The Spectral City. Leanna Renee Hieber

stared at the ghosts of the two young children—six, perhaps seven years old—who had fierce, defiant looks on their faces as they took in the horrified expressions of the living. She saw a photograph lying there of the two of them, in their Bavarian garb, posed with a shepherd’s crook and a prop sheep. Their eyes were closed but their eyelids had been painted with eyes as if they were open.

      A tall, thin, dour-looking man in a fine umber brown suitcoat strode forward, his long face elongated in a frown, his auburn hair greying at the temples. The man scooped up the strewn images with an irritated sigh, glaring in the direction of Maggie, but not directly at her. This man, she determined, must be a Prenze patriarch.

      “What . . . what were those . . .?” a young woman sitting on a velvet settee asked, leaning forward curiously, her blue silk gown pooling around her.

      Everyone stared at their host, who offered a thin-lipped smile. “Confiscated property from a recent wayward friend. I have been known to minister to those among my station who are lost. This is a friend’s collection. What an unfortunate fetish; to covet deceased who are not his kin. I took them away, lest he be haunted. Perhaps I have brought a haunt upon us instead. What an ungodly thing. Isn’t that right, Madame Nightstar?”

      Maggie nearly snorted at the unoriginal stage name.

      The man turned to the medium, who was white as a sheet. “Oh . . . of course . . . Mr. Prenze. Of course.”

      Maggie wanted to interject that there was nothing inherently ‘ungodly’ about a spirit in the least, but the man ushered everyone out of the room to go on to dinner, saying he would be right with them all. They did so, looking warily at the upturned box, at their host, and at the ‘medium’ before obeying and filing out to a feast.

      Once the parlor door had closed behind the last guest, the towering man closed the distance between himself and Maggie in two easy strides.

      “Ah, naughty girl,” the man clucked his tongue, staring at Maggie directly, eye to eye. That answered whether or not she could be seen by him. He hadn’t given her any clue before. Wily. “How did you get in?” he pressed.

      Maggie turned toward the children. They were gone.

      “Just passing by,” Maggie replied, unsure if he could hear her.

      “Well, now that you’re here, stay indefinitely—” the man said with a leering grin. He moved to the door, to a switch along the wall that surely controlled the lighting. She had assumed from the opulence of the home that the lighting was electric; it was too bright and had a harsher quality, and the man made it only more so as he turned a knob and the lights grew even brighter. Impossibly so. The room grew blinding. Maggie squinted, raising an incorporeal arm over her eyes as if she could shield herself.

      Along with the bright light came a hum, a rising, whining, whirring, grating noise like a mechanical roar. The sound hurt. The light burned. She felt as though she were being torn apart . . . she opened her mouth to scream . . .

      And then . . . utter darkness.

      Chapter One

      Manhattan, 1899

      Only the ghosts surrounding Eve Whitby could cool her blushing cheeks as the inimitable Theodore Roosevelt, Governor of New York, stood to toast her before a host of lieutenants, detectives and patrolmen, all of whom found her highly dubious.

      Many of these same New York Police Department officers found Roosevelt just as problematic. He wasn’t Police Commissioner anymore—he’d used the notoriety from having cleaned up corruption within police departments and ridden it straight to the governorship, but as some detractors noted, the man couldn’t leave well enough alone. So here he was meddling again with the police, and Eve was at the center of it.

      While Eve tried to appear confident in most situations, being at the center of a crowd made her nerve-wracked and flushed. She was surer of her mission than she was of herself. When one followed a calling, passion was often a driving force greater than self-assuredness.

      Whole departments turning to her and lifting glasses made her stomach lurch and waver like the transparent, hovering ghosts glowing about the room who made her work possible. She looked down at the hem of her black dress—simple light wool attire of clean lines and polished buttons she’d designed to look like a police matron’s uniform, but in the colors of mourning. When she took on this department, she donned mourning. Not out of sorrow, but in celebration of her co-workers, the dead.

      I am a woman of particular purpose . . . she thought, an internal rallying cry. Any moment Roosevelt was going to make an announcement about The Ghost Precinct, the project she’d put everything in her young life on hold to spearhead.

      Taking a breath, she steadied her feet, shifting the heel of her black boots on the smooth wooden floor. She glanced in a mirror and tucked an errant thick black lock of hair back into her bun, trying to shift her pallid, nearly sickly-looking expression to something that appeared more commanding lest her wide green eyes give away her concerns.

      The manner in which the three ghosts at the edges of the room were bobbing insistently in the air meant something. They had something to say and were her most vocal operatives. Vera, Olga, and little Zofia, who was actually wringing her hands. Eve had asked that her operative spirits not come tonight, for fear of distraction, but they had come regardless. She ignored them, though their behavior made her nervous. Something was wrong. But she couldn’t ask what. Not now. Not in the spotlight in front of a crowd who didn’t trust her.

      Roosevelt, dressed in a white suit with a striped waistcoat, his iconic moustache moving with his expressive face as if it were punctuating his dialogue, adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses, lifted a glass, and bid his fellows do the same.

      “I give you Miss Evelyn H. Whitby, daughter of Lord and Lady Denbury, and I bid you toast the inception of her Ghost Precinct. Now, because we live in an age of skeptics and charlatans in equal measure, we’re not going public about this Precinct beyond our department heads here. We don’t need undue fuss, we don’t need hysterics. What we know conclusively is that this young woman’s talents aided in solving two brutal murders to date. As we near a new century, no one knows what new crimes will come with it, but one thing we can count on is that there will always be the dead, with a perspective none of us have. It’s foolish to leave such a resource untapped, especially as this city grows by the thousands every month.

      “We await many more resolutions and have directed her to cases that have gone cold. Perhaps, dare I say, she and her colleagues may even garner a few premonitions to stop a crime before it’s even begun! To the young lady and her ghosts! Whether you’re a believer or not, she has assured me there’s nothing to be afraid of!”

      There was a polite if less than enthusiastic clap of hands.

      Nothing to be afraid of . . . she repeated to herself. That’s exactly your purpose on this earth, to make ghosts a less frightful reality for those who do believe. For those who can see, for those who want to know. You are the voice of the departed, you are their champion. Be proud. Show these people how proud you are to be the advocate for the dead.

      Eve nodded to the politician, squared her shoulders, lifted her flute, and allowed herself to enjoy the distinct, sweet bite of a good champagne, feeling the chill of the dead on the air. If her spirits could not calm her nerves with their presence, at least their drastic temperature wafting towards her warm cheeks made her appear more poised and stoic than nervous in the spotlight.

      While she was fairly certain she was the only one present who could fully see and interact with her spirit department, she didn’t rule out that some members of the force might be aware that they were being watched from beyond the veil. While the ghosts had disobeyed Eve’s orders to stay entirely away tonight, at least they were keeping their distance from the attendees, as some of her friends and family were too affected when more than one was in the room. When she had agreed to be noted in tonight’s reception, she’d done everything in her power to avoid a scene.

      The intense, inimitable Mister Roosevelt