongue nearly to bleeding to keep herself composed.
Closing her eyes, Eve begged the spirit world’s guidance and felt it rustling around her like the leaves in these sharp last days of autumn, turning brittle and whirling in winds.
Vera appeared and wafted to the parlor wall to ponder the art as Gran entered with a tea tray full of small bites and savory treasures.
“Antonia has gained precognitive visions, Gran,” Eve said. “She’s seen a forest that may be Sanctuary. I know Clara Bishop said she’d set wards, but we may need greater protections.”
“Noted.”
A roaring in Eve’s ears accompanied more tea being poured into her cup. A different kind of pressure than the recent bout with the children and their resolution. Eve sighed irritably at the sudden pain.
“What is it?” Gran asked, pouring herself tea.
“There’s a grip on my skull. I don’t know if it’s the worry of spirits or Prenze trying to worm deeper in. I’m tired of being reactive, Gran. I began this precinct without constraint. I began fearless. I want to regain that strength and return to principle. Alone. I have to fight back.”
“So, challenge him,” Vera said, floating near enough for steam from Eve’s teacup to make her image waver in mist. “Provocation will throw him off. He wouldn’t expect it of you.”
“What sort of provocation?” she asked the elderly ghost.
“If he hates ghosts so much, why don’t you do something to celebrate them? Isn’t that the premise of the precinct, at least in part? You’re in hiding when you shouldn’t be. You’re meant to help keep moving us into the light.”
Eve snapped her fingers, a solution hitting her. “That’s brilliant, Vera, thank you. Gran, will you lend me your newspaper friends?”
This clearly wasn’t the direction Gran thought the conversation was turning, and she sat back, raising an eyebrow. “I will connect you to whoever you need, provided you’ve a good reason.”
“I’m going to write an editorial in honor of ghosts. To reaffirm my purpose. The pressure has been building to reclaim it. I can feel it from within Sanctuary; I feel it in my head.” She rubbed the back of her skull where the pain resided. “We took our name off the door to placate threats. It did nothing to make us safer. Tonight, I’ll write a declaration. I want to publish a manifest of the beauty of spirit. The glory of ghosts. For all New York to see.”
“Wise. And the spirit world will rally to your cry. They will respond to your affirmations. Of all the challenges I thought you might issue, this is one I can get behind.”
Eve brandished a pen. “A spell must be cast, in the grand tradition of gentlemen writing letters in newspapers, defending their honor, I shall throw down a glove of spirit.”
She nearly ran out and up the main stairs to the next floors.
“I’m going up to the tower for all this, Gran,” she called back down. There was a heavy pause. Eve hadn’t been to “the tower” in years; left alone and unfurnished since her childhood. “I’ll bring it down when I’m done.”
Gran came back into view at the base of the stairs, visage steeled. “Very well. Mr. Godkin. Evening Post. I guarantee he won’t like it, but he’ll do it if I demand a place in editorial. I’ll leave his information on a Western Union envelope by the door. Slide it under the door when you’re done, and one of my guards will run it to him. I’ll call and lean on him for urgency. While you write, I’m going to check on the girls.”
“And keep them out of it.”
“That’s for them to decide. You may be their manager, but you’re not their mother. Besides, in every tale of woe and terror, keeping information from parties affected is the chief way in which people get hurt. You, of all the Gothic enthusiasts, should know that.”
Eve took in her words and sighed. “Still, remind them to stay back.”
“Let me handle it.” Gran stepped forward to the base of the stairs, pinning Eve with her sharp eye and commanding presence. “Where is the surveillance team?”
“There’s a key on my foyer table. The New Netherland. Sixth floor unless they’ve shifted to the fifth in hopes of a better angle.”
“Very good. I’m going to make some calls. Preparedness, and all.”
Eve snapped her fingers. “We’ll need to engage your odd friend Mosley again.”
Gran nodded. “I already planned on it. Disabling the Prenze mansion is key.”
“Yes. We’ll have to time that, because if we can throw him off, we can all act, Maggie too, wounding him with cuts all at once. But challenge first…” Eve trailed off, thinking about what to write. “It will have to be direct, precise, and invoking the spirit world. Ah! I need the help of another woman’s words.”
Descending again, Eve brushed Gran’s shoulder fondly as she maneuvered past, toward the cozy library of deep colors, rich stained glass, and tall, dark bookcases. As she searched for a specific spine she knew all too well, Gran followed her and stood at the threshold.
“I am loath to leave you…” Gran said mournfully. “I fear I’ve done too good a job of making you an independent lady at too young an age—”
“I’ll be fine,” Eve said, batting her hand. “I don’t plan to leave cloistered work. The tower shall be my abbey. Post guards by the door if you’re afraid I’ll sleepwalk.”
“I’ll do exactly that,” Gran said and kissed her on the forehead. “Once you’ve gotten your writing out, rest. Take sedative in your tea if need be; it’s in the master bath medicine cabinet. I’ll be back soon. Psychically reach out to me in any emergency. If you don’t”—Gran pointed a long, steady finger that had all the power in it of drawing a bow—“I’ll never forgive you, and you really don’t want to see me angry.”
“I know, Gran. Go on.” Eve blew her a kiss and waited until Gran turned away from the library to turn her attention to the books.
Eve let out a tense breath when the front door closed behind her. Vera must have escorted Gran out, for there were no other presences remaining with Eve. As pressure on her skull eased into a broader thrum rather than a spiking sting, she reached a breathing quietude from which she could more manageably pass through the auras of any forthcoming migraine.
“Focus on the work,” she commanded herself. “It’s the only thing you’ve ever been able to rely on your whole, weird little life.” Work was the only thing keeping her from an incalculable abyss of emotion and fear.
Alone in the library, Eve scanned the spines until she fell upon her treasure: Nineteenth Century Miracles by Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten, a leading Spiritualist of the century.
Britten had recently died, near the beginning of their whole ordeal with Prenze, and Eve hadn’t even had time to process the fact.
“May your spirit be with me as I write, Mrs. Britten,” she murmured as she opened the cover, running her finger over the table of contents she’d practically memorized as a child. Nineteenth Century Miracles came out when Eve was three; she’d grown up with it. Gran suggested it as a way to understand and learn from gifted experiences other than Eve’s or her own.
A chapter on Spiritualism in the law and courts had been an important source of encouragement for Eve to start the Ghost Precinct; and she used it as precedent.
Some wars were won by swords, guns, and battles. This personal war would be won by the mind, pen, and spirit, working in concert.
Once she’d read a few of her favorite passages, Eve began writing from her heart:
“On the Importance of a Willing Spirit”
Greetings, dear reader, fellow New Yorkers, beings of spirit and life. I have tried all my life to bridge the eternal and the material. To make the antithetical helpful. To celebrate how much the dead teach us about life.
Emma Hardinge Britten writes in her Nineteenth Century Miracles that “Eternity and Infinity are the only words that seem, in our imperfect form of speech, to embody the conditions of spiritual existence. Time and space are equally opposite to the state of being we call ‘material.’ Whilst therefore, we essay to write of a dispensation which manifests the characteristics of the endless and illimitable, it must not be forgotten that we are yet denizens of a material sphere, bounded in on every side by the limitations of time and space.”
And so, the universe has seen fit to provide the world with Sensitives, those of us who can make polarities palatable and be the bridge between material and spiritual.
I began hearing the voices of the dead as a child. It was admittedly maddening, but with the help of other Sensitive souls and a keen desire to understand purpose in the gift, hearing patterns in the noise proved helpful for everything around me.
I am here to tell you that the spirit world is real. It is very active in this city. And I am here, with other positive spirits, to help this city. So can you. Your loved ones aren’t gone; they’re a memory away. Call to them in your heart and share a bit of love. Remember life. It will lift this city up, and that’s needed right now, not anyone or anything wishing to tear it down.
Leave room in your heart for the loving souls of the spirit world. You’d be surprised at what they have in store to show and share with you.
Those who wish harm upon innocent spirits, good souls lingering, I say to him: For shame. Celebrate life hand in hand with the echo of life. Otherwise the finality of death is all that you’ll see.
Blessings,
E. H. W., Spiritualist, Advisor on Matters of Crime and Justice in the City, Director of the Ghost Precinct
P.S. To Mr. A. P., the gentleman returned from the grave who has threatened me and mine and all the ghosts of this city, I remain unafraid. The spirits will not go quietly. They go to peace on their own terms, not on your demand. You have been warned.
Eve put her pen down and looked at the words she’d penned. The spirit world murmured the truth of it; it was a bold, blazing dare.
She readied the envelope, sealed it, said a brief protective prayer over it, and slid the spell out the front door as Gran had instructed. What Eve could only see as a silhouette—one of Gran’s hired watchmen—stepped up from the shadows of the protective detail along Gran’s property line, tipped his hat to her, and strode briskly down the walk to relay the thrown gauntlet.
“Spirits help me, it’s begun,” Eve murmured.
The response from the spirit world was another crash of murmurs, a wave upon Eve’s mental shore, the pressure in her head cresting and receding.
“Spirits, yes, you are my help, and I know you will lead the way,” she said. “So please do.” Instinctively, she put her left hand to her heart, her right to her mouth, and gestured both forward, signing a thank-you in advance, the gesture like a benediction.
An invigorating wind whipped around her body as if she had stepped into a vortex. She was heard. For all the time in her young life she had chafed against the spirits so constantly talking at and around her; she sometimes forgot she could talk back, bid back, request back.
“My good girl,” Vera whispered before floating back against the wallpaper.
“I have always wanted to be,” Eve whispered in return, in a small voice that put her in mind of the first time she’d retreated to the room she was climbing to now.
Eve climbed narrow sets of stairs to a jutting dormer corner, a square battlement in sandstone at the top of Gran’s house, carrying the weight of Gothic tradition in her wake; the heavyhearted heroine withdrawing to her peak. But in those old tales, the woman withdrew as a victim. Here, Eve readied in her war room.
The tower was an isolation, which would normally have rattled her. Eve had to be content that this was what she’d asked for. She was not in danger here. Not physically. Not yet. But there were other ways in. And there would be other ways to get her out.
She took the sedative Gran gave her, thankfully not a Prenze tonic, and curled up on her childhood cot, letting the memories enswathe her in all their torment and triumph.
In the morning, her words would be published, and Albert Prenze, feeling the direct sting of it, and a city renewed in spirits, would come collect.