Eve walked in darkness. Regaining a sense of herself only in sound, a crying child. One by one her senses returned. Vision finally arrived. She stood in the hallway of a large house with no lights on, only moonlight through tall windows with every shutter open and creaking in a high wind that gusted against shuddering panes. Beyond was a sleepy New York that seemed less built up than she remembered. She didn’t recognize the grand home.
The last thing she remembered, she’d been thrown against the wall of a carriage by Prenze’s manipulation. She was, for all intents and purposes, unconscious. But where was she now? This was like no psychic journey she’d ever experienced before.
She passed a little boy in a room with two beds, two sides of the room identical to each other. One of the beds was empty. In the other sat a boy, in a white nightgown, stock still, bright red hair mussed, a frightened look on his young face.
There was crying from the end of the hall. Eve was drawn to it and looked in: a miserable looking alcove with one narrow window and an empty wardrobe with no doors.
“What did I tell you?” a sharp voice yelled.
“To stop inventing nonsense,” the child repeated morosely.
“To stop being stupid. Pray to God he makes you smarter, like your brother.” The woman shoved him toward the door. “If you don’t quit your fantastical ideas you’ll be sleeping in this closet for the rest of the week.”
She raised her hand as if she was about to strike him. He ran back to his room down the carpeted hall and slammed the door.
Eve followed toward it and moved through the door as if she were a ghost.
“I think they’re good ideas, Albert,” the other boy whispered. “In fact, I think we could make a whole business of your tonics and cure-alls. Just keep it to yourself.”
Albert said nothing, just climbed into bed and crawled under the covers, turning away from the brother who was clearly concerned for him.
Albert and Alfred Prenze as children. How was she watching this memory?
The malevolent Albert had truly gotten into her head. With his level of psychic connection to her, albeit an unwelcome bond, perhaps when she went unconscious, she had slipped into his unconscious mind? An unexpected merge?
The scene changed. Eve stood in the corner of a lavish parlor draped in black crepe and filled with vases of pungent lilies. A man was laid out in finery with his arms crossed over his chest. A wake. The two boys, a bit older, were staring at the body before them. To their right was a pretty little flame-haired baby in a white lace dress set in a pram. Mrs. Prenze, tall and severe, looking older than she likely was on account of her harsh face, gripped each twin’s hand tightly.
One of the boys—Eve couldn’t really make out who was who—was sniffling quietly.
The woman seized each of the children’s hands and placed them on their father’s cold face. Each boy whimpered.
“Your father is dead and that’s that,” the woman scolded, her voice rising. “No crying for the dead!”
The baby in white lace began to whine.
She whirled toward the pram and screamed. “NO CRYING FOR THE DEAD!”
A sharp, dizzying shift in vision and the scene changed. Partially.
Eve was staring at the same room. Some of the furnishings of the gilded parlor were different, but the room was again draped in crepe. The two boys were now adults. The differences in personality became clear: Alfred had a softer face that was pensive and peaceful: Albert was hard and harsh. Arielle was a young and lovely thirteen or so, wide eyed and vulnerable. All were dressed in black.
Before them lay another body.
Mrs. Prenze. She even died with a scowl on her face.
There was a tense, dreadful silence between the siblings.
Suddenly, Albert screamed at the body. “NO CRYING FOR THE DEAD!” Abruptly, he turned on his heel to leave the room.
A ghost shot up from the body in a move so sudden it made Eve gasp.
Mrs. Prenze’s greyscale body, her transparent form swathed in the widow’s weeds the undertaker had dressed her in, flew up above her body and turned toward Albert as Arielle’s hands went to her mouth in a shriek. Alfred’s mouth gaped open.
The newly risen spirit flew after Albert as he ran to the door with a moan of despair, her shrill, berating tone like nails on a chalkboard. “YOU UNGRATEFUL WRETCH!”
Eve followed the ghost and Albert, but at the threshold of the parlor, everything changed again. She was plunged into a long corridor that was entirely dark ahead, save for the slight silhouette of Albert, lit by a building in flames behind them, framed by a doorway.
The hall they were now in was a distinct one, a psychic precipice Eve had been in often of late. The Corridors between life and death that opened up to anyone at a particular crossroads. This was the day Albert nearly died.
“I want to be free,” he pleaded to the empty hall. Eve found it striking that there were no framed pictures on the Corridor walls indicating distinct moments of Albert’s life, only the faint flicker of fire behind them vaguely illuminating a misty darkness.
Suddenly Albert put a hand to his head, and Eve felt a sympathetic pang in her own. A different pain than that of a blow. A specific tearing, rending feeling. She knew it well. It happened to her when she was young and her psychic gifts first took over her awareness, obliterating all else.
Then, the air of the Corridors spoke in an eerie chorus:
“You want power you feel you were denied, do you not, Albert Prenze?” The collective unseen voices made for an unnatural sound. Eve didn’t trust that it was human; it sounded like an elemental force given capacity for speech.
Gran had always told Eve to be careful if the Corridors ever spoke, and never, ever accept if the Corridors offered something. It was like eating something in the underworld: it would prove binding and never for the soul’s own good. The Corridors were a place where souls could easily be tempted to darkness before they searched out the light.
“Yes,” Albert gasped desperately. “Give me what I deserve.”
“Then go,” the seething murmurs chorused. “See what you can do with it.…”
Still clutching his aching, expanding mind, Albert turned back to the threshold, toward the living, toward the fire, his eyes falling on something. Eve watched as he bent to examine a wooden crate set just at the edge of the portal toward death.
Inside the crate was a makeshift box with a spool of paper, wires, and graphing implements. The early great experiment. Propped against it was a medical journal boasting bold queries as headlines:
Can we map the human brain? Can we chart a sixth and psychic sense? Are we merely a sequence of electrical charges or do we have Patterns? What does our mind possess?
“I will possess control,” Albert murmured, sweeping the box into his arms as he rushed out from the Corridors into the burning building. Eve followed as if she were attached to him. Heat flashed across her face and body. Out of the corner of her eye across a smoke-filled factory floor, she could see a figure choking and falling to his knees. Albert, coughing, escaped onto the second-floor landing as the flames crested without helping the man behind, the body that would be left in his wake.
As he was about to hobble down a metal set of stairs to a loading landing, Albert turned to Eve.
“You,” he sneered. His face could have been handsome if it weren’t so hardened and weighted down by bitterness. “You’re not welcome here,” he said, and pushed her down the stairs of his memory.
Eve fell as though she were falling down a pit or a well, falling away from memory and back against the hard wood and upholstered fabric of the present carriage, her consciousness crashing against the pain erupting in her head.
Lifting her hand, she felt the large lump where she’d been cast against the side of the carriage and a narrow gash that was slightly bloody, although coagulation slowed the flow. She gritted her teeth as she raised her injured shoulder. Putting her cuff to the small gash, Eve pressed to stanch it fully, hissing at the sting and throb. Otherwise she seemed intact.
Opening her eyes slowly, she cried out at the face that floated before her: Albert Prenze still projected his presence just on the other side of the carriage window, a rivulet of her own blood intersecting the pane from where she’d been knocked against the corner of the frame. She put her hand to the sheathed knife but stopped. It would do no good against a mere projection.
You intruder, his presence growled.
“You’re the one who wanted hold of my mind,” Eve muttered. “Don’t blame me if it wanders. Just because you lived through pain doesn’t mean you can inflict it on others. You were given an opportunity, granted psychic gifts on the doorstep of death. Just think of all the good you could’ve done with it. Instead you just left a man to die and increased your own misery and that of others.”
Prenze’s image just laughed and faded. She hadn’t banished it; he simply disappeared. Eve wasn’t sure she wanted to know why.
The metal walls of the carriage still blocked out the ghosts beyond from coming too close, though nothing could keep little Zofia from maintaining a watch at a safe distance, floating as the carriage slowed in downtown congestion.
Lining up behind other fine vehicles outside the bridge side of city hall, the carriage stopped. No one came for her. No one stepped down from the driver’s perch. She tried the door. It was locked securely from the outside by some sort of device. Average hired hacks and hansoms had no such impolite trappings.
Glancing out the window past gaslight streetlamps not yet lit during the bright midday, Eve noticed the side seams of city hall. Like so much of New York, it was all façade and positioning. The building’s face was marble and beaux arts finery while the back of the building remained plain, its 1811 designers foolishly thinking no one would bother to be anywhere uptown of it, especially not near such a derelict district as the former Five Points. That infamy was gone; the gilded age consuming every scrap of the teeming island at the center of the world, and nothing spoke of its dizzying appetite as much as the great landmark ahead.
It was impossible not to be in awe of the inimitable New York and Brooklyn Bridge, no matter what.
A stunning web of wire rope sloped gracefully to the brown granite and limestone towers set with two enormous, pointed arches. The vast, suspension bridge was unmatched, a wonder of engineering and the vision of the Roeblings, finished thanks to the steadfast effort of Emily Roebling, one of Eve’s inspirations. Countless New Yorkers strolled its pedestrian walkways.
The double Gothic arches of the behemoth, the tallest man-made structure on the continent, seemed to hold up the bright sky as if the clouds were the clerestory of a cathedral. What a magnificent stage for her antagonist to set his scene. What did Prenze want with Eve here?
The permits they’d found in the folder at the viewing parlor, Eve remembered with a sinking feeling. City permits for an art exhibit.
Was she about to be on terrible display?
Loud and abrupt, a barrel organ erupted into a clattering, eerie tune not meant for such a machine at the mouth of the pedestrian landing. The instrument and its grinder, a cloaked figure, were bordered on either side by the immense arches set out into the river, and suddenly the beauty of it all loomed as a threat.
Eve placed the tune clanging from the organ bleating at the bridge approach; it was one of her favorites, a pavane in F-sharp minor by Gabriel Fauré. Written a decade prior, the tune was known to waft into her head more than any other. It was an intimate, particular personal detail Prenze couldn’t have known, and that terrified Eve more than anything yet had.
She gripped the carriage door again, but this time, with a pinging, metallic click, the door swung open.
That’s it, whispered a snide and sneering Prenze. Eve prayed she could unsettle and overturn his haughtiness. Come, it’ll all be over soon, just as you dared, so go on.
A sign at the mouth of the pedestrian walkway proclaimed the arrival of a temporary exhibit:
Welcome to The River Styx! Cross at your leisure or peril and reflect upon your life!
Art installation courtesy of Arte Uber Alles
Her mind remained wedged open, unable to reclaim her shielding. Nudged along, she felt as though her body was being carried in the eddy of a current. Stepping out onto the wooden slats of the bridge promenade, watching the buildings fall away below, a tenth of a mile passed before she was over water and nearing the great Gothic suspension towers.
Couples, families, tourists, and workers strolled across the promenade in a range of immaculate finery to sooty work clothes, looking at the beautiful sculptures of angels and seraphim placed at intervals.
To Eve’s horror, she recognized the sculptural style. Dupont’s figures, just like he’d made for the stage set: sculpture in the manner of reliquaries. What the passersby couldn’t know was that each figure held bits of dead flesh inside. Some might wear actual skin, others bones, organs, hair, each a token taken without permission, each a work of haunt.
These statues represented more restless souls and unfinished business, hence the ache at the back of her skull, the constant whispers at the corner of her mind. But with these works now exposed, where were their spirits? Trapped, most likely. Hopefully not for long, if Maggie had her way and Mosley ruined his systems, but she couldn’t be sure.
A few workers in suspenders and shirtsleeves were wrapping bits of wire across the railing. The bridge was made of wire rope, so much so the wire could wrap around the earth, designers were proud to boast. What was this additional wire needed for?
You… murmured a reply in her mind. This is all here for you, my dear.…
The hairs on the back of her neck rose as something bored into the base of her skull.
Turning slowly around, the sight before her made her blood run cold.
Above her and coming closer, a man floated in a black suit coat and cloak, hanging among the diagonal stays and vertical suspender cables, a fearsome spider in the web of wire rope.
His smile was fixed like a mask, his eyes bright and hard, glasses slightly askew. Prenze’s projection had never been stronger or more unnerving.
A man began walking toward her, his feet solidly on the wooden planks. In a dizzying optical shift, the projection retreated as the man strode closer.
Body paralyzed, time slowing, Eve stood stock still as Prenze, the actual, physical man himself, approached and stood a mere foot away from her. The projection of his energy merged with the man in a sickening, disconcerting fusion of dimensions, his mask of a clenched-jaw smile unchanging as he regained himself.
“What do you want with me?” She asked.
“Nothing unusual,” Prenze replied calmly. The sound of his voice just before her and not against her ear was a relief, though his proximity was cause for alarm. She put her hand back on her forearm, ready to withdraw the knife if need be. “You’re just here to do what you always do, Miss Whitby. You’re here as a service to the dead.”
He tried to nudge her forward with a physical hand on her shoulder, but she dug her heels in against the edge of the wood. “And what would that be?” Eve figured if she could buy time, to keep him talking, then she could strategize a plan of escape and any of her ghosts watching could find ways to help. Zofia had removed herself from view, which was wise, but she wasn’t sure who was on her side.
“To talk to spirits,” he replied simply. “Come, let’s take in this art installation, shall we? Can’t make a scene if you’re already in a scene!”
The sculptures were placed at forty-something-foot intervals along the bridge’s walkway, pedestrian flow keeping to the right coming and going but pausing in clusters and knots of family and friends taking in the harbor view and the installation.
Hired guards, Pinkertons from the look of their uniforms, stood between the statue intervals as if they, too, were part of the exhibit. Each had a tray in their hands with faux coins and a small sign marked “For Your Safe Passage.” The coins representing passage across the river Styx, the principal of Greek mythology’s five underworld rivers the dead might pass over. Everyone was bid contemplate their mortality high above the East River current. It only played into Eve’s plea to make the spirit world that much closer to touch.
The sky was so beautiful, the river so busy, the promenade so full of life. The ever-climbing skyline of New York—Manhattan and its boroughs, both inspiring and hard to fathom, the large and small scale—was all in view, from the teeming docks to high-finance rooftop spires gleaming in sun like cathedrals of commerce.
Passersby along the promenade, tucking their parasols under arms lest they be turned inside out in the wind, top hats held by the brim, murmured toward Eve and Prenze in their black clothes, gesturing and complimenting the immersion of all the “performers” with their tokens of travel, their payment to the boatman, as they contemplated the sculptural visages of disquieted forms.
The spirits of the city were equally intrigued by this display. Each statue had a throng of spirits floating around it, examining it, their transparent bodies silhouettes from a range of decades and cultures, imprinted against the sky like dimensional cameos with light shining through. Several spirits, their frock coats and dresses trailing away into wisps of vapor, tried to take the prop coins, looking at the offerings wistfully as if the tokens might return them to the shores of the living, their hands passing through the platters, gently rearranging the offerings.
The art had drawn out the delighted living and the luminous dead in equal measure, mortality contemplated on the stage of man’s greatest feat of engineering far above the dynamic metropolis. It would be utterly poetic if it weren’t so spiritually threatening.
“Keep moving,” Prenze murmured. He wasn’t touching her, but she could feel her body pressed as though a hand were clamped on her shoulder, pushing. “Toward the tower.”
When she turned back, looking up at Prenze’s cruel face defiantly, he loomed over her. She could feel his mesmerism pressuring her to engage, to reach out to the spirit world she was so awash in. She closed her eyes and pushed back against the impulse.
“What do you want?”
“To end ghosts’ unholy reign of terror on this city. And I admit, I want to expand my influence and thrall over the living. Is that too much to ask?”
He laughed. Whatever he had once been—once a scared, sad and mistreated child, then a hardworking chemist and innovative businessman— exerting power now was the goal, the broken child trying to reclaim a dominance he felt was owed him.
Slipping her hand in one of her jacket pockets, she felt for the tintype of Mrs. Prenze. She’d use it to unsettle him at the right moment. It wasn’t all ghosts he hated, it was just his mother, Eve intuited; but any ghost represented his childhood torment. All the vast wonders his expanded psychic capacity had offered and he’d gathered no nuance? Made no new discoveries of the wonders of the spirit? Eve pitied as much as feared someone so fixated on one violent retaliation. She and her team were each an example of how to live a haunted life more fully and meaningfully.
However, righteousness didn’t free her. Trying to turn on her heel and run, she was quickly whirled back around again by psychic force. Eve had no experience in the kind of physical compelling Albert was exerting. She tried again to shield, but the wounds on her temple and shoulder throbbed instead. He was too far in for her to shield with any effectiveness. Even her hand was immovable, unable to unsheathe her knife after all.
Ahead, set up against the formidable stones on the right side of the vast western suspension tower, sat a black-lacquered wooden dais topped with a carved wooden throne trimmed in gold. All this must have been made in tandem with Dupont’s stage work, a culmination of the elusive great experiment.
Above the dais, a few feet above the apex of the throne was a golden diadem tacked to the stone, a floating crown with wires trailing away from it. Behind the throne was a whirring, circular dynamo, powering an electrical current that attached not only to the throne, but Eve could see bright new copper wiring tracing up and over along the whole of the bridge, wire upon wire, upon wire.
“The Pretty Girl with the Electric Mind,” read a plaque at the base of the platform.
To the side of the throne, under glass, sat a familiar object: the monitor box that had been placed outside her office to affect her engagement with spirits before Mosley blew it down and Jacob had taken it to Bellevue for examination. Here it was again, stolen from the doctors, repaired and in working order. As she approached, she noticed the graph, the ticker scrolling out graphite markings from a needle, reading more rapidly, a peak and valley, an undulating line. It sensed her fear; or, in fact, it was recording it. Perhaps even amplifying it, she couldn’t be sure.
“What is all this?” Eve asked, folding her arms.
Prenze smiled that disturbing mask of a smile. “You’re the most gifted medium of your age, Miss Whitby. And that isn’t, as I’ve realized, a lie or hyperbole. I tested your grandmother who is a known legend, but you…your readings were quite literally off the charts. I’ve never seen someone so open to ghosts. So utterly drowning in them,” he said with distaste. His eyes, perhaps once bright and engaging, seemed clouded by cataracts of hate. “You’re just covered in them. They swarm around you. Like a disease. It isn’t right, Whitby. You spread contagion.”
Movement drew her eye to the monitor, the pencil making wide swaths along the ticker tape. She could feel the spirit world’s agitation. Whispers and murmurs, shouts even, were all coming at her as swift as the biting breeze, autumn shifting toward a distinct chill, the changing seasons and the ice of spirits entwined. She glanced away from the monitor to the harbor below, boat whistles suddenly mirroring banshee screams, the harbor noise traded for the clatter of the dead.
“I’ve made adjustments to this device that was placed outside your office to gain readings on you, and your spirits.”
“Blocking them, you mean—”
“Not entirely. Many of your associates still got through. I learned a lot. Now I know how to cast your net, your signature, for the widest impact.”
The barrel organ grinder was making his way across the bridge; the unsettling tune seemed to crescendo as Eve’s nerves mounted.
“Step up, please,” Prenze said, taking her hand and, with his walking stick, pressing it against the back of her knee, forcing her to bend. She stumbled forward and onto the small dais, her knees crashing against the foot of the throne. “To your seat. Come. You cannot fight this.”
He hoisted her up and sat her down. She closed her eyes and tried to push back, to shield, to reject his hold, but her body felt numb. A low-grade vibration pulsed across the seat of the throne, which she realized was a plate of metal, mildly electrified. Once she was seated, Prenze gingerly set small metal discs in place, one on each temple and one tacked with a theatrical adhesive to the center of her forehead—her third eye.
Wires flowed from the discs and toward the bridge where they wound around the thick wire rope, wiring her into the thousands of miles of wire coiled across the structure. It seemed clear the wires were meant to amplify her mind. Once the spirit world was entirely open, truly open, that is.
In her editorial, in hopes of a show of force, Eve had bid the spectral city open itself to goodness and fullness, to declare itself. For the living and the dead to rejoice in the presence of ghosts. They were all the more visible. Now, all the more vulnerable. Somehow, she’d played right into his hands when she’d hoped she was shaking a spear and appearing formidable as a unified spiritual front against him.
The low-grade current made her teeth chatter and made her slump as if lifeless against the throne. Her body was unresponsive, but her mind raced.
With horror, she thought about the additional wire servicing paperwork routing from New York to Tarrytown. There was another wire tracing its way to Sanctuary. She had warned Clara Bishop, advising her and Gran that the forest glade was in need of protection, and had told Antonia to follow her visions, which surely warned of the same concern, but was that enough now, when whatever burst of electricity she’d be a part of, would arc its way there?
From the back of the dais, Prenze brought out stanchions with a velvet rope and corded off an area around them, nodding to one of the hired guards who then set up a similar barrier, indicating that the area Prenze and Eve took up could only be witnessed at a significant arm’s length.
Movement out of the corner of her eye drew Eve’s attention: her operatives, including their quiet Olga, along with Vera and Zofia, were floating just beyond the wide curving tube of the greatest load-bearing cables of the main suspension.
Withdrawing a black scarf from his interior coat pocket, Prenze unfurled a few specific objects that made Eve queasy. He’d been to her workplace to take her sacred items.
He placed her séance bell, Cora’s painted box of matches, and her office tallow candle next to her on the wide arm of the throne. “No one can say I stole your séance materials if you have them,” he said, leaning in toward her with a smile.
The insidious power-play of it all: he’d gotten to Gran, to her, to Cora, to her operatives, to the reverends. He’d loomed at her house. At her parents’. He’d gotten into her office. He’d gotten into her head. Her ears. Her life. Tried to hurt—no, kill, her love. He’d swiped at everything that meant anything, trying to destroy it all. Eve had never felt such fury or boiling hatred in her entire life. Perhaps he hated her just the same, for all the things he never had.
She spat in his face.
The smile unchanged, he used the black scarf to wipe the spittle from his nose and cheek. Still smiling, he struck the match and lit the candle.
He picked up her bell and rang it, a clarion, resounding tone that seemed to carry, in Eve’s mind, across the whole harbor.
“Go on. Call your work to order.”
He turned a knob near the wires, and she felt a surging, painful snap. The metal buttons on her uniform sparked. Wisps of smoke came up from the buttonholes, and Eve let loose a panicked gasp before he turned down the knob again.
“Call your work to order,” he repeated. “I’ve calibrated the amperage perfectly, for the best long-range effect. But you’d best get on with it, as women have a lower tolerance level to prolonged current, so call your work to order,” Prenze bid softly in her ear. “Open.”
She wanted to swing her fist and punch him right in the insidious mouth, but she couldn’t move her arms; the current had seen to that, weighing her down, tethering her where she sat.
Eve was too in tune with the spirit world to ever be fully closed from it. The sound of the bell was an instinctual opening, a drawing back of a curtain, connecting to the spirit world was muscle memory tied to the ring of the bell, and Prenze was counting on it. The sounds of the rushing wind, an opened door, an unlocked gate, all followed. She was connected to the dead, and they to her. As inextricable now as ever.
“Spirits, hear us…” Prenze hissed like a snake, aping her séance opening.
He turned on the electricity, and Eve felt her body shake more boldly, felt her teeth snapping together, felt any scrap of physical control leave her.
Every wire, cable, metal part of the bridge, all seemed alive and pulsing. Joints sparked. A string of colored lights and little paper lanterns along the bridge’s length lit up, buzzing and flickering with the pulse of Eve’s heartbeat, the sparks that the increased electricity manifested created small explosions of glittering silica dust of many colors that trailed out from the lanterns like firework streams. The crowd gasped and cheered at the unique visual effect.
The spirits did too, reactive to the pretty fireworks, but to Eve’s horror, every spirit that touched the bridge, whatever spirit might be near a metal support or floated within any of the web of wires and cables, their form faded away. Dissolving like wisps of smoke blown by a swift breath. The tiny gasps of delight the ghosts had exclaimed while watching the show soon turned to stifled spectral screams.
Where the spirits went, Eve couldn’t guess. The electrical force magnified by the wiring of the bridge was disassembling the spirits near it, whether the souls could amass ever again was a part of the divine mystery she couldn’t be privy to.
“Get away, spirits…away from the bridge,” Eve cried, her tongue thick in her throat. She was parched, dizzy and nauseous.
Prenze seemed delighted by her panic and leaned in to plead in a sickening, saccharine manner. “I want in. Now let me in. Let me see what you see. Let me walk your walks.” He reached out as if to touch her temples.
Eve closed her eyes and sent what shielding she could muster out from her body in an explosive capacity, hoping she could sever the tie, close the door, shove him back. “I…renounce…” She couldn’t manage to speak the full rejection, but her energy burst from her like the slap of a hand.
Prenze rocked back from the force of her shielding, but rather than being put off, he smiled that terrible smile again.
Her shielding blow was directed overbroad rather than specific, magnified by the wiring. Her radiant energy created a psychic wave that furthered the electrical charge. She could see it on the air, a transparent, cresting, outwardly surging, sluggish tide that glittered with Tesla-coil edges.
The lightning tendrils of psychic power consumed the nearest floating spirit, a young ghost that wore a long robe, the wispy form dissolving into mist with a little cry of surprise, like blowing a tendril of smoke and seeing it disperse. The forked tongues of the electrical edges of this psychic, electric tide paused for a moment, its pace slowed by consuming the ghost, but then continued to spread.
Vera floated in proximity to this epicenter, and the old woman’s eyes widened as she saw the wave begin to crest over the edges of the bridge and reach out toward Manhattan, hungry.
“Run,” Vera cried, screaming to the spirits of the city. “Run! Keep away from the sparking light!” The woman gestured behind her wildly. The spirits heeded her, fleeing in careening, airborne speeds. Vera floated in place.
Zofia wafted to her side and wrapped her arm around the old woman’s torso and closed her eyes, standing as if they could stop the flow or at least slow the wave down from the rest fleeing in terror and buy them time and distance.
“No!” Eve cried.
Vera tried to remove Zofia from a clinging grasp. “No, mi pajarita,” Vera lovingly scolded the floating child at her hip. “I lived a full, living life, a second one in death, I’m ready, you are not. Run to safety, you know where to go.”
Zofia struggled to keep hold as Vera tried to disentangle her. Olga’s form appeared on the air, always the big sister who swooped in when order needed restoring. The adolescent ghost wrested Zofia free with a gentle, Ukrainian admonishment. Picking up the child she’d taken on as a ward, a fellow casualty from a garment district fire, Olga nearly threw the little girl away from the encroaching spread, putting distance between them.
Throwing her arms around the old woman as if to shield her from any pain, Olga turned to see the Tesla-coil tendrils work their way up her skirt, leaving nothing behind. The current slowed, surging around them as it encountered their forms, pausing to take them apart as other spirits fled. Olga was the first to disassemble, Vera’s light merging with her own, and soon their clutching images were only vapor, then a bright shimmer of light, then simply part of the hovering clouds.
Eve’s throat was raw, choking a cry, as further away Zofia screamed, weeping, hands clenched in her slightly singed dress. The little ghost ran away from the consuming tide, as it began spreading again, toward a small, dark point in the air.
In the distance, between two heavy clouds, a shape seemed to grow in the sky: a small Gothic arch. But the clouds obscured it as the wind picked up across the whole of the harbor, and even Zofia’s form was lost behind mist and vapor. Eve didn’t know where she’d gone, but she prayed it was somewhere safe that only a spirit knew.
“You can’t…take…m-my spirit family,” Eve mumbled. The rattling of her bones and chattering of her teeth drew blood as she bit her tongue; she had no control to keep a stream of bloody spittle from dripping down the side of her slack jaw.
“But I can. I am…” Prenze applauded. “You’re doing so well.…” He turned to the harbor and shrieked, “NO CRYING FOR THE DEAD!”
The only thing Eve could think to do to try to stem the tide, to try to reroute all the energy bent on dispersal of spirit, was to drag it down with her to murky depths. The Corridors between life and death were as much of life as they were of spirit. As this energy wouldn’t harm the living other than perhaps a slight shock or sting, she hoped the dead could take shelter from dissipation in the meantime.
With the last of her physical control, closing her eyes, Eve said a private benediction known only to her and Gran and let herself slide under into darkness as if slipping beneath the surface of a great body of water.
Life was unpredictable and cruel, but in death, the spirit should have more control as to when to move on, an idea Eve took great comfort in. As she tumbled into darkness, waiting for the metaphysical floor of the Corridors to catch her falling spirit, Eve mourned her colleagues.
Vera and Olga should have been able to choose their times to say goodbye, not in an abrupt spiritual sacrifice. Being so tied to her spirit colleagues, Eve could feel the immediate absence, the utter silence of those once vibrant energies. Wherever the wisps went, Eve could only beg the divine mystery of all that was beyond their reach to gather the essence of her friend and hold it in eternal, beautiful, peaceful light.
But she had to still fight, to warn every spirit to brace itself. Everything of body and spirit existed in a balance, the reality of which only the most dedicated Sensitives could truly grasp, a subtlety lost on Prenze’s vendetta. He had forced her to create an imbalance, used her power to hurt others. She wasn’t going to do that again.
Her fall into darkness had never taken so long and the Corridors had never felt so foreign. The rising murk she’d first encountered at the beginning of the search for missing and unsettled children during the first brushes with Prenze’s great experiment was now even thicker, as if she were floating in ooze and smoke.
Eve hoped that by slipping away into the Corridors it could somehow detach her from being a conduit of destruction, but her mental and physical state was so addled, she didn’t know if she was making anything worse or better. Time was lost to her. All she felt was raw pain, every nerve singed and flayed. She tried to stay conscious, but the darkness of the Corridors was so soothing.
Dangerous, this precipice. Gran had often warned her of this place; when the Corridors seemed like a place to sleep, it was a place one wouldn’t wake up from. In this walkway, souls often got lost. Jacob nearly had been—confused and misdirected. She thought of bringing him back to himself when the injury had knocked the spirit right out of him.
“Jacob,” she whimpered, wishing for all the world she could just curl up in his hold and rest there, indefinitely, at peace, warm, safe, and in love. Folding her arms around her chest, she sank to her knees on the cool, murky floor of this liminal space and closed her eyes.
At some point, she roused to the distinct feel of hands on her shoulders, shaking her, demanding she wake up. Prenze’s angry voice was growling her name. Good. Let him rail. She wanted to sleep. Forks of lightning flashed across her closed eyes; the current had made her a Tesla coil from the inside out.
He wanted further into her mind. But he didn’t know the Corridors. He was a bully and a coercive mesmerist, but he did not have her gifts and could not go all the places she had experience going. Yes, he’d been in them during his own near-death experience, but he couldn’t know how to slip between the cracks of life and death as Eve had become accustomed to in her work of late.
Her diving into the Corridors was stalling for time, yes, but Eve didn’t know how much longer her body could hold out against the current. Prenze was varying the levels, keeping it shy of fatal, though there was only so much a body could take. He did seem to be trying to skirt murder charges, even if he was the proxy for many deaths.
If one was at a precarious threshold of physical vulnerability, as Eve was, this walk between life and death was generally, in Eve and her family’s experience, full of framed moments, slivers of memory, hope, happiness or poignance, frozen in static pictures on the liminal walls of an endless hallway; the art of a life on display for the purposes of reflection. As she’d seen with Jacob. But here, the walls had gone dark. Everything of life and death had been hiding from Prenze this whole time. Perhaps that was for the best.
Just as she felt herself beginning to fade into a sleep from which she might never awake, there was a ring. A distinct, glaring, irritating ring. In sequence. A telephone. She opened her eyes and focused on an object.
Out of the dark pool ahead rose a telephone box floating in the darkness.
Eve slowly got to her feet, drifted to it, picked up the bell, and whispered hello.
“Hello, Eve,” came a familiar voice, still distant, crossing between life and death. Lily Strand, calling from Sanctuary.
“He’s here.… He wants in, don’t let him,” Eve whispered.
“I know, dear heart. We know,” the deaconess assured her. “We have help from your dear ones, here with us now. Your Antonia disengaged the wire. We’ll be all right. But you? You’re very precarious. Shield and let go.”
“But the shielding just disassembled Vera and Olga—” Eve wept.
“It won’t again. The spirits are no longer in play.”
“I’m sorry I—”
“Hush, child, I couldn’t have known, when my soul cried out in hopes of protecting a lost child, finding you through the modernity of a telephone wire of all things, how this would come to pass. We wander life’s labyrinth until great forces nudge us away from dead ends toward the right path. We are prepared. You’re a product of now. We’re a product of eternity. Go live, Eve.”
There was a click on the line, and then the telephone dissolved into mist.
“But what do I do…” Eve whispered into the darkness, having never felt so lost.
Eve was seized. Not by darkness but by familiar hands, and she was whirled around to see a concerned face.
“Cora!” Eve exclaimed. The brilliant woman had found her by astral projection.
“Eve, I have to pull you out. You’re in far too deep.”
“But Cora, beloved friend, be careful; you could get lost here too,” Eve cautioned, looking around for a path forward. “I fear I’ve fallen deeper than I can find my way out of. Please don’t get lost here too, on my account.…”
Cora cupped both hands around Eve’s cheeks.
“As mad as I am when you try to take on the whole world all on your own, I can’t stay angry because you do it out of care. It’s noble, but maddening.” Cora stepped back and gestured to herself. “I’m a projection, but you won’t be alone for long. Just hang on. In the meantime, take care of your mind.” Cora gave her a shove.
The process of falling back into herself began again in a sickening tumble.
She wondered what Cora meant by not being alone for long; her heart lurched at the idea of Jacob coming. Her aching body longed for his touch: a soothing, all-encompassing salve. If she ever felt safe enough to see him again, she’d let him hold her for hours, days even, to restore her.
Praying the rest of the spirits she loved had all somehow weathered the blast, she had to trust Lily Strand and listen to Cora. She fought back up toward the surface of life.
In returning to herself, vibrating pain rousing her back, she knew she couldn’t amass her own energy again, not in shielding as Lily had instructed, nor in reaching for spiritual contact. Prenze’s ultimate cruelty was that her efforts of protection were used against her. Did he plan to just roast her slowly with low voltage until she collapsed, spent, charged to a crisp? The amperage was now a light cyclical thrum, but her nerves were so exposed her skin felt raked by coals.
Her eyes fluttered open as her hands shifted onto her lap. The candle wax pooled on her knee, a burned spot on the wool, the bell was upturned, her hand was inching toward the pockets sewn into the waist gathers of her jacket. For the moment, Prenze was nowhere to be seen.
The sky had entirely cleared of spirits. Eve had never, in her memory, seen the skyline, the harbor, without them. She had to blink to believe her eyes. While for Eve and any ghost, the bridge was an apocalypse; for most New Yorkers, the day remained pleasant and the sky striking.
A shadow fell over her face; then a cruel smile came back around into view.
“Are you ready to reach out once more?” Prenze asked quietly. “You can’t have gotten all of the spirits. More will come if you ask nicely. Then we’ll banish them like all the rest.”
“This one too?” Eve mumbled as she withdrew the tintype, shaking violently even though the current had let go.
Prenze’s eyes widened in surprise; then his face contorted into hatred. “Where did you get that?!” he growled. “Yes, most certainly that one, that one’s why there’s all this! Why we’re going to wipe the whole city free from the dead!” He swung his hand in a violent gesture across the harbor.
It was as if just looking at the image of Mrs. Prenze summoned her in a banshee wail of righteous fury as Eve’s and Prenze’s attention were drawn to a knot of Pinkerton guards and a cluster of protesting people some yards toward the mouth of the walkway.
Her heart surged at the sight of Cora, gesturing toward the Gothic tower, but her colleague was pushed back by a Pinkerton guard. Sergeant Mahoney tried to calm the situation, but the guards still argued. Several New York police hired by the event seemed confused as to which loyalty they should attend.
Above them all floated the ghost of a wild-haired woman, eyes dark pools of fury, in a tattered gown that had once been fine; but now the fabric looked like it had been shredded to pieces by the old woman’s sharp nails. Whoever was in the right or wrong concerning the Prenze family now, the matriarch was terrifying.
Whatever spirits had been open and drawn to Eve’s call, Mrs. Prenze had not been among them. Instead she made quite an entrance at the mouth of the approach, her wail as intense as the shrillest train whistle.
One woman, shaded behind a parasol, scurried around the melee and made a direct line, an odd, disjointed run, toward them. Another tall, lean figure in a black frock coat edged around behind her, face and head shaded by a large-brimmed black hat. The wiry figure made Eve’s heart surge with hope.
A harpy shriek was bearing down upon them as if no amount of charge would stop her. Even despite her trembling form, Eve held on to the tintype, her own bond with the object tethering the spirit in a channel that mere zaps of electricity couldn’t disperse. Albert Prenze likely hadn’t accounted for the fact that the ghost he most wanted to kill, his own mother, would be the hardest to drive away. The pain, anger, and fury between them had forged an unstoppable haunt and worn a psychic groove to the bone.
“Brother,” Arielle cried from paces away, moving awkwardly. “End this. Stop now! I can’t protect you anymore. I won’t. Alfred knows all. Punishment is up to you.”
Horrified, Prenze stared back and forth between his younger sister and the screaming, translucent form of his mother, arms out, claws raised.
The stanchions kept the crowd at bay, but some watched in wide-eyed fixation at the intense play being performed before them, oohing and clapping alternately. Eve couldn’t be sure if anyone saw the ghost above or if onlookers might think it was some elaborate stage effect.
Suddenly Albert ran toward the side of the bridge, and Eve couldn’t tell if he was about to fling himself from its side or was just looking for escape. He grabbed hold of a switch that had been rigged to the suspension cables and moved to turn the dial, but his mother’s ghost dove at him, and the force of her knocked him back onto the planks.
She stopped screaming and began crying, folded over him in wispy scraps and tatters like gnarled branches of a windswept tree bent over a weary body.
“I’m no good at showing care,” the ghost cried. “I never was. But if I thought it would drive you to all this…I’d have tried to do better.…”
“Better isn’t in you! Leave us be!” Albert howled. “Go to Hell,” he cried, scrambling toward Eve. His hands fumbled across hers as he reached for the levers and settings, knocking the candle and bell aside where they clattered to the planks before spilling hot wax on Eve’s hands. The tintype slid from her hands, which had turned into sudden claws in the pain of the increased voltage.
“Come away, Mother,” Arielle cried. Having gained swiftly on them, she dove for the tintype image before it fell through the cracks in the boards, but Arielle caught it, the sharp side of the image slicing her finger.
Prenze had turned the current higher than before, and Eve was sure she wouldn’t survive it this time. Her body shook with a fresh violence. Mrs. Prenze returned to her screaming and flew back as if shoved by the current, tatters of her gown flying away into mist. Eve lost sight of her as another form swept toward Eve in a swirl of black fabric.
A fist came barreling toward Albert Prenze’s face, and the man was knocked back cold onto the planks, a spurt of blood spilling onto his cloak, head lolling to the side.
The resulting cries of the crowd and guards telling people to keep moving were drowned out as the current crested in Eve’s body and her eyes rolled back in her head. As she was barely managing to murmur, “Help,” strong arms scooped her up and out of the dais, yanking away all the wires, tearing off the discs with swift pulls and a hiss of pain as the electricity stung her liberator.
With a swift kick, her rescuer knocked the monitor box from the throne where it crashed to the planks.
She was entirely at the mercy of whoever had struck Prenze and now held her tightly, whisking her away from the dais. Limp and barely conscious, Eve found the hold familiar and her racing heart skipped beats as tears leaked from her eyes, hope and need surging in her soul.
“Evelyn Whitby,” Jacob Horowitz murmured with loving admonishment in her ear.
“Jacob,” she murmured achingly, her deepest desires answered by his voice, by his covetous hold. “M-make sure the e…lectric is off.…”
With her still locked in his arms, Jacob bent down to disengage the lever of the dynamo. The dreadful whine and crackle of the turbine subsided. Moving with Eve to the interior side of the tower, he sunk to his knees with her, leaning against the rough stone.
“I don’t care if it’s dangerous! Do you hear me?” He insisted. “I refuse to be banished from your side.”
Clutching her to him, cheek to cheek, breath hot against her ear, he uttered a prayer of thanks Eve recognized as an offering for surviving a great hardship: “Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam, hagomel lahayavim tovot, sheg’molani kol tov.”
“Amen,” Eve offered weakly.
Her childhood time spent in prayer with Rachel made this prayer of thanks all the more resonant as it reminded her of the times when she’d felt most spiritually at peace, and here she was with the man who made her soul rejoice. His ministrations took away pain; his touch healed. He drew back to look at her, and just the sight of him made her weep in relief, processing all the pain and fear. She didn’t know if they’d won the day or just a respite, but for this moment they were conscious and Prenze wasn’t.
Jacob cupped her face, staring in horror at the blood and saliva pooling down the side of her chin, reaching for a handkerchief, wiping the gore away with such gentleness, staring into her eyes, ascertaining her state and strength.
“Do we have enough…” Eve mumbled, fighting for words, trying to rally. “Even with all this, the coercion…hard to prove, because I went…willingly.…”
“He hurt you, Eve,” Jacob cried, anguished, “and could easily have killed you! All the money and tricky lawyers in the world can’t refute the level of malice and madness here.”
Arielle Prenze knelt before them and reached into an interior pocket of her coat, presenting a black bound book. “Take this.” She handed the journal to the detective. “It should illuminate the rest of what’s been speculated—putting your pieces together.”
Jacob took it and slipped it immediately out of sight into a breast pocket. “Thank you, Miss Prenze. Are you all right?”
Arielle rose, smiled uncannily, and walked away.
“Maggie,” Eve called after her, “are you…”
“Shh…” Arielle said over her shoulder as her face shifted ever so slightly, a little luminous rustle within.
Eve almost chuckled, but it turned into a wracking, painful cough. The smell and taste of copper overwhelmed her, and she gasped for fresh air.
Jacob cradled her closer, moaning in abject horror at her pain. His generous heart, operating with a level of empathy that might put him in the capacity of a Sensitive himself, appeared nearly undone. “What were you thinking going it alone!” Jacob cupped her face again, brushing hair from her eyes before pressing his forehead to hers.
“I can’t bear to lose you,” Eve gasped, tears leaking again onto her cheeks. Jacob gently wiped them away. “I’d rather be miserable, devastated, lost, alone without you than be the cause of your suffering, injury, or worse.”
“That isn’t your choice to make,” Jacob declared. “I’ll take my chances with you any day instead of a brokenhearted half life. The job is dangerous, you no more so than the job. Don’t fight me, Eve. Love me. Like you said you did. Unless that was a lie?”
“No, I do…” Eve sobbed. “I’m so scared. I love you so much, it hurts. Worse even than any of this—I’ve never been so terrified to lose something.”
“How did you think I felt when I learned you had shunned me, told my parents you wanted nothing to do with me, kept me out of your plan, put yourself on a suicide mission? Even if you thought it was ‘for my own good’? What if I’d done that to you?”
“I…I didn’t know what else to do. Don’t be angry with me,” Eve pleaded.
“I’m not angry; I’m beside myself,” Jacob exclaimed, his hand hovering over her body. “Just like you came after my spirit when you saw it leave my body, I could…I could feel you flagging, your spirit separating out, nearly torn to pieces. I wasn’t next to you to help, and it was agony. Please. Don’t push me away again.”
He pressed his forehead to hers again, murmuring against her lips. “You have changed me irrevocably, Eve Whitby. You can’t turn me away when I have become so cleaved to you, my treasure. I love you with all my heart. Love me, as you said you do, and let me love you.”
At this confession, Eve gasped, the jarring pain of the electric replaced by a shudder of pleasure. He drew back again to stare into her eyes. Her angel: the closest thing she’d ever known to a heavenly sort of happiness. Nothing had ever made her feel as alive as this. He was right. It was worth the risk. If he indeed felt the way she did, she couldn’t reject him. Neither would ever recover. They’d live, but forever haunted. Ghosts weren’t just spirits. Ghosts were also the heart’s roads not traveled.
Eve gathered what strength she had and reached up, bringing him down to her lips. She murmured her assent. “Yes, Jacob. My beloved. I will. For you…for the love in my heart I can’t possibly deny or forget…I will do anything.”
“Thank you,” he exclaimed. “Thank you, beloved.” Embracing her fully, he sealed their compact with the tenderest of kisses.
After a sweet, breathless moment, he drew back. “Can you stand?”
“Jarred to the bone, I thought my skin was rattling off. I doubt it. Am I still shaking? It feels like I am.”
“Slight tremors. Come on, then,” Jacob hoisted her up toward the dais. They saw that Prenze was stirring, so Jacob placed Eve on the neutralized throne and blocked her with a wide stance. The sight of her torturer rousing made Eve shrink back, but Jacob raised his fists to have another go at the wretch before he could stand.
From the other side of the tower, jumping over the stanchions, Mahoney came swiftly between them and seemed to be helping Prenze up. The waking man seemed happy to see the officer at first, but then there was a struggle.
“Sergeant, what are you—” Horowitz stopped as he saw the officer forcing a vial of green liquid down Prenze’s throat. The man sputtered before going entirely limp from sedation and fell back to the boards.
“Taste of his own medicine,” Mahoney replied. “Pulled from the stores he was using to control his household.” He nodded his head at Eve. “Miss, I hope you didn’t suffer too much.” The officer stared down at Albert in disgust. “Between what you’ve all seen and what I’ve seen, we’ve enough. We’ve enough to try him.”
Horowitz patted his coat pocket. “In addition, we’ve his journal thanks to Miss Prenze and Chief Inspector Harold Spire’s Scotland Yard case notes on the body presumed his.”
“Very good.” Mahoney clapped his hands.
“Thank you, Sergeant, and I’m sorry to have doubted you,” Eve said quietly to the Irishman, “But I wasn’t sure what side you were on.”
“That was intentional,” Mahoney replied. “Albert revealed himself to me, and then the fool thought he had me under mind control. But as I said, when I gave up the drink, I promised myself and the spirits of my wife and child I’d never give anyone or anything that power over me. So, I played along.”
“Brilliant,” Eve murmured, before a wracking cough took her. Jacob stepped up to the side and soothed her aching back with a gentle, massaging caress.
“We’ll book him,” Mahoney said, reaching down to cuff Prenze, “but we’ve only a bit of time to hold him unless we formally charge him.”
“Assault of a city official,” Jacob stated. “Eve isn’t an officer in the traditional sense, but she is a public servant Roosevelt himself signed for.” The detective shook with rage as he described what had happened. “Prenze drew blood from Eve. Even if his fancy lawyers dare say Eve came here of her own volition. It got out of hand, beyond all reason and sense. The devices and testing link him to the abduction of Evelyn Northe-Stewart. He tried to coerce you too, Sergeant: another charge.”
“I’ll testify, but I’d rather you keep Arielle and Alfred clear of it. They were victims in this, and if anything’s to blame, it’s from turning blind eyes, not active participation.”
Mahoney took a step closer, looking around.
“Even though I’m sure it was her helping Albert in the funerary warehouse where Gran and I were first experimented on?” Eve countered, following Mahoney’s eyes to Arielle, who had gone to stand further up the approach, staring out over the harbor.
Looking at the tintype of her mother, Arielle seemed to be conversing with herself. Maggie must be giving her instructions.
“He did control her,” Mahoney said, balling his fists. “Preying on her piousness in his delusions of Godlike powers, the wretch.”
“We’ll keep her out of it once we’ve built an irrefutable case,” Jacob declared.
The passersby remained cordoned off, but Cora finally fought off guards keeping them from “the art and performers” and hurried to their colleagues’ side. Behind Cora, keeping a respectful distance but a sharp eye, Eve noted that the good officer Fitton had arrived to help. Jacob’s friend and a stalwart, unfailing help to their cases, he must have received a call and hurried to attend it. Jacob stepped aside to allow Cora clearance, and she rushed to embrace Eve warmly but carefully.
Cora didn’t get to say a word before Eve demanded: “Where’s Gran? Antonia? At Sanctuary? What about Jenny—”
“Zofia told Jacob and me, as we rushed from his office, that they were rushing toward Sanctuary,” Cora replied. “Antonia’s vision: the wiring was there too; we had to split up—”
“Good. I fear for all the spirit world, it’s so vacant here,” Eve said, wincing with pain and raw nerves, glancing nervously at the harbor. Busy with boats and life, it remained empty of spirits. “Vera and Olga are gone.…”
Tears flowed again as Eve relived the sight of their last moment. “It’s my fault, I was trying to shield against Prenze, but it magnified an electrical blast.… They stood in the way to buy time so that Zofia could run. I…doubt they can reassemble. I’m praying Sanctuary created a safe haven for other souls, until the ground is safe for those that wish to haunt.”
Cora nodded, biting her lip.
“I am deeply sorry for your loss, but don’t take on guilt,” Jacob said quietly. “You couldn’t have known what his devices would do; you were doing what you’d been trained to do to protect yourself and others.”
“Exactly,” Cora agreed.
“I’m just sorry I didn’t get to you sooner,” Jacob explained to Eve. “There was massive confusion between the guards and hired police at the mouth of the approach. They tried to stop the group of us. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have paused to show my badge; I should have just rushed this stage when I saw it. Cora and Fitton brilliantly caused a scene so I could slip by the barricade. Thank you both.”
Fitton, who had joined them during Jacob’s explanation, nodded acknowledgment. The two clapped one another on the back in appreciation before Fitton began examining the scene and taking notes.
“I know why you did what you did, Eve, letting this play out,” Cora said, edging closer to Eve, scrutinizing her, trying to determine if Eve was hiding any deeper injury from them. “But I thought you’d promised Gran you wouldn’t leave her house. I’m angry with you for letting yourself get hurt.”
“That makes two of us,” Jacob added.
“But the court of New York does not accept spectral evidence since the advent of seventeenth-century witch trials,” Eve countered. “We had to get to the point where he drew living blood. I hadn’t thought I’d be left entirely unguarded and without resource, but it makes my case all the more compelling.”
“Thank God for ghosts letting us know where to find you,” Jacob said.
“I’ll get Centre Street to come collect all the statues, wire, and boxes for evidence,” Fitton said.
“Yes please, and if you could have any wire that doesn’t belong to the bridge cleared,” Eve begged the diligent officer who had been such a boon to the case. “That’s very important.”
Perhaps the spirits would return if they felt it was safe. She prayed Prenze hadn’t been successful in driving them all away for good. What had become of Mrs. Prenze, Eve couldn’t be sure. The electrical surge seemed to have torn her apart from what Eve could tell in the melee.
“I’m going to stay here, Eve, if that’s all right, to help Fitton clear and catalog things,” Cora said. “Then I want to get psychometric reads on Prenze, likely while en route to prison.”
“Do you need help?” Eve said, struggling to sit up.
“No!” Cora and Jacob both chorused.
“You’re going to rest,” Jacob commanded.
“It’s a wonder you survived. Let us each do work we’re called to do,” Cora declared.
“Does anyone need a stretcher?” Fitton asked Eve, glancing over at the prone Albert. Mahoney hoisted Prenze over his broad shoulder in an impressive fireman’s carry.
“Stretcher or…” Jacob held out his arms. Eve moved toward him as he smiled, again scooping Eve up, pressing his lips to her forehead in reassurance and gratefulness. She wound her arms around his neck and held on as tight as she could. “Then let’s be done with this,” the detective said, carrying her away.
Exhaustion overtook Eve. Finally feeling safe for the first time in a long time, she nodded off until she was aware of being lifted into a carriage, heard a door shut, and was jostled into another covetous hold.
Eyes fluttering open, she saw that Jacob still cradled her as an open-air hack carried them uptown. They were halfway to her house.
“I think we should stay close tonight,” Jacob said quietly. “I see no reason now why your home shouldn’t be safe, but I will feel better if you allow me to help stand guard alongside your colleagues. I don’t know what mental powers Prenze will wake up with.”
It was a solid point, and it was true she’d take any excuse to stay near to Jacob.
Nuzzling close, she kissed the hollow of his throat and pressed her ear to his strong heartbeat.
“Thank you…” she murmured against that comforting thrum. “My whole life has been dealt in spirit, in realms beyond my body. I was so scared of being separated from you, body and spirit, it shocked me, the depths of emotion. I haven’t known how to be whole as a living woman, but you…just here in your hold, you bring me back to life.”
He bent and kissed the crown of her head. “You’ve done the same for me.” Brushing her hair from her cheek, he tightened his grip around her, pressing her head to his heart. “Literally and figuratively. I’ve always felt called to my work, but you call me to life.”
“If the ghosts have all gone somewhere for peace and safety,” Eve said, “it would behoove me to remember that I still live. I live here.” Looking up at him, his beautiful eyes spoke volumes of passion and promise. “And I want to enjoy every minute I have with you.…”
He arched her up into a hungry kiss. While her world was tactile, she would appreciate every sensation, grateful for the opportunity to touch, to feel, and to fumble toward love.
Once arrived at Waverly Place, Jacob helped Eve up to her door with an arm around her waist. The lights were dim. The detective removed his hat, and Eve now saw it had been concealing the damage he still bore evidence of: a bandage affixed to the stitches on his head, and the remaining bruise across his forehead and temple. He was surely dealing with significant lingering pain from his injuries, but he’d entirely hidden it, valiantly.
Once inside, Eve looked around for signs of her team but found only Rachel Horowitz sitting with tea in the parlor next to a stained-glass lamp as she wrote in a notebook.
Looking up as Jacob helped Eve in, Rachel jumped to her feet and rushed to set extra pillows on the settee for Eve to sit and lean against.
Are you all right? Rachel signed, looking at the two of them in horror. What happened?
“I am all right now.” Eve nodded, gesturing to Jacob.
Jacob added, “And I am all right thanks to Eve’s intercept. But it’s been a trying few days.”
Rachel embraced both of them. Eve didn’t want to go into all the electricity and pain, or any of the previous attacks, but she did want to get Rachel’s read on the state of the spirit world. Glancing around, Eve noted that even the usual house haunts were absent.
I’m the only one here. Rachel intuited her thoughts. Your mother let me in. I explained you were still working a case so she didn’t ask questions. I wanted this to be a safe space for the team to return to, and to be an intercept for spirits to relay messages.
Eve posed the most important question on her mind. “Have you seen any city spirits since this afternoon, Rachel? Any usual haunts outside? Has your spiritual channel changed?”
It’s quiet, Rachel signed, gesturing all around her and to her head. Too quiet.
Eve pursed her lips. She wanted to hold a séance but didn’t have the energy. If any lingering effects of Prenze’s experiment were somehow still in her system, she didn’t want to do additional damage. She’d done enough. Grateful she still had gas pipes, she doubted she’d ever switch over to electric after this.
Closing her eyes, she only had enough energy left in her to reach out to one asset.
“Margaret Hathorn.” She tried to summon her best ally. “Come talk to me. I know you’re busy with Arielle but…”
There was no answer. Eve sighed.
“In the morning we’ll call the reverends for an exorcism,” Jacob said. “I can’t imagine taking over Arielle Prenze was something Maggie wanted to do for too long.”
“I can’t imagine Reverend Coronado would mind obliging,” Eve replied with a grin, recalling how much the previous encounter seemed to affect both spirit and clergyman.
Rachel poured Jacob and Eve tea while they shared some of what had happened.
“If Gran had been there on that bridge”—Eve shuddered—“she’d have tried to put herself in the way. I am so glad she went to Sanctuary instead. Bless Antonia’s vision. It’s my hope that Sanctuary is playing a part in the protection of all spirits.”
“In the morning we’ll take a look at these,” Jacob said, reaching into his coat pocket and withdrawing two bound books. Arielle’s offering: Albert’s diary, and something else. “Before Zofia burst into my office,” Jacob explained, “I was given this casebook.”
Eve reached over and took the second book, reading Harold Spire’s letter to the detective. “Chief Inspector Spire! Gran worked with him; you’re wise to ask his advice. This will be an enormous asset. While I know Prenze will never be able to be tried for the torture and dispersing of souls, he can’t be let to abuse the living anymore either.”
As she eagerly began perusing the pages, Jacob chuckled.
“In the morning, Eve, not now. Prenze nearly made a dynamo out of you. You must rest.”
“I…” She looked up at him then at Rachel, who mirrored his stern look.
“But I am rather, energized…” she said with a sheepish smile.
Jacob groaned at her poor attempt at humor. “Drink some tea, at least, will you?”
“Yes, and an aspirin. They’re in a bottle by my bedside, if you don’t mind?”
Jacob went for them, and Eve blushed at the idea she was sending him off to her room, watching him go, savoring the look of him: determined and strong, striking in any state. The only thing that could pull her away from looking at Spire’s casebook and Prenze’s diary was the prospect of being alone in a room with Jacob Horowitz. Rachel was staring at her, looking bemused.
Gesturing after Jacob and back to Eve, Rachel inquired about the state of things. I was worried about you two after the Thalia gala. The Veils said you were very upset when you left. Did you and Jacob have an argument?
“It was a misunderstanding,” Eve explained. “When I saw Jacob with Sophie, so close and familiar, I thought they were courting and I just…panicked.…” Her face went bright red. Glancing at Rachel sheepishly, she added, in sign; Because honestly, I’m helplessly in love with him.
Rachel beamed. I know. At this, Eve bit her lip, her blush brightening. Rachel chuckled.
I remember them both, she continued, Jacob and Sophie, from my youth. Before I moved to the Connecticut Asylum to learn sign and our families lost touch. They cared deeply, but I knew, as did the spirits, that those two were meant only for dear friendship.
Eve welcomed Rachel’s reassurance, having thought she’d never be able to forget the sight of Jacob’s handsome face looking so lovingly at such a beautiful woman. But jealousy was a warped, foolish demon Eve wanted nothing to do with.
He loves you too, I can see it, Rachel signed. Confirming something the spirits said to me long ago, about you. About your future.
Before Rachel could elaborate, Jacob returned with two small white tablets, holding them out for Eve.
She took the pills from him and clasped his hand as she did, looking into his eyes, hoping her gaze showed him the truth of her heart: that she did want to go forward, fearless and with hope.…
Just then, a roaring, piercing pain struck Eve’s skull. A shriek awoke within her, and she didn’t know if the sound was hers or another soul’s cry that echoed in the room. All the pain she’d experienced at the bridge swept back over her body, starting with the crown of her head and overtaking her whole body with a vengeance.
“Prenze woke. I can feel him,” Eve ground through clenched teeth. “The anger…”
Albert, in his dread astral projection form, was looming over her head, reaching out for her neck as if he held a reaper’s scythe. “Get out,” she growled. Looking to the table where Rachel had lit candles, she focused on the tips of the flame as inspiration for her shielding; but his anger anticipated her, lashing out in his own swift, psychic blow. The aspirin rolled away as Eve’s eyes rolled back and darkness descended once more.