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“Wait! Just another minute, I—” Evie said.
“We can’t wait, Baby Vamp! Quick—before she comes for us,” Sam said.
But the ghost made no move. She stood perfectly still. “You’ll be sorry,” she repeated.
Within seconds, Sam, Evie, and Theta had annihilated the dead girl. Evie felt the familiar surge of overwhelming energy coursing through them all, the temporary euphoria making them feel invincible, as the ghost’s atoms were scattered to the winds.
“Ohhhh,” Evie said, falling into the grass. Somewhere inside she still felt the ghost’s terrible hunger. She let the bloodlust run through her. When it left, she shivered from the lack of it. She felt awful now. She knew Sam and Theta felt the same. That was the price.
“What were you thinking? Were you trying to be dumb?” Theta said when she could speak again. She coughed something up into the grass and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“I heard Mabel’s voice! I did, I swear. I had to know if she was okay,” Evie said.
Theta softened. “And is she?”
“I don’t know.”
She dreamed of Mabel’s funeral. The mourners dressed in black, crying at the graveside. And her brother was there in his war uniform. He came to sit beside her. “It’s going to get rough, old girl,” he said. A crow cawed from a headstone across the way. It had a woman’s face. When Evie looked away, her brother was gone. In his place was the dead girl with the brooch. She pointed that bony finger at Evie. “You’ll be sorry,” she said.
The mourners gathered around the gravesite and tossed in their handfuls of dirt. But the coffin was open. “What are you doing?” Evie said to them. “You’re getting her dirty!” She jumped down into the grave. It was wider than it looked. Up close, she could see the worms wiggling from the tall earthen sides. She pushed a hand against the grave wall to steady herself and it gave way. There was a hole now, and when Evie peered into it, she could see into another univers
e, a place of dead trees and, far off, the Eye, shining gold, creating death.
Evie turned back to Mabel. She brushed the dirt away from Mabel’s serene face, from her pretty yellow dress. She brushed dirt from Mabel’s hands and the skin slipped off like rumpled paper. Underneath was a mangled hand, the work of the bomb. Evie saw that the other sleeve was empty, the arm simply gone. And Mabel’s face was not serene at all. Explosion burns marred her cheeks. A chunk of her neck was missing.
“No,” Evie said. “No.”
She covered Mabel with dirt to keep her safe and whole. Other things were slithering out of the grave now. Two tiny green snakes plopped down and twined around Evie’s shoes. With a cry, she stepped on them. Fingers pushed their way through the packed dirt surrounding her. The grave walls were growing. Higher and higher. She would never get out if she didn’t start. “I have to go, Mabesie. I’m sorry,” Evie said.
She kissed Mabel’s cheek and started to climb.
Mabel opened her eyes.
SECOND SON
Jacob Ennis Marlowe was a second son. His older brother, John Edwin “Ned” Marlowe, Jr., had been the favorite, as first sons so often are. Ned was also delicate. A hemophiliac, he’d been only fifteen when he’d suffered a fall and bled to death. Jake had been lucky. The “royal disease” had not been passed to him.
The morning following Ned’s death, the staff swabbed and mopped Hopeful Harbor until it gleamed. But his mother could never bear to live in the house after that. Too many memories. Was that Ned bounding down the stairs now? Was that his laugh outside by the rose garden? The house was full of ghosts, and Martha Marlowe spent a fortune on spirit mediums in an effort to make contact with her son on the other side, a practice Jake both resented and found fascinating. One night, his mother held a séance in the library. Jake hid in the closet to watch through a crack in the door. As the medium begged for a sign from the world beyond, the crystal chandeliers winked. A cup that had been Ned’s favorite shot to the floor and broke. Had it been coincidence? Or was it evidence of a world beyond this one?
In that moment, Jake Marlowe became determined to find the answer.
The Marlowes moved to an apartment along the East River in Manhattan. But Jake longed for the simple pleasures of Hopeful Harbor. The lush grounds. The servants bustling through the corridors. The elaborate dinners his parents had hosted for important, elegant people who were not mediums and fortune-tellers. It had all seemed to belong to a time untouched by loss and calamity. Jake Marlowe, the great inventor and industrialist, the trumpeter of progress, was actually building blindly toward the future in the hope of recapturing an idyllic past that had never truly existed in the first place.
The servants could have told Jake this if he’d ever been willing to listen. Downstairs, their hard work hidden from sight, they worried they’d be let go for some small infraction—a meal that hadn’t been quite enough; the silver not polished sufficiently; the time Maisie asked for a few days to see to a sick sister but was told she couldn’t be spared from her chores, so she’d not been there when her only sister died. That idyllic past Jake glorified had not been so idyllic for them.
The ghosts could have told Jake this, too.
Jake Marlowe went on to a prestigious boarding school and then to Yale, as wealthy sons do. He joined a secret society there, but it bored him. Those boys drank port and indulged in symbolic rituals, putting on the trappings of magic when there was real magic out there somewhere, to be found and conquered, Jake was certain.
Meeting Will Fitzgerald had seemed like fate stepping in. Will was wildly intelligent, if lacking in social good fortune. His Irish last name and Midwestern bluntness had made him a bit of an outcast among most of Yale’s elite. Will had never been chosen to join Skull and Bones or any other fraternity, but his brilliance, curiosity, and tenacity commanded respect. Jake had never noticed the slim, bespectacled boy until, during a dreadfully dull lecture on Hamlet, Will had raised his hand and made an argument that William Shakespeare might have himself been a witch. He held forth with such dizzying argument that the professor had ordered him from the class for disorderly conduct. On his way out, Will had retorted, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” a line he would use time and again.
Jake had chased after him on the snowy lawn.
“Have you ever heard of Diviners?” Will had asked him as they warmed their hands on cups of weak coffee.
From that moment on, Jake Marlowe and Will Fitzgerald had been the best of friends, with a shared mission: to reach into the supernatural realm and decode its mysteries. That passion would take them to the Department of Paranormal, and to Diviners. For Will, this study meant crossing the nation to collect their stories. For Jake, it was about collecting their blood.
For years, he’d been reading about heredity and bloodlines. Eugenics was the science, and it promised that selective breeding was the answer to all social ills. Blood was the problem and blood would prove the cure.
