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  Jill Fritzo

  The world is a brighter place because you are in it.

  Acknowledgments

  More than a decade and a half ago I was approached to write a book about my life and the psychic experiences of clients—it was called One Last Time. Unbeknownst to me at that time, I would go on to write seven more books on the subject of spirituality—both fiction and nonfiction. Hold the psychic jokes please!

  Over the years I discovered that, while many people are wide open to the potential of going “above and beyond,” there are also many who are deeply rooted in their belief systems yet are curious and inquisitive of the infinite possibilities of the “Other Side.” Through fiction, I learned that I could convey a message of spirituality, kindness, and love that allowed the reader (whatever their religion) to contemplate, without giving up or abandoning their faith. I love taking people on these journeys of potential.

  People often ask, “Where do you get your ideas from?” and quite honestly I can only say that I believe most of it is channeled creatively in some way. I’ve been blessed with guides—both here and on the “Other Side”—and I want to take this opportunity to thank a few of my earthly guides for stewarding this new work of fiction: Claire Eddy, for not being “Lost” on the subject; Greg Tobin, for your guiding light and literary tailoring; Corinda Carfora, for always being one of my original Publishing Angels and just “here and there”; and Tom Doherty, for the opportunity to bring a message of love and humanity to the world by igniting people’s imagination. To my family: my love and appreciation. And to the Fallen Masters in all of our lives … here’s our story.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Part Two

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Part Three

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Part Four

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Twenty-eight years ago

  Ten-year-old Charlene St. John glanced at the clock. It was almost 6 P.M. and her father should have been home by now. Her father, Ian St. John, was a Scottish immigrant who had fallen in love with the African-American woman who worked at the laundry where he took his clothes each week. Ian and Louise had married and moved into a small house in Denbigh, a suburb of Newport News, Virginia.

  Ian worked for the Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding Company in Newport News.

  With only a rudimentary education, he was not one of the white-collar engineers or technicians. He was, he liked to say, one of the men who held the ships together.

  “If men like me dinna screw in the bolts and tighten the nuts, the ship would come apart and sink to the bottom of the sea,” he insisted.

  Ian took pride in his work, and the walls in the living room of his house on Loraine Drive were lined with photographs of the USS Ronald Reagan, and the USS George H. W. Bush. These were nuclear carriers of the Nimitz class, both of which he had worked on for years.

  “Mama,” Charlene pleaded, her hands over her heart, “is something wrong? Did Daddy call and say he was going to be late?”

  “No, darlin’,” Louise said. “But you know what your daddy says about traffic on Warwick Boulevard. In the morning going toward the shipyard, it’s like pushing down on a coiled spring. And in the evening coming back home, it’s like pushing on that same spring from the other direction. I’m sure he’s just tied up in traffic or something. Probably a wreck somewhere, and that brings traffic to a complete halt.”

  “Oh!” the girl said. She put her hands to the sides of her head. “Oh, Mama! There was a wreck, and Daddy was in it. Daddy is dead!”

  “Charlene, what are you talking about?”

  Charlene began crying inconsolably.

  “Hush now, dear,” Louise said. “You want your eyes looking all red when your daddy comes home?”

  “He’s not coming home, Mama. Never again,” Charlene said.

  “Now, Charlene, stop it. You’re making me nervous.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “See, there’s your daddy now.” Though, even as Louise said the words, she had a sinking feeling. Why would Ian ring his own doorbell?

  When Louise opened the door, she saw two uniformed p
olice officers standing on the front porch, a black male and a white female. The police car was parked out on the street, right in front of her house.

  “Mrs. St. John?” the male police officer said.

  “No,” Louise said quietly—so quietly that she could barely be heard. She held her hand out in front of her, as if holding the police officers off, and stepped back into the house, away from the door. “No, no, no, dear God in Heaven, no!”

  “May we come in for a moment?” the policewoman asked gently.

  “No, no, no, no—,” Louise said, burying her face in her hands and shaking her head.

  Charlene, who was no longer crying, came to the front door. “You may come in,” she said.

  “And who are you?” the policewoman asked, smiling at the little girl.

  “My name is Charlene, and my daddy is dead, isn’t he? He was killed in a car wreck on Warwick Avenue.” As she said this, she clasped her hands over her heart again.

  The two police officers looked at each other in shock.

  “Has someone already called?” the policewoman wondered. “Nobody is supposed to call before we get here.”

  “Nobody called,” Charlene said. “But Daddy is dead, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, sweetheart, I’m sorry to have to tell you, that is true,” the policewoman answered.

  “Mrs. St. John, is there someone we could call? A relative? A close friend, perhaps?” the police officer asked.

  Louise was still sobbing and totally unresponsive.

  “Mama has a good friend named Norma Keeler,” Charlene said.

  “Do you know her telephone number?” the policeman asked.

  Charlene led the policeman over to the telephone, then pointed to a number that was written on a pad on the wall.

  “Thank you,” the policeman said as he picked up the phone and dialed the number.

  “Mama,” Charlene said. She stood next to her mother and wrapped her arms around her. “Mama, it will be all right.”

  “Oh, Charlene, how did you know?” Louise asked, putting an arm around her daughter. “How did you know?”

  They could hear the low-key voice of the policeman on the phone.

  “What do you mean, how did she know?” the policewoman asked.

  “She knew,” Louise said. “Even before you got here, she knew.”

  “But how?” the policewoman asked.

  Charlene stood there like a little statue or a sentry on watch, gazing up at her mother; then turning to the lady cop she quietly said, “I felt it, here,” and put her hands over her heart for the third time. Charlene’s mother began to keen softly, and the look on the young girl’s face as she comforted her mother brought tears to the policewoman’s eyes.

  Part

  ONE

  CHAPTER

  1

  New York

  Dave Hampton had the looks of a star. With a full head of dark hair always perfectly coiffed, blue eyes, and well-chiseled features, he could have been the lead in a dramatic television show. He was, in fact, a television star, but not in a drama series. He had his own news, commentary, and talk show airing at six o’clock eastern time, Monday through Friday. From Maine to California, millions of Americans adjusted their schedules so they could watch the show live, and those who couldn’t watch it live recorded it.

  Hampton specialized in controversy and conspiracy theories. There were few who were ambivalent about him—the public either loved him or hated him. “Innovative, brave, probing,” his supporters said. “A wacko, conspiracy nut-job,” his detractors said.

  Today his guests had discussed such subjects as whether or not the United States was purposely not drilling for domestic oil in order to exhaust all the oil reserves of the rest of the world, to whether or not Errol Flynn was actually a Nazi spy.

  The guests were gone now and the show was on a commercial break before the final segment, which Hampton called “Critical Update.”

  “Back in one minute thirty seconds, Dave,” the director said, his voice audible in Dave’s ear plug.

  “I don’t see my CU queued on the teleprompter,” Dave said.

  “Sure it is,” the director said. “Untapped Oil Reserves.”

  “That’s not the one I want. I changed it, remember? I want Sinister Shadow.”

  “You mean you were serious about that?”

  “If you don’t put it on the teleprompter, I’m going to try and wing it, and that will make it worse.”

  “All right, all right,” the studio floor manager said. “Just a minute.”

  Dave stared into the three teleprompters, which were just below the camera lenses. “I’m waiting.”

  “Coming up—now,” the director said.

  The story on the teleprompter changed, and Dave acknowledged, “Thanks.”

  “We’re going to hear about this one, Dave. This is the kookiest of them all.”

  “I wish you were right,” the studio floor manager said.

  “Come on, you mean you actually believe this?”

  “I’m afraid I do,” she said.

  “Ten seconds, stand by.”

  Dave nodded and looked at the camera. When the red light came on, he began to speak.

  “Have you ever had one of those feelings that nag at you? You know what I’m talking about, a smell that is familiar but you just can’t place it, a voice, face, or event that is just on the other side of memory, or a tune that haunts you from your past?

  “I’m having just such a sensation now. There is something up, something going on—and though I don’t know what it is, I know that it is mon-u-ment-al! It is of earth-shaking proportions, and when I say earth shaking, I’m not just engaging in hyperbole.

  “Whatever this is—and for lack of a better word, I am going to call it a sinister shadow—it is hanging over our heads now like the fabled Sword of Damocles. Is this merely another one of Crazy Dave’s conspiracy theories?

  “No, I’m not saying that there is a Nazi settlement on the moon, or there are aliens among us in high-ranking positions. I’m not saying that the Illuminati control all the governments of the world.

  “I can’t be weaving a conspiracy out of this, because I don’t have enough of a grasp on this to formulate a hypothesis, or even to ask a question.

  “Let me keep this very simple: Responsible and believable people, speaking off the record and with the assurance of anonymity, have told me of a disturbing paradigm, great and troubling movements that are taking place in religious, scientific, and political circles. I don’t know what it is—but I do know that it is making strange bedfellows, bringing about cooperation between the most disparate sectors of all human society. And while this cooperation would normally be considered a good thing, I am told these meetings are not the result of some universal brotherhood of man. This coming together is not anything born of altruism but rather a desperate seeking of the deliverance of humankind from this—sinister shadow.

  “I feel as if all humanity is in a car, driving toward the edge of a cliff, headed toward one final catastrophic car accident. And the biggest problem is that while some of us can see the accident coming at us in slow motion, we can’t figure out how to put on the brakes. I don’t have the answers, but I can promise you that I am going to do my level best to find the truth and bring it to you. The one thing that I know in my heart is true is that something of epic proportions is coming toward us, and we soon might be faced with making some pretty important choices.

  “Choices, ladies and gentlemen. Choices that might change the world.”

  Hampton, in his signature sign-off, held his hand up, palm facing the camera. “From New York, this is Dave Hampton. Good night, America.”

  As soon as he had delivered the sign-off, the telephones in the cable network studio began to ring off the hook, and within the hour, emails and tweets flooded into Dave’s own phone and swamped his website. Dave looked at the response and was both relieved and afraid. He had taken a gamble tonight and knew that the network
would be breathing down his neck for what it would probably consider a bold stunt just for ratings.

  But people were interested in—no, deeply concerned about—his report and felt they had to reach out to him to express their emotional responses to the news. He just wished he knew what he was going to tell them, for if his sources were correct, the truth was far worse than anything they could imagine.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Vatican City

  Giovanni Giuseppe Battista, known to the world as Pope Genaro I, strode purposefully along the corridor of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican with two of his most senior and trusted cardinals. The Holy Father, as spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics, felt the burden weighing heavily on his shoulders this day.

  He was a tall man, rail thin at age seventy-two, who wore thick wire-rimmed glasses that gave him an intellectual look, which belied his deeply held commitment to charity for all people and his natural personal humility. In the deep pocket of his white cassock, the familiar “uniform” of his religious office, he fingered a simple wooden set of rosary beads and prayed silently, almost unconsciously.

  As Genaro walked to what might be most important meeting of his life, he found himself thinking about the nature of time. With a heavy heart, Genaro was struck by a sense of ending rather than beginning—on the line of human history that stretched back some tens or hundreds of thousands of years, depending on where one pegged the creation of the first man. And to his sorrow, he silently prayed for the billions of souls who currently resided on the planet Earth, whose ultimate salvation was his greatest care, for he feared that in this most crucial hour he might fail them as their shepherd.

  He and Cardinals Luigi Morricone and Zachary Yamba were the last to walk into the meeting of representatives from the world’s greatest religions, representing a huge percentage of the entire world’s population. The pope sat in a high-backed chair (with his cardinals at designated spots behind the pontiff) at a huge conference table that had been set up on the floor before the altar in one of the most familiar worship spaces on the planet: the Sistine Chapel. Countless prayers had been offered to heaven in this sacred space but never had it been the site of such a meeting that crossed over such ancient and complicated divides—chasms even—between and among the faiths of the world. Never had there been an event that would warrant a gathering like this. Until now.