A Sanctuary of Spirits Read online

  New York, 1899, and the police department’s best ally is the secret Ghost Precinct, where spirits and psychics help solve the city’s most perplexing crimes . . .

  There’s more than one way to catch a killer—though the methods employed by the NYPD’s Ghost Precinct, an all-female team of psychics and spiritualists led by gifted young medium Eve Whitby, are unconventional to say the least. Eve is concerned by the backlash that threatens the department—and by the discovery of an otherworldly realm, the Ghost Sanctuary, where the dead can provide answers. But is there a price to be paid for Eve and her colleagues venturing beyond the land of the living?

  Searching for clues about a mortician’s disappearance, Eve encounters a charismatic magician and mesmerist whose abilities are unlike any she’s seen. Is he a link to mysterious deaths around the city, or to the Ghost Sanctuary? Torn between the bonds of her team and her growing relationship with the dashing Detective Horowitz, Eve must discern truth from illusion and friend from foe, before another soul vanishes into the ether . . .

  Visit us at www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Books by Leanna Renee Hieber

  The Spectral City series:

  The Spectral City

  A Sanctuary of Spirits

  The Magic Most Foul trilogy

  Darker Still

  The Twisted Tragedy of Miss Natalie Stewart

  The Double Life of Incorporate Things

  The Strangely Beautiful saga:

  Strangely Beautiful

  Perilous Prophecy

  Miss Violet and the Great War

  The Eterna Files trilogy:

  The Eterna Files

  Eterna and Omega

  The Eterna Solution

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  A Sanctuary of Spirits

  Leanna Renee Hieber

  REBEL BASE

  Kensington Book Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Contents

  Books by Leanna Renee Hieber

  A Sanctuary of Spirits

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Meet the Author

  Excerpt from book 1 of The Spectral City series

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Copyright

  Rebel Base Books are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp. 119 West 40th Street New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2019 by Leanna Renee Hieber

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  The RB logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.

  First Electronic Edition: November 2019

  eISBN-13: 978-1-63573-059-3

  eISBN-10: 1-6357-3059-7

  First Print Edition: November 2019

  ISBN-13: 978-1-63573-062-3

  ISBN-10: 1-6357-3062-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  Prologue

  Manhattan, 1899

  Monsieur Dupont, career undertaker and director of a Manhattan viewing parlor for the dead, considered a postmortem body the most beautiful treasure. For him, the tired cliché of an undertaker being obsessed with death was transcended; he rejoiced that the dead made him feel so alive.

  The dead were the key to the kingdom of heaven.

  His craft had started innocently enough. Locks of hair. The obsession progressed. Other tokens and trinkets were next, taken and procured with exquisite care. Subtle trophies.

  No one would know or see. No one could. Grief was such a strange, ever-changing beast, but one constant remained: no one ever noticed all the details of a corpse. No one would notice if some small thing wasn’t exactly as it had been, as death had already made the familiar strange.

  Memory rewrote itself. He’d seen the proof of it time and again. The dead were transformed and made perfect by their loved ones. In that perfection it was just so lovely, so sacred, so beautiful to take a small scrap of that elevated, exalted existence…

  So, he began. Tokens of his little saints made into sacred objects. Tiny souvenirs from the world’s most innocent: children. Taking something from a child was the most sacred of all transactions. Procured and placed into sacred vessels. Surely no one would mind. Their bodies were photographed for posterity, and a souvenir was taken in private just before the body was taken to the grave.

  No one but the ghosts, that is. Spirits of children noticed what was gone but didn’t understand.

  Then there was Ingrid. His Ingrid. The child that by all rights should have been his if fate hadn’t been so cruel. Heinrich Schwerin, thinking the girl was actually his, had interfered and ruined everything. He took the little girl’s body, presenting her dressed and anointed as a saint and giving it as a gift to an orphanage when worship of her should have been done in private. A promising apprentice gone mad. None of it had gone to the grand design. As a divine architect, Dupont had lost control of the lamb that wandered from the flock and had to be fed to the wolves, never knowing the child he’d gone mad over wasn’t even his.

  He stared out the third-floor window of his viewing parlor and watched as boisterous theatre folk tumbled from their boarding house. There was such life in this city, and to juxtapose it with constant death was high art. He took on the sorrows of those who did not wish to, or could not, greet death in their own homes. He took it on for them, an extension of his undertaker role. Wakes were usually done in the home, in the downstairs parlor, but for those who couldn’t bear it or didn’t have a suitable place to host an entourage for days, his viewing parlor stood in for home. Families could consider calling their parlor instead a “living room” because he was displacing death for them, banishing it from their doorstep.

  Thankfully, the spirits had been banished from his.

  The best thing about meeting his business partner Montmartre at a lecture about the mapping of the human mind three years prior was that the man had devised a way to keep out the ghosts. The children floating outside the window, poin
ting at what had been left behind in Dupont’s cabinet of treasures, simply didn’t understand. He’d tried to explain it to them, but if children had a hard time grasping divine mystery in life, it was even more hopeless after death. He wished he, like most people, didn’t see ghosts. He supposed his ability was an unfortunate symptom of a profession in death.

  Montmartre had devised the ghost barricade, but out of the corner of Dupont’s eye, he could see them marching around the exterior of the building like striking workers on the line. He couldn’t allow their constant parade to distract him, so he stared at a fresh child laid out on the slab and dabbed rouge on cold blue cheeks.

  He feared his careful enterprise would be revealed after all the nonsense with Ingrid. Part of him relished the edge of danger. Part of him wrestled to regain a simpler life he’d left behind once his mind had been opened to the grander possibilities of his artistic rituals. What was it his friends would say? Arte Uber Alles. Art above everything.

  Turning to another work in progress, a waxen sculpture standing against the wall, he affixed a hint of color to the lips of the new seraph that adorned a pedestal of the stage set. So very realistic. He stared at his work and swelled in pride. No amount of danger could dull this rush.

  He stared at the lovely little faces. He would make saints of them all.

  There was a knock at the door. He scowled, put down his tools, and went to answer it. His stomach twisted with dread when he saw the tired face he’d once found sweet, years ago, when she’d worked as his maid. But now she was a troublesome card he had to strategize how to play.

  “What did you do to my daughter?” the mousy-haired woman demanded, barging past him into the entrance foyer, her wide eyes full of rage. “And why?” She shrieked. Whatever beauty she’d once had was now sunken by grief and pierced by the sharp knife of poverty.

  “Shhh, my Greta, my love,” he murmured. “You’ve come back to me. Now we can grieve, together…”

  He clutched her passionately, forced her to acknowledge him. Their past. Their little Ingrid. Their illicit child. He held Greta as she cried and tried to soothe the wildness of her sorrow with sweet nothings.

  The thought occurred to him that they could try again. She could be his Eve and he could build something new, with all of his prizes collected in an Eden of his design. Perhaps, finally, he could feast with all the saints…

  Montmartre wouldn’t like it. But that man had his own agenda, and Dupont planned on leaving him to it.

  Dupont seized Greta roughly. “Come with me, and we’ll make hell a heaven.”

  Chapter One

  Union Square

  Manhattan, 1899

  “Maggie.” Eve Whitby waved at the distracted ghost who floated before her, a transparent, greyscale and luminous form. “Answer me. How could you, of all spirits, simply disappear? And what brought you back?”

  “I am dead; we do that sometimes, you know. Vanish,” Maggie said with a laugh. She turned and began floating north, in the direction of the train depot where they were headed. The wraith was a visual echo of the lovely young lady she’d been in life, dressed in a fine gown of the early eighties.

  “Don’t you be flippant, my dear,” Eve chided, lifting her skirts and hurrying after the specter, running directly into the cold chill of her wake. “We’ve been distraught for weeks,” she continued with a shiver. “We knew you’d never leave without telling us! We couldn’t even catch a trace of you during our séances!”

  The dark-haired man taking long strides to keep up beside Eve cleared his throat.

  The generally drawn pallor of Eve’s cheek colored. “I’m sorry, Detective.” She turned to him without breaking her pace. “I forget you can’t completely hear or see our subject here.”

  Tall and lithe, with a neatly trimmed mop of dark brown curls that bounced in the breeze, dressed in a simple black suit with a white cravat, Detective Horowitz, in his midtwenties, was as sharp in wit and mind as he was in features. The angles of his face curved and softened as he smiled. His ability to shift from serious to amused was as swift as it was attractive.

  “I’m catching pieces here and there,” he replied, “but to be honest, I’m more enjoying the looks you’re getting from passersby, averting wary, disdainful eyes behind hat brims and parasols.”

  “Oh.” Eve batted an ungloved hand, caring not a whit for the fine details of sartorial propriety, as gloves often got in her way of tactile experience important to her work. “Mad folk walk New York streets daily and no one stops them; it’s one of the glories of the city—minding one’s own business!”

  Horowitz laughed and kept pace.

  The three angled along bustling Broadway as it slanted up ahead of them, the ghost at the fore, dodging passersby with parasols and weaving past horse-carts, careful to mind their droppings. Eve grumbled as the stray foot of a businessman’s cigar was lifted by the wind onto her shoulder, and she brushed off the embers before they caught the thin wool on fire. She wore an adaptation of a police matron’s uniform: a simple dress with buttons down the front, but in black, having donned constant mourning in honor of those she worked with and for, the spirits of New York.

  The detective didn’t seem to hold Maggie’s interruption against her, despite the fact that he’d been leaning toward Eve in a near-kiss when the spirit’s incorporeal form had appeared between them. That the detective even entertained the idea of a ghost was a blessing. That he could slightly see and barely hear fragments from Maggie was incredible progress. Just weeks before he’d been a confirmed skeptic. Perhaps Eve’s Sensitivities were rubbing off on the practical, level-headed detective. The idea that she might be able to draw this man further into her world was an equally thrilling and cautionary prospect. Eve reeled in more directions than one.

  Maggie Hathorn had been Eve’s dearest friend since childhood, the most trusted spectral asset in her Ghost Precinct since its recent inception, and the spirit didn’t seem to be taking her own disappearance seriously. Yes, ghosts often came and went as they pleased. But they were generally creatures of habit with particular patterns of haunt. Eve’s Ghost Precinct of four mediums relied on the constancy of their stable of specters, Maggie at the core. Until she’d vanished with no word.

  “If the Summerland draws you and you wish to go, Maggie,” Eve said earnestly, reaching out to the floating figure and touching chilled air, “just tell us. I love and need you, but I know I mustn’t keep my dear friend from her well-earned peace.”

  “Oh, my dearest friend.” Maggie turned and reached out. A transparent, icy hand brushed across Eve’s cheek. “None of this was about wanting to go but wanting to stay, to help. But come, there are details I can’t trust myself to remember. I’ll take you to where the Sanctuary left me. You can’t go in, but you of all people should know where I came out.” She turned and resumed her float. Eve and the detective tried again to keep up.

  The spirits that pledged themselves to Eve’s Ghost Precinct promised they wouldn’t go on to the Sweet Summerland, as the Spiritualists called their idea of a heavenly plane, without telling their coworkers. It was a way of ensuring that the delicate channel between the precinct Mediums and the spirits did not tear itself into injurious pieces. An open, psychic channel to the spirit world hurt if torn away and not properly shut. A wounded third eye could never properly heal. It had injured Eve when Maggie had been ripped away. It seemed the spirit hadn’t thought of that. Eve swallowed back a reprimand that would seem ungrateful considering how glad she was to see her dead friend.

  “Eve, who is this gentleman trailing you?” Maggie waved an incorporeal hand toward the detective. “Have you started hiring men since I’ve been gone?”

  Eve shook her head. “Detective Horowitz and I have been consulting on strange cases that have unexpected, intersecting patterns. He’s been a critical liaison for the department and a valuable friend.”

  “To
be clear,” the detective added, looking vaguely in Maggie’s direction as they continued uptown, his gaze focusing and losing focus as if he faintly caught sight of her spectral person then lost her again. “I do support Miss Whitby and her precinct, even if I don’t always understand it.”

  The public at large didn’t know about the existence of the small Ghost Precinct, technically part of the New York Police Department. The few lieutenants and sergeants who did know thought the whole thing preposterous. “Full of hogwash,” Eve had overheard one day in Mulberry Headquarters. The fact that the Ghost Precinct was made up of women didn’t help the force’s estimation, and it had been Eve’s hope that Horowitz championing them would help win over some colleagues. The ones who didn’t similarly judge him for being Jewish, that is.

  The unlikely trio made the last fifteen blocks to Grand Central quicker by jogging over an avenue to catch an uptown trolley line, hopping on the next car that clanged its bell at the stop.

  Maggie looked around with fierce interest in every sensory detail as the trolley dinged along, her luminous eyes taking in every storefront and theatre. The venues grew grander as the blocks ticked up their numbers. The ghost seemed to study every horse and cart, carriage or hack; every passerby, be they elegant or ragged, watching the shifting sea of hats along the sidewalk, from silk top to tattered caps, feathered millinery to threadbare scarves, forms dodging and darting like fish in a narrow stream. Eve saw it all pass around and through the ghost, her transparent image superimposed over the tumult of midday Manhattan.

  “I’ve missed you,” the specter murmured to the metropolis. Eve didn’t hear New York reply, but she felt it in her heart. When one genuinely loved the city, the soul of New York took note.

  Watching Maggie watch New York was a study in eternal eagerness. Love kept the good spirits tethered to the tactile world. Moments like this were Eve’s lesson about life taught by the dead: drink it all in, the chaos, the tumult, the bustle of existence and its myriad details as much as possible, as one’s relationship to it all could change at any moment.