“And that’s why I’m back,” Maggie countered. “I don’t know how we’re going to prove the evil of this house in ways that the living can prosecute, but this is now our sole focus.”
“What if we could compel someone living to go in for us?” Zofia asked. “Someone who isn’t Eve or any of the precinct operatives, seeing as they’re known now by the family.”
“That…could work,” Maggie said, her mind already whirring. She’d taken note of several Sensitives in the city, not those as gifted as ran the Ghost Precinct she worked for, but ones who did see or sense. “We might find an ally I hadn’t thought to utilize.… Good thinking, little one!”
Zofia looked up at Maggie proudly, and for a moment in those wide, dark irises of the child’s eyes, Maggie saw the reflection of the fire that had signaled her doom. Even ghosts were haunted. The choice was theirs if they would let it entirely define them, or motivate them to a new mission.
There was movement in the basement. A form loomed in a dim doorway before darkness overtook the cellar level again. The ghostly palms withdrew from the barred windows, but the sounds of sobs overtook the exterior garden.
A murderer of ghosts, living like a king in the finest part of Manhattan.
“The Ghost Precinct has to root him out,” Zofia murmured. “Force him into the light.”
“I already have an idea. Tell the girls I’m off on an experiment and not to worry if I’m not back for a bit. Let’s see if I can scare up some help.”
Chapter One
Eve Whitby came to in a forest glade with no memory of how she’d gotten there.
Before her was a stone cairn, and from its foundation rose a single sandstone Gothic arch, the only standing evidence of a chapel that had never been built.
Eve recognized this sacred place, having been called here before to commune with the spirit world. This was a place that spirits called Sanctuary, and she must have sleepwalked to this precipice between worlds. Again.
The sky was brightening; dawn had broken on a cool, late autumn morning as the last months of the nineteenth century were shortening.
The realization of where she had wandered came with a wave of terrors: Where were her colleagues, and were they all right? As director of the Ghost Precinct, she was responsible for three young women, gifted psychic mediums. As leader, she was setting a poor precedent of wandering off unannounced, a rule she’d made her team promise they’d never break.
The last thing she remembered was trying to get to sleep after Albert Prenze, a man with no morals, a vehement hatred of ghosts, a terrifying capacity to mesmerize and compel his subjects, and a likely culprit of murder, had drawn her and dear Detective Horowitz outside into a confrontation, threatening them before disappearing.
She and Jacob Horowitz had parted ways after a breathless, private moment together, and her heart burned with a flame it had never before experienced while her mind raced with terrors of the present case. The combination of yearning and fear hadn’t made for a pleasant night’s sleep in her grandmother’s fine townhouse. But, being so restless, she should have remembered rising, throwing a housecoat and wool coat over her nightdress and getting on a northbound train to exit outside the city limits on the Hudson River Line. But she didn’t.
Jacob. Was he here now? Her heart spasmed. Whirling around, she found herself alone with only the pine trees and a few maples losing the remainder of their colorful leaves, one by one like slow tears, dripping from the tall eaves above her head. The last time she was at this precarious doorway where soul separated from body, Jacob had been there to catch her when she came to, making her feel safe, alive, delighted.
But there was no such comfort here now. There were only soft voices from unseen sources, echoing on the breeze.
Eve had grown up quickly due to necessity. Her nineteen years of life were entirely haunted. But that didn’t mean she was inured to spectral chill or the threats brought on by certain paranormal experiences. There were things even seasoned minds and old souls should fear. The whispered phrase that distinctly emanated from the stone arch directly before her was one such thing; a recurring warning of late, from the spirit world to hers.
“Don’t let anything in!”
The phrase repeated itself on the air. Eve crept forward and placed her ear against the cool grey surface, listening to the murmur of spirits, as if whispering on the other side of a door.
Then, a voice she recognized. A friend.
“Eve isn’t ‘anything’; she’s my trusted ally in the living world,” explained the voice of Episcopalian deaconess Lily Strand, a woman of the cloth whose ghost had devoted herself to the safety of children’s spirits. Lily was Eve’s guide through Sanctuary, a space outside life and death that had pieced together the souls of attacked loved ones, a service for which Eve would be forever grateful.
“Deaconess Strand,” Eve called to the arch. “Lily. I don’t know how I got here. Did you call for me again?” The pine trees rustled an answer she didn’t understand.
A hand clamped on her shoulder, and she pitched forward through the archway, almost striking her head on the stone cairn covered in moss and ivy at her feet. She plummeted in a hazy fall.
Just as Eve was about to crash into a wooden doorway, she closed her eyes and braced for an impact that never came. She was wrested to her feet, gravity shifting, the world righting itself. Opening her eyes, the willowy, sharp-featured Strand stared at her, dressed in a simple blue sisters’ habit. The deaconess released her grip on Eve’s arms. They stood just outside what appeared to be a large cathedral when she’d just moments ago been in an empty forest clearing. Arches and spires soared away from them into oblivion. The building changed depending on one’s general beliefs, familiar comforts or favorite architecture.
“There’s an entity following you,” Strand said sharply, looking around. Eve turned. Although there was nothing but a thick mist behind her and the vague outline of trees, a murky reflection of the forest beyond, the hairs at the nape of Eve’s neck wouldn’t settle.
“The man brings in his wake a terrible fear,” Strand continued, “and promise of violence. In Sanctuary, we are all a bit psychic. The sacred space itself was made from the sheer force of spirit ages ago, made not from mythic creatures but human hearts. We know that man means us harm and I will not have it find us.”
“Albert Prenze.”
“Yes, he hates us. Not us specifically, but ghosts. And he’s following you.”
“Yes. My precinct has been working his case,” Eve said. Strand opened the arched door of Sanctuary just wide enough for their bodies and hurried Eve in, closing it behind her to stand in a shadowy entrance foyer of grey stone arches and colored light. “His irrational hatred of ghosts stems from family torment. I don’t know what purpose could be served by terrorizing you here.”
“You’ve led him to us,” murmured a voice from the shadows in a light African accent. A young woman stepped into the light cast by a bay of quatrefoil stained-glass windows over the front door, dressed in the same blue habit as Lily Strand, her brown face framed by the white of her wimple, her dark eyes wide and worried.
“Mara, please, Sister,” Lily said in a low voice. “Eve has only ever wanted to help. That’s why I called out to her in the first place. I trust this living one.”
“You can trust my whole team,” Eve insisted.
“But none of them know what we need here,” the woman continued, anxious. “You can’t know the ways in which we are vulnerable, and your presence only tears at our fabric.”
“Mara, please, light candles if you fear a breach,”