“Maggie, then you tell him. He’s getting better at hearing spirits, isn’t he? I’m not here to play messenger between lovebirds; we’re here to nab Prenze on something we can use.”
“When the next steps unfold, Cora, it’s all going to go in a rushing jumble and none of us will be prepared. Two worlds, yours and mine, are on alert. I’ll work from within the Prenze family. But I’ve a strong instinct that Jacob needs to be nearby for whatever is to come.”
“Is he still at the hospital?”
“No, he went home last night. I checked,” Maggie answered. “He looked toward me at the window, so he is getting better at sensing spirits, but he couldn’t hear me. You should have seen his poor face. Whatever was said in the hospital must have heartbroken him.”
“You weren’t there with them?”
“No. I’ve been prowling Prenze’s mansion from outside, so I know the rooms when I enter. I’ve tried to memorize them. Ghosts have to do things repeatedly for anything to stick.”
“So you want me to go to the detective and say what?”
“That he should be with us, ready for anything. Not separated or kept in the dark. We need hearts intact. What I know about wielding power between this plane and mine, it all has to do with hearts, connection, and love. Eve’s somehow lost track of that. Much like Jacob helped get Eve out of Sanctuary and come back to herself, we may need that again. If she’s incapacitated, she can’t yell at us for bringing him back in.”
“Where is Eve now?”
“At Gran’s, in her little ‘tower room’—where she first came to terms with her gifts, a room that was her crucible when she was a child. From there, she’s opening herself to the whole of the spirit world, and provoking Prenze in doing so. Whatever is next, there will be spirits relaying between all of you. I don’t know where is best to be, but together, I believe, is wise.”
“All right, then, I’ll go. It’s best I be the one to try to navigate Mulberry anyway; they’ll get used to seeing me if it kills them.”
* * * *
Alone in her corner tower, Eve woke with the sun, drawn from a heavy sleep as if pulled up from a well. She opened the door, wincing as it groaned on its hinges. Gran was downstairs; she could hear her in the parlor, humming softly, as she tended to do when nervous and trying to pretend she wasn’t.
Eve looked to the coat-tree in the corner of the spare room. She needed to feel prepared. Official. As she slowly dressed in her adapted, black edition of the police matron’s uniform, the stalwart look of it helped her confidence.
Patting the pocket, she was pleased the tintype was still there, that she’d kept it with her for good measure. This battle, she thought grimly, may be won by emotion and the ability to control it. In the other pocket was the knife her mother had given her when this all began and Gran had been abducted. Just in case she did end up leaving the house. Even though she’d promised she wouldn’t.
But no battle could be won without some breakfast.
She descended into the parlor, where Gran, humming a refrain Eve recognized as a dreamy new piece by Debussy, had prepared a whole tray of deviled eggs, Eve’s favorite, and a carafe of coffee. Gran sat in a fashionable riding habit at the tea table, light filtering over blue wool in patterns of magnolia leaves leaded in Tiffany glass that lined the bay window.
“Hello, dear.” Gran gestured to the morning papers, bidding Eve take a seat before her. “Look at what you’ve wrought. My editorial contacts printed you in three morning papers.”
Examining the papers, Eve tuned her psychic ear to the spirit world as she sipped the strong coffee and contented herself that the feel of it was balanced. Bidding the city to think of spirits with love was creating a far more pleasant spiritual resonance than the usual jarring chatter of the dismissed, disgraced, or forgotten. But with it too, she felt the sharp whine of discord and discontent, the wedge Prenze was trying to drive between worlds.
Before Eve even realized it, she ate the whole plate of deviled eggs, blushing an apology midbite in case Gran had wanted any. She only laughed heartily.
“I’m merely relieved you’re fortifying yourself. Whatever unfolds, it will take all our energy.” Gran explained what had happened at the New Netherland, the scuffle between Arielle and her brother, with Mahoney caught in the middle, no one sure where his loyalty lay. When Gran explained Cora’s excellent astral work, Eve beamed.
“How brilliant. I look forward to telling her how proud I am of her when all of this is over. With this, it’s clear we really have no time to waste. The pot is boiling.”
“Well then, I’d best not delay in getting Mosley in place to set off the electrics. You’re planning on opening yourself to the whole spirit world in a séance, then?” Gran asked hesitantly. Eve nodded. Gran grimaced. “I wish I could be in two places at once.”
Eve offered her best impression of Gran’s gentle scolding reassurance. “You are, Gran. Your energy is; don’t doubt that now. Not to mention that’s what the ghosts are for: a relay. Quicker than any modern invention.”
As if to prove the point, Zofia appeared. “Ready for duty,” the child said, lifting her hand to her forehead in a small salute.
“I’d like to begin,” Eve stated, embracing Gran.
“You’ll not leave the house.”
“If, for some reason I have to, I’ll be followed, will I not?”
Gran nodded.
By the front door Eve watched as Gran checked in with the men stationed within her eyeline. Elegant and powerful, Gran strode down her front walk, glancing back over her shoulder with a complicated look. Neither of them knew how many of these moments, embroiled in important things, they had left together in mortal form. The thought seemed to pain them both.
“No time for melancholy or fear,” Eve chided herself, turning away.
Zofia floated close. “Chopin, my favorite musician, and my countryman, once said, ‘I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness.’ It is a phrase I think of often. Do so. Throw off the thoughts that don’t help. It’s how I get through anything.”
“You’re such a help, becoming as much a mystic and muse as anything, dear one,” Eve said with a smile. “And I can’t imagine a better companion for this task.”
The little girl beamed, her greyscale form brightening.
This whole, complicated case had begun with a warning from the spirit world: “Don’t invite anything in.”
She was about to do just that.
Each stair back up to that lonely room was a prayer. Step by step, preparing for the best and worst. With methodical precision, she set the séance table with items that she and Gran had used through the years.
Picking up a small silver bell etched with an image of Parliament’s clock tower and its famous Big Ben bell within, Eve couldn’t help but think back to when she’d first commandeered this piece, in her youth when Gran was describing different ways to begin a séance.
“Some use a bell,” Gran had stated to little Eve, who immediately replied she wanted one. Gran returned from a parlor curio cabinet with the one Eve now held over a decade later.
“And a candle?” Eve had asked then. “I read some Spiritualists rely on candles to light their way in the channel.” She’d run to her designated room at Gran’s and taken the small silver tallow candleholder from her bedside table in case the gas went out.
The same small, tarnished single candleholder with its wide saucer and curved handle now sat before her, waiting. Small items with specific histories that imbued them as sacred relics were the best spiritual conduits.
She rung the bell and let the sound of the tiny, clarion ring echo in the room it faded. Striking the match, she said a quiet prayer to whatever force of love and peace was listening. Blowing out the match after the candle was lit, she watched the smoke curl away and placed the charcoal on the candle saucer and let
the first drip of the candle fall on the top of her hand.
The spiritual colleagues with whom Eve already had a rapport didn’t need a word from her to be summoned; just the ring of that bell and the opening of her heart was enough.
One by one, her spectral guides and colleagues arrived, filling and chilling the small upstairs room. First Zofia, then she was followed by her fellow worker Olga, who was showing up more frequently as an observer, quiet and steadfast. Vera wafted in, clucked her tongue at the sparse surroundings, making a face when she saw the cot. Eve was struck by a memory of Vera coming to her in her youth and admonishing a group of henpecking spirits to leave her be and give her space to breathe and live. That had happened here, and Eve had bonded with the old woman immediately.
They stared at Eve, and she realized she had to rally them, but she didn’t have a muse of fire in her bosom like Shakespeare gave Henry V. Tired and worried, she had to come up with something nonetheless. With the same openness that she wrote the editorial, she spoke from the heart to those who had forgone eternal peace to make mortal life more bearable.
“My friends. Dear, stalwart soldiers. I don’t know what’s next, other than a psychological, spiritual battle. While I appreciate your presence, don’t put yourselves in danger on my account. I have intentionally secluded myself from my living loved ones. At any point I want you to be prepared to do the same. Albert Prenze has been working on strategies and devices meant to rip spirits apart. Don’t stand in the way of his line of fire, however that manifests. Be my relay while keeping everyone at a distance.” She blinked back tears. “I’m not ready to lose any of my living loved ones today any more than I’m willing to lose my spirits; is this clear?”
The spirits nodded. As they did, the air rippled around them and Maggie was last to arrive, floating through the squat dormer window.
“My dear, while I’m always glad to see you…” Eve folded her arms and lowered her gaze at her best ghostly friend. “If you plan on entering the house to possess Arielle, you need to be there when Mosley upends their electrical system.”
“I know…” The ghost darted around her like a flittering bird. Maggie’s eternal ringlets bounced as she wafted before Eve, her face set in a spoiled pout. Emotional nuance hadn’t had the chance to take a living root before her murder. “I just hate to leave you alone here in such a raw, vulnerable state.”
“I’ll be all right. Go to the house; this isn’t goodbye and I’m not alone.” Eve waved her off, praying that her words were true. The ghost bit her lip a moment, reached out fondly with a cold hand, brushed Eve’s face, and flew off toward her designated target.
“Take care of her,” Maggie instructed to the ghostly entourage.
“You take care of yourself,” Zofia called after the woman she considered a sister.
Eve wasn’t sure what to believe. She was alternately sure of herself, tapping into the natural-born confidence that Gran had nourished and tended like a garden, and cracking at the seams. What if what she’d built for herself sat on rocky foundations and at any moment she’d tumble apart like Poe’s house of Usher?
Her ghosts hung at the periphery of the room, and she dug deeper, reached out psychically further.
“Spirits. Entities. The forces at work. Tell me. Speak to me. Whatever must be will be,” she said to the air. She didn’t want to invite Prenze all the way in, but it was an opening of a door of communication she’d tried to keep shut.
There was only a moment before a flurry of motion was visible outside.
The shadow arrived at the dormer window, looking in. As her enemy appeared, her ghosts receded as requested. This time, it was accompanied by the man’s voice.
“Finally.” Prenze’s projection offered a cold smile, cruel eyes glinting behind glasses slid down at an angle, looking down his nose at her. “I only need a moment with you. It’s best you don’t fight it anymore. Follow,” bid the voice. “Come alone. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Only the ghosts?” Eve countered, narrowing her eyes.
“One can’t hurt the already dead,” the voice chided. “Don’t resist. Once it’s over I’ll never trouble you again. You were designed for a unique purpose. As am I.”
Eve pressed her mother’s knife close on her wrist and buttoned up her uniform over the white sheath beneath. Patting her pockets, she felt a small bottle of water, notebook, money, a small bottle of various pills, a roll of bandage, and a tintype for provocation. She noted the shimmering air off to the side and knew her associates, careful to not make themselves fully manifest so as to avoid detection, would follow at a distance.
Eve prayed that the Prenze mansion, unbeknownst to its owner, was about to be thrown into chaos, clues and solutions unearthed, and those trapped be set free to set wrongs to right.
Chapter Thirteen
It wasn’t many blocks from Gran’s townhouse to the mansion at the center of the conflict. Maggie floated just above the low stone wall of Central Park, letting the brush and young tree branches tickle the hem of her skirts, passing through as if she were running a hand slowly over soft, supple grass. There was no friction in the spirit world, only movement, air, whispers, and a peculiar sense of time. She had to be at her most alert. A distracted soul in life, easily captivated by pretty things and pretty people, Maggie the magpie was even worse about it in death.
The formidable brownstone block that was the Vanderbilt mansion meant she had gone too far downtown, but she allowed herself a moment to stare in the windows of a second-floor room. A child swathed in silk and bows screamed at the sight of her. The mischief maker in Maggie giggled.
The earnest part of Maggie yearned for the type of experience she’d found with Reverend Coronado, an experience that she was still ruminating about, one that changed her profoundly. She’d tasted life again, and it was so very tantalizing. Now she’d cherish it again inside Arielle Prenze, someone only just older than her when she died. For a moment she might feel like herself again. But that wasn’t the task. She needed access to Arielle, not her own missed opportunities and sentimentalism. The danger of ghosts was that they could grow too fond.…
The Prenze mansion loomed ahead, its lights dimmed. If she wasn’t mistaken, she saw tiny, sparking eyes watching from between the small bank of hedgerows the family had managed to wedge in. Around them every property line was exchanging greenery for granite and grandeur, expanding until there was hardly any breath from one mansion to the next.
“Auntie?” Maggie called.
A figure in a black gown and veil tapped a cane against the flagstones. There she was, just across the street and south a quarter block, like a haunt in reverse, trading luminosity for shadow. Aunt Evelyn would be presumed as a mere passerby; she would give Mosley a sign to trip all the wires, and whatever secondary generator the Prenze prison had in place.
“You’re sure,” Aunt Evelyn murmured.
“As anything,” Maggie responded confidently.
Further up the block, a driver waited with the largest carriage. Antonia and Jenny had insisted upon coming and waited inside. Clara Bishop had returned home to Tarrytown to keep a spiritual ear tuned to the spectral dynamics of the area. Prenze hadn’t been lurking outside of Sanctuary for nothing.
Maggie stared at the mansion. This place had done her harm, torn her apart, split her soul into pieces, and thrown it all into darkness before Sanctuary repaired her again. The thought that she might be ripped asunder again occurred to her, but like little Zofia, who appeared suddenly by her side even though she’d been told to stay with Eve, she couldn’t let her own trauma keep her from the task at hand.
“Olga and Vera are with Eve. I’m not losing you again, sister,” she said, reaching toward Maggie. Maggie patted her companion on the head, every touch an echo of its former power, a phantom comfort.
“But if I give you a message, you have to listen to me. If all goes to plan
, I’ll not be free to come and go in and out of Arielle’s body. You’re the best of us at a relay.”
“All right,” the little girl agreed, beaming with pride at the compliment about her spectral acuity in vanishing and reappearing in the right places.
Maggie nodded toward her aunt. “It’s time.”
Three sharp raps of the steel-tipped cane upon the slate stone outside the mansion gate. The cue.
From within the branches of the evergreens came a growl, then a hiss, then a sizzle, then a roar.
“Float back,” a nervous voice insisted, waving at the ghost from between the hedges. Maggie turned toward Mr. Mosley. She’d heard Auntie Evelyn speak of this “man of current” in uneasy terms, reluctant to call upon the favors of an unpredictable soul. But Evelyn Northe-Stewart kept a motley crew of associates at the ready, specialists perfectly suited for the types of peculiar situations Eve and her family seemed destined to fall into.
“Back,” he repeated before Maggie realized he could see and was talking to her and Zofia. The small, wiry man’s eyes were wide and the Tesla coils within them sparked the brightest she’d yet seen. “Float back from the direct line of it.”
Maggie didn’t understand, but she didn’t protest and she drew Zofia away and into the street just as a carriage passed through them: another tickle of tactile object through vaporous mass, only this one smacked rather than elided, a denser mass than the caress of leaves. The horses gave a whinny of dismay at the ghosts, the carriage veering away and the driver cracking the whip to regain order.
Sparks flew up around a wooden pole on the street outside the Prenze mansion where countless wires converged.
A hum rose in the air, and though Maggie didn’t have tactile hair to raise, her spectral hair stood on end, as did Zofia’s, flying out all around them as if in a gust of static wind.
Another pop, bang, and reverberate thunderclap. Fireworks of sparks erupted all around the Prenze mansion, a whole bay erupting in particular from the cellar level, glass shattering and the wrought iron rattling.
A Summoning of Souls Page 20