Evelyn Northe-Stewart had tried not to panic when her carriage sped away from the city and her granddaughter. The spirits were urging her toward where she needed to be; it was very clear. Antonia and Jenny had been supremely focused, quiet, listening on the journey. Gran was impressed with their studious fortitude. They’d discussed Eve briefly, as Gran tried to explain her strategy, though the vagaries clearly unsettled the trio deeply. Focusing on what they could control, they tuned themselves to the energy of the sacred space ahead.
Antonia, quite brilliantly, had taken a quiet initiative, after seeing how their foes affected spirits via electrical manipulation, to learn about the power lines and what companies serviced what area in the boroughs and beyond. When they arrived at Clara Bishop’s house to apprise her of the Spiritualist guard they were keeping not far from her property, Antonia suggested Ambassador Bishop call the local service company. Under the guise of contracting digging and construction in the surrounding acreage, he bid the power company shut down nearby lines for the remainder of the day, encouraging any affected parties to contact him directly. He’d pleasantly mesmerize anyone concerned into not minding any inconvenience.
Once the mechanical threat was neutralized, it was their purview to tend to the spiritual.
Now they were outside of the Sanctuary arch, and everything was very quiet. Unnaturally so.
The three had brought a picnic to the arch that Clara had packed them while her husband cajoled with the local utilities. She remained home, as getting that close to a parting of the veil was a guaranteed epileptic seizure. But she promised to listen for disturbances and to pull positive ley line energy, routing a different kind of “wiring” than Prenze could ever have fashioned, compensating with ancient light if things grew dark.
For most of the day, as they picnicked before the arch and listened to the chatter of any passing dead, all of it was general murmuring, familiar to any Sensitive. But then there was a distinct shift. A rush of noise and then nothing, just as they’d had the last of their tea cakes. Even the dead leaves on the rustling trees had gone silent.
Too quiet, Jenny signed to Gran, who nodded.
She rose, still in the black widow’s weeds from earlier—it suited their mission—and placed her hand on the arch.
Gran’s fall was swift and instant.
All she could hear was “She’s here! Our benefactress! The one whose heart built the door!”
And then she lay on the floor of a beautiful cathedral. Above her head soared innumerable Gothic arches.
Joyously she realized it looked like the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine was meant to look. A behemoth Gothic wonder that hadn’t yet been completed, it was just getting started in upper Manhattan, the mere hope and darling of her heart, the life’s work of so many, here made manifest. She gasped in delight. The nave was enormous, the altar expansive and bordered by carved wooden choir rows, the front rose window huge and blue, each petal signifying one of the Beatitudes. The rear ambulatory let in more light, the chapels of patron saints all lending their stained-glass glory to the Gothic whole.
“How is this possible,” Evelyn breathed, and music answered.
Angelic sound swelled around her: all women’s voices, a sacred tune Evelyn recognized as that of the great Hildegard, inspiration to women who sought to be seen and heard. The light, the living light of her twelfth-century visions, brightened around the great space poised to become one of the largest Gothic cathedrals in the world. Long after Evelyn would pass from this mortal coil.
A woman in a blue Episcopalian deaconess habit peered down at her before helping her up from the stone floor. “Evelyn Northe-Stewart, the legend herself,” the woman said, guiding her to a nearby pew and sitting down. “Hello, I’m Lily Strand. I imagine Eve may have mentioned me.”
“Yes, I’m so grateful to you, and for this place to look like my church…” Tears flowed down Evelyn’s cheeks. “I knew I’d never live to see it finished! Thank you...thank you for this.”
“It was your steadfast faith, even when everyone else in your childhood hurt and rejected you, that created this portal. The least we could do is let you see this future.”
“I fear for the present,” Evelyn said gravely.
“Don’t. You’ve done well to protect us by shutting down the wires. What you’ll need to do is shield yourself and your psychic friends. Because we’re going to fight back.”
“And Eve?”
“She’ll survive—”
Evelyn shot to her feet. “What do you mean, ‘she’ll survive’?”
The deaconess rose too, walking Evelyn toward the vast front door of the ponderous space. “I mean exactly that. I’ve checked on her. She’s not alone.”
“But she’s still at the house—”
“What’s important now is the protection of a whole city’s worth of spirits, making sure the psychic wave Prenze created stops here with us, the levee. We strain at capacity, but we will hold for safety.”
“Where are all the spirits of this Sanctuary, then?”
“Hiding,” Strand said. “Those who enter here will first see the sacred space they most want or expect to see. The truth of this place lives in the recesses. We’ve not time for a tour. Go, sit with your fellows. Keep watch like all the women who have kept watch since time began. Go with our heart and our thanks, and when the trumpet sounds, brace yourselves.”
Lily Strand flung open the great door, and light beyond blinded Evelyn. With a gentle shove from the deaconess, Evelyn fell back, but as she did, the world opened.
For one brief moment she thought she glimpsed every shadow of Sanctuary, and beyond, into the Corridors, past the Corridors into a more ancient place even deeper into a stone purgatory, into the land some called the Whisper-world, all the levels and layers and labyrinths open to the dead. One yawning, gaping moment when everything seemed vulnerable. But it had to be an illusion. One could not get to the mythic Whisper-world from Sanctuary. She had been expressly told by spiritual agents she met in her youth that those gates were shut.
And yet, the whole of the spirit world had become to Evelyn’s eye a great, yawning maw, a widening scream and at the center of it, a terror. A hulking, undulating shadow that filled Evelyn with dread. As it pulsed, so did it grow. The spirit world feared it too, and Evelyn’s empathetic Sensitivities were overwhelmed. Her heart faltered in her chest. She was no longer the young warrior she once had been. She didn’t want to die like this, falling away from the Heaven she’d been so desperate to see finished—
“Wake up.” A whisper fluttered over Evelyn’s eyelids, and she felt as though she struck ground. With a moan, she opened her eyes to see Jenny staring down at her, Antonia at her elbow.
And then there was a loud, clarion trumpet blast. Evelyn couldn’t be sure who or what heavenly host sounded it, but she knew the onslaught was coming.
“Shield!” Evelyn cried, bolting up to grab and cover Jenny with her body as if blocking her from a blast, cradling the child as she’d done over Eve when first embattled with her gifts.
In a freezing immersion, the forest clearing was gone and the women were drowning in spirits.